Oh good. Let's repeat all of the mistakes of the 1980s and relive the
best moments of the cold war. At least the fashion will be terrible and
the music will be off-putting.

Play:
--=--

Revelations: Persona (PSX) - The star of the weekend, which was filled
with proper retro gaming. The very first western Persona release has
sort of a bad reputation for its attempt to fully Americanise all of the
content, but in retrospect it's charming and respectable that they even
made the attempt. Little things like changing the side of the road that
the cars are on to indicate that we're not in Japan don't get sabotaged
or negated just because there happens to be a Shinto shrine in the town.
That and the earthquakes seem to indicate that Nate and Yuki and Ellen
and Mary are living in California somewhere. Four hours in it's a slow
but standard RPG, with very little signposted and a clear requirement to
explore *everywhere* in order to figure out where to go next and what to
do, and I seem to be in exactly the right mood to enjoy something
classical and old fashioned like this.

I think that all of the music is chiptune rather than redbook? The
combat theme does that clever thing where it wraps up and lands on a
resolved theme no matter when you actually end the fight, so I think
it's being generated on the fly to suit the context. The ambient sound
of the town (before and after the demon attack) and the subtle things
like changing your footsteps depending on the surface of the floor are
all really immersive in a way that you wouldn't have expected from a
game of this era.

Shadow Tower (PSX) - I wouldn't go as far as to call the game
unplayable, but for sure it would benefit from some modern analogue
controls. As it stands it's a twitchy Dark Souls predecessor that's much
simpler than it looks, but also demands much more from a player in terms
of doing things exactly right. The combat is extraordinarily central to
the experience, in that you must get it exactly right and beat every
monster or you miss out on vital information and equipment. I'm very
glad I've played it now, decades after having bought it, but I'm
probably not going to stick with it.

Spy Fiction (PS2) - Numpty alert. I've been shopping for this stupid
game for the last six months, seeing aftermarket used prices for the
thing running into $80 or more. I finally gave in and bought the
JPN-region one, only to discover the day after that I already own the
US-region disc. I bought it in January of 2006, brand new, for the
princely sum of $10. It is kind of single-mindedly obsessive about
simulating what it would actually be like to be some kind of secret
agent infiltrating a hostile military target, in that you wait for
minutes and minutes in real time for the opportunity to mess up and have
to start the whole level over. That's really realistic, but I'm not sure
if it makes for the best game. I'm going to give this some more time and
see if it grows on me and if I can learn to love it in a sort of Dark
Souls kind of way.

Want:
--=--

Monster Hunter Portable 3rd Remake (PS3) - JPN-only because at this
point in the franchise Nintendo had secured western-region exclusivity.
This is a remaster of (believe it or not) the PSP version of the game
that originated the whole notion of throwing every previous area in the
game together into one giant mish-mash that barely fit together. Of
course I do have the PSP UMD and have never played it for it is all in
squiggly foreign, so obviously having it up on a giant HD screen will
help me enjoy it more. Probably.

Bin:
-==-

Nothing game-related.

Expenditure:
-----=-----

Balance forward - $1,101

Front Mission 1st Remake (PS5) - $50
Crosscode (NSW) - $30
Sega Ages vol 31: Virtual On (PS2) - $40
Spy Fiction (PS2) - $15
Monster Hunter Portable 3rd HD Remake (PS3) - $10

Total to date - $1,246

-KKC, who is worn out from lawn mower repair.

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

> Oh good. Let's repeat all of the mistakes of the 1980s

RAM pack wobble is probably a bit harder to achieve now, but well
worth the effort I'd say.

> Play:

Outrun 2006 (PC) - so as it turns out, if you have a suitable version,
the rocket surgery required to run this on Linux now seems to be...
run it in Wine. Set to 1080p it works surprisingly well. So I cleared
a few goals and, inevitably, did a bit of Flagman again. It does seem
to run noticeably less well during the latter, for some reason.

> Want:

Nothing.

> Bin:

Outrun 2006 on Wine seizing up for no obvious reason, which didn't
crash the machine, but did seem to effectively mess up the X server's
graphics output. Restarting X resolved that, and for something arcadey
I suppose this isn't too disastrous - still a bit of a shame though.
(Possibly Wayland might have handled this better somehow, but talk of
an "experimental Wayland driver" in the three-month-old stable version
of Wine I'm using doesn't sound too promising.)

-Rus.

In article <3nRXN.1648268$Rq2.1325600@usenetxs.com>,
Russell Marks <zgedneil@spam^H^H^H^Hgmail.com> wrote:
>Kendrick Kerwin Chua <kendrick@nospam.io-nyc> wrote:
>
>> Oh good. Let's repeat all of the mistakes of the 1980s
>
>RAM pack wobble is probably a bit harder to achieve now, but well
>worth the effort I'd say.
>
>> Play:
>
>Outrun 2006 (PC) - so as it turns out, if you have a suitable version,
>the rocket surgery required to run this on Linux now seems to be...
>run it in Wine. Set to 1080p it works surprisingly well. So I cleared
>a few goals and, inevitably, did a bit of Flagman again. It does seem
>to run noticeably less well during the latter, for some reason.
>

Oh! How did I miss that there was a PC port of this game? How is it
possible that Sega hasn't seen fit to test and release for modern
distribution platforms? I don't fancy paying $60 for the DVD, at least
not while I have all the console versions ready to go.

-KKC, who needs a nap.