From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc


I can't recall that I ever had this particular US bank holiday off work,
as it's one of those that's not celebrated nationally. We previously
called it 'Columbus Day' because it was one of those headfakes towards diversity as a bone of recognition thrown to Italian-Americans of the
1960s. The idea that we now collectively have an embarrassing moment to remember all of the native peoples that we displaced is no less empty a gesture.

Play:
--=--

Bloody Roar 3 (PS2) - I never did own any of the games in this series,
being the martial arts snob that I am. I knew sort of instinctively that
the Bloody Roar games lean more heavily on their narrative than they do anything approaching a simulation of martial arts, and to be fair what
story there is in this third entry is pretty compelling. I just wish
there were an original thought in here somewhere. The 3D ring navigation
is a Soul Calibur riff, the walled rings are exactly what you get in
Fighting Vipers, and if you set aside the fourth button for transforming
into a beast the punch/kick/guard input is pure Virtua Fighter and DOA.
These games still command slightly more than their original retail
price, and I'd be a bit grumpy if I'd paid more than the $20 I did for
this and the pile of crap games it came with.

Batman (MD) - The Sunsoft game, for which I own the JPN-region cart.
That doesn't really matter because there's hardly any text in the game
to localise, and the manual helpfully translates the chapter titles for
any Nihonjin who haven't seen the film. I can't recall ever having
played the game before, and it's a notable item in my collection only
because it's one of those super compact Megadrive cart boxes that's
barely larger than the actual cartridge itself. I don't think I was
prepared for how... boring the game is? Scroll right, punch bad mans.
Repeat until boss. It's not even tactically fulfilling in the way a good session of Double Dragon would accidentally reveal how the designers
expected you to take on multiple opponents at once. I'm sure there must
be some kind of difficulty setting I'm setting wrong.

Pac Man World (PSX) - Truthfully it's my son who's been playing, after
having watched seven million hours of Youtubers playing the remake. He
was thrilled to learn that I have the original game lying about, and
he's accidentally learning all the rules of action platforming from
playing. It's fascinating to see him discover things once he learns all
of the rules, and even more interesting to watch him attempt to exploit
the spaces in between those rules to get an advantage or uncover
secrets.

Want:
--=--

Pump It Up (PS2) - I recently bought the US-region disc, and I lost an
auction for a set of floor pads from the Korean region. If I'm being
honest I don't really have enough room for any dance game setup, and I'm
also too old to properly enjoy it. So this is an exercise in wanting
things that I shouldn't have, which is a grand tradition handed down
from father to son since ancient times.

Bin:
-==-

Netgear Router (RL) - Netgear has lost, in me, a customer for life.
They've decided that their business model requires squeezing people by purposefully breaking the network hardware they sell, and then charging
people hourly rates to walk them through basic setup. And I say, screw
that. I bought a Synology router which is a bit more capable than I'd anticipated, although it doesn't play nice with some older equipment. I
almost typed 'legacy' there because I've been working in tech too long. Anyway, here I go creating complicated VLAN and routing setups because I
can. I'm sitting here being sorely tempted to run the Netgear device
through an industrial shredder and send it back to them for purposes of
spite.

-KKC, who is too tired to care about anything this week.
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

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

Play:

Minecraft (Linux) - this was a bit odd. Since one of the villages near
my main base happened to have a cartographer, I levelled them up and
ended up getting some sort of ocean map. I couldn't remember for sure
what that would be indicating, so I went there and checked, and it was
an ocean monument. Which is how I ended up doing one of those for no
particular reason. It was quite a pain, as while the three elder
guardians seemed similar on Java to how they are on the Bedrock
versions of the game, the non-elder guardians were far more aggressive
and numerous. So as now seems to be traditional, I died a lot. To be
fair, I've always died a lot clearing these things out, but here I
just offed the elder guardians, grabbed a bunch of sponges, and left -
and still managed to die a good dozen times. Somehow, I suspect I
won't be doing another of these any time soon.

Pac Man World (PSX) - Truthfully it's my son who's been playing, after having watched seven million hours of Youtubers playing the remake. He
was thrilled to learn that I have the original game lying about, and
he's accidentally learning all the rules of action platforming from
playing. It's fascinating to see him discover things once he learns all
of the rules, and even more interesting to watch him attempt to exploit
the spaces in between those rules to get an advantage or uncover
secrets.

I think PMW felt like a sort of weird altitude training for 3D
platformers in general, with the way it forced you to judge platform positioning without being able to control the camera (IIRC). Much more
so than playing Super Mario 3D Land on the 2DS, even.

Want:

A brewing stand in Linux Minecraft. While tackling that ocean monument
I only had three underwater-breathing potions and used them all, so I
could do with making more.

Bin:

Nothing.

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