The Videogames Tab

It should be here in about half an hour.

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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

Referred to commonly as the good ol' days.
Throw in the lack of internet instant answers and one would be left praying that Nintendo Power had addressed the issue.

Must. Resist. Urge. To. Hack. Expensive. Little. Super. Nintendo.

I don't need to. My NESPi has every SNES (and NES, Mega Drive, PC Engine, Neo Geo and Vectrex game ever made on it), but I'm a tinkerer. What can I say?

As to the SNES, controller cables are WAY too short and you need to hit a button on the machine to bring you back to the menu ... but that's fixed by a £2 extension cable and a cheapo Wii Pro controller so it's definitely a 1st world problem.

It's EXTREMELY neat.

Get to it Tattgyver!

I've had a look and don't think I'll bother. The Mini has 300mb additional space for games - the English SNES catalogue is coming in at over 1GB on my system - and I'd only have done it if I could fit everything on there.

It seems super easy to do though...

EDIT - Tetris Battle Gaiden, however. Hmmm

I'm betting it's almost to the point where, if not for the games, they could fit the SNES in the controller or something.

The modding community are way ahead on that one.



The little Pi Zero can emulate everything up to SNES pretty easily. Games are on a microSD card inside.

Setting aside talk of SNES Minis and on to actual good games, @Yoda - Have you played Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter? It's just been made free on Xbox Games Pass so I might download it.

No; the wife and I still haven't finished Crimes and Punishments (not because it's bad, but because if I play it more than an hour I get some motion sickness). I was thinking of passing on The Devil's Daughter because the reviews all mentioned that it's veering into action game territory (relatively speaking, of course), and that sounds totally plausible given the shift we've seen in the last couple of these Sherlock games. I might buy it on sale, but it's been drifting away from what we liked about it ever since Jack the Ripper.

Just finished downloading it, I'll let you know what my first impressions are (can't me playing it super long).

Funny you should mention Jack the Ripper as it's the only one of those games I've liked. The drift towards action is sad, especially since the makers don't seem to be particularly good at it.

Yeah, exactly: sad both in a general sense (I'd dislike it even if it was good), and in a specific sense, because they don't seem to have much of a talent for it.

I already wasn't nuts about that "everything looks like it's been shot in HDR" style they started using more a few games ago (I think Crimes and Punishments is when it first becomes really noticeable). It doesn't look bad (sometimes it looks downright great), but it was definitely a red flag in that it seemed to coincide with them hyping this stuff up on consoles, and it all seemed like a larger shift in priorities was taking place. So when I heard the action stuff, it all sort of fit well enough that I barely even looked into it further.

But yeah, lemme know. I'm actually assuming the "action" is modest, so if the puzzles are really good I'd still play it, but I'm just sort of assuming the puzzles have gotten worse if this is the kind of thing they're introducing more of. That and/or having to sit through a ton of cutscenes.

Please don't make me play any more, Mr Yoda, sir! Please!

Now, my deep and unwavering love for Deadly Premonition suggests that games with a high degree of clunk are of no barrier to me, but this is something else.

For all its faults, Deadly Premonition had masses of heart, atmosphere, a killer soundtrack and a surprisingly good range of voice actors. The Devil's Daughter opened with a cutscene like a Poundland Witcher, had me pixel-hunting within 5 and on a eavesdropping mission (what Assassin's Creed did away with years ago) within 10.

The character models were dead-eyed mannequins animated to the degree of a PS2 game and while the world looks quite detailed at first glance, it's really all just a collection of tiny maps.

And it controls really poorly.

And Holmes' ears seem to be permanently glowing bright red!

Yikes.

Yeah, this is a good point. In the recent games, everything looks really good from even a modest distance, but I suppose it's easy to make things look great when the areas are small and very little can be interacted with. Makes for some great screenshots, though.

Even the good ones have controlled pretty badly, so no surprise here.

Thanks for taking one for the team. If you get far enough to see what kind of action-y stuff is in there and/or find out how the puzzles are, lemme know.

I uninstalled it, sorry.

What an age we live in where, 20 miles from the closest sizeable town, I can download 22GB in a couple of hours then uninstall an hour later without a second thought.

I remember taking 3 days to download 500mb once, and it was well under a decade ago.

Finally got around to finishing Prey. I really liked how intricate it was, it made it easy for me to immerse myself in the story. Had a lot of fun playing it, I'm hoping they make a sequel.

Now on to Papers, Please.

I've bounced hard off Prey twice now, but I'll definitely give it another chance.

Whoo:


Prime example of that thing I've mentioned before, where independent games only announce their release date when it's imminent. So instead of circling a date and waiting for months, you just get one crazy hype week right before.

It's crazy what's transpired over the past 2 months with games like Battlefront 2 and Destiny 2. I'm glad players are taking a stand against these loot boxes and microtransactions, which never seemed like a good idea to begin with. From what I read I'm not sure how some of these devs aren't getting put in handcuffs with the way they've scammed and exploited their playerbase.

By taking a stand, do you mean spinning on their head?

(Cueeee Tattyyyy...)

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Hello. My name is Golgot. And I am a Star Citizen addict....

Not playing it. Screw that. But watching it crumple in slow motion, dragging itself along the ground as it attempts lift off, is just bizarrely compelling. And what can I say, that's a game that's free to play



Wants It... But...

The damn game looks soo space-pretty. I want it to be a living beast. But it is telling that the current open alpha really isn't that different from the free weekend I tried over a year ago. Well... it does have planetary surfaces now, which is a pretty impressive cosmetic addition. Unfortunately it also seems to have less frames than a neolithic art gallery. And to be as littered with bugs as it's ever been. So the other additions like shooty zones, and basic fetch quests, and the ability to carry a box... don't really add much.

The 'land sale' thing really does suggest that the money's running out and even whale milk won't sustain them forever. Which is a shame. Because we're about 6 years into the open dev now, and this thing still isn't close to being a game...

Something Something Schadenfreude...

So while I wait to see whether it can assemble itself, Transformers style, into something viable, I've completely given myself over to the vicious vicissitudes of the 'hater' / 'Goon' crowd. Because although they're just as blinkered and emotional as the pious believer crew, they're a helluva a lot funnier with it . (This thread is a gold mine of irreverence, evisceration, detective activities and crazed conspiracies. Also features tapirs.)

Memes and themes...

'Eventually I found the buttons to kill myself' [A Review by an annoyed but amusing 'Goon']

Streamer gives up and plays Race the Sun instead



The AI is definitely rustic. But hey, 1 out of 4 ain't bad

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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

*shrugs* I bought Curse of Osiris yesterday and am playing through it. There's some sick loot, great locations and a dull story ... bit like the main game, then.

I think the whole Destiny loot box thing is a storm in a teacup which would barely have raised a ripple had EA not dropped the ball so spectacularly with Battlefront 2.

If Bungie had said up front that you'd get progressively less XP for repeating the public events, then fair enough. When you're at max level they're pretty easy and a lot can even be done solo, which means it's an easy way to farm Engrams, which are the game's loot boxes.

The problem was that they didn't make this public and the XP you thought you were getting didn't tally with how much your bar actually went up. Silly move.

I bought a Destiny loot box once, as part of an introductory offer, and never plan to again. Engrams drop so frequently that there really is no need unless you're super impatient. It's one of the better systems out there.