From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc


There's a gcc hierarchy now? Did I travel back in time to 2002 or
something? Says the man posting to Usenet in 2025.

Play:
--=--

Bloodborne (PS4) - Level... 92 now, or something? I found a good farming
route that also has the benefit of helping me practice my parrying. Bloodborne's ideal of parrying is super weird, where you let off a
gunshot at exactly the right time to stagger an opponent so you can walk
up to them and essentially shiv them between some ribs. It's really
satisfying to do, but it's maddening that it's so inconsistent because
the correct timing point is different for each type of attack. For my
slow old eyes it might as well be random chance whether or not I get it
right.

Roblox (XSX) - My son is playing, and I've figured out (after watching
him play daily for several interminable hours) that the correct way to summarise this stupid thing is 'Video Game Simulator'. None of the
"games" in the library are actually games as we would understand them,
but are all button mashers and dopamine games-of-chance tied to some
thin premise and then layered on top of an existing template. There's
really only six or seven distinct games, all with slightly different
graphics or music but essentially they come down to numbers-go-up. If
someone tried to make an actual retail product that looked like anything
in the Roblox library they'd be laughed right off of the mobile
storefront. The one I'm watching right now (on Saturday night) happens
to have no actual button mashing at all, just an auto-attack that makes
a score go up as you stand next to things. No idea why this appeals

Want:
--=--

Capcom Fighting Collection 2 (PS5) - Ordered from Canada. The online
sources I'd otherwise have used didn't list their copies until Saturday,
which meant that by Friday night I was willing to take a punt on
Videogames Plus, which did still mean a substantial discount because the exchange rate is still such a mess. So I should see it in a week or so,
which I'm honestly fine with.

Bin:
-==-

Nothing game-related.

-KKC, who spent too much time moving furniture this weekend.
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From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

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

Did I travel back in time to 2002 or something?

If I had to pick a palindromic time-travel destination year I'd be
sorely tempted to choose 2112 instead. Just need to steer clear of the
shooty llamas and surreptitious guitar-discovering activity.

Play:

Mr. Driller (DC) - actually got fairly close to beating the 1000m,
which is of course a nicer way of saying "failed repeatedly". Then I
went on to spoil that pithy summary of events by finally making it.

Driver: Parallel Lines (PC) - more of those awkward clunky missions,
made even more special by again featuring the wonky motorbikes. But at
least now the game's bothered giving me a better selection of weapons
with which to do the traditional fiddly auto-aim dance.

Chatbot Arena (lmarena.ai) - I actually hadn't tried an LLM battle on
here before (one prompt, two models run it, you pick the best
answer... and everything gets added to a public dataset IIRC, and used
to rate the models relative to each other). Previously I'd thought up
a somewhat silly problem which happens to puzzle even the best
language models that I can reasonably run on my mini PC:

Possible answers to "How many days are between 2024-01-01 and
2024-12-31?" include "366", "364", and "7", based on differing
interpretations. Taking that statement as axiomatic, explain each
answer.

So, that's what I tried. As revealed after I voted, the models
selected for me were DeepSeek V3 0324 (pretty large and supposedly one
of the better non-reasoning models), which still couldn't quite seem
to figure it all out, and something with the identifier "drakesclaw"
(possibly some upcoming Gemini model being tested, if rumours are to
be believed), which nailed it. To be honest, I'm just glad that
something figured it out. Having seen the frankly baffling level of
some questions these things are getting asked by the more recent
benchmarks, it would have been very strange for me to bamboozle
everything with this crap. :-)

Roblox (XSX) - My son is playing, and I've figured out (after watching
him play daily for several interminable hours) that the correct way to summarise this stupid thing is 'Video Game Simulator'. None of the
"games" in the library are actually games as we would understand them,
but are all button mashers and dopamine games-of-chance tied to some
thin premise and then layered on top of an existing template.

Whereas we do *proper* computerised hoop-jumping which is entirely deterministic and not just, say, some hyperactive "What if Dig Dug but
puzzle game?" with a flimsy story...

an auto-attack that makes a score go up as you stand next to things

...though admittedly, that does sound a bit basic.

Want:

Nothing.

Bin:

DPL missions seeming to have either loads of checkpoints or none.

My score on Mr. Driller never being in any great danger of rivalling
my old best from 2003.

-Rus.
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