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    Posted on 18-12-03, 02:35 (revision 1)

    Post: #22 of 166
    Since: 10-29-18

    Last post: 1323 days
    Last view: 999 days
    Circle of the Moon is the only GBA Castlevania I never finished. I kind of played it a bit but was turned off by the graphics so I never really gave the game a chance (this was after I played HoD and AoS). I ought to play it sometime.

    Random game: Cyber Police ESWAT

    It's like Shinobi (very similar physics and gameplay and made on the same arcade system) had a child with Robocop. I'm not sure how it works exactly but it seems you can't continue or you have a limited number of continues passed a certain stage*...Very frustrating but brilliant in terms of making arcade goers put more quarters in the machine and something I'm surprised more companies didn't use more often back then.

    Also, the game features the most comically cringe voice ever recorded in a video game. I'm guessing it's made worse by the low audio quality of the sample.



    *Seem you can't continue on the last stage. So if you're not on full lives before the last stage, lose on purpose then beat the stage I guess.
    Posted on 18-12-14, 08:09 (revision 2)
    Post: #47 of 426
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 260 days
    Last view: 20 hours
    . . . .

    AMD Ryzen 3700X | MSI Gamer Geforce 1070Ti 8GB | 16GB 3600MHz DDR4 RAM | ASUS Crosshair VIII Hero (WiFi) Motherboard | Windows 10 x64
    Posted on 18-12-16, 01:08 (revision 1)

    Post: #15 of 88
    Since: 11-04-18

    Last post: 1644 days
    Last view: 1644 days
    Posted by Nicholas Steel
    ............. ...................... ....................


    ....Great game.



    Chrono Trigger playthrough. "Beyond Time: Follow that cat!" ending.
    Posted on 18-12-16, 02:27
    Full mod

    Post: #65 of 443
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 863 days
    Last view: 60 days
    A while ago I played through Fallout: New Vegas and enjoyed it immensely, so I figured I should get around to playing the other non-Bethesda games in the series.

    With the Fallout Fixt bugfix mod, the game works pretty well in Wine and I've played a few hours so far. It's interesting to see what parts of the game carried over to New Vegas, like the stats and perks, and to see dramatic changes, like turn-based third-person combat becoming real-time first-person, or the way moving from one town to another was originally watching a dotted line crawling across a map with random encounters, and wound up as actual gameplay.

    Unfortunately, although the game works *pretty* well it doesn't work *perfectly*. Apparently Fallout is from that late-MS-DOS-early-Windows era when it was OK to just spin the CPU while waiting to draw the next frame, and as a result this old 2D game is using most of two CPU cores (I guess it spawns a thread?), causing my CPU to get hot and my motherboard to start beeping temperature warnings at me. I guess I need to blow dust off the heat-sinks again, but it annoys me that I should have to worry about CPU usage on a 23-year-old game. I tried running the game pinned to a single CPU core, but the game wound up playing at about half speed, so that was no good. I found a program called "cpulimit" that would limit a process to some particular percentage of CPU usage, which sounded great... but apparently it worked per second, so if I set it to 50% it would run at full speed for half a second, then pause for half a second.

    Maybe I'll just play in very short bursts...

    The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.
    Posted on 18-12-16, 03:31 (revision 1)
    Post: #50 of 426
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 260 days
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    You could underclock the CPU instead of cleaning dust, if you wanted. Also most games that use a wait loop don't cause the CPU to heat up much, since it's barely a work load. The game must be doing something in addition to that (or some weird interaction with it and Wine).

    AMD Ryzen 3700X | MSI Gamer Geforce 1070Ti 8GB | 16GB 3600MHz DDR4 RAM | ASUS Crosshair VIII Hero (WiFi) Motherboard | Windows 10 x64
    Posted on 18-12-16, 09:18 (revision 1)
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    Post: #66 of 443
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 863 days
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    > Also most games that use a wait loop don't cause the CPU to heat up much, since it's barely a work load.

    Modern applications that need to wait for something to happen will have code like:
    while (not_happened_yet()) {
    sleep(0.001);
    }
    ...where `sleep()` is a function that tells the operating system "I'm done with the CPU for a while", and if all the running applications happen to be sleeping at the same time, the operating system tells the CPU to power down, saving heat and energy.

    However, this power-consciousness is a relatively new development; in the bad old days CPUs couldn't power down, so there was no good reason for applications to call `sleep()` and a few good reasons not to, so they did things like:
    while (not_happened_yet()) {
    1+1;
    }
    which keeps the application (and CPU) running at full speed.

    I spent a few minutes today creating a patch for the CPU limit tool, teaching it to do its limiting in smaller chunks. Once I told it to use 16ms chunks (about a frame at 60fps), the game ran a *lot* more smoothly. Still a little bit gritty, and occasionally it would ignore a mouse-click because I happened to click within the 8ms window when the app was asleep, but the audio is fine and the game is more than playable.

    Unfortunately, it seems that the "cpulimit" tool is woefully unmaintained (pretty much no issues or pull-requests have been touched since 2015). Debian's "cpulimit" package is apparently a competing project really named LimitCPU, which doesn't have a public issue-tracker. Its last update was in 2017, though, so maybe it's a bit more lively...

    ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT THE GAME NOW

    This is not actually my first run-in with Fallout 1; I watched a YouTube Let's Play of a low-int, melee run years ago, and I also tried to play it on my laptop once (bad idea: the game relies pretty heavily on right-clicking and is therefore not trackpad friendly). This time I went a bit easier on myself and picked the agility archetype rather than trying to roll a character completely from scratch, and it's going pretty well.

    I was worried about the turn-based combat, but it turns out that as long as you only aggro one at a time, you can walk up to a radscorpion and plug it in the face with your starting 10mm pistol before it does much damage. Cave rats are harder to hit, but they also deal a lot less damage. Three swipes at 47% to-hit is *usually* enough to finish them off in a single round of combat. After finding Shady Sands, I explored Vault 15 and did the radscorpion cave quest without much issue.

    The social side of things is more surprising. My expectation was that exploring the raider camp, or the Skullz HQ would be risky... instead, most people are pretty chill and will talk to you and let you leave, as long as you don't actually draw your weapon or insult them to their face. On the other hand, I expected that if anybody was going to be aggressive, I'd have a chance to talk them down, or at least apologise and run away. A couple of times now I've talked to somebody politely, only to get a response like "now you die!" and then all the NPCs attack me at once and it's time to reload a save.

    The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.
    Posted on 18-12-16, 09:33
    Custom title here

    Post: #132 of 1150
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 6 days
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    Posted by Screwtape
    Debian's "cpulimit" package is apparently a competing project really named LimitCPU, which doesn't have a public issue-tracker. Its last update was in 2017, though, so maybe it's a bit more lively...

    Go to install one program, get a completely different program that claims to be the one you wanted.
    GOD, I LOVE LINUX!

    --- In UTF-16, where available. ---
    Posted on 18-12-17, 18:29

    Post: #36 of 63
    Since: 10-29-18

    Last post: 1126 days
    Last view: 404 days
    For reasons even I don't fully understand—but might've been related to playing with shaders in Retroarch—I went back and played some Super Smash Bros. yesterday. Not Ultimate, which I was taking a break from, but the original N64 game.

    I'm amazed at how poorly this game holds up against its successors. Not just in volume of content, which I'm willing to overlook, but mechanically. The balance is all over the place, the controls are finicky, and the lack of charged smash attacks tends to make matches take longer than they need to. I also missed side specials, but that didn't hurt the experience nearly as much as I thought it would.

    In the end, the control and physics oddities just frustrated me to the point that I got annoyed into playing Super Mario 64 instead, a game which does hold up pretty well. Hard to believe I loved Smash 64 so much as a kid.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Screw_Yall
    Posted on 18-12-18, 00:39
    Custom title here

    Post: #133 of 1150
    Since: 10-30-18

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    Posted by Covarr
    Hard to believe I loved Smash 64 so much as a kid.
    Seriously. You can't even make Mario fight Sonic.

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    Posted on 18-12-18, 01:01 (revision 1)
    Post: #51 of 426
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 260 days
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    I've been watching videos of ProJared play through Smash Ultimate's adventure mode and jeezus christ the game spends a huge amount of time in loading screens. Why does it have to reload the entire level when you Retry? It should be simply respawning everyone at the correct health percentage and statuses...

    I might stop after this second video and keep the rest of adventure mode unspoiled.

    AMD Ryzen 3700X | MSI Gamer Geforce 1070Ti 8GB | 16GB 3600MHz DDR4 RAM | ASUS Crosshair VIII Hero (WiFi) Motherboard | Windows 10 x64
    Posted on 18-12-18, 01:17

    Post: #12 of 49
    Since: 10-29-18

    Last post: 1663 days
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    So far I've successfully and intentionally avoided watching any LPs of Smash Ultimate, mainly because I actually plan on getting a Switch soon and want to be unspoiled re Zelda BOTW and Smash Ultimate. I made the mistake of watching the Super Best Friends LP of Super Mario Odyssey, so unfortunately I've spoiled myself with that.
    Posted on 18-12-18, 22:38 (revision 3)
    Post: #54 of 426
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 260 days
    Last view: 20 hours
    Played the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate for a few hours now and there's a few things that have bothered me in the game.

    1) When quitting a game mode after playing the game for a while you may be faced with a "new challenger approaches" event. This adopts the controller configuration & chosen fighter that was most recently used and gives you no opportunity to change it.

    This is bad because Amiibo's Smash mode uses the default No Name controller configuration and chooses a fighter for you to play as. So you're stuck with the default No Name controller configuration and whatever character you were playing as when the New Challenger Approaches event happens (I have no clue if the No Name controller configuration can be renamed). This ruins the fun of these events a little.

    2) For a game that's all about pressing a certain direction & buttons to perform moves, it's mind blowing that they still don't let you use a DPad for controlling the character (It's relegated to Taunts). I get nowhere near the level of combat precision I'd otherwise be able to achieve because of this limitation. Often when trying to do an aerial recovery it treats me as doing a side-special attack and the analog stick is in general not very good at reading what direction I'm thinking I'm pressing the analog stick in. With a DPad it's super easy to tell what direction you're pressing at any given moment.

    3) After my first experience with gameplay, quitting to the main menu resulted in a barrage of screens with zero context. It showed me unlocking a bunch of stuff for no apparent reason (maybe it did say it within the text) and then I got taken to a wallpaper gallery... took a moment to realize it was a Challenge list (it defaulted to showing a zoomed in image from the wall of images).

    I hadn't been to the Challenge list before hand so I didn't know it was a thing. I wasted my first 3 uses of the unexplained Hammer ability on the Challenge screen revealing what I thought was just pieces of artwork (I would've used them on the seemingly more challenging challenges if I knew what was going on in the first place). In addition to there being no explanation for the hammer it does have text mentioning I need to obtain a number of "tiles" whatever those are to unlock another use of the Hammer.

    4) The game doesn't explain the rewards screen at the end of combat in Spirit Mode. You can't hover over the reward items to read something about them, it's just a wall of poorly explained pictures and you're somehow meant to know what it all is.

    5) The menus are slow to navigate compared to the Wii, Gamecube and N64 games. Most menu transitions have a loading screen.

    AMD Ryzen 3700X | MSI Gamer Geforce 1070Ti 8GB | 16GB 3600MHz DDR4 RAM | ASUS Crosshair VIII Hero (WiFi) Motherboard | Windows 10 x64
    Posted on 18-12-23, 17:03 (revision 3)
    Post: #58 of 426
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 260 days
    Last view: 20 hours
    Dammit, it seems the Bloodborne servers are offline (Australia), or at least I can't sign in to the games Online Mode. Every network Status website Sony hosts says everything should be working fine...

    Edit: Seems like it might be an ISP issue? Or even a modem issue, had various internet issues which seemingly resolved themselves after power cycling the modem.

    AMD Ryzen 3700X | MSI Gamer Geforce 1070Ti 8GB | 16GB 3600MHz DDR4 RAM | ASUS Crosshair VIII Hero (WiFi) Motherboard | Windows 10 x64
    Posted on 19-01-05, 10:49
    Custom title here

    Post: #183 of 1150
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 6 days
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    So, I got a flash cart for Christmas, and I've been poking at various 99/4a games I never owned. Poking as much as a failed pair of joysticks allows, anyways. Hooray for keyboard controls!


    One of those games was a sequel to TI's legally distinct eating-things-off-the-floor maze game, Munch Man.
    Munch Man II isn't as concerned with not looking like Pac-Man as the original was, so the hoonos(tm)(definitely not ghosts) live in the center of the maze instead of in four houses in the corners. Munch Man himself starts in the maze instead of in his house, and you eat things off the floor instead of laying chain down onto the floor(a change the manual calls out as a major feature).

    Munch Man II does some interesting things. While the original had one maze(like a certain Namco title), Munch Man II has two mazes... and unlike a certain Midway-developed title, you play both of them at once. Exit gates take you from one maze board to the other, and you clear a stage by clearing both boards. There's also a teleporter that roams around the maze more or less at random that will warp you to the other board if you move into it. When you move into the other board, you are completely alone in the maze until the hoonos "catch up"(the game doesn't actually track their position across both boards, and they enter through the side gates a fixed time after you enter the second board). This makes for some interesting complexities over the standard maze game.


    On the other hand, the hoonos are faster and more aggressive than they used to be, there are only exits on one side of either maze, energizers don't last nearly as long, and the boards are designed so that you have limited movement options coming out of an exit. The game is designed to be much harder than the original Munch Man(which aimed to be similarly difficult to a game starring a yellow puck), and... it succeeds at that.


    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=layZEOQMJKs



    I'm mentioning it mainly because the dual-maze mechanic is interesting.

    --- In UTF-16, where available. ---
    Posted on 19-01-18, 11:00
    Custom title here

    Post: #192 of 1150
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 6 days
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    Posted by Screwtape
    Posted by CaptainJistuce
    I might type up a proper review later.

    That's what the thread's for, bring it on!


    I'm like three months late here, but let's see if I can't get some thoughts up about Blue Reflection.

    First, I retract the "aimed at teenage girls" statement. Found an interview with the producer, and despite being a bright, fluffy, pastel-colored magical girl story set in an all-girls high school, the game was designed for males. This actually hurts my impressions of the game a bit, as it changes my perception of some scenes and makes them somewhat voyeuristic.

    Anyways. Disclosure presented, moving on now.




    The plot!
    You play a young girl named Hinako. She was a ballet prodigy, accepted into a prestigious high school on the merits of her awesome ballet skills. WAS a ballet prodigy. An accident injured her leg badly, and she can't dance anymore. Her knee can't handle the stress and collapses under her. The school didn't rescind her admission, but it DID bump her out of the "special" course and into the regular plebe course for lame-o normies. Not that it matters, as Hinako spent a few months depressed in her bedroom and didn't go to school anyways.

    But time waits for no one. Wounds scab over, seasons change, and sometimes people find strength in odd places. As it is with Hinako. When she realizes the calendar says her classmates are changing from winter uniforms to summer uniforms today, she decides she probably ought to go to school and not let the summer uniform go to waste like the winter one did.

    And then things get weird.


    To make a long story short, this prestigious high school was built on top of a hellmouth. Only instead of belching demons forth into the real world, it makes people go crazy. And Hinako is just the unsuspecting girl to have magical powers awaken and fix it. Along with her two mysterious classmates, Yuzu and Lime, she can use her newly-awoken magical girl powers to step into people's heads, find the juicy emotional knots driving them mad, kill the demons trying to eat them, and save their classmates' sanity. And maybe along the way, open her own heart up and make some friends.
    ...
    Look, there's good reasons I thought this game was made for teenage girls, okay? And it STILL isn't the dumbest, least realistic, or most overwrought thing I've seen in a JRPG, though that is certainly damning with faint praise.


    The characters themselves are all actually fairly well-written. Most of them feel like real people, and the ones that don't are quite obviously exaggerated for comic effect. Apparently, the producer actually spent time interviewing teenage girls for this purpose. As you've probably noticed by now, I place a premium on believable characters, so the effort is appreciated.



    The gameplay consists of ambling about school and talking to girls to either A. increase your friendship gauge, or B. jump into their head to beat monsters up. The fantasyland in the girls' head is luscious, brightly-colored, and definitely the better part of the game.

    Combat COULD be interesting and engaging, if the game wasn't about as difficult as cutting overcooked spaghetti.

    That's the game's greatest flaw, nothing lives long enough for the various mechanics present to be of any consequence. There's a LOT of interesting wrinkles in the combat engine, and with some different enemy stats, it would carry a lot of depth, but... nope. If I could change ONE thing, it would be combat difficulty.


    -------------




    But all that isn't why I got the game. That the writing is compentent and the gameplay has potential was a pleasant surprise. I'm here because of shit like this:

    This is the first boss of this game about going to high school and talking with your classmates.

    I got this game because it has a distinct visual style. The menus all have a nifty diagonal grid motif, the enemies and environments are all fun to look at(except for the boring high school map), and I'm not above buying a game just because it has an interesting aesthetic.



    This was going to go on longer, but my muse took a vacation somewhere. This has been sitting in Notepad long enough.

    --- In UTF-16, where available. ---
    Posted on 19-01-18, 12:18
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    Post: #84 of 443
    Since: 10-30-18

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    So what you're saying is, it's the Bizarro World version of Psychonauts?

    The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.
    Posted on 19-01-18, 13:04
    Custom title here

    Post: #193 of 1150
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 6 days
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    Posted by Screwtape
    So what you're saying is, it's the Bizarro World version of Psychonauts?
    Sounds like a fair assessment.

    --- In UTF-16, where available. ---
    Posted on 19-01-20, 11:56
    Custom title here

    Post: #194 of 1150
    Since: 10-30-18

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    Well. This is unexpected.

    https://www.spike-chunsoft.com/games/yu-no/

    Yu-No is a seminal and iconic japanese adventure title, I greatly enjoyed my time with the fan-translation of the original, and I'd given up any hope of seeing the remake in english. Then this wanders across my browser out of nowhere.




    I have but two questions:
    1. Is Spike Chunsoft actually any good? I know nothing about them.
    2. Are they bringing over the first-pressing bonus port of the original version of the game too?

    The answers to these questions won't actually stop me from buying this, but it would be nice to know how high to set my hype-meter..

    --- In UTF-16, where available. ---
    Posted on 19-01-20, 23:13

    Post: #18 of 49
    Since: 10-29-18

    Last post: 1663 days
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    Posted by CaptainJistuce
    1. Is Spike Chunsoft actually any good? I know nothing about them.


    Fire Pro Wrestling series.
    Posted on 19-01-22, 08:16
    Custom title here

    Post: #200 of 1150
    Since: 10-30-18

    Last post: 6 days
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    Posted by neologix
    Posted by CaptainJistuce
    1. Is Spike Chunsoft actually any good? I know nothing about them.


    Fire Pro Wrestling series.
    I don't know how good the localization is on those. I also know they're the US publisher for the Danganropa games, but I don't know how good THOSE localizations are either.



    In unrelated news, STUPID POKEMON TRIVIA!

    So I was curious how many polygons are in porygon's design. I was studying it, when I realized something was odd. The design was not actually a design someone would create to be rendered with triangles. In fact, there's several places where facets could serve to make a much more realistic bird-thing at no triangle increase.

    It IS a design someone would make if their hardware rendered with QUADS, though.


    Conclusion: Pokemon exists in a world where the Saturn beat the Playstation.

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