I have no meaningful advice or clever observations about the war in
Ukraine and my hope is that people with more fame and louder megaphones
might come to the same restrained conclusion themselves about having
something to say.

Play:
--=--

Demon's Souls (PS3) - No, not even the PS5 version. I started a new
character on PS3 just to remind myself why I liked the old game series,
and I find the original much more appealing for reasons I can't quite put
my finger on. On the PS5 it runs at 60 FPS and has bloom and HDR and
lovingly detailed models of everything, and somehow it's less involving or
immersive *because* of all that extra information. Something about the
original game on PS3 is sparse and dreamlike and oh-so-disturbing in a way
that they haven't quite duplicated.

Dark Souls (Switch) - I have no idea why I've been so interested in Souls
games this past weekend. It's almost as if there was some new release that
made the whole world go mad for the series. Anyway, I finally beat the
Ceaseless Discharge boss, in the cheesiest of cheese ways possible. I
found a spot in a passage on the side of the mountain where his big
Lovecraftian tentacle hit can't reach, and where I can loose three arrows
for about 11 HP of damage each. Considering that the guy has 4,200 HP in
his base original appearance, he went down surprisingly fast (if you think
45 minutes of boss fight is surprising in any way). Of course, this
massive burning giant thing with no face was just a gatekeeper and not the
true boss of the area, but I think I'm well positioned to due a couple of
hundred times as I experience something new in the game for once.

It's really weird to be coming back to this four years later and
experience content I haven't seen before. This first Dark Souls game still
feels like a weird misstep to me, even though for most it was their very
first exposure to the world and this type of play. For me Demon's Souls
will always be the proper model on which these games are built, and I'm
always a little unhappy when they stray a bit further from that original
experience.

Want:
--=--

Sega Rally 2006 (PS2) - Ordered this back in August and it's just now due
at my house today. Supposedly it comes with Sega Rally 95 as a bonus
pack-in disc but I'm not going to get my hopes up. Sadly the store that
sold it to me isn't having a very good time during the pandemic, and they
probably won't be able to ship me the other stuff I ordered. They didn't
take my money yet to be clear, but I'm sympathetic to anybody trying to
make a go of selling games media now. I'm not steaming mad at them, to be
clear, just hoping that they get their act together soon and stay solvent.

Record of Lodoss War: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth (Switch) - Also due
today. Either it's the bestest Metroidvania that's not actually a
Castlevania game, or it's a cheap cash-in that misuses a character from an
unlicensed D&D fanfic that should have stayed in the past. I should be
able to say something meaningful in about 48 hours after I've had a chance
to not play it enough.

Bin:
-==-

Nothing game-related. I wish every comedian in the world were secretly a
gifted politician and wartime strategist.

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

Balance forward - $757

-KKC, who wonders if that Servant of the People show has an English dub.
--
-- "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 28 Feb 2022 at 00:21:43 GMT, "Kendrick Kerwin Chua"
<kendrick@nospam.io-nyc> wrote:

> Play:
> --=--

Vampire Survivors (Windows) - cleaned up the last few weapon upgrades.
Managed to actually make an incompetent build since the last few are of
course the ones I don't use because they're a bit like hard work, and
died before the time limit for once. Parked this game for now.

Death's Door (Windows GPU) - hesitated between starting this or
Unpacking, decided on this. It's a slightly puzzly mostly fighty game.
It's got a very nice style, varied combat, a neat "get more magic by
hitting things" mechanic, nice controls, mild puzzles, and I'm not sure
if I'm actually enjoying it at all. The boss fights are not only
uncommunicative in that currently fashionable "No health bar or health
tells on the boss-type fights" which I find flat out irritating when
there's no way to regen my health in a fight (at least so far). It also
has rather variable distances to walk back to the boss fights after
you've fucked it and respawned, sometimes through a small maze and
there's no mapping. We'll see.

Sacred 2 (X360 bc, PMG) - more fun now we're practicing playing as a
team rather than spinning off on our own. Still a bit rubbish, and still
has the might-end-up-too-game-breaking bug, Zo's had his character go
semi-uncontrollable two sessions running and I had it before that. Its
upgrade system is a bit too RNG and a bit too pointlessly opaque.

Mario Odyssey (Switch) - discovered I'd left this on the approach to the
Bowser fight at the end of the main game, so polished him off. Onwards
to 500 moons. Peach appears to have run off with her favourite
waist-high mushroom-shaped companion, finally answering *that* question.

> Want:
> --=--

Not sure I've got anything sensible on the want list now, so BotW2 it
is.

> Bin:
> -==-
>
> Nothing game-related. I wish every comedian in the world were secretly a
> gifted politician and wartime strategist.

That would be fine. But it would probably be a waste for every
heavyweight boxer to have a PhD, due to the brain damage risks.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
"The polar opposite of cinnamon is frogs."
-- Mandy, in "Mandy the Merciless"

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

> Play:

Shenmue 2 (DC) - checking out a resurrected 2003 save from near the
end of disc 1; I think I originally kept this one around for just
looking around the map and the like, and sure enough that's what I did
this time. It's curious seeing how it compares with Shenmue 1&2 on the
PS4 - most obviously the loading times and NPC pop-in are rough, but
there's still that unmistakable sense of it being the original.
Another thing that's obvious is that back in 2003 I hadn't spotted the
Fortune's Pier gambling den which lets you gamble HK$100-500, as I
only had $111 on this save (now boosted to $1800 for no good reason).

Metropolis Street Racer (DC) - also messing about on an old save of
mine. I am quite impressively bad at the game at this point, though I
think part of that is that the game's not aged terribly well. It's not
so much the graphics or even the physics, it's more that all the
narrow roads with barriers everywhere don't feel especially pleasant
to drive around, it's vaguely reminiscent of the first Wipeout game in
that sense. Some of the maps are wider and more forgiving of course,
but it does seem like an issue for most of them.

> Want:

Nothing.

> Bin:

My bluetooth speaker acting strangely if the automatic connection it
does when it's turned on fails.

Not having any emailed copies of old disc-3 saves for Shenmue 2, I'm
pretty sure I'd kept one or two around years ago. At least I did still
have the one covering the disc-1/2 area, and a completed file.

The old emailed DC saves I've found only being from eight different
games - mostly the ones with bigger saves that I had to move back and
forth to make room on VMUs at the time. So I have e.g. a few MSR and
Shenmue 1 & 2 saves, Crazy Taxi, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2... but no
Soul Calibur, Mr. Driller, Virtua Tennis, Bangai-O, SF Rush 2049, etc.

Probably not noticing for a good 20 years that the encoded attachment
data for my emailed DC save backup for THPS2 somehow happens to end
with the text "RUS=". :-)

-Rus.