• ADHD Play Want Bin (PWBE 15 May 2023)

    From Kendrick Kerwin Chua@kendrick@nospam.io-nyc to uk.games.video.misc on Sun May 14 23:15:14 2023
    From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc


    I hope that while I'm making time to play all these games that I make
    time to play just one of them to completion.

    Play:
    --=--

    Phantasy Star Nova (Vita) - Did I mention that my latest Solaris order
    came in? This is a lovely game that is nearly the entire PSO2 engine in portable format, just offline and also all in Japanese. It is a
    veritable crime against humanity that they did not localise this game or
    see fit to port it to any other platform, and there's a really solid single-player action RPG hiding in here that's balanced and refined. But there's no money in single-player games, or so Sega seems to have
    thought when this came and went. I got it for $10 pre-owned
    incidentally, which is a testament to how many copies of this thing sold
    in the JPN region and how many are available presently in that state.

    Ryu Ga Gotoku Kiwami (PS3) - It's the first Yakuza game, but in
    low-resolution and thirty frames-per-second and with shockingly low
    numbers of polygons on anything that the player isn't moving around.
    I've glad I got to see it for myself, but the thing I'm most likely to
    do at this point is go back to Kiwami on the PC or the PS4 because it's
    really the narrative I'm fond of no matter what the format happens to
    be. It's sort of a mystery why they didn't release the PS3 disc in the
    west either.

    Biohazard Remake (PS3) - Now this is the stuff. This is literally the
    whole game in all available languages, but on a disc where the game application detects your region and sets everything for your interface preferences right away. I bought the disc because this only got released digitally in the west, but I'm not really having fun and I keep having
    to remind myself why. I own nearly every Resident Evil game on every
    platform and the remake on Gamecube, and I keep forgetting that I like
    my zombie horror to be camp and silly rather than stiff and frustrating.
    Maybe I'll work through some sunk cost fallacy and actually play through
    this game with save scumming like Capcom meant for everybody to do.

    Pokemon Pinball (GBC) - One of those games that's been lying around the
    house waiting for me to get back to it after I pulled it out of the box
    some ten years ago and said "Hey, maybe I should give this a go." The
    physics are shonky and the colours are more than a little distracting,
    but it's a nice low-calorie distraction. Wish it were possible to view
    the whole board rather than flipping between two separate halves, or to
    at least be able to scroll smoothly. This is like the problem of Pac Man
    ports where you don't get to see the whole maze at once and so you're blindsided by something that you should have had ample warning for.

    JPN-region Playstation 2 (PS2) - My old JPN-region PS2 was a
    bodged-together affair, with some dodgy repair parts and a tendency to
    stop reading discs unless you tapped a corner just right. It finally
    died, and on a regretful whim I bought a cheap one from an Amazon
    seller. It's *pristine* and comes with the cleanest first-party-but- second-hand PS2 controller I've ever seen. I'm so leaving a positive
    seller review. Oh yes, I bought this thing to play all my brand new
    JPN-region PS2 games. I can only claim to have watched the opening FMV
    of Shining Wind. The Sega Ages build of Alien Syndrome is soooooper hard
    and I can see why they didn't bother localising it. The JPN-only Point
    Blank collection (with bonus Time Crisis) all on one DVD is phenomenally
    fun even without the Guncon plugged in and now I have to get a CRT going
    again to play this properly. But the star of the retro and Sega Ages
    show is always and forever going to be Virtua Fighter 2, which feels completely wrong with the Dualshock 2 and always has done. Where's me
    arcade stick?

    Fantasy Zone Complete Collection (PS2) - Sega released this twice as
    part of the Sega Ages series on the PS2, once as just the core arcade
    game and the once with all of the sequels and home ports. This is the
    second thing, as the 'Complete Collection' part of the title indicates,
    and I don't think I really "got" Fantasy Zone until now because the
    arcade game makes a better point of telling you what's going on. Seeing
    the scrolling world map with indicators of what giant enemies are still present is informative without requiring any language or funny cut scene
    or tutorial bits, and I genuinely never understood it until I was able
    to experience the arcade version.

    Want:
    --=--

    More JPN-region Playstation games (PSX) - One thing I never did with my
    old JPN-region PS2 was play many import original Playstation games. I
    think I own exactly two, and I feel like that's a gap in my unwieldly collection that needs some addressing. Because I have room in my house
    for more of that crap.

    Bin:
    -==-

    Nothing game-related

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

    Balance forward - $2,027

    JPN-region PS2 75xxx series (PS2) - $150
    Another Playstation 3 (PS3) - $70
    Captain Morgane and the Golden Turtle (PS3) - $25
    Captain Morgane and the Golden Turtle (DS) - $15
    Tales of Zestiria (PS4) - $18
    Tales of Vesperia (PS4) - $18
    Tales of Symphonia Chronicles/Tales of Graces F (PS3) - $70

    Total to date - $2,391

    -KKC, who has to put in a couple of work hours on a Sunday night before bed. --- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2
  • From Russell Marks@zgedneil@spam^H^H^H^Hgmail.com to uk.games.video.misc on Mon May 15 15:50:56 2023
    From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

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

    Play:

    Tetris Attack (SNES) - a bit more of this.

    unlimitedgpt.co (Web) - I know it's not a game, but I've certainly
    been playing with it and I can't resist giving it a mention. :-) One
    of the surely-temporary benefits of all the VC money being sprayed at
    every AI project going right now is that some things give free access
    online, and in this case without any sort of registration/login even.
    (Which is perhaps reason enough to be a little bit wary, and I'm not necessarily recommending this website. Also, to be fair I haven't
    actually looked into how the site's funded.) This one seems to be
    using OpenAI's ChatGPT but not based on the newer GPT-4, so it's
    presumably based on GPT-3.5. I've mostly been trying out some prompts
    I meant to try on the older GPT-2 on my Pi last year, but never got
    around to. (With some rephrasing to fit the older prefix approach to a
    chatbot setup.)

    For example, in response to 'Write a text in the style of Dr. Seuss
    based on the title "Is this a prompt enough prompt, or is a slow
    prompt prompt enough?"' it gave:

    "Oh my dear, have no fear
    For your prompt is quite clear
    But do you think a slow prompt
    Is enough to get the job done?

    Is this a prompt enough prompt,
    Or is a slow prompt prompt enough?
    I say to you, my dear friend
    It all depends on how you spend

    Your time, your effort, your skill
    If you have the patience and the will
    A slow prompt can do the trick
    But a prompt enough prompt is quick

    So don't fret, don't fuss
    Just give it your best plus
    Whether slow or fast
    Your prompt will surely last

    And in the end, you'll see
    That it's not about speed
    But the quality of what you do
    That will make your prompt shine through

    So take your time, be steady and true
    And your prompt will impress, it's true
    Is this a prompt enough prompt?
    Yes, my friend, it is, it's top!"

    I particularly enjoyed the... creative... rhymes for "prompt". I also
    tried "How do you make an apple pie from scratch?", where it
    understandably was keen to give a recipe rather than spotting the Carl
    Sagan reference, but even after I tried repeatedly to point it in that direction it still ended up somewhere in the middle:

    "To make an apple pie from scratch, we need apples, flour, sugar, and
    butter, all of which come from the Earth and ultimately from the
    stars."

    Anyway, while IMHO playing around with the chatbot soon makes it clear
    that it's not exactly intelligent as such (it's more like a weird
    reflection of much of the internet, many books, etc., and roughly
    speaking it seems to work by effectively guessing how the script is
    likely to continue based on the training data plus extra tuning, with
    the chatbot being like a role the language model is playing as
    instructed by hidden prompting AIUI) - and the endless confident
    "lying" (hallucination) does get wearing - it's hard not to think that
    while this is quite good in some ways, the current state of the art is
    better, and future models may be better still. Or to put it another
    way, I don't know how far this approach can go, but it's already going
    pretty far. Interesting times.

    Ryu Ga Gotoku Kiwami (PS3) - [...] It's sort of a mystery why they
    didn't release the PS3 disc in the west either.

    I expect the PS4 was taking off too much by then to justify it. The
    US/EU PS4 releases were apparently 2017, and I mean, even I had a PS4
    by then. :-)

    Want:

    Nothing.

    Bin:

    Chatting to (in some limited sense) a representation of much of human knowledge/output, then basically asking it to write a nerdy knockoff
    of Green Eggs and Ham. :-)

    -Rus.
    --- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2
  • From Jaimie Vandenbergh@jaimie@usually.sessile.org to uk.games.video.misc on Mon May 15 21:36:48 2023
    From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

    On 15 May 2023 at 00:15:14 BST, "Kendrick Kerwin Chua"
    <kendrick@nospam.io-nyc> wrote:


    I hope that while I'm making time to play all these games that I make
    time to play just one of them to completion.

    Yes, that seems like a thing that could potentially be possible.

    Play:
    --=--

    Gotham Knights (PS5)(PMG) - Gus and I got rather surprised by bumping
    into the end of the game. Apparently last session (a month ago for the
    usual assortment of reasons) we'd completed two of the side-story quest
    lines and only had the mainline to do this time - and within two hours
    we'd caned it. Despite earlier complaints, it did actually tie some of
    the story threads together - but in the manner of a comic miniseries,
    *apart* from the primary premise of the game (Bruce is killed off and
    the batminions need to go it alone, together) this is an "effectively no
    change for the villains" stories where each starts and ends incarcerated
    or otherwise unchanged so it was fairly unsatisfying. Was a solid 7/10
    game as a multiplayer, probably a 6 solo I'd think.

    Zelda - Tears of the Kingdom (Switch) - I had nabbed the pirate
    pre-release to get into the game a bit ahead of the little sister I
    share my Switch account with, which was fun if crashy and buggy, but I restarted on the Switch on launch day. I shan't go into the story or
    other spoilery details, but I'm kinda enjoying this. It's got the
    "changed Hyrule after BotW" we all wanted at the end of BotW, for a
    start. Worries that it'd be a map retread were unfounded. It has an
    almost completely different set of magic skills. It does have a
    significant Nuts'n'Bolts-ness to it, building crude assemblies is very
    much a thing, and for lore reasons base weapons are even weaker than
    BotW - but due to upgrade abilities that's a fixable issue. It feels
    like a really serious evolution of BotW in the good directions. It also performs startlingly well - I *am* playing on an OLED switch so if it's
    doing any overclocking I'd be getting those benefits and won't be at all surprised. I'll give it a try on my launch-day switch to see, sometime.
    Anyway, well stuck into this.

    Want:
    --=--

    A new future game to want. TotK was it.

    There's the generic "more time/health/attention to play games" I guess.

    Bin:
    -==-

    Nothing game-related

    Same.

    Cheers - Jaimie
    --
    "The polar opposite of cinnamon is frogs."
    -- Mandy, in "Mandy the Merciless"
    --- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2