From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc


So I wouldn't draw a straight line between my fully retro-inspired
gaming weekend and Sony's announcement that they're going to end
physical disc media production in 2028. But there's a certain poetry in turning away to enjoy the games I have, instead of looking forward to
games that have not yet been made. I'm honestly worried that not being
able to buy games on disc in just over a year is going to feel like sour grapes, but it's honestly no different to any other financial decision
I've ever made. If something's hard to buy or hard to get to, I won't
bother and I'll spend my money on something else. Sony is about to make
it impossible to buy the thing I want from them because they won't offer
it anymore, and that means the money I'm going to spend on games goes somewhere else.

Play:
--=--

Panzer Dragoon Saga (SAT) - There is no other game like it. I love that
you interact with everything using the little aiming reticle, which
saves you the trouble of having to have separate buttons for opening
boxes or saving your game or starting conversations. I love that the
dragon biology is so arrestingly different, in that it's the back limbs
that form the wings and the front limbs that he walks on. I love that
the whole story kicks off /in media res/ and that the game doesn't try
to drown you in exposition or world-building Final Fantasy style, and
just gives you enough credit to be able to catch up with this world that
has unfamiliar culture but familiar politics. It is genuinely a crime
that there is no modern way to experience this game outside of on the
original platform.

Last Gladiators (SAT) - So that's super interesting. If you do A/B
comparison of Last Gladiators on the FPGA system and the US-region
Saturn, then what you see is that the real hardware cuts off the ends of
audio tracks because it was expecting to, whereas the FPGA reads the
redbook audio snippets too fast and only starts playing them a second in
which means that it cuts off the beginnings. But either way you slice it
the game never expects to be able to play the whole audio, so there's
some wiggle room built into each bit of data. I'm proud to say that this
is the first time I've cut-and-pasted something I posted into Discord
for use on Usenet with hardly any modification at all. :)

Fighting Vipers (SAT) - Of all the Saturn games I played this weekend,
this one might be the one I felt the most joy about. I miss fighting
games with a small, manageable roster of combatants that you could
become very familiar with over time. The simple three-button input
scheme that produces such a wide variety of stances and attacks doesn't
hurt either. Is it weird to prefer fewer characters but more fighting
style variety? No matter, because I also realised how much I miss
innovation in this particular genre. The idea of armour (which can
either be broken up or removed intentionally for purpose) is something
that really hasn't been imitated at all. It is a crime that this game
isn't just widely available on all platforms all the time.

Want:
--=--

Angel Devoid: Face of the Enemy (PC) - I played the first ten minutes of
the Saturn version, which is JPN-region only and has the absurd title 'Deathmask'. I knew this was a pretty high-production value FMV game but
I was sort of surprised to see that all the characters and actors were
white people, and I only learned that it was a western game after
looking it up. I'm now on a fruitless hunt for the original media, since
this is one of the many, many games you can't get on modern digital distribution services. If only game companies were supportive of
offline, physical media to aid in the act of preservation.

Time - I have all these unfinished projects lying about that are all
related to gaming in one way or another. I have a retail Dreamcast kiosk
that I mean to replace the CRT in so that it's easier to move around or transport when I want. I have an ancient 286 laptop here that just
happens to run on a single five volt power input that I've been meaning
to convert to run on a USB wall wart. There's loads of modern game
controllers for retro game systems that I have yet to deploy, an absurd backlog of game media I want to get into, and piles of cardboard boxes
full of mysterious leads and peripherals that I need to catalogue and
label. So why did I spend three hours on Friday looking for a composite
video lead for my US-region Sega Saturn? I ended up reusing the S-video
lead that I had to hand because that's how I had it deployed back in the
days when it was always ready to go, and I really should have known to
do that first instead of spending an eighth of the day fettling.

Bin:
-==-

Any faith I might have had in Sony - I get that corporations aren't your friends. They exist to make sales to you and profit from you, and
nothing more. But all this time with Sega's old output shows me that a
company can try to be profitable but also be creative and inspiring and enriching too. Sony abandoning physical media says to be that they're
just not interested in those sides of the medium anymore.

-KKC, tempted more than anything to pick up another JPN-region Saturn.
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From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

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

Play:

Picross e6 (3DS) - a bit of this. I was of course fully expecting the
puzzles to just happen to be like sun, heatwave, desert, lava, but no.
Probably for the best.

Want:

To cool off by playing a snow level on some random game. I'm pretty
sure that's how that works.

Bin:

Apparently having had roughly zero thoughts aside from "heat bad".

Sony abandoning physical media says to be that they're just not
interested in those sides of the medium anymore.

I think you could argue that the only side of any medium they've ever
cared about is their upside.

-Rus.
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