Currently playing...

[noodles]

Flight of the Amazon Queen (CD-Rom edition)

Cold weather is for point'n'click adventures.

Indeed. Just got into Neuromancer (Amiga), which was a game I'd always told myself I'd get into seriously one day,
and I have to say it's not bad at all, even with its little 16-bit era quirks and occasional sluggishness.

[VanAlphen]

Utopia Must Fall I tried as well, the demo, I liked the Missile Command part but not the upgrades. The difficulty progressed too slowly imo and you needed to memorize the order of which upgrades to get when. I got pretty far by following tips but I was so bored.

The UMF devs released another title in early access called Grid Ranger which I did get. It's a bit like Polybius but only 3 levels and bosses.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2964400/Grid_Ranger/

[Whiteball]

Flight of the Amazon Queen (CD-Rom edition)

Cold weather is for point'n'click adventures.

Indeed. Just got into Neuromancer (Amiga), which was a game I'd always told myself I'd get into seriously one day,
and I have to say it's not bad at all, even with its little 16-bit era quirks and occasional sluggishness.

I've been going back into some of the old adventures too that I played all those years ago.

One I'm hopefully going to try soon which is often spoken about as being one of the best is Indana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.
I never played this one back in the day which is suprising as my brother had (and still has, I believe) an Amiga 1200 original floppy disk version (in mint condition too).
Might be better to get a emulator version though because if I remeber correctly it was on a whole stack of disks and I've also heard there is one with lots of speech in?

[noodles]

Flight of the Amazon Queen (CD-Rom edition)

Cold weather is for point'n'click adventures.

Indeed. Just got into Neuromancer (Amiga), which was a game I'd always told myself I'd get into seriously one day,
and I have to say it's not bad at all, even with its little 16-bit era quirks and occasional sluggishness.

I've been going back into some of the old adventures too that I played all those years ago.

One I'm hopefully going to try soon which is often spoken about as being one of the best is Indana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.
I never played this one back in the day which is suprising as my brother had (and still has, I believe) an Amiga 1200 original floppy disk version (in mint condition too).
Might be better to get a emulator version though because if I remeber correctly it was on a whole stack of disks and I've also heard there is one with lots of speech in?

I hadn't been able to finish that one on the Amiga because the version I had still had some protection that hadn't been cracked all the way and I was stuck
about half way through the adventure. Got to finish it on a PC Dosbox version. It was nicely done, very enjoyable.
And yes, there is a version with speech on two CDs, about 160Meg in one file in compressed form.

[grue]

Indeed. Just got into Neuromancer (Amiga), which was a game I'd always told myself I'd get into seriously one day,
and I have to say it's not bad at all, even with its little 16-bit era quirks and occasional sluggishness.

I've been going back into some of the old adventures too that I played all those years ago.

One I'm hopefully going to try soon which is often spoken about as being one of the best is Indana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.
I never played this one back in the day which is suprising as my brother had (and still has, I believe) an Amiga 1200 original floppy disk version (in mint condition too).
Might be better to get a emulator version though because if I remeber correctly it was on a whole stack of disks and I've also heard there is one with lots of speech in?[/quote]

Oh boy, aren't you in for a treat!

[VNVObit]

I rock - top dog on Satryn ! All posing aside just love this game - not as quirky as LLamatron but an equally good take and the collection aspect of the humans should not be overstated. Plus the sound for the mini bosses - the diamonds, as good as a Williams one !

https://rwr.es/satryn/

Plus how great is it to have high scores accessible via the web rather than having to fire up your console to see if you've been beat !

Damn I forgot about this game. I had 5 quid in my paypal account so I got it on Steam and its great. so far only 348 000 and 748th on the steam leaderboard. Lets have just one more go

not a multi system hi-score table though you'd trounce the top score on steam. Currently struggling to replicate my high score (7.8million) but getting 2m+ scores regularly just find some of the bigger aliens difficult


Did pick up Kill Knight which is another twin stick shooter and spent some time on it. Very quick pace not sure if it'll appear on anything other than steam

[rowan]

Psychonauts 2.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/6070 ... honauts_2/

Great stuff. Lived up to expected quality on art direction, music & level design which is amongst the best.
If you liked the first, this feels like it came out right after it 15 years ago.

[rowan]

Psychonauts 2.

I'm a bit deeper in and I must add it has the finest 3D wool / knitwear rendering I've seen, plus I saw a goat on a loading screen.

[VNVObit]

Picked up "Die For The Economy". Saw a toot on Mastodon for an updated Berserk and investigated. Achay's review sealed the deal and picked it up. At £6.69 it's less than the price of a pint and well worth the entry fee.
It has that "just one more go" feel for me as you try to explore the level and destroy the security servers while the robots try and shoot you as you avoid electric walls.

Great fun

[r1ckyrock]

I hardly ever post anything here, although I still visit regularly, and have done for many, many years - but anyway...

One of my long-term friends recently gave me his old TV - a nice 55" LG 3DTV from 2015; not HDR or OLED, but a significant improvement on my old reliable 32" 2009 Sony - beautiful screen and fantastic for 3D movies. I lost myself down the 3D game rabbithole for a while - finally I could experience all my old 3D TV PS3 games. Ridge Racer 7 in 3D was certainly worth waiting for. Super Stardust - very nice, and, I believe, one of the few which ran at 60fps in 3D on PS3. Child of Eden is fantastic. Wipeout, of course - great for the novelty value, and amazing for the time, but the PSVR version is better. Halo Anniversary on Xbox 360 is pretty good - I had no idea, when I bought it back in the day, that there even was a 3D mode - there weren't many on 360. Nice to actually see PS4 Polybius in its 3D TV incarnation, although I find it much harder compared with playing in VR. With the "fake 3D" option on the TV, I spent the most time with Tempest 4000 - more, probably, than the actual 3D games - which looked surprisingly and unexpectedly good.

Last few weeks have been all about Steam Deck and emulation. I had been meaning to sort out Sega Saturn emulation on it for over a year, and, having ticked that off the list, spending some quality time with Sega Rally among others, moved on to Sega arcade racer emulation. The novelty of seeing Scud Race on an OLED screen handheld (although it's a twitchy bastard to play - haven't tried "tuning" the controls yet) is brilliant. Sega Rally still feels so good. Sega Rally 2 arcade looks so much more vibrant than the muted palette of the Dreamcast one, and feels great to play, although I had to take the frame rate down from 90fps, which was a bit too intense! Yesterday I sorted out Outrun 2006, PC version + FXT mod - another thing on my list for a year or so, but so worth it. Next up is the fairly new Lindbergh Loader - curious to see how the Lindbergh version of Outrun 2SPDX looks on it, but I need to "clear the deck" a bit, as it were: 1TB internal, 1TB microSD - almost completely full...

I did actually buy a modern game - Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, on PS5. It sounded so ridiculous I had to pick it up, and, so far, so good - haven't played a Yakuza game since the PS2 days. Anyway, there are a bunch of Sega Model 3 games, which can be played in multiplayer, straight from the options screen (not 1 player, though - I guess I'll have to find them in-game) so I forced my 14 year old son to play Daytona 2 (or Sega Racing Classic 2, sans license) and Fighting Vipers 2 with me - excellent fun, and, most importantly, I beat him - which is more than can be said for our subsequent Mario Kart 8 session; my excuse for being so bad was "I've been solidly playing Sega racers!". Speaking of which - all the Sonic racers, the ones by Sumo, have also been receiving a lot of love from me recently - they do have a bit of that classic Sega arcade racer feel to them. Nice to have them all in one place, on Steam Deck.

[Misfit]

I hadn't realised there were so many top-titled 3D games, to be honest I'm not sure I had any idea there were any on the PS3!

I still have a 3D-capable TV and projector, but I haven't touched that side in ages. I have dabbled a bit with movies on the Quest headset, but I wouldn't generally want to watch movies in it. Hmm, I wonder if I can on my Xreal glasses.

On the emulation front, especially around all the arcade driving games, I do want to get all that setup, but can never seem to get the energy for the faff. Does TeknoParrot work on the Deck?

[r1ckyrock]

I hadn't realised there were so many top-titled 3D games, to be honest I'm not sure I had any idea there were any on the PS3!

I still have a 3D-capable TV and projector, but I haven't touched that side in ages. I have dabbled a bit with movies on the Quest headset, but I wouldn't generally want to watch movies in it. Hmm, I wonder if I can on my Xreal glasses.

On the emulation front, especially around all the arcade driving games, I do want to get all that setup, but can never seem to get the energy for the faff. Does TeknoParrot work on the Deck?

Re: Sony PS3 3D games - there were indeed quite a few. I suppose, back then, in the wake of the first Avatar film, there seemed to be a bit of momentum around the idea of 3D in film and in gaming. It's a shame it didn't catch on more. I have watched some 3D movies on the Quest 2/3, but prefer the experience on an actual screen.

It is a bit of a faff to set up the various emulators on Steam Deck - that's why it took me so long to set up Saturn emulation properly - I couldn't figure out where the bios roms were supposed to go for quite a long time, and moved on. EmuDeck in desktop mode, and ES-DE frontend for Gaming Mode, does make it a bit simpler, but, during initial setup, when it creates a bios folder, though, with lots of subfolders inside, already created, named "Saturn" or "PS2" or whatever, I logically, and clearly foolishly, assumed that the bioses should actually go into their respective named folders - WRONG! Just dump them all into bios folder - not the subfolders - and suddenly EmuDeck can see them - hurrah!

Regarding Sega Model 2 emulation (Sega Rally, Daytona etc.), it took me a week or two to sort out the controls - the games would work, but not the controls. I eventually discovered a suggestion that resetting the configuration on the specific emulator, in EmuDeck desktop mode, might work; must admit, I was skeptical - thought it sounded a bit like "Have you tried turning it off and turning it on again?", but, for me, it actually worked!

I guess I'm of an age that finds it almost unbelievable that I can, with effort, research, and the internet (particularly r/roms on Reddit) play stuff from the Golden Age of Sega arcade games on a beautiful, portable OLED screen. Last night I finally got a few Namco games working through MAME - Ridge Racer, Rave Racer and Starblade. Ridge/Rave Racer play particularly sweetly through the ES-DE frontend, using MAME, on Deck - controls already configured for L and R triggers for accelerate/brake - as they also are for Sega Model 3 emulator (and Model 2 once I reset config).

One of my buddies asked me whether I actually have time to play any of this stuff - and I do - that is the point, after all! There's always something to chase, always something to fix, but, ultimately, on the emulation side, I wanted the best version of Outrun 2/2006, the best version of Sega Rally (and I have pretty much every version of both, arcade rom, home, etc.) and Scud Race which, of course, never came out on any home console (but it doesn't handle nicely, unfortunately - very twitchy with a controller - maybe better with a wheel, but I haven't yet figured out how to get my Deck to talk to my Thrustmaster T300 RS - a journey for another day, but the wheel is mainly for PS5 Gran Turismo 7 in VR anyway). On the non-emulation front, I love having a handheld which plays Space Giraffe and all my old and new Steam games.

I have yet to attempt using TeknoParrot; might have to, for the Lindbergh version of Outrun 2, Sega Race TV and also non-Lindbergh Planet Harriers, but there is a Lindbergh Loader which apparently now functions well. Great thing about the Deck, and PC gaming in general, I suppose - always something to tinker with, and, chances are, someone probably has the answer to the thing you're trying to sort out/make work - I love it. Now all I need is a secret 8th day of the week...

[MattyP]

So what is everyone playing at the moment?

Just finished up on Sword Of The Sea which is a lovely Journey like experience by Giant Squid. It's included on PS+ and on PC at the moment.

Next up is probably the DLC (finally) for Indiana Jones on the Xbox. I picked this up at release of the game last year. However need to get some GamePass sorted out as I played Indy on that.

Not sure if anyone is into Hollow Knight? Apparently the follow up to that is also out this week although not sure I'm into Metrovanias. Had a quick play last night on this (it's on PS+ and GamePass). Lovely visuals and sound although looks to be one of those games that is quite tricky that could perhaps get annoyingly frustrating after a while. I'll continue with it this week see how I get on.

[rowan]

I was just listening nostalgically to some track on youtube from the skate franchise & thinking "gosh I wish there was a skate 4".
Then I saw someone in comments years ago said "they're making it", then some other comment from a few weeks back saying "it's out".


Searched on steam and it is [called "skate."] and it's blimmin' free.
In general I'm against FTP but it's not going to stop me playing this one, I'm not buying owt though [it's all outfits and stickers & shite].

Anyway, only a couple of days in and apart from annoying voices which you can mostly switch off, I'm having a laugh. Which is welcome & rare.

[MattyP]

Picked up R-Type Final 3 - Evolved for the PS5 the other day.

Being a bit of a fan of the series since its inception - this and Gradius series being masterpiece SHMUPS IMHO.

Lovely game sumptuous visuals and audio. Gameplay is same as always with plenty of spectacle bosses and things to shoot. It plays really well and really enjoying the retro feel to this.

One word of warning though this is really just R-Type Final 2 with some extra fluff. You get several extra stages exclusive to this release and some other bits. So if you own 2 probably not worth the asking price unless you are a hardcore R-Type fan. The deluxe version comes with a little booklet which is basically an interview with the creator and a few pages of art. Also an audio CD. Adds to the experience. This version is also exclusive to the PS5 for some reason (despite 2 being on pretty much every platform).