• Ethnic Stereotyping Play Want Bin (PWBE 24 Feb 2025)

    From Kendrick Kerwin Chua@kendrick@nospam.io-nyc to uk.games.video.misc on Mon Feb 24 01:06:06 2025
    From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc


    It's unfair to paint an entire nationality with a broad and unflattering brush. Anna Sorokin doesn't represent all Russians any more than Vlad
    Putin does. But it's very weird to be living in a world where the
    majority of Russian people are more exhausted than sceptical of their government, given that one of their stereotypes is how much they
    distrust authority figures who have no credibility and no ability to
    serve. If there's one thing that Tolstoy and Chekhov and Goncharov all
    had in common it was that they were screaming at their peers and their
    readers not to trust the people in charge. Somehow we've learned that
    lesson exactly the wrong way.

    Play:
    --=--

    Shopping (RL) - No time to play, too many things going on this weekend.
    I made a little bit of time for myself on Sunday taking the boy to a
    retro toy convention, where there were a surprising number of video game sellers on duty. Brought home another VMU and a copy of Alias for PS2
    that had a memory card in the package. Also a bunch of crap PS3 games
    and an extra copy of Persona 4 Golden on Vita that I don't really need.

    Want:
    --=--

    Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii (PS5) - My copy from
    VideoGamesPlus has been bouncing around the postal system very close to
    my house for three days. I should get it today, but I also know better
    than to bet money on that.

    Suikoden I + II HD Remaster (PS5) - On a separate VGP order coming next
    week, or more likely the week after. I should have done more research
    instead of just buying it blind, because I suspect I'm going to be disappointed in it the same way that I was in the Tactics Ogre Reborn
    release.

    Bin:
    -==-

    Nothing game-related.

    -KKC, who also spent many hours cleaning.
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  • From Russell Marks@zgedneil@spam^H^H^H^Hgmail.com to uk.games.video.misc on Mon Feb 24 22:18:57 2025
    From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

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

    If there's one thing that Tolstoy and Chekhov and Goncharov all had
    in common it was that they were screaming at their peers and their
    readers not to trust the people in charge.

    An interesting point to ponder nowadays, given that it could be argued
    we're returning to feudalism of a sort. Speaking of which...

    Play:

    Kingdom Come: Deliverance (PC) - the original not the sequel. It's a "realistic" medieval action-RPG-ish thing which I thought looked worth
    a shot. Somehow I'd managed to get the impression that this was maybe
    20GB, so having to scrape together over 60GB of free space on a small
    and nearly-full SSD came as a reasonably annoying surprise. And even
    better, on my N100 it does maybe 20 fps in 720p on low settings,
    dropping to 10 at times. So I ended up opting for, wait for it...
    720x400 mode. To really get up close and personal with those chunky
    pixels. That gave a more playable 20-40 fps.

    The game tends to be a bit pedantic, clunky, and awkward, with a
    pathological need to beat the player over the head with entropy.
    Virtually every item breaks or rots rapidly. And if you want a save
    that can be loaded more than once and which isn't an autosave related
    to quest progress, you need the equivalent of Resident Evil typewriter
    ribbons. Which is not great, and means you can quite easily lose a
    whole day of progress. Still, it has a nice enough map and a vaguely
    competent story so far, and between bouts of swearing at the thing
    there's been enough there to keep me playing - despite a few times
    where almost the entire screen rapidly went completely black,
    presumably due to some sort of shader or post-processing issue.
    (Something similar happened for me with GTA5, before I switched to
    using DXVK there. In this case it's happening *with* DXVK, so that's
    fun.)

    I think generally, the biggest issue for me is the combat, mostly
    first-person sword fighting and the like. I'm sure my low level(s) and
    crappy gear can't be helping, but I really am remarkably bad at it.
    It's also a bit depressing that fighting more than one person at a
    time (and certainly more than two) is so often a death sentence,
    whatever gear they have. I think I could have lived with having a bit
    less realism in that respect, frankly. :-)

    Tempest 4000 (PC) - I had some graphical issues with this as well.
    (Clearly, it serves me right for previously saying how so many PC
    games seem easy to run on Linux now.) While it does work to some
    extent with Wine and DXVK, the powerups you're supposed to collect are literally invisible, on my setup at least. You can just about see the
    effect of them locally lighting up the web, but that's an awfully
    subtle cue to pick up on and surely wouldn't be realistic to do in
    later levels (it's hard enough even in the first few).

    Want:

    A return to greater success in buying games which run tolerably for me
    on Linux.

    I should have done more research instead of just buying it blind

    That sounds far too sensible.

    Bin:

    Various other things about KC:D, but in particular:

    - Lacking an option within the game's own settings for disabling
    controller vibration, AFAICT. Not that it does much vibration, but
    it does seem to vibrate quite severely during the fiddly
    lock-picking minigame.

    - That lock-picking minigame having the option of a "Simplified" mode
    which is arguably *even worse* than the default method of rotating
    both sticks at once while potentially holding them in different
    directions and/or to a differing extent (this default method is grim
    but at least lets you dictate the rotation speed). And of course,
    lock picks are brittle consumables which break if you make the
    slightest mistake.

    -Rus.
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