From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc


If this had been an actual emergency, the sound you just heard would
have been followed by hundreds of social media users posting a link to
the Mitchell and Webb sketch where they portray steady and bored
newscasters assuring you that the unspecified crisis has ended and that everything is fine.

Play:
--=--

Lyrica and Lyrica 2: Stars Align (NSW) - These games are... okay. As
rhythm games they're not nearly as extraordinary as I hoped they would
be, and the tacked-on button mode is really no substitute for the
intended (and annoying) interface of mashing icons on the touchscreen.
But the music is top-notch, a hodge-podge of Taiwanese pop that I don't
think I had any awareness of before. So essentially what I've done is
bought a double CD that happens to have a Switch game packed in.

Want:
--=--

Afterimage (NSW/PS5) - Bought. There's a new studio in China whose first indie-esque work is a gorgeous hand-drawn Metroidvania game that's doing something different with its combat. I liked the look of it enough to
pick it up without much additional research.

Nobunaga's Ambition: Sphere of Influence (PS4) - I ordered this a couple
of months ago from a retailer that has trouble keeping video games in
stock because they mainly sell vinyl records and porn these days, so I
ended up getting it and its sequel for the price I originally paid last
year. At least one of those discs should be in my mailbox today, I hope.

Bin:
-==-

Nothing game-related

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

Balance forward - $1,078

Afterimage (NSW) - $30
Afterimage (PS5) - $30

Total to date - $1,138

-KKC, who also did some 3D printing and caught up on sleep.
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From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

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

If this had been an actual emergency, the sound you just heard would
have been followed by hundreds of social media users posting a link to
the Mitchell and Webb sketch where they portray steady and bored
newscasters assuring you that the unspecified crisis has ended and that everything is fine.

Personally, I think it's good that a system designed to get the
immediate attention of maybe 90% of the population will only ever be
used for an actual emergency, like it just wasn't.

Play:

Nethack (nethack.alt.org) - version 3.6.7. This seems to only be a
bugfix release, but I thought I might as well have a go anyway. I died
really early as an Archaeologist then a Samurai, then got another
Samurai to the castle. Which was a bit interesting to try with neither
magic resistance nor levitation. For a while it looked like I might
still manage it by using basically every trick in the book including wand-breaking (an expensive way of getting one-off area effects) and a
ring of conflict (meaning the monsters tend to fight each other and
not just you) - but eventually I misjudged the time at which I could
safely pray to restore health. And that tends to be a great way to get
deaded.

Another neat option for deadening is what I did in my next go -
getting a Knight to just before the castle level, while also failing
to ever get reflection or magic resistance, then randomly finding an
arch-lich. I did get a few turns of mostly missing it before it did
the inevitable instakill move on me, so that was nice. Probably I
should have just dug down to the castle instead and hoped for the
best, but it's hard to imagine that would have gone much better (even
assuming the arch-lich wouldn't have followed me down, and I have a
feeling it might have done).

Want:

Nothing.

Bin:

Those games in Nethack where you're almost certainly dead if you play
it relatively normally, but could probably make it if e.g. you did a
tedious grind for items for 100k turns. Those last two goes above were
very much like that. The last one was particularly bizarre, I didn't
even get a blindfold or towel IIRC (for deliberate temporary blindness
which is useful at times) and when you've been exploring all the
levels it's seriously rare to not have one by that point.

-Rus.
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