From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc


Well I guess it beats not being employed.

Play:
--=--

Spider-Man vs The Kingpin (MD) - Oh! You have to hold down the jump
button to crawl up walls or on the ceiling. Well that's silly. I can't
believe this was the height of media adaptation 30 years ago.

American Gladiators (MD) - A US-exclusive cartridge, and I can see why.
It has the worst loading times of any ROM-based game I've ever played,
and that's setting aside that it's one of the carts that refuses to work
with the six-button controller. I see a really old design aesthetic at
work here, in that this is exactly how they adapted beloved television programmes for games back in the C-64 days. Every last level is a
different game genre, poorly adapted from the real event in the show.

Arc Rise Fantasia (Wii) - This is a really nice RPG and one that I'm
surprised I didn't get hip to before. Yes, the English dubbing is
terrible and the graphics look like an unpolished first draft, even for
the time. But the encounter combat is super original and there's a
complex story about war and government hiding here under all of the
rough edges that I'm interested to check out. Although I've said that
about a lot of RPGs lately, so we'll see if it lasts.

Time and Eternity (PS3) - Been meaning to get to this forever now. The
most notable delisting from the digital PS3 library, you can't even get
the DLC anymore because Sony wants to pretend the game never existed.
It's a weird hybrid of animated television program and RPG, and the game
is trying to simulate all of the tropes and events that would go on in a
show that wouldn't happen in a game. It doesn't quite work (and the game reviews bear that out) but there's something worthwhile hidden
underneath all of this weirdness that I want to try and understand. The
art style alone is remarkable, with a 3D polygonal background rolling
along as 2D hand-drawn animated figures run back and forth along it.
It's sort of like a super expensive riff on what we'd see later with
sprites in Octopath Traveller.

Want:
--=--

Moar Thyme (RL) - I made sure to get all my gardening done late at night
on Saturday so that I could have the whole of Sunday free for gaming,
and it was still carved up into little ten-minute intervals because of parenting and real life. I'm about ready to fake my death at this point
and just go run off somewhere with a generator, a supply of army
rations, and a sanitary way of enclosing my body so that there's no mess
when I actually die.

Bin:
-==-

My project to create a standard input mechanism for Steel Battalion
Heavy Armour (360) - So this game is well-known as a Kinect-exclusive
that tried to substitute motion detection for the expensive and heavy
custom control panel used for input in the original two Steel Battalion
games. I originally had the brilliant idea to map all of the input possibilities to actual buttons to fake the Kinect interface back to the
360, and in so doing substitute an expensive and heavy custom control
panel for the flaky and unreliable motion detection Kinect camera. What
I've discovered (after six years of casual research on and off) is that
this isn't possible because of the stupid 'modes' that the game forces
you into. It's a different set of motions being detected when you're
sitting in the cockpit, versus moving around inside the mech, versus
moving around outside of the mech. The game is trying to do something
much more ambitious than I had anticipated and it failed in so many spectacular, cringeworthy ways that there's just no room to bodge in a
fix externally. There's an informal rule that you should only spend time
on remaking the bad motion pictures, and I think that the rule for games should be largely the same. This is by way of saying Heavy Armor needs a remaster now so we can see what in the world it was they were actually
trying to do here.

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

Balance forward - $2,054

American Gladiators (MD) - $4
Sports Talk Baseball (MD) - $3
Jeopardy Sports Edition (MD) - $4
Arc Rise Fantasia (Wii) - $48

Total to date - $2,113

-KKC, who hopes someday to play for more than a few minutes at a time.
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

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

Play:

Grand Theft Auto 5 (PC) - bang up to date this time, playing the most
recent GTA. :-) And story mode is surprisingly playable on the mini
PC, with the game on low settings. Really I only got this to have the
sandbox available on yet another platform, but inevitably I'm going
through the story missions again - maybe about halfway through so far.

Want:

Nothing.

Bin:

In a way, going through the story in GTA5 for what must be at least
the fourth time. While it's probably my favourite GTA, and some
missions give you the option of two different ways to approach them,
that still seems like a bit much.

My project to create a standard input mechanism for Steel Battalion
Heavy Armour (360) - So this game is well-known as a Kinect-exclusive
that tried to substitute motion detection for the expensive and heavy
custom control panel used for input in the original two Steel Battalion games. I originally had the brilliant idea to map all of the input possibilities to actual buttons to fake the Kinect interface back to the 360, and in so doing substitute an expensive and heavy custom control
panel for the flaky and unreliable motion detection Kinect camera. What
I've discovered (after six years of casual research on and off) is that
this isn't possible because of the stupid 'modes' that the game forces
you into. It's a different set of motions being detected when you're
sitting in the cockpit, versus moving around inside the mech, versus
moving around outside of the mech.

Still, perhaps the world does need a modal interpretation applied to
the Steel Battalion controller at some point. If only to ensure that
vi technically does not have the most obtuse and unwieldy modal
interface in existence.

-Rus.
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

In article <WIOwO.299470$5%Ga.289823@usenetxs.com>,
Russell Marks <zgedneil@spam^H^H^H^Hgmail.com> wrote:

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

Bin:

My project to create a standard input mechanism for Steel Battalion
Heavy Armour (360) - So this game is well-known as a Kinect-exclusive
that tried to substitute motion detection for the expensive and heavy
custom control panel used for input in the original two Steel Battalion
games. I originally had the brilliant idea to map all of the input
possibilities to actual buttons to fake the Kinect interface back to the
360, and in so doing substitute an expensive and heavy custom control
panel for the flaky and unreliable motion detection Kinect camera. What
I've discovered (after six years of casual research on and off) is that
this isn't possible because of the stupid 'modes' that the game forces
you into. It's a different set of motions being detected when you're
sitting in the cockpit, versus moving around inside the mech, versus
moving around outside of the mech.

Still, perhaps the world does need a modal interpretation applied to
the Steel Battalion controller at some point. If only to ensure that
vi technically does not have the most obtuse and unwieldy modal
interface in existence.

You know why it still wouldn't work? One of the things you have to do is encourage your crew. Among the many commands one can issue inside the
cockpit is to 'fist bump' the gunner as a way of celebrating a
successful artillery delivery. You can't map a button just for that, and
even if you did you'd feel like a completely douchebag every time you
pressed it. Basically the whole damn game just needs a ground-up
remaster and open-source control panel specs,

-KKC, aiming to get back into 3D printing as the temperature drops.
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

On 19 Aug 2024 at 10:12:36 BST, "Kendrick Kerwin Chua"
<kendrick@nospam.io-nyc> wrote:

Well I guess it beats not being employed.

Ehhh. Well.

Play:
--=--

Just finished We Were Here Forever, my PMG with Angus for the last few
months. That whole series is such good fun, they're excellent co-op
asymmetric puzzlers (Operation Tango being another in a similar vein but completely different aesthetic).

I do slightly wish they'd make the framing story less nonsensical, but
you can totally ignore it since it has no impact on the actual puzzles
at all. The puzzles are the star: They're of a depth where you can spend
30-60 minutes working out what the puzzle is and how to interact with it
before even beginning to work out the strategy of solving it. In some
places even getting to the puzzle is a puzzle in traversal first. Jolly
good stuff.

Forever is volume 4 of the series, and 2022 so I'm hoping for another
one in the nearish future - I joined their discord to make sure they're
working on it, and they say they're working on *something* so that'll
do.

Want:
--=--

More two player co-op games. As our PMG whittled down from 4 to 3 to 2
people (Hey Niaz and Jon!) it's become hard to find new appropriate
games. There are plenty of 4 player squad games that *can* be played
with two but so far they always turn out to be rather imbalanced for it.

Current plan is to try Lego, the skywalker saga since it was just free
on PS+

Bin:
-==-

My project to create a standard input mechanism for Steel Battalion
Heavy Armour (360) [snip]
this isn't possible because of the stupid 'modes' that the game forces
you into. It's a different set of motions being detected when you're
sitting in the cockpit, versus moving around inside the mech, versus
moving around outside of the mech.

What I'm understanding is that this could be handled by making *more*
dedicated control panels and swapping them in as needed.

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

I've barely bought anything this year, I already have most of them and
Game Pass/PSN covers a lot of the rest. I do have a couple of Nintendo
tokens waiting for the new Peach game plus whatever else.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
If C gives you enough rope to hang yourself, then C++
gives you enough rope to bind and gag your
neighborhood, rig the sails on a small ship, and still
have enough rope to hang yourself from the yardarm.
-- The UNIX-HATERS Handbook
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2