Quick Questions XIV: A Question Reasked (Part 1)

I have a little under an hour to use a free Audible credit. Any suggestions on a good audio book? I was considering maybe getting a Chinese novel but haven’t been able to figure out what’s a good buy.

Really, any fiction works well in audiobook form. If you want something audiobook-specific, I liked this set of interviews with Korean adoptees: https://www.audible.com/pd/Given-Away-Audiobook/B08KWRMHTZ

The best value for a single credit in my library is this Le Guin short story and novella collection: https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Found-and-the-Lost-Audiobook/B01M3YQ17W . 35 hours of content and I enjoyed almost all of it

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I can’t redeem Given Away, but the Le Guin collection does and should be good. The only issue is that apparently the audiobook doesn’t have any way to navigate between any individual story? Reviews say it has no chapters, which is a strange oversight. I’ll get this if I can’t find anything else though. Thanks!

You can navigate between stories, the only problem is they’re given meaningless names like “Chapter 18”. I didn’t find it a big problem.

Oh okay, that’s fine then! Thanks for the recommendation!

What do u think about prey’s spiral menu?

Feel like someone from the FF14 contingent should chime in on this, apparently it has an elegant solution for a full suite of MMO abilities on a gamepad and frankly I can’t imagine it

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@dylan @HOBO

Because the cover is intoxicating I keep being tempted by the Tesudou Nippon Rokusen Tabi Switch/PS4 title which the one ps4 review mentions runs like garbage which is hilariously ps2.

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I vaguely recall someone doing an enthusiastic write-up for the game Master Spy (the game I’m currently playing through (it seems rather good so far)) and of all the online places I frequent SB feels like the most likely place where it’d have been written but I can’t seem to find it, so curious if this rings a bell for anyone else or if I need to start looking elsewhere.

I have it on switch and it runs fine in a typical videogame sense, the issue with it is the same as all these video-based train games which is - I think - that they record the footage by getting someone to drive the train through the line at a constant speed without stopping at any stations etc. The logistics of how they could possibly do this without interrupting regular scheduling and breaking speed limit rules i do not understand but I believe this is how they record the footage. The camera they use is a low quality digital camera and it looks pretty bad but that’s part of the charm. The problem arises with the framerate of the camera which is i guess around 24. So they have this baseline footage of the train going through the line at a constant speed of let’s say 20km/h at 24 fps. They simulate the train accelerating and decelerating by speeding up and slowing down this footage, which means at high speeds it runs smoothly and looks great, but the slower you get the more clear the illusion of cinema becomes as you see the frames slow down. This is kinda cool imo but it makes it really hard to stop at the right part of the station because when you’re going below 10 km/h it is basically a slideshow of photos and the distance the train has moved between one frame and the next is substantial enough that not having that visual information is a big hindrance. There is a little UI display of your distance and that’s basically all you’re looking at while stopping. The photography is useless. I do not understand why, if you were making this kind of game, you would not make getting a high quality camera with as high framerate as possible the top priority in your budget. That’s all your graphics right there!!

Also the game only has one line (it claims to have 2 but one is like a 2 station detour off the other one).

I still think it’s cool tho lol. ive said somewhere before that this method of making a videogame is so primitive that it could have been invented 120 years ago. This could have been Train Arriving At The Station 2: The Cinemagame. Just alter a film projector to look like a train controller and you’ve made an arcade game. For that reason it is a magical little thing.

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It’s not a weapon wheel but the RTS Gate 88 has a 4 way menu that contains like 40 options or something because it has nested options. You end up learning directional combos to build things, give orders, etc. It’s cool.

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when two devices I want to connect say they have to be “on the same wifi network”, is there any way around that? They’re both connecting through the same modem, but one is wired and the other is on wifi. Is there anything I can do, or am I just stuck?

That’s hard to say without more details, what sort of devices are you talking about?

About to watch Tim’s enormous Tokimeki Memorial review.

Have any of the Tokimeki Memorial games been translated into English?

Sub-question: (if the answer to that first question isn’t no.)
Have either of the Game Boy Color Tokimeki Memorial games been translated into English?

Edit: Unless there is some sort of twist coming Tim Rogers seems to have answered these questions with ‘no’
pretty early into the review.

It allows accurate selection once mastered; it’s visually complex and noisy and requires acclimation, so you have to be careful with what audience you’ll lose with it. For Prey, they’re a complex game with lots of menu and item manipulation, so it’s suitable.

It affords poor readability once the list grows beyond a single spiral; I think it’s significantly more difficult for people to remember items ‘offscreen’ than in a standard up/down list. They mitigate this somewhat by allowing the user to map four shortcuts to the dpad directions.

It’s not a fast-select menu; loading it requires a period of cursor orientation and it loses the absolute direction-to-output mapping a basic radial menu has, so it’s no longer suitable for quick-weapon selection. Prey has enough slow hiding and they pause the world sim while the menu is open.

I think this would be suitable for single-player games which necessarily have large ability/spell lists, like Elder Scrolls games, whose primary aesthetics are about the accumulation of varied and situational powers, rather than fluid mastery.

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I just did that 3 months of game pass thing for a dollar specifically to play the N64 Perfect Dark port on the 360 online.

Is there anything worthwhile on PC that I should try while I can?

Some of the Nintendo DS tokimemos have been fan translated:

Girl’s Side First Love Plus: https://sites.google.com/site/tokimemogs1/

Girl’s Side Third Story: https://www.romhacking.net/translations/2370/

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my PC and my phone

trying to use the windows 10 “Your Phone” app, but it wants me to either put my desktop PC on wifi (lol) or my phone on LAN (uh…)

xiv doesn’t use a radial wheel or anything like that, it’s kind of it’s own weird beast.

basically each controller hotbar contains 16 customizable action slots in a ++ ++ shape, corresponding to the 8 buttons on a ps4 controller (dpad + 4 face buttons.) holding L2 gives you access to the left 8, R2 the right 8. double tapping L2 or R2 brings up an additional 8 actions each. all that combined gives you access to 32 actions without swapping between hotbars, which is enough to fit any job’s full set of actions iirc.

this mostly works because the devs aggressively cull actions on major expansions to make this keep working as the game ages, and some actions can replace themselves contextually to avoid button bloat (a good example is how the astrologian’s card draw action changes to a card play action whenever you’re holding a card.) imo they show more care to controller players than any other adaptation of a very KBM oriented genre i’ve played

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there’s a few pc players i know who still use a ps4 controller for some jobs because it flows better for them than the normal mmo hotkey approach.