From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc


Amazon is under the impression that the next two Evercade carts are
still coming out at the end of the month. Probably because they still
want that interest-free preorder money.

Play:
--=--

Jane Austen's 8-bit Adventures (EVC) - Slated to be released for real in
the Indie Heroes 4 Evercade cartridge in February, but it's this month's
free preview game as part of the Evercade EXP firmware update. It's
really nice, the rare sort of Metroidvania game that evokes the original scrolling Castlevania on the NES than anything approaching the open
world of Symphony of the Night. The boss fights are ridiculous and a bit unfair, because they're relentless and don't really have discernible
attack patterns, and that nicely balances out that the actual
platforming and cannon fodder enemies are a bit dull.

Beijing 2008 (PS3) - Why is this only three dollars? Oh, because it's impossible to play. Also, it comes from the era before they really
figured out standards around online play, which means that if you're
signed into PSN the game will try endlessly to connect to backend
servers that have been gone for a decade and won't give you another
option to play offline. If you want to enjoy what remains of the game
you have to actively disconnect from the network, and the most effective
way of doing that is to kill your Wi-Fi or pull out the cable. Weirdly,
the game doesn't tell you that the correct way to play is not to roll an all-rounder competitor like you might in an RPG, but to create a
specialist in one sport so that you can qualify and then win events to
level up your other stats. That's both unintuitive and not much fun.

Want:
--=--

Motivation - I deliberately decided to put off gardening and some minor
home improvement stuff just to have time for gaming, and it turned out
what I actually needed was a couple of three-hour naps. This aging thing
can go right in the bin, please.

Bin:
-==-

Nothing game-related.

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

Balance forward - $1,551

Beijing 2008 (PS3) - $3
Agents of Mayhem (XB1) - $5
Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth (XSX) - $35
Conception Plus Maidens of the Twelve Stars (PS4) - $28
Like a Dragon Gaiden (PS5) - $42
Valkyria Chronicles 4 (XSX) - $7
Lost Judgment (XSX) - $11
Valkyria Revolution (XSX) - $7
Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 (XSX) - $3
Bayonetta/Vanquish 10th Anniversary (PS4) - $7
Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania (PS5) - $11
Soul Hackers 2 (XSX) - $11
13 Sentinels Aegis Rim (PS4) - $20
Sega Genesis Classics (XSX) - $17

Total to date - $1,758

-KKC, who doesn't feel much like citing current events today.
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From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

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

Play:

Kerbal Space Program (Linux) - the original not the sequel, and a game
that can run natively on Linux for once. It's decent enough on the
mini PC, in a curious way. It seems to handle it both better and worse
than the PS4 does - like it's a lot happier with the CPU side, but not
so much the GPU. Anyway, I did a bunch of probe stuff and had Jeb
visit Mun and Duna and Dres, and put labs in Minmus and Duna orbit to
help get the tech tree unlocked in cheesy but rapid fashion.

Saints Row 3 (PC) - finished the story missions. Apparently I said of
the PS3 version in 2013 that it was "not too bad", so I think I might
actually have liked this a bit more than I did back then. Though
obviously, it is quite dated in various ways.

Jane Austen's 8-bit Adventures (EVC) - [...] Metroidvania

The most sensible genre choice of course, but personally I'm still
holding out for a pinball version of Pride and Prejudice.

Want:

Saints Row 4 (PC) - maybe. The problem with this one is that I've
played through it at least twice already, while SR3 I think I'd only
ever played once before. Also, I think the minimum requirements are
higher, which is probably bad news on a PC with weedy integrated
graphics. (And it still slightly breaks my brain to be thinking of
PS3-ish graphics in that way, but there it is.)

Bin:

Realising that I bought three sandbox games at once, then arguably
bought another. Such a sensible decision.

KSP's manoeuvre tool, the thing they added a while back that can
automatically plan an orbital transfer for you. (I can't remember if
this was ever added to the PS4 version, but either way I don't think
I'd used it before.) There seems to be so many caveats to using the
thing that it's barely worth bothering with - seemingly limited
destinations (or if you have to unlock them then I'm not really sure
how), only allowed from limited orbit types, and made deliberately
imprecise. It's like the devs added it recognising that online tools
exist to plan orbital transfers so they had no real reason not to
include their own tool, yet while adding it they somehow managed to
forget all about that, acting as if they could preserve some
non-existent game balance by half-breaking only their own take on it.

KSP's weird default of having the number-pad -/+ as the only keyboard
zoom control. You might expect -/= to work too without having to add
the bindings yourself, but... nope.

Unity's gratuitous telemetry, as pointed out by KSP. What I disliked
most about this was that if you opt out, that seems to be happening at
their end (!) on a per-device basis only. Which really makes me
question how seriously they take any user's decision to opt out.

-Rus.
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