Since we're posting stuff a day early (well it's already May in some countries), I might as well do this too. :P
Um, I barely played anything. I finally plaued my iPhone's thinking games (not Duo Lingo) this morning.
On 4/30/2025 7:18 PM, Ant wrote:
Since we're posting stuff a day early (well it's already May in some"plaued"?
countries), I might as well do this too. :P
Um, I barely played anything. I finally plaued my iPhone's thinking
games (not Duo Lingo) this morning.
Since we're posting stuff a day early (well it's already May in some countries), I might as well do this too. :P
Since we're posting stuff a day early (well it's already May in some countries), I might as well do this too. :P
Um, I barely played anything. I finally plaued my iPhone's thinking games (not Duo Lingo) this morning.
On Thu, 1 May 2025 02:18:22 -0000 (UTC), Ant wrote:
Since we're posting stuff a day early (well it's already May in some
countries), I might as well do this too. :P
"What Have You Been Playing... IN APRIL 2025?"
Guess!
Since we're posting stuff a day early (well it's already May in some >countries), I might as well do this too. :P
If it sounds like I'm blasting this game, though, think again. Like I
said, "Fallen Order" isn't great, but it_is_ good. It captures the
Star Wars mythos fairly well, and its mechanics --if lacking in
innovation-- are good enough. It's a competently put-together game
that doesn't insult the player by pretending to be more than it is, or
waste their time with tedious make-work. It might not appeal to
everyone, but if you like Star Wars or Souls-like, then "Fallen Order"
is for you.
Oy, April. Some people like Spring; I'm not one of them. It's not so
much the changing weather or light, it's the heat. I remember Springs
not being so oppressively warm in years past. If it was all bluebells
and 15C degrees, I'd be thrilled... but it's birds tweeting cheerfully
at 3AM and 25C and I'm miserable. Maybe that's why I didn't do as much
gaming as I usually do.
On Thu, 1 May 2025 14:54:12 +0100, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:
It's been another month where I've played basically nothing on the PC so
I'll talk about other things.
The Spectrum - Retro
--------------------
I picked up one of these in the second production run and I've enjoyed
it so far. It's a Raspberry Pi in an 'original' Spectrum case running an
emulator. The additions are some more modern things such as controller
support, HDMI, USB (gotta get those extra games on) and a save and
rewind feature.
The downside is this really is for those of us, like me, for where the
Spectrum plays a huge part in their happy childhood memories and having
a physical Spectrum just takes it up another level that a PC emulator can't. >>
The plus side is that I both forgot just how hard the games were and
also how much that feds into to that almost addiction of just one my try
as you failed that pixel perfect jump on Manic Miner.
Yeah, the classic 8-bit games really fail on a gameplay front for modern-gamers. They were designed in an era when the goal was to steal
as many quarters from you as possible (even if a computer game where
quarters weren't involved, that philosophy remained engrained into the mechanics) and weren't meant to be easily finished -or even help you
get past level one. Plus, memory and storage requirements were so
strict there was only so much game you could stick onto a tape, so it
was beneficial to both developer (and player) to throw up as many
obstacles as possible so that the game couldn't be finished in five
minutes. Once you realize this, you see how /cheap/ a lot of the
mechanics are, especially compared to modern titles which actively
WANT you to see the end-game.
Nostalgia only brings you so far with these games.
Call of Cthulhu (TT RPG)
------------------------
Well we finally finished our first campaign (roughly eighty hours spread
over nine months) and we had a fitting end with one character making a
defiant last stand against a Dark Young (that didn't end well - I'll
shoot it, me - well if you want to) and the other going totally insane
and now living out their live as a brain in a jar after being
transferred into the 'care' of the big bad evil.
Didn't end well? Isn't /not/ ending in a TPK the 'good ending' of a
CoC game? ;-)
As one of the players
said it was probably best that they 'retired' as their characters would
never get over being in a town full of killers that are children.
Are... are you Richard Garriot in disguise?
It did give me a gentle reminder of just how cheap RPG's are so the
campaign cost less than £40 which gave three people a play time of
eighty hours and that didn't include any fluff that PC games often pad
their content out with.
Obviously you didn't invest in the Premium Dice ;-)
I was just musing earlier that as much as I have enjoyed the first
four games in my list, the last four have kept me captivated the most
and have held me the longest. My taste in games is definitely a lot
broader than it was 30 years ago, but a good old school FPS is still
my favourite single player experience.
TL;DR: Wanna talk about PC games? c.s.i.p.g.action is the place for
it, regardless of its genre.
On 5/1/2025 7:52 AM, Dimensional Traveler wrote:
On 5/1/2025 3:55 AM, vallor wrote:Based on his previous posts, he's still playing Elite Dangerous
On Thu, 1 May 2025 02:18:22 -0000 (UTC), Ant wrote:You played a guessing game!
Since we're posting stuff a day early (well it's already May in some
countries), I might as well do this too. :P
"What Have You Been Playing... IN APRIL 2025?"
Guess!
On Wed, 30 Apr 2025 22:25:49 -0700, Dimensional Traveler wrote:
On 4/30/2025 7:18 PM, Ant wrote:
Since we're posting stuff a day early (well it's already May in some"plaued"?
countries), I might as well do this too. :P
Um, I barely played anything. I finally plaued my iPhone's thinking
games (not Duo Lingo) this morning.
Clearly, a bit of a portmanteau between "plaud" (to applaud)(obs.) and "played" (to play). Ant is quite a wordsmith! ;)
Seriously, I wonder if they make spelling deconstructors that have some
sense of the proximity of qwerty keys.
Also, since Ant is usually spot-on with their spelling, and would seem
to not use a spell-checker, it would seem that they are _really_ good
at spelling.
On 2025-05-01, Ant <ant@zimage.comANT> wrote:
Since we're posting stuff a day early (well it's already May in some countries), I might as well do this too. :P
Um, I barely played anything. I finally plaued my iPhone's thinking games (not Duo Lingo) this morning.
If I didn't really play anything, should I show myself the way out and
leave?
Well, I did play a little Quake as I'm working on a map, but thats it. Possbily, I might have loaded up SimCity 4, but that may have been
earlier. That doens't count as an action game now, does it?.
Oy, April. Some people like Spring; I'm not one of them. It's not so
much the changing weather or light, it's the heat. I remember Springs
not being so oppressively warm in years past. If it was all bluebells
and 15C degrees, I'd be thrilled... but it's birds tweeting cheerfully
at 3AM and 25C and I'm miserable. Maybe that's why I didn't do as much
gaming as I usually do.
Short
---------------------------------------
* Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
* Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
Long. So very, very, very long.
---------------------------------------
* Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
Even at my most generous, I can't say that "Fallen Order" is a _great_
game. But after the disappointment of "Star Wars: Outlaws", I didn't
need a _great_ game. I just wanted a good one, and "Fallen Order"
certainly categorizes as that.
It's biggest advantage, as I see it, is it's level design. Namely, it actually has levels as opposed to one giant open world. There's just
so much less pointless faffing about, because the developers aren't so desperate to fill their massive creations with something --anything!--
to do. That's not to say the levels in "Fallen Order" are small; there
are four primary worlds to explore (and three smaller mission-based
ones) and each one has numerous nooks and crannies to explore. But the
level design --while still allowing some exploration and looping back
onto itself-- is far more linear. Admittedly, there were a handful of
times I was stumped as where to go next because the way wasn't clear,
but on the whole the game signposted the correct path admirably.
The gameplay of "Fallen Order" is a cross between third-person action/adventures like "Uncharted" and the combat of Dark Souls,
except softened in both instances. The platforming is fairly
straightforward, with different areas gated by powers you only get
later in the game (similar to many a Metroidvania). The combat is the
usual dodge-block-strike of any Souls-like, except without the sheer
and nasty difficulty. It's not that it's an easy game, but "Fallen
Order" is a lot more accessible and the difficulty curve is much more generous. The incredible mobility of your character --you're a Jedi,
so you can leap and bounce around the arena like a coked-out
superball-- gives you a lot more maneuverability to avoid incoming
blows. The combat is almost entirely melee based (no blasters --or
even crossbows!-- to take out enemies from afar) but the game is
fairly generous with the size of its arenas. There were some instances
when the enemy crowded me against the wall, making it all but
impossible for me to see anything (and thus impossible to block) but
these were rare occasions.
Beyond that, it's all a fairly humdrum affair. There's a bunch of
cosmetics to discover, if you've a desire to smarten up your
appearance, but beyond that --and the XP you get for discovering the secrets-- there's little reason to leave the beaten path. You won't
find any awesome weapons or powers for your trouble; all the necessary
tools are drip-fed to you as you progress through the campaign. The
story certainly isn't going to dazzle; it's okay as far as it goes
(it's the usual Star Wars claptrap; 'stay true to yourself and your
friends and everything will work out') and the voice-performances are
good enough, but there's no real depth to it. It's not the sort of
narrative you experience a second time and discover hidden facets you
missed the first time.
If it sounds like I'm blasting this game, though, think again. Like I
said, "Fallen Order" isn't great, but it _is_ good. It captures the
Star Wars mythos fairly well, and its mechanics --if lacking in
innovation-- are good enough. It's a competently put-together game
that doesn't insult the player by pretending to be more than it is, or
waste their time with tedious make-work. It might not appeal to
everyone, but if you like Star Wars or Souls-like, then "Fallen Order"
is for you.
* Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
I wasn't really intending to play "Survivor" again so soon. I last
played it in February 2024, and while I generally enjoyed the game, I
thought it a distinctly less polished experience than "Fallen Order",
and I had no real desire to go through it again any time soon. But
after playing "Fallen Order" to clear the taste of Ubisoft from my
mouth, I figured what the hell; I might as well finish up the series.
"Survivor" is a clear example of what I've termed a "kitchen sink"
title; a game where the developers throw in new mechanics solely for
the point of adding new mechanics, because we as gamers expect that in
a new game. It ignores (or at least, fails to understand) the balance
of ideas that made the original so memorable, adding new complexities
because to do otherwise --to release a game without new features--
would seem lazy on the part of the developers. It's an unfortunate
Catch-22 for developers --they're damned if they do, damned if they
don't-- but it's an understandable choice only escapable if you're a
/great/ developer, or simply refrain from making sequels.
It doesn't help that the developers decided to (mostly) avoid the
usual trope of 'bag of spilling' the hero between games; at the end of "Fallen Order", you've gone through an epic Hero's Journey, starting
from a powerless apprentice and ending up a full fledged Jedi Knight.
Many other games would reset the clock, stripping you of all those hard-earned powers at the start of the next game, but "Survivor"
leaves (most of) your abilities intact. This left the developers less
room to maneuver; they couldn't spend most of the game having you
re-learn all your powers, and so were forced to invent new ones. I can
admire the reasoning that led to this decision, even as I regret the
outcome.
Because all these new abilities added to the game don't really make it
any better. It just makes everything more complex. It's like changing
Chess so that every time a Knight takes a queen, three enemy pawns are spawned. It would certainly add some new flair to the game, but it
wouldn't actually make the game _better_. There's a balance and
cleanness to chess based on its relative simplicity that's marred by
reckless additions to the rules.
So too with "Fallen Order"; in the first game, I could jump and climb
my way past obstacles; now in "Survivor", I have a grappling hook,
hang on ceilings, bounce off walls and get launched from balloons, but
it doesn't make the platforming any different or better. It's just...
more. The combat is similar; I've new abilities but if anything it
makes the combat less fun. I was already super-powered by the end of
the first game; in "Survivor" I become a literal god-amongst-men and
the challenge of the game is greatly reduced (the developers strove
against this by making you face off against more enemies at once,
which is admittedly awesome spectacle but just drags out each battle
in terms of gameplay).
Then there's the case of the open-world, which is something the game absolutely did not need, and even the developers didn't seem to know
what to do with. It's so full of useless stuff to do (like collecting
seeds to grow flowers in your garden, or stones to buy songs to unlock
in your cantina). It's all pointless make-work designed to give the open-world some reason to exist.
The thing is, I'm pretty sure most people weren't playing the first
game for its mechanics anyway. The game was enjoyable in that respect, certainly, but had it been a generic sci-fi game, it would likely have
sunk like a stone. It succeeded largely because it was a good Star
Wars story, and this is another area where the game fails. It's story
feels directionless; none of the major characters have any real arc to
their journey (and why should they, seeing as they all completed their
arcs in the first game?), and almost every new character added to the
game varied from forgettable to annoying.
Despite this, I don't really dislike "Survivor". It's a competent
enough game in terms of its mechanics, and --useless open-world
aside-- doesn't really annoy me the way "Star Wars Outlaws" did. But
it is definitely an inferior copy of the first game, with many of its
changes seemingly mandated by marketing rather than any need or vision
on the part of the developers. If "Fallen Order" was good-not-great, "Survivor" is 'fine-could-be-better'; hardly a desirable outcome for
the devs, but not damning either.
Oh, and one last thing: is it just me or would the titles of these two
games be more suited if they were reversed? The first game is all
about being one of the last survivors of the Jedi Knights, and coming
to grips with the guilt and the new situation you've found yourself
in. Meanwhile, the second game is all about maybe rebuilding the Jedi,
and then deciding that maybe the order as you knew it was ill-suited
for these new times and giving up on the fight to find new ways. The
first game should have been subtitled "Survivor", the second should
have been "Fallen Order". At least that's the way I see it.
---------------------------------------
I'm adding an additional game in this conclusion, but not as a game I
played but as a game I very specifically DIDN'T play. It's "AMERICAN
TRUCK SIMULATOR", and it's a title that I fully expected to dominate
this month's gaming, just because a new expansion DLC ("Missouri")
dropped for it at the beginning of the month, and I'm usually all over
those. I bought the DLC day-one, of course; I just didn't play it. Or
rather, I didn't play it for long. I loaded the game, started tooling about... and almost immediately stopped. Because, quite frankly,
driving about in a game that celebrates America --and ATS does just
that, showing America at its best-- just isn't FUN right now.
Especially not driving around in the Trump-dominated heartlands where
they proudly support the current regime. It's just not a country I
want to have anything to do with right now, whether in real life or digitally. And that's incredibly disappointing, because I love the
base game. (Instead, I drove around in "EUROPEAN TRUCK SIMULATOR", but
since there's nothing new for me to say about the game, it didn't get included in my 'what have I been playing' thread). Sort yourself out, America... if only so I can go back to enjoying my video games.
Anyway, with that unfortunate (political) digression aside, all that's
left is my usual query with which I end these posts:
What Have You Been Playing... IN APRIL 2025?
On Thu, 1 May 2025 08:45:02 -0700, Justisaur wrote:
On 5/1/2025 7:52 AM, Dimensional Traveler wrote:
On 5/1/2025 3:55 AM, vallor wrote:Based on his previous posts, he's still playing Elite Dangerous
On Thu, 1 May 2025 02:18:22 -0000 (UTC), Ant wrote:You played a guessing game!
Since we're posting stuff a day early (well it's already May in some >>>>> countries), I might as well do this too. :P
"What Have You Been Playing... IN APRIL 2025?"
Guess!
You got it! ;)
Also I forgot -- booted up "Doom+DoomII" and found that Sigil II was available, so did a few levels of that. It's tough! I might
have to restart it on lowest difficulty, since I'm more of
a "casual tourist" than anything else...
Borax Man <rotflol2@hotmail.com> wrote:
On 2025-05-01, Ant <ant@zimage.comANT> wrote:
Since we're posting stuff a day early (well it's already May in some countries), I might as well do this too. :P
Um, I barely played anything. I finally plaued my iPhone's thinking games (not Duo Lingo) this morning.
If I didn't really play anything, should I show myself the way out and
leave?
Not even for a (nano/mili)second? ;)
Well, I did play a little Quake as I'm working on a map, but thats it.
Possbily, I might have loaded up SimCity 4, but that may have been
earlier. That doens't count as an action game now, does it?.
It's enough. ;)
On Thu, 01 May 2025 09:12:28 -0400, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
Oy, April. Some people like Spring; I'm not one of them. It's not so
much the changing weather or light, it's the heat. I remember Springs
not being so oppressively warm in years past. If it was all bluebells
and 15C degrees, I'd be thrilled... but it's birds tweeting cheerfully
at 3AM and 25C and I'm miserable. Maybe that's why I didn't do as much >>gaming as I usually do.
Atomfall
Oblivion Remastered
Defiance
The Division 2
Mother Hub
Selaco
Ion Fury
WRATH: Aeon of Ruin
I was just musing earlier that as much as I have enjoyed the first
four games in my list, the last four have kept me captivated the most
and have held me the longest. My taste in games is definitely a lot
broader than it was 30 years ago, but a good old school FPS is still
my favourite single player experience.
There's this one nutcase, for instance, who keeps
bringing up NFTs
Since we're posting stuff a day early (well it's already May in some countries), I might as well do this too. :P
Um, I barely played anything. I finally plaued my iPhone's thinking games (not Duo Lingo) this morning.
On Fri, 02 May 2025 10:59:51 -0400, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,
Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
There's this one nutcase, for instance, who keeps
bringing up NFTs
Damn. You fell off the wagon, sir.
Baldur's Gate III
``````````````````
It's lost its luster, but every now and then I go back, run a combat, do
a few quests. I don't know why Baldur's Gate games seem to lose their
appeal as soon as you get to Baludr's Gate (for me), but that's my >experience.
On Fri, 02 May 2025 17:17:27 -0500, Zaghadka <zaghadka@hotmail.com>
wrote:
On Thu, 1 May 2025 02:18:22 -0000 (UTC), in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action, >>Ant wrote:
Baldur's Gate III
``````````````````
It's lost its luster, but every now and then I go back, run a combat, do
a few quests. I don't know why Baldur's Gate games seem to lose their >>appeal as soon as you get to Baludr's Gate (for me), but that's my >>experience.
I assume it's because in an urban area the adventure takes a turn more >towards those interacting with NPCs than the simpler but more directly >fulfilling find-kill-loot cycle of adventuring you do in the dungeons.
Which is neither to condemn urban adventuring or your tastes; it's
just that the loop is more immediate and quicker to resolution
(usually) outside of the cities. Meanwhile, in-city you're forced to
endure more talkie-talkie-talk NPCs (which, regardless of how good the >writing is, are still essentially signposts dropping quest-lore on you
and with whom you have no emotional connection), which can drastically
slow down the challenge/reward cycle. It doesn't help that CRPGs often
lock you into city-adventures for long periods before releasing you
back into the wilds, which just makes everything drag on even longer.
Is this true of BG3? I don't know; I haven't played it yet. It's
common to many CRPGs though.
Another example: One of the urban quests in BG3 is a mass murder plot/conspiracy/mystery, and it's basically just an endless series of
fetch quests, where you're fetching things for*yourself*. Mostly
evidence. And they're spread out all over the place. Even with the warp
point system there's a whole lotta clickity-walking involved, and the background activities in the city wear out quickly when you walk past the same colorful script for the 50th time. This could have been tightened
up.
You can break that thread up with other things, but I would say the main problem here is a) writing, and/or b) CRPGs are just not good at this
kind of thing.
Ion Fury I have, but I'm not sure about Aeon of Ruin, and whether that would be one I like.
Is it true to a "Retro style"?
Well, I can't speak specifically to the Speccy. It wasn't my device of
choice and I've very little familiarity with its software. But a lot
of the ports to PC and Apple (where I did have familiarity) did suffer
from the problem. There were, of course, exceptions but even in games
like "Zork" you could sense this underlying philosophy; make things as
hard as possible for the player to extend the duration of the game.
I assume it's because in an urban area the adventure takes a turn more >towards those interacting with NPCs than the simpler but more directly >fulfilling find-kill-loot cycle of adventuring you do in the dungeons.
Which is neither to condemn urban adventuring or your tastes; it's
just that the loop is more immediate and quicker to resolution
(usually) outside of the cities. Meanwhile, in-city you're forced to
endure more talkie-talkie-talk NPCs (which, regardless of how good the >writing is, are still essentially signposts dropping quest-lore on you
and with whom you have no emotional connection), which can drastically
slow down the challenge/reward cycle. It doesn't help that CRPGs often
lock you into city-adventures for long periods before releasing you
back into the wilds, which just makes everything drag on even longer.
Is this true of BG3? I don't know; I haven't played it yet. It's
common to many CRPGs though.
TL;DR: outdoor adventures tend to be more immediately rewarding
Since we're posting stuff a day early (well it's already May in some countries), I might as well do this too. :P
Um, I barely played anything. I finally plaued my iPhone's thinking games (not Duo Lingo) this morning.
On Thu, 1 May 2025 13:25:35 -0000 (UTC), Borax Man
<rotflol2@hotmail.com> wrote:
On 2025-05-01, Ant <ant@zimage.comANT> wrote:
Since we're posting stuff a day early (well it's already May in some countries), I might as well do this too. :P
Um, I barely played anything. I finally plaued my iPhone's thinking games (not Duo Lingo) this morning.
If I didn't really play anything, should I show myself the way out and >>leave?
Well, I did play a little Quake as I'm working on a map, but thats it. >>Possbily, I might have loaded up SimCity 4, but that may have been
earlier. That doens't count as an action game now, does it?.
Despite the group name, its catholic enough that we talk about all
genres. Which is fortunate as there just isn't enough traffic on
Usenet to support all 11 (19) newsgroups in the c.s.i.p.games
hierarchy.
TL;DR: Wanna talk about PC games? c.s.i.p.g.action is the place for
it, regardless of its genre.
* Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
What Have You Been Playing... IN APRIL 2025?
Heh. I played both. "Wrath: Aeon of Fury's" visuals were the least
annoying part of the game. In some ways, they were almost impressive.
But the gameplay was just attrocious; a really bad boomer-shooter. >(disclaimer: I played it three years ago, and I think the game was
still in early-access at the time, albeit in a late stage of EA, so
maybe it's had a tremendous improvement since then).
"Ion Fury" was
better, but not by much; it played too closely to the 'boomer shooter'
"look, I'm just like a game from the 90s!" trope, forgetting that not
all the games from that era were great. It wasn't terrible, no, but it
was no "Duke Nukem 3D" or "Dark Forces" either. Maybe more of a
"Witchhaven" or a "Rebel Moon".
The plus side is that I both forgot just how hard the games were and
also how much that feds into to that almost addiction of just one my
try as you failed that pixel perfect jump on Manic Miner.
The Gun Seller (book)
---------------------
The Gun Seller (book)Thanks for the tip, I'll take a look. I'm kinda stuck with nothing good
---------------------
to read and have a business trip coming up where I'll likely have quite
a lot of tedious waiting and travel time.
It's one of the reasons I dislike modern 'retro' games in general,
because they are aping the form without realizing it's not the
pixelated graphics/etc. which made these classics so beloved. We love
them DESPITE those limitations. We love them because they SURPASSED
those limitations. Just slapping on a veneer of retroism is a lazy
appeal to nostalgia without an understanding as to why we're nostalgic
in the first place.
You can break that thread up with other things, but I would say the main >>> problem here is a) writing, and/or b) CRPGs are just not good at this
kind of thing.
Oh I agree with b), one of the nice things about TT RPG's is that you
can cut out all that fluff without breaking immersion. You want to go
all the way across town to investigate where you think someone lives.
Well five seconds of narration and you arrive there and the story
carries on.
You could cut all that out, and a lot of games do by allowing you to
teleport to places you've been before. Or in the old, old days of
random encounters on a map allowing you to cover a lot of distance and
if anything interesting happens it just takes you to that particular set piece (thinking of fallout 1 & 2) which is my favorite way to handle that.
Apperently there's a lot of weird people who like just tooling through everywhere repeatedly as evidenced by the GTAs and Cyberpunk though.
Although generally it's a lot faster in a car.
So things are looking bright on the NFT front! Buy now. New SpallsCoin
coming soon; use them to buy SpallsNFTs! And we're working on
SpallsGame that will allow you to buy lootboxes that reveal NFT
SpallsMTX that you will own and can resell on the soon to be launched SpallsCryptoMarket. 😉
I got similar joys wandering around Skyrim too. The autumnal forests
around Riften were particular favorites. I got similar -but not as
intense- joy from the Grand Theft Auto games; GTA4 in particular had
lots of nifty nooks and crannies to discover, and I loved comparing
its representation of NYC with my memories of the real thing.
I don't get that experience from all open-world games; for instance,
Ubisoft games all feel to generic, seemingly made of cut-n-paste
locations and once you've seen a little bit of the map, you've pretty
much seen it all. (and seen it for the next five games to boot). But
the joy of wandering open worlds obviously isn't unique to me alone; a
lot of 'walking sims' are essentially nothing BUT that joy,
encapsulated in a single game.
Skyrim, like FO:3/NV, is one of those games that does it well as you
can pretty much ignore the main quest and wander off where you like,
to see what little stories you can find and explore.
I know what you mean. Everybody is raving about Balatro, I feel I
ought to give it a chance. But then, like you say: card game.
Maybe if it were free... but I don't feel like paying for a game at
least half of my brain insists I won't like.
On 5/4/2025 7:50 AM, candycanearter07 wrote:
Ant <ant@zimage.comANT> wrote at 02:18 this Thursday (GMT):
Since we're posting stuff a day early (well it's already May in some countries), I might as well do this too. :P
Um, I barely played anything. I finally plaued my iPhone's thinking games (not Duo Lingo) this morning.
Still a lot of Balatro, tho I also picked up a cool little indie game
for 2$ called Downwell, too.
I think I played Downwell for about 2 minutes.
I'm on the fence on Balatro. On the one hand, card game. On the other,
so high a rating.
On Sun, 4 May 2025 09:32:40 +0100, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:
On 02/05/2025 15:58, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
Well, I can't speak specifically to the Speccy. It wasn't my device of
choice and I've very little familiarity with its software. But a lot
of the ports to PC and Apple (where I did have familiarity) did suffer
from the problem. There were, of course, exceptions but even in games
like "Zork" you could sense this underlying philosophy; make things as
hard as possible for the player to extend the duration of the game.
I tend to agree. With their limitations there was only so much content
you could put in so if you knew exactly what to do you could
play-through a game in a few hours or so. As you say to increase the
actual game time the easiest option is just make it hard to know exactly >>what you had to do.
I remember some of the early text adventures and you could easily spend >>half-an-hour working out just how to get past a problem. Then there was >>Manic Miner with it with its massive single screen level count of
twenty. I spent many hours playing that but I never got past probably
level fourteen or fifteen.
And yet... the games WERE fun, weren't they? Because for all that I
point out the foibles of early game design, I never want to imply that
we didn't have a blast with them, or that they weren't well-made
games.
Just that they reflect a different design philosophy and I think that
modern games (mostly) use a better one. But it's this conflict --as
well as various technical issues, not the least being the god-awful
controls of yesterday's games-- that makes it hard to enjoy a lot of
these older titles. And it makes the few exceptions all the more
impressive when they --despite their eye-gouging visuals, ear-bleeding
beeps, hand-cramping controls and ruthlessly antagonistic mechanics--
still manage to hold up as good games to this day.
It's one of the reasons I dislike modern 'retro' games in general,
because they are aping the form without realizing it's not the
pixelated graphics/etc. which made these classics so beloved. We love
them DESPITE those limitations. We love them because they SURPASSED
those limitations. Just slapping on a veneer of retroism is a lazy
appeal to nostalgia without an understanding as to why we're nostalgic
in the first place.
On Mon, 5 May 2025 08:50:23 -0700, Justisaur <justisaur@gmail.com>
wrote:
I haven't heard anything about NFTs in awhile. Surely they've gone the
way of the Dodo (but I mourn the Dodo.)
Also:
Apparently Charlie Guillemot, son of Yves Guillemot (CEO of Ubisoft)
is returning to the company. Charlie is, apparently, a big crypto-bro
and had run off for a while to found his own "web3" video game
company, Unagi. Now he's back at Ubisoft.
I'd always wondered why Ubisoft had dived so deep into the crypto/NFT
hole back in the early 2020s, and suspected it was less because they
saw it as a viable business or something players wanted, and more
because somebody in the C-levels had a hard-on for the tech. But who?
Well, now we know. Whether it was Charlie himself, or Yves shilling
for his son, that's probably where the need to forced NFTs into
Ubisoft games came from.
Whether Charlie has learned his lesson from his four-year sabbatical
at Unagi, or if he's going to push more of this shit down our throats
in coming years has yet to be seen. But Ubisoft has been struggling
for some time now (and while "Assassins Creed: Shadows" has garnered
some good reviews, Ubisoft has been weirdly coy on actual sales
figures, so things may not be getting better). So Charlie's
NFT-fascination may appeal to the desperate company; it's a quick way
to scam money from the foolish. And right now, with the Guillemot
family's hold on the company becoming increasingly shaky --especially
if "Shadows" flops financially-- quick money, however they come by it, probably looks pretty good.
On Wed, 21 May 2025 07:54:24 -0700, Dimensional Traveler
<dtravel@sonic.net> wrote:
Given the current trend in the American Monarchy expect LOTS more crypto.
But will the official scam-coin of the United States of America be
Musk's favorite, Dogecoin or... whatever the hell the orange lunatic's cryptocoin is called?
Meanwhile, Coinbase announced* it was hacked and data on 70K of its
users was stolen. So now criminals know the name and addresses (and
account balances) of tens of thousands of crypto-coin users... and
these same criminals have recently shown they've NO reluctance to come a'visiting to the victim's house to demand --through the clever
application of broken bones-- passwords so they can drain the wallets.
It's almost as if keeping your money in a properly secured and insured
bank is a better idea than crypto. Who knew?
So now criminals know the name and addresses (and
account balances) of tens of thousands of crypto-coin users... and
these same criminals have recently shown they've NO reluctance to come >a'visiting to the victim's house to demand --through the clever
application of broken bones-- passwords so they can drain the wallets.
On 5/21/2025 7:29 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
Given the current trend in the American Monarchy expect LOTS more crypto.On Mon, 5 May 2025 08:50:23 -0700, Justisaur <justisaur@gmail.com>
wrote:
I haven't heard anything about NFTs in awhile. Surely they've gone the >>>> way of the Dodo (but I mourn the Dodo.)
Also:
Apparently Charlie Guillemot, son of Yves Guillemot (CEO of Ubisoft)
is returning to the company. Charlie is, apparently, a big crypto-bro
and had run off for a while to found his own "web3" video game
company, Unagi. Now he's back at Ubisoft.
I'd always wondered why Ubisoft had dived so deep into the crypto/NFT
hole back in the early 2020s, and suspected it was less because they
saw it as a viable business or something players wanted, and more
because somebody in the C-levels had a hard-on for the tech. But who?
Well, now we know. Whether it was Charlie himself, or Yves shilling
for his son, that's probably where the need to forced NFTs into
Ubisoft games came from.
Whether Charlie has learned his lesson from his four-year sabbatical
at Unagi, or if he's going to push more of this shit down our throats
in coming years has yet to be seen. But Ubisoft has been struggling
for some time now (and while "Assassins Creed: Shadows" has garnered
some good reviews, Ubisoft has been weirdly coy on actual sales
figures, so things may not be getting better). So Charlie's
NFT-fascination may appeal to the desperate company; it's a quick way
to scam money from the foolish. And right now, with the Guillemot
family's hold on the company becoming increasingly shaky --especially
if "Shadows" flops financially-- quick money, however they come by it,
probably looks pretty good.
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