From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

Play:

Golf Club Nostalgia (PC) - a dystopian crazy golf game which I bought
under that name, yet resulting in an installed directory and title
screen claiming to be Golf Club Wasteland (which as I said before
seems to have been the original name). So that's not confusing at all.

I'd say the game itself is a very traditionally indie kind of indie,
to the point that I wondered if I'd somehow ended up buying a Wii Ware
game or something. I started out in challenge mode, which has a
required par to match/beat on each hole, but around hole 15 or so I
switched to story mode (which doesn't) because it was clearly getting
less golf and more crazy. It essentially becomes a golf-based 2D
platformer, and for me I'm not sure how well it works to treat this
oddity like a conventional golf game.

There are various little issues, like the 2.5D look making angles
quite hard to judge at times, and the ball having differing behaviour
over various surfaces in a way which doesn't seem quite as clear or
consistent as it could be. There's also the weird way you get a
seconds-long animation of the camera moving up into the sky when you
pause the game before the pause menu appears - I'm not sure if that's
worth having the "stop" button mean "go more, then eventually stop".

Anyway, moaning aside, it's not bad in story mode (i.e. easy mode).

Metal Slug (Neo Geo) - more precisely, running the ROM files from the
gog.com Linux version in Retroarch on my mini PC. Just a quick go to
try it out really, and it works well enough. But I have to admit, it
hadn't occurred to me that it'd have the "sweat" rather than blood. I
wouldn't say it ruins the game exactly, but it's a bit silly. (More
surprising to me is that it still seems to persist even after trying
different region settings and the like.)

Want:

To play Dying Light (PC), having bought that. I don't often seem to
play zombie-ish games unless they are Resident and Evil and ideally 4,
so this non-Resident non-Evil non-4 game is probably a bit outlandish
by my standards.

Bin:

Wine apparently deciding to have some particularly curious focus issue specifically for Golf Club Nostalgia. Possibly in Wine's slight
defence, I did notice that by default the game runs fullscreen with
the Windowed setting on (sic), but if you turn that setting off,
window borders appear and it no longer seems to run fullscreen. I
ended up using a "UseTakeFocus" = "N" registry setting which got it
working, but also meant that if you switch away from the window - at
least when it's being managed by Wine - you have to use xdotool to get
it back. For which I suppose the fix is "well don't do that then". :-)

-Rus.
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From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

In article <_iIvQ.41063$JfAf.25113@usenetxs.com>,
Russell Marks <zgedneil@spam^H^H^H^Hgmail.com> wrote:

Play:

Outlander (MD) - I shouldn't really call this a 'Megadrive' game because
it never got an EU or JPN region release. Imagine if at the last minute
just before you finalised your licenced Mad Max game, the people who
owned the film series pulled out of the agreement and you had to
scramble to remove any trace of Crazy Mel Gibson from your graphics and packaging before deciding whether to even release the completed game at
all. There's also a SNES version, but the game for Sega's system has a
unique first-person view in the driving sections where it briefly
flashes up a little separate window to show you that an angry biker or
other opponent is alongside your vehicle and that you can take them out
with your pistol rather than the bonnet-mounted machine guns. It's
ambitious and it's graphically amazing and it almost works. This is the
kind of game the desperately needs to be revisited with modern design and graphics capabilities.

Want:

All the sports games - I just bought a bunch of the Sega Sports and/or
2K NHL and NBA games, and also the University Football game from the
same Visual Concepts team. Apparently there's one of these that's super collectible because they only printed like a few hundred for Gamecube
before Sega decided to pull the plug on the whole enterprise, and it's
taking all my willpower not to buy the PS2 copy in spite of that it
costs nearly full retail price still.

Bin:

Nothing game-related.

-KKC, up too late doing emergency laundry.
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