Such a lonely fiddler, he makes me weep.
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Is maybe very Russian!
Congratulations, you get depression!
And it may be why you only get to see his two animation frames for about two seconds. ^) ^
Neither is quite a standard romanization but romanization of cyrillic tends to be up to the preference of the person more often than not (my own real name is not romanized in the standard way because the standard would be too confusing for english speakers)
Алексей Пажитнов in standard romanization would be Aleksei Pazhitnov, so I’m sure he went with Alexey Pajitnov when he immigrated to the US simply because english speakers are more likely to get the pronunciation close enough with that spelling.
the zh/j is the same sound as the ‘g’ in genre’
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Did you know that the GB Tetris’s randomiser is heavily biased toward T, S and O pieces, which have roughly 1/6 odds instead of 1/7? I was astounded when I found out.
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Trackmania Turbo (PS4) - this game has a technical issue which is really quite frustrating. every once in awhile the game will stutter and drop a handful of frames. given the nature of the game, this is effectively a death sentence for whatever run you’re currently on. pretty inexcusable for a game like this. doesn’t matter if you run from a spinning platter or an SSD, PS4/Pro/PS5, it makes no difference.
real shame, as the game is rather incredible otherwise. i’ve been enjoying playing it a lot, and it is giving me flashbacks to the very enjoyable time i had working through the wii version many years ago
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I knew it wasn’t equal weight; actually I was thinking it favored L, but come to think of it that was probably something I was reading about the NES version.
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Water Margin: A Tale of Clouds and Wind Mega Drive
I copied the “game” file from the “res” folder where Steam installed it, renamed it to an .md file, since it’s a Mega Drive game ROM : ), zipped it, and ran it with Mednafen. (Steam by the way lists it as “THE Tale of…,” and YouTube as “THE TALES of Clouds and WINDS.”)
The Mednafen command-line parameters I used were “-video.driver softfb -md.stretch aspect -md.videoip 0.”
The game started off as a Mega Drive bootleg/unlicensed game in 1996, made by a group in Taiwan calling themselves Never Ending Soft Team; the game was entirely in Chinese, with the title “Shui Hu Feng Yun Zhuan” ( Shui Hu Feng Yun Zhuan | BootlegGames Wiki | Fandom ); according to Wikipedia, this literally translates as “Water and Wind” ( Water Margin - Wikipedia ); it is also translated as “Outlaws of the Marsh,” which is what Google translates it as: https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=水滸風雲傳&op=translate (you can hear a pronunciation of the Chinese there, it’s neat!).
Even though the game supposedly uses enemy sprites modified from other games, including Capcom’s Knights of the Round, and Sega’s Golden Axe and Streets of Rage, Piko Interactive were somehow able to publish an English translation in 2015, even getting it on Steam in 2019. It’s also on GOG and current consoles.
The game is based on “Water Margin,” a Chinese novel written “perhaps mid-14th century,” and in that regard reminds me a lot of Capcom’s beat em up Warriors of Fate / Tenchi wo Kurau II, which is based on a manga that was based on the 14th century Chinese historical novel “Romance of the Three Kingdoms.”
I played on the lowest difficulty, Grunt, and that ends abruptly after Chapter 5, maybe a bit over halfway through the full game (which has 7 chapters, but those last couple look like doozies!). You can give yourself up to 4 lives per credit, and you get 9 continues; I wasn’t using the Golden Axe-style magic spells, which can wipe out whole screens of enemies, because I didn’t like the very flashy visual effects some of them have; maybe it was partially that, and probably mainly because I’m bad at the game, but I was getting beat on pretty good toward the middle of the run, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it through on the next difficulty level!
Well, actually I had only just plunked in my third (of nine) extra credits just before the end of “Grunt,” so maybe? Early on, I was getting a lot of extra lives from every 250K pts; later, not so many points. ; )
But it’s actually really fun to play, so maybe I won’t mind not quite getting through as a noob; the story was hard to follow, so I didn’t care that much about seeing all of it or not, and was just enjoying the challenging encounters. The AI have varied attacks that work extremely well in combination, and you really have to stay on your toes at all times. I think I’ll stick with the female character for now, Hu Sanniang, because she’s faster than the two guys, and moving seems pretty important given how many AIs are swarming around and trying to getcha.
One thing I think I’ll be able to do better on next time is just getting up without getting chopped back down–the AIs really know how to lurk there and attack just as you’re getting to your feet, and you can’t seem to beat them to the punch, so it’s much better to try moving away as soon as you stand, rather than trying to mash your attack button.
I really like these modern budget classic game releases that are selling us legal copies of the game ROMs. : D They always come with crummy built-in emulation set-ups, but that’s because you’re supposed to save the ROM they give you so you can run it in whatever you want! ^ _^
Thanks to Loki who brought the game up recently, and who reviewed it as the original bootleg back in 2009: lunatic obscurity: Shui Hu Feng Yun Zhuan (Mega Drive) . : )
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Played through Alien Death Mob over the past few days, it’s a twin stick shooter seemingly made by the same people who made Destructivator 2. It’s basically a high score chasing arena twin stick deal that looks like this:
Basically aliens invaded the earth and your tiny guy has to shoot them all across thirty different real world country-based stages (and five later space ones) where you get swamped from all sides by a ton of smaller enemies and some bigger ones with more advanced attacks. Survive three waves as long as you can (you are given four or five lives per stage), but the game prioritizes score over actual survival even though they are often connected. At points around the stage a black flashing counting down will appear and picking these up will boost your multiplier, so prioritizing these at the expense of almost everything else is wisest but of course when there is a horde between you and it it can be easier said than done.
Despite being a $2 game (79 cents during the current spring sale) the amount of nice touches in here stand out. Nearly every stage has a unique enemy type and there are bits of level geometry that affects how each stage plays beyond the different enemy types, and the limited time power-ups that are dropped in the stage by a passing vehicle are fairly distinct and in general look neat. When an enemy or bullet is nearby you get slow motion “bullet time” to help you survive longer. I’m not generally a big fan of this sort of twin-stick shooter but I was legit impressed by this one, I don’t have it in my to get 5 stars on every stage but I got the 140 (out of 170 possible) to unlock the final stage which is the game’s sole boss fight which of course is a bullet hell monster. Full thumbs up from me!
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Ice Pick Lodge made a narrative game called Know by heart… Can you imagine an IPL game without fail states? Almost unfathomable. I’ve tried 3 of their other games before and I stopped playing each of them 2 hours in, before even losing, because all signs pointed to my imminent, unrecoverable, defeat
Know by Heart… starts with a 5 minutes dream sequence (terrible idea…) , takes 2 hours to get going and lasts only 4.
First 2 hours are about old friends reuniting and their childhood nostalgia which… didn’t speak to me at all, though the uniquely Russian bitterness in setting and dialogue kept me going. The last 2 hours were great, before the expected harsh finale.
Laughing at the main character’s job which is coming to the train station in the morning, writing the name of each onboarding passenger on a typewriter + checking their passports for the 1 train that’s still coming to this town, then leaving for the rest of the day to do whatever he wants until the evening. He still can’t manage to be on time (realistic)
There’s a little map to explore like in Night in the woods, which makes the game breathe a lot. Non-obvious choices about where to go alter small obscure branching paths, judging by two online playthroughs I’ve checked. Very very cool.
Not a fan of the art direction at all, with its cheap faceless characters and distorted architecture like in 90s American cartoons
Certainly a minor work for Ice Pick Lodge but I could at least finish it. Recommended if like me you’re too much of a loser to get anywhere in Pathologic 2
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tengai makyo zero has a realtime clock with in game events on specific dates, and an ingame calendar with a “on this day in history” blurb
gonna probably take it slow with this one for the calendar stuff. there must have been an insane amount of text to find and translate.
also, the battle sprites are great! love how everyone turns around to pose for victory
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The tenet ricocheting through my head playing the new remaster of Mask Of The Lunar Eclipse was this was the RE2’s remake to Maiden In Black Water’s RE3 remake. Despite coming out afterwards, more of the pieces makes sense, fully building off what made The Tormented interesting and folding ideas like the flashlight which makes the dead or alive stuff in MOBW stranger in hindsight portioning this feature into a side mission of the successor.
Tormented’s a crucial point here because if CB built (unsuccessfully) off FF/PZ’s structure then this takes T’s core premise and flattens it to a single space making MOTLE the synthesis of everything that came before. It is the only game of the five NOT to directly tie score into upgrades which at first felt like a major misstep in the mythical Arcade Appeal. This goes unremarked on in what I have read about this series but cordoning it off to optional health/film means that encounters have a vitality to them which is close to actually being scary that this series will ever manage.
I want to say this makes me appreciate MOBW more and while that’s partially true (all the flashback scenes in this have great construction as far as post 6th gen horror games go) the RE2/RE3Make comparison still feels apt, most notably maintaining the Examine feature which is the worst “innovation” in any of these but it’s present here? and it’s done infrequently enough that it works? Why did they have this sorted out over a decade ago and thought it’d be a good idea to fix it?
Story is the same as all of these games, not interested in regurgitating something natsuhiko kyogoku would have knocked out in an evening. Suda’s the co-director although I cba to reread the grasshopper book on how much of this game was his but either way they’re a good fit and while I still want to play Kurayami, this’ll do.
Overall I’d say 4>3>1>2>5 with an overall rating of No, I’m Not Playing Fucking Spirit Camera out of 10.
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Played through Gourmet Squad–aka “Gourmet Warriors” (Steam, etc) / “Gourmet Sentai Bara Yarou” (GameFAQs, etc) / “Bishoku Sentai Barayarō” (Wikipedia) / "“Rose Rascals: Gourmet Squadron” (Wikipedia) / “Gourmet Sentai Bara Bastard” (Google Translate) from Steam, in my own installation of emulator Mesen: I copied the “game” file from the “res” folder where Steam installed it, renamed it to .sfc file, since it’s a Super Famicom game ROM, zipped it, and ran it with Mesen. Default “Medium” difficulty.
Two of the three main developers for the Super Famicom game at Japanese studio Winds–one of whom would go on to do Astro Boy: Omega Factor (GBA) at Treasure–had worked on Choaniki, and there are direct Choaniki vibes here in various beefy fleshpots and general weirdness.
The “Gourmet” part refers to food items that pop out of defeated enemies and which you take back to your giant robot chef between levels, who dices and fries two specific ingredients you choose into a meal that restores a certain amount of your health, depending on what it was and maybe your character? Of which there are three regular playable characters–the girl character being knock-kneed fan-servicey ; P–and various of the enemy character you can play using input codes–or rather, try to play, as most of them aren’t actually very good.
They mostly aren’t very dangerous when controlled by the CPU, either, and really the minor health regain you may get from the whole cooking side of things is fairly pointless for the short stages and their unlimited continues, and the wimpy AI; at best it’s kind of a funky rhythm game where you go for two punch combos to heavy-stun-state them so you can use a heavy grab finisher, which is kind of fun.
There’s a mechanic by which hitting an AI with a certain move will put them in a “spiked” state with their head embedded in the ground and you can jump on their upraised feet and do special attack moves on them, but it seems pretty pointless given the easier grabs. Several special hit-inflicting versions of the pose you can do (with the Pose button) also seem pretty pointless.
A nice touch for single player is the powerup that spawns a CPU-controlled ally character who fights alongside you and eh well you learn not to hit accidentally TOO often maybe.
Really gorgeous pixel art at times and pretty decent music doesn’t hurt. Probably not much replay value single-player though given the not-so-challenging difficulty–okay I haven’t played it on the hard (“Spicy”) difficulty level, but given that switching to easy (“Mild”) for a bit just reduced the number of enemies, Spicy will probably just be more of the rather lightweight enemies. Even the bosses (on regular difficulty) are a breeze once you know their gimmick, if they have one.
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went to the arcade yesterday, played a lot of ketsui, outrun 2, afterburner climax.
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Fire Pro Wrestling World PC
Well I tried to convince myself that I didn’t like the gamey self-parodied timed grapple system in any of the Fire Pro games I’ve played (heck I even had Iron Slam '96, the shunned 3D one whose director and section head Shuji Yoshida still believed in 3D wrestling and quit Human to start AKI Corporation*)
but then FPWW was $5.99 in Steam’s spring sale and I had no excuse not to at least TRY it and then I ended up downloading nearly 4700 user-made wrestlers/moves/etc that the game has to “download” for a minute every time it starts now and got this ModPack thing off Discord that installs .dlls and takes over the game with a buggy really clunky out-of-game UI and the game hangs on exit now and the UI isn’t really made for handling 2000+ wrestlers like when you accidentally misplace one and there’s no way to search by name
but I can do things like turn off the ugly blood spatters and run in theory hundreds-strong Royal Rumbles
and then yes I convinced myself I had to buy all the DLC because it turns out you need various DLC for most of the user-made wrestlers and now I can run '86 Hulk Hogan vs Andre
which is all the wrestling I know as an old person who never followed wrestling and it was actually a really thrilling match and there really IS a unique rhythm you fall into with the timed grapple thing even on my piddly CPU 2 (of 10) difficulty and even though I’m terrible at rhythm and I started Fighting Road and it makes you do Create-a-Wrestler and I don’t know what I’m doing so of course I made a big animal bobble head who was actually a lot of fun to play.
(*) :
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if you have all the dlc, you can also play fire promoter mode. just like how fire pro is infinitely better than the wwe games, fire promoter is infinitely better than those games’ gm modes.
also there is an sb fire pro thread you might want to post in in future
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I started it to see but like with the Wrestling Empire one the business management aspect freaked me out and I ran away.
Haven’t played WWE games; was sort of watching stuff on the new one but don’t think it’s my thing, heck I don’t even think I can handle the AKI WWF games or probably basically any wrestling set post-mid-90s.
Oh! This one?
If I have detailed stuff to discuss I use specific threads but for daily play stuff, especially since it’s often weeks/months before I revisit a game, I prefer the games-you-played-today thread.
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Something in the big modpack helps better organize things and it is almost mandatory at least when doing the original organizing as the default system is baaaaad. Once I got everyone into their own “companies” that let me alphabetize them with the press of a button and that literally saved me hours.
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this finally found its way to me from Japan
so I wanted to play some SNES and kinda did, never beat the All-Stars version of SMB3 and had a hankering so that’s what I did last night. the newer graphics grew on me over time but I definitely prefer the artificially constructed charm and abstraction of the original vs. trying to make it more naturalistic
sometimes it even smudges over little designer winks like the hidden block tells
the IP in-joke king transformations are a cute idea
but I still prefer the originals, same for the song arrangements, same for the end titles (<3 that muted colour palette)
still an A+ tipped over toybox of a thing though and being able to save your game is a big plus!
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Oh! Okay thanks for confirming that, I had poked earlier but amidst the blitz of stuff I wasn’t sure where it was. Went back and checked “Better Wrestler Organization” in the PWGR Patcher, then in the window named that that comes in the cascade of windows when running, clicked the “Alphabetize Edits” button, then the “Save” button below it, and hey-o, everyone’s alphabetical now. : D
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WCW/nWo Revenge N64
Didn’t know what I was doing in Revenge or Mupen64 so this was a bit of a mess. = P
Felt flat after the session, maybe something to do with 5 hours of wildness with 1000s of edits and 8-at-once action in Fire Pro Wrestling World the day before. It made me re-examine my resolve NOT to get AKI’s later WWF No Mercy, and…well, after another look, No Mercy sure seems a lot faster (even in 4-character matches, at least when played via emulation) and more varied than Revenge, with more moves, livelier AI, more distinct character models, much better music and lighting–and dang that wrestler editor really does look like something you can chill with. Basically No Mercy is looking sleeker and more groovalicious than the chunkier and clunkier Revenge (although I was grooving pretty good with somebody in a Revenge Battle Royal after hours comparison test, dang I should’a paid attention to who that was, some shirtless guy in the usual tight shorts is all I got).
(Oh huh No Mercy has Andre the Giant as an unlockable.)
(So yes apparently when I’m slating a game I don’t own it’s because I’m trying and generally failing to convince myself NOT to buy it. ; D)
No Mercy though seems prone to texture glitches in Mupen64, so I guess it’ll be back to Project64–it and Revenge seem to capture with really weird tearing in fullscreen under Project64–some kind of slightly off refresh rate or something there even with Vsync, I dunno–but all right when run in a window.
(Update 3/21:
Ah! Switching to Mupen’s included Glide graphic module (default is “Rice”) fixes the texture drop-outs. Also, fullscreen and resolution seem to be handled automatically, so the only parameters I need are
–gfx mupen64plus-video-glide64mk2.dll wwfnomercy.n64
Still runs on left side of screen, can’t seem to find a way to center it. Still, it’s simpler and can run full screen and just generally seems more with it than Project64, so I’ll be using Mupen64Plus after all.
AA blurs UI slightly so I’m not using it; but could enable either in C:\Users[name]\AppData\Roaming\Mupen64Plus\mupen64plus.cfg
wrpAntiAliasing = 16
or through Nvidia control panel override (but don’t do FXAA, that turns AA off in Mupen64, and trying to set Anisotropic there prevents OBS from capturing, possibly because Anisotropic is already on in the .cfg)
)
These AKI N64 wrestling games are natively 30 fps, so if you see someone proudly proclaiming the 60fps-ness of their Revenge or No Mercy video, well, they haven’t paid attention to the game’s actual framerate. Run one of those videos on YouTube in 60fps, then pause and advance one frame at a time with the “.” (period) key on your keyboard and you’ll see they only actually update every other “60fps” frame–at most.
Mupen pretty much just worked with Revenge when run with command line parameters like
–resolution 1440x1080 --fullscreen wcw.z64
(it doesn’t seem to do zipped ROMs) except that I eventually realized the C buttons (via the DualShock4’s right analog stick) weren’t working right–was only getting two “directions” and they were the wrong ones; with trial and error found I had to change four values under "Sony DS4"in InputAutoCfg.ini:
C Button R = axis(2+)
C Button L = axis(2-)
C Button D = axis(3+)
C Button U = axis(3-)
and then it ran pretty much perfectly; in full-screen the 4:3 display was on the left side of my 1920x1080 screen rather than centered, which is sorta weird, but I just moved my chair over a bit. ^ ^) Hm and I thought I’d got AA to work through the Nvidia control panel but it sure wasn’t on here after all, oops.
The N64 seems like an interesting beast; for all its baffling C “button” (oh heck somehow I thought the C thing was a little yellow nub stick, now that I actually look it’s four separate face buttons, Ah), it has just two main action buttons, and in Revenge I found myself getting into just pounding away with subconscious frequencies on A, B, and L; with just one attack and one grapple button the game seems designed for more groove play than a Fire Pro, where you have to decide which of three or more buttons plus four directions you’re going to go with at any time.
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