I don't want to joke about all the bad UK weather because a number of
people died and that's unfortunate. I just wanted to say that destructive
winter storms should not be like buses, where you wait for just one all
day and then three come at the same time.

Play:
--=--

King's Bounty II (Switch/PS4) - It's pleasant, but somehow all the pieces
don't quite fit together. Marrying Oblivion-style fetch quests with
Advance War combat resolution is bold and ambitious, but you can't help
wondering where everybody else is. Where do my ten Dwarven pikemen and
three trained wolves and six elderly Imperial guardsmen go when I'm
sitting here digging up the lost correspondence from underneath the ruins
of the abandoned village? I get the feeling that this might have made more
sense earlier in the design phase. I'm going to keep playing on and off
until I get it or until I give up.

Demon's Souls (PS3) - No, not even the PS5 version. There's something
charming and elegant about this original iteration of the Souls game, and
I still think it largely has the best narrative when compared to its
*five* successors.

Want:
--=--

More time - The room in my house that's supposed to be a study or a
sitting room of some kind is filled with bookshelves, and is overflowing
with board games and a lot of crap I bought in 2020 when we weren't sure
which direction the pandemic was going to go. So what I really want is a
solid month to clean my house so that I can feel good about playing games,
without the nagging sense that there's something more urgent that I should
be spending my time on. I imagine people with desperate legal problems
feel this way when they sit down to watch a TV show, consumed with the
nagging doubt that this precious hour after supper should really be spent
shredding evidence or buying off judges.

Bin:
-==-

Nothing game-related. Didn't play enough to really decide to retire
anything.

Expenditure:
-----=-----

Balance forward - $757

-KKC, who also caught his kid's cold.
--
-- "People with happy families don't become spies. A bad | kendrick
childhood is the perfect background for covert ops. You | @
don't trust anyone. You're used to getting smacked around, | io-nyc
and you never get homesick." - Michael Westen, /Burn Notice/ | .com

On 21 Feb 2022 at 12:47:45 GMT, "Kendrick Kerwin Chua"
<kendrick@nospam.io-nyc> wrote:

>
> I don't want to joke about all the bad UK weather because a number of
> people died and that's unfortunate. I just wanted to say that destructive
> winter storms should not be like buses, where you wait for just one all
> day and then three come at the same time.

I only had one at the start of the year and haven't seen another since.

> Play:
> --=--

Sea of Thieves (XsX, PMG) - a pleasant meander through the high seas,
smashing skellies, drinking treasure and looting grog. Very low impact
gaming, even the ship battles are pretty slow. The only time it gets
frantic is when some wanko PvP players board you, at which point you
might as well just let them since the fps mechanics are pish.

Sacred 2 (x360 on XsX, PMG) - restarted this after the Great Hakk
Xbox360 HDD Crash of 2014 lost our save. It has some significant flaws
for an isometric open world multiplayer quest game: The quests aren't
tagged as to main/side/character at all. It's incredibly easy to lose
the rest of the party. The UI is Rockstar levels of hard to navigate,
including rotary menus that might fire on release of a button or might
on pressing a button. The inventory screens for your weapons and such
default to only showing value and weight, not damage/armour/etc.
Interacting with NPCs can result in no-actions. Aiming is auto and
targets can't be picked except by stopping fighting and trying again to
get a different random target on the screen.
On the upside, the humour is so bad it's funny (German quips often badly
translated to English or just replaced with unrelated aphorisms), and
there's an *excellent* 'teleport to any player' which obviates the
getting lost thing. It's better on modern xbox in backcompat as you get
there quick enough that the other person hasn't already wandered
offscreen...
It does seem to have a major bugginess in the back compat though - loss
of sync with the other players. I got it last week, Zo this week. You
end up fighting critters who won't take or give damage, and other
players just see you flailing wildly at nothing, and then you get stuck
flailing for tens of seconds after you stop pressing the fight button,
or take three minutes for a teleport to trigger, or when you get there
you're stuck and can only rotate on the spot for 30 seconds. So that
might kill the game if it keeps happening.

Vampire Survivors (PC) - I've put a few more half-hours into this,
nearly got the whole set of upgrades now. I suspect I need to go look up
what powerups I need to trigger the last three upgrades, as I've not
bumped into them randomly yet.

Beat Saber (VR) - realised I hadn't played it in a while, horror! Long
enough that a half hour session fucked my arm and shoulder muscles
ouchy. Trying to ease myself back in, but current coldy thing precludes
putting in the energy. I'm failing expert+ tracks that I've one-shotted
before at the mo, tch.

> Want:
> --=--
> which direction the pandemic was going to go. So what I really want is a
> solid month to clean my house so that I can feel good about playing games,

Oh, I get this a *lot*. I run out of energy and leave a mess, then can't
do anything actually fun until I've cleared that up a day or more later.
By which time of course I've run out of energy again and don't want to
do anything.

I did intend to be recording the pod tomorrow night, but I'm too ill to
do that. So I want to do that next month instead.

> Bin:
> -==-

Ill.

> -KKC, who also caught his kid's cold.

Sympathy.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
"What we have done with PCs so far is not natural"
- Craig Mundie, CTO Microsoft

Kendrick Kerwin Chua <kendrick@nospam.io-nyc> wrote:

> Play:

Burnout Legends (PSP) - as much as I prefer Outrun 2006 and Test Drive
Unlimited, this port of the Burnout 1/2(/3?) tracks in Burnout 3 style
still plays really well. Though it's fair to say that the low-poly
corners tend to be extremely pointy.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (PC) - had the opportunity to try this. I
think at this point I mostly prefer Vice City Stories as a VC sandbox,
but it was still interesting to see the older/newer map for the first
time in a while.

Lego Star Wars 2 (PSP) - did the first of two rather tedious Endor
levels. I'm not surprised that I stopped at around this point in my
original replay on the PS2 (IIRC), it seems like a real possibility
this time too.

> Want:

Nothing.

> Bin:

The Pi 400 lacking a headphone jack. I knew this beforehand, but I
have to admit it's still a minor annoyance. Bluetooth audio seems to
work well enough, at least.

LSW2's score multipliers costing a silly amount. It looks like after
clearing story mode I still wouldn't have enough to buy even the x2,
and the x4 costs three times as much.

Not previously realising that Dreamcast emulation might run better on
the Pi if rendered at e.g. 1024x768 rather than 1080p. In the sense of
having a largely stable framerate rather than a very wobbly one.

Bashing my head against the combined might of Dreamkey 3 and Emacs
while trying to restore an old emailed DC save (for Shenmue 2).
Curiously Emacs was the main problem, as it turned out to be quietly
rewriting the attachment encoding which Dreamkey is quite picky about.
I did eventually get the save across using a command-line emailer (it
was sendemail in raw message mode with TLS enabled, for anyone playing
along at home), so I'll be digging around to see exactly what else I
still have. And figuring out just how many VMUs I'll have to spread it
across.

-Rus.