From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc


It's the week after the PSN boycott! Strictly speaking the boycott is
supposed to go as long as participants can bother, but all week there's
been thousands of people Fortniting and Robloxing and Calling of Duty
and I imagine Pornhubbing too. Basically it's been an effective way of
showing how much disunity and lack of intent there is among gamers as a
whole market. Although having spent a week observing the stats it's interesting to conclude that all of the use of PSN over the last eight
days has been stuff that isn't exclusive or otherwise dependent on Sony
in any functional way. All these people could move to PC or to some
other platform easily and transparently and there'd be nothing keeping
them in place.

Play:
--=--

Dead or Alive (SAT/PSX) - It's a crime that the Saturn disc was never
made available in the States, doubly so that this is one of the handful
of games that doesn't run right on the the MiSTer hardware. The
SuperStation chugs trying to make some 3D fighting games go, in that on
the original hardware it was just a boulder rolling out of control down
the hill, but the FPGA is trying to tightly constrain what's happening
and has to do ten times as much work to get essentially the same result.
I don't mind the Playstation port of the game, but the colours and the
physics are so much more dreary than they are on its predecessor. I
defaulted to playing both on the original hardware just because I had
the discs to hand.

Virtual Hydlide (SAT) - After some 28 years I think I've finally cracked
the combat. I took on a treeant and was able to successfully dodge
around it and chip away at its health until I scored 20 inexplicable
points for killing it. This is a game that's really crying out for a
remaster, and perhaps a proper tutorial and in-game explanation of what
in the hell is going on, because unless you show up knowing that the job
is to reunite the three fairies so that the kidnapped princess can be reconstituted and rescued from the vampire it's not really clear what's
going on. There's something of a Souls game in the way that it's
presented, and something of Doom in how it's painstakingly rendering all
of the 2D textures in each depth plane as it attempts to show you a
forest or a mountain range or a castle interior as you wander about. I
need to find more spare time so I can enjoy this mess of a game some
more.

Saturn Bomberman (SAT) - Made it all the way through the first world,
seven stages and a boss battle. Minor spoiler, I forgot that the game
uses the limited medium of sprite animation to tell an interesting
story, in that the first boss is initially presented as three
sword-wielding enemies who are unexpectedly cleared from the board by a
giant robot formed from the tower of the castle at the center of the
amusement park. I don't mean to grouse, but it's really hard to imagine Konami's creators being half as whimsical or charming with the property
as Hudson could be.

Want:
--=--

Hood Story: Kaito Yamazaki (PS5) - I play a lot of Yakuza games and I
should branch out and play something other than an open-world brawler
RPG hybrid set primarily in Tokyo that's centered on an unflappable and experienced gangster. What if the game were set in Osaka instead? And
was about a younger gangster who's not as experienced? Yeah, that shakes
up the formula all kinds of ways. I wonder if the format of the title
suggests that there may be other Hood Story games in the future with
slightly different protagonists. Maybe they could explore the organised
crime connections of a moneylender, or a slightly corrupt police
officer, or a baseball player.

Bin:
-==-

The Playstation Network Boycott - So I don't think anybody seriously
thought this would have any effect. But just as I'm the only person in
the world who successfully stopped buying from eBay and Amazon and
Wal-Mart and Electronic Arts, I will also have been the only regular
user of the service who actually didn't log in to PSN for seven days
like I said I would. I'm not suggesting that the people who just kept on gaming as usual lack principles, but it does elude me as to why so many
people don't do what they say they're going to do. And clearly large
uncaring corporations have already predicted that this will happen, over
and over again.

-KKC, who doesn't get his bank holiday until next week.
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From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

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

All these people could move to PC or to some other platform easily
and transparently and there'd be nothing keeping them in place.

I think it's firmly established by now that only crazy people play
games on PC though.

Play:

Grow Home (PC) - finished the Star Seeds and the Data Bank, which just
leaves Three Crystals and an excess of Capitalised Words. (This is not financial advice.) That might actually be closer to full completion
than I did on the PS4, which is bizarre^Wobviously super important and meaningful and stuff.

This is a game that's really crying out for a remaster, and perhaps
a proper tutorial and in-game explanation of what in the hell is
going on, because unless you show up knowing that the job is to
reunite the three fairies so that the kidnapped princess can be
reconstituted and rescued from the vampire it's not really clear

Just like real life.

Want:

To finally replay Grow Up rather than tediously squeezing every last
possible drop out of Grow Home. More than I already have, I mean.

Bin:

Nothing.

-Rus.
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