Going back to sports management games, and I am yet to play Football Manager 2020.

I replayed Deus Ex with the Shifter mod and had a few laughs after getting the "Magnum" from Lebedev's 747 Private Quarters room. It's basically the sniper rifle in pistol form.

The "10mm Explosive Tipped" ammo it adds also ends up killing virtually anybody with one headshot. Even Walton Simmons was defeated instantaneously by that.

I spent an hour or two yesterday playing The Lost city of Atlantis -- a.k.a. "that game with the naked dude."

So far I can say that I really dig the colourful VGA graphics and pixel art, which are very reminiscent of 1991's "Gods". The game tries to merge exploration underwater as well as on land and it mostly succeeds; the protagonist jackknifes into the water with appropriate panache and the swimming animation is nicely executed. However, overall the controls sit uncomfortably between being too stiff and being overresponsive, which can make underwater navigation painful, particularly since you continuously loose health while you're in the water. At least you can save anywhere, so you don't have to sweat too much about timing (or rather aiming) your jumps.

I'll play this one some more but, alas, I wish this little platformer had gotten some more polish because it could have been a small gem.

The art work does indeed look beautiful. I’m not a fan of the you’re-running-out-of-breath-so-hurry mechanic; the water levels in Sonic, etc were always my least favourite.

I am looking for a Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator add-on named Battle For Midway, and I am yet to watch the new movie this week... should be fun

For some reason I really enjoy insanely difficult platformers So I'll fire up Super Mario Maker and play the hardest levels people create. But today was different.

I plopped down in front of my old TV and TG16 today and played JJ & Jeff ( Kato & Ken Chan.) This game is/was insanely difficult. And I can't believe that nearly thirty years after buying this game, I finally finished it. I didn't use any cheats or walkthroughs; only what I remember from playing it way back when: warp to level three, warp to 6-4 by jumping on a rat, warp back to 6-3 to get the key. Go to 6-4 and kick the boss to death.

badmojo wrote:

The art work does indeed look beautiful. I’m not a fan of the you’re-running-out-of-breath-so-hurry mechanic; the water levels in Sonic, etc were always my least favourite.

I know and I'm usually not a fan either, but in this game's defense I'll say that it's only a mild case of oh-no-better-hurry-tf-up.

henryVK wrote:

I spent an hour or two yesterday playing The Lost city of Atlantis -- a.k.a. "that game with the naked dude."

So far I can say that I really dig the colourful VGA graphics and pixel art, which are very reminiscent of 1991's "Gods". The game tries to merge exploration underwater as well as on land and it mostly succeeds; the protagonist jackknifes into the water with appropriate panache and the swimming animation is nicely executed. However, overall the controls sit uncomfortably between being too stiff and being overresponsive, which can make underwater navigation painful, particularly since you continuously loose health while you're in the water. At least you can save anywhere, so you don't have to sweat too much about timing (or rather aiming) your jumps.

I'll play this one some more but, alas, I wish this little platformer had gotten some more polish because it could have been a small gem.

I'm gonna have to check this one out too. You had me at "naked dude." 😜 (Actually you had me at "save anywhere" and "really nice pixel art.")

-----

Just for fun, I'm going to try to stream the last few maps of Slaughter Spectrum. Expect me to cheat like a bastard, stop to look at EVERYTHING, spend WAY too much time finding secrets, and just generally playing exactly how you're not supposed to. Also, I have a 4Mbit down / 768kb up DSL line so those of you who love compression artifacts will have plenty to appreciate. I'll be online starting at 1PM PST (or 2PM PDT if you're me and refuse to change your clocks just because the government says to), so if you see this, feel free to join the fun. 😀 [EDIT: finished!] https://www.twitch.tv/oldskooljay

Map 3 is up next. It's very green:

xjas wrote:

Just for fun, I'm going to try to stream the last few maps of Slaughter Spectrum.

Surprised I was able to catch some of that stream after AT&T got their idiot act together today.

I kinda find it funny you use a dedicated machine to stream separate of the one running the game. I have a old Phenom 2 quad core so I just try to do everything at once on it. I can still manage a 640x360 20 FPS stream but if I had the bandwidth I'd be streaming at 1366x768 30 FPS instead.

Fun fact, the way I access a Twitch stream's chat looks like this: (yes including the tiny pixel font)

Finished Slaughter Spectrum! It wasn't the most polished or well-balanced map pack in the world, but as an architectural showpiece it was incredible. Maps 3-5 were significantly shorter & a lot tighter than the first two (my own utter incompetence at one switch puzzle that shouldn't have taken anywhere near the 45 mins it did notwithstanding.) My earlier comments stand, but still, highly recommended. I mean, just look at this!

I still think map 2 was my favorite - the absolute mindfuck geometry in that one was a treat.

DracoNihil wrote:

Surprised I was able to catch some of that stream after AT&T got their idiot act together today.

I kinda find it funny you use a dedicated machine to stream separate of the one running the game. I have a old Phenom 2 quad core so I just try to do everything at once on it. I can still manage a 640x360 20 FPS stream but if I had the bandwidth I'd be streaming at 1366x768 30 FPS instead.

I was actually playing on the stream PC today. It's an i7 3770 + GTX 750Ti - not the most powerful thing in the world but it does the job. I had a laptop on the desk next to me running twitch chat on an entirely separate internet connection off my phone. 😜 That probably wasn't completely necessary though.

There's a Datapath VisionRGB PCI VGA capture card in the system, so I can stream from real hardware on retro machines. It's really only good for lower resolutions (640x480 or less) but that's acceptable for Win98. Here's a pic of the setup (sorry about the grubby carpet, I need to vacuum in this spot!)

The Win98 PC's VGA out is connected to a 4-way splitter box, which feeds the capture card in the i7 rig and a separate monitor so I don't have to play through the capture window. I also have an audio cable connected from one PC to the other. It's a bit clunky but it works.

(There's a quad-head Matrox card in there right now so technically I don't need the splitter box, but I'll put the ATI Rage back in sooner or later.)

I've really only tried streaming a few times so I'm still dialling in the setup. I might bump the canvas size down to 800x600 which should give a decent quality boost at the same bitrate.

DracoNihil wrote:

Fun fact, the way I access a Twitch stream's chat looks like this: (yes including the tiny pixel font)
[...]

That's really cool! Is that a separate app or browser extension, or just a skin for something?

xjas wrote:

That's really cool! Is that a separate app or browser extension, or just a skin for something?

It's irssi running with a custom tailored config and styles file in a very specifically configured xterm plus a XPM I made of the Twitch logo for the icon. The Xresources I use for the terminal itself are as follows:

1TwitchChat.iconHint:	twitchchat
2TwitchChat.termName:	xterm-256color
3TwitchChat.title:	Twitch Chat
4TwitchChat.ttyModes:	erase ^?
5TwitchChat.vt100.allowBoldFonts:	false
6TwitchChat.vt100.backarrowKey:	false
7TwitchChat.vt100.boldFont:	-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--7-50-100-100-c-50-iso8859-1
8TwitchChat.vt100.color0:	#000000
9TwitchChat.vt100.color1:	#aa0000
10TwitchChat.vt100.color10:	#55ff55
11TwitchChat.vt100.color11:	#ffff55
12TwitchChat.vt100.color12:	#5555ff
13TwitchChat.vt100.color13:	#ff55ff
14TwitchChat.vt100.color14:	#55ffff
15TwitchChat.vt100.color15:	#ffffff
16TwitchChat.vt100.color2:	#00aa00
17TwitchChat.vt100.color3:	#aaaa00
18TwitchChat.vt100.color4:	#0000aa
19TwitchChat.vt100.color5:	#aa00aa
20TwitchChat.vt100.color6:	#00aaaa
21TwitchChat.vt100.color7:	#aaaaaa
22TwitchChat.vt100.color8:	#555555
23TwitchChat.vt100.color9:	#ff5555
24TwitchChat.vt100.colorBD:	#ffffff
25TwitchChat.vt100.colorBDMode:	true
26TwitchChat.vt100.font:	-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--7-50-100-100-c-50-iso8859-1
27TwitchChat.vt100.foreground:	#aaaaaa
28TwitchChat.vt100.geometry:	31x35
29TwitchChat.vt100.internalBorder:	0
30TwitchChat.vt100.locale:	true
31TwitchChat.vt100.metaSendsEscape:	true
32TwitchChat.vt100.selectToClipboard:	true
33TwitchChat.vt100.translations:	#override \nCtrl Shift <Key>C: copy-selection(CLIPBOARD) \nCtrl Shift <Key>V: insert-selection(CLIPBOARD)
34TwitchChat.vt100.utf8:	true
35TwitchChat.vt100.utf8Fonts.boldFont:	-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--7-70-75-75-c-50-iso10646-1
36TwitchChat.vt100.utf8Fonts.font:	-misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--7-70-75-75-c-50-iso10646-1

Then it's just as simple as doing the following in a desktop launcher:

1xterm -name TwitchChat -u8 -e "irssi --config=twitch-config"

xjas wrote:

Just for fun, I'm going to try to stream the last few maps of Slaughter Spectrum. Expect me to cheat like a bastard, stop to look at EVERYTHING, spend WAY too much time finding secrets, and just generally playing exactly how you're not supposed to. Also, I have a 4Mbit down / 768kb up DSL line so those of you who love compression artifacts will have plenty to appreciate. I'll be online starting at 1PM PST (or 2PM PDT if you're me and refuse to change your clocks just because the government says to), so if you see this, feel free to join the fun. 😀 [EDIT: finished!] https://www.twitch.tv/oldskooljay

Map 3 is up next. It's very green:

*snip*

That, literally, looks sweet as hell! I'll check it out for sure.

Played some Halo 2 online using Xlink Kai on my laptop via system link. Planning on turning a Raspberry Pi into a dedicated Xlink Kai device for my Original Xbox 1.0 and 2x 1.6b systems by using a wireless extender (or old Linksys router) to connect the Raspberry Pi and the Xbox systems to it and possibly setup other ones for a future Xbox LAN party of some sort.

I started playing Wizardry 7: Crusaders of the Dark Savant 17 days ago. I'm now about 24 hours in and have made it through New City and am at Orkogre Castle at the moment. This game is a nice improvement over the already excellent Wizardry 6: Bane of the Cosmic Forge. Beautiful VGA artwork, much improved sound effects, and very nice MT-32 music. Though the game doesn't have music throughout, it's well-placed in the character screens, level-up process, during camping/rest, and as a brief announcement when combat begins. Still no realtime automapping, but at least you can spend skill points on mapping and "use" your map to look at statically while not moving around. The more skill points you assign to the mapping skill, the more detail shows in the map when you use it. Of course, if you're using a clue book, this skill is not so important. 😉 As in Wiz 6, the highlight of this game is party/character management and building. When a character levels up, I could spend 30 minutes deciding where to assign skill points and which spell to learn, to maximize overall party strength. For example, some spells aren't as useful as others, sometimes you pick a useless spell on purpose because you need more spell points in that realm for another spell that you do find very useful, and sometimes you forgo a very useful spell because two or three other party members already have it. The strategy of maximizing overall party strength is so well-done!

Just a couple of Playstation3 games: Dead Or Alive 5, Gran Turismo 6 and Burnout Paradise City.

Since I have a new computer I am testing several titles that I can't played before.

For example, Mirror's Edge or Shadow Warrior 2.

But, one of the most I have been playing is Outlast 😳

I played the latest DLCs for Borlderlands 3 and did the boss a few times and got all the skins in Bloody Harvest so I'm finished with that again until the next DLC comes out.

I installed Mass Effect 1-3 and started to play the first game, dumped about 10 hours in so far and enjoying it. I needed the mouse acceleration fix and added the bugfix mod for it.

I also installed Cryostasis and got it working, played a bit of it but didn't get far yet.

Still need to finish Doom 3, FEAR and TOW...

SOULCALIBUR VI

here's my representation of the voodoo2 in soul form

Knocked a couple off my active playlist during the end of November thanksgiving holiday.

Assassin's Creed: Origins - This game was good, except for the end, everything from the moment of 'No Return' felt rushed and disconnected from the rest of the game. In the end an open world of to-do lists can't be held together by an origin of the assassins story that feels like it was thrown together in an attempt to cobble it all together. I feel like I must have left about 40 percent of the Non-Main quests undone simply because I got a feel for it and have a lot of other games I would like to get to, but I enjoyed the time I did spend with it. Playtime : 36 hours.

Quake II RTX - Not much to say about this Quake II with path tracing. I still found the game enjoyable though compared to modern games its really lacking in the genre, but thats as expected. Paper thin story, which isn't really a problem, level design that is caught somewhere between arcade and an attempt to create a believable narrative/world but it seems like it only mattered when the designers could be bothered to do one or the other. Strange 1 time set pieces such as mountable guns, or puzzles which try to build a world but fall short. Playtime: 10 hours.

With those out of the way I will continue to focus on the following: God of War (PS4), Yoshi's Crafted World (Switch), and Red Dead Redemption II (PC). I will probably complete Yoshi's shortly as I think I'm a good way through it and its a very light game, then switch on and off both the remaining 2 till I complete them.

schmatzler wrote:

Rise of the Tomb Raider - it's on sale at Steam right now, so I had to get it. And I Iove it.

Thanks for the heads up on this! I'm taking a bit of a break from DOOM maps to play something I picked up during the same Tomb Raider sale now - Lara Croft: GO.

Do you need a turn-based chillout puzzle "board game" featuring Ms. Croft doing suitably Indiana Jones-y things such as fighting sneks, stealing artifacts, and dodging giant boulders in your life? I sure did!

With all the hype the rest of the franchise gets, I didn't even know this existed, but it's pretty cool. I love the art style, and thankfully it scales suitably to a 4:3 resolution (a lot of games of this type don't!) The ambient synth music score is awesome and was a really pleasant surprise. The music isn't at all what you'd expect, but it works quite well. The game has unlimited do-overs and an unrestricted hint system, so it's pretty easy, but it plays at a nice relaxing pace and the puzzles never get aggravating.

My only "complaint" is that it forces you to use the analog stick to make digital movements if you're using a gamepad and it splits the available "actions" across four buttons, although it really only needed one because of the way it's designed. AFAIK there's no way to remap the controls, but I haven't tried it with the keyboard so I don't know if those are any better. You get used to the awkward gamepad mapping pretty quick. It seems quite short - I think I got through about 60% of the game in a 3 hour binge last night. This is actually fine for me because I like short & sweet games. It was definitely worth the $2.50 I paid, but maybe hard to justify at full-price. Still, I'd recommend it.

I might stream the rest of this tomorrow if people are interested. I think the slower pace and bright art design would play nice with my upload bitrate.