SqueakyG

I have always looked forward to "the christmas game", exactly as this thread describes. BUT... what actually happens is that big open-world games take 3 weeks to play... and I get one week off for Christmas if I'm lucky. So it never actually feels like I played a game "for Christmas". Whatever game I begin playing on my week off will still be in progress mid-January. The backlog is immense at this point, with games large and small. Forget anything that came out this year - the backlog has some ancient stuff in it. So I sometimes think I should get through some smaller bitty games in the Steam backlog. Each Christmas I always mean to play What Remains of Edith Finch, because it should take one afternoon... yet it's still on the damn backlog.

The game list is exactly the same for US and UK versions, but there are some differences in presentation and how to access games. US Genesis model: When the language is set to English it defaults to a US Genesis presentation with US ROMs. If you want JP presentation and JP variants of some games you switch the language to JP. If you want Euro Mega Drive presentation you switch to French or German. UK Mega Drive model: When the language is set to English it defaults to a UK Mega Drive presentation. I'm not sure if any ROMs this time are EU variants (like Probotector and Castlevania: The New Generation on the previous mini). If you want JP presentation and JP variants of some games you switch the language to JP. If you want a USA Genesis presentation you switch... oddly... to Korean.

I'm starting with the Sega CD games because I'm least familiar with them. Sewer Shark is infuriating. First of all it took a silly amount of time to understand how to make turns correctly. I was getting it wrong, and this is one of those 90s games with "tude" that insults you when you get things wrong. Eventually I realised how it works: the navigator will yell out three correct turns - such as "Twelve, three, twelve" - which means up, right, up. However, the game will also present you with a bunch of WRONG directions along the way, so you must ignore those and only take the turns you were told. I finally got the hang of it... then it abruptly Game Over'd anyway. I was making the correct turns and had plenty of energy. The obnoxious co-pilot suggested I hadn't scored enough, I think? Well fuck you too. Night Trap... that's an interesting game. You can't afford to watch any of the plot scenes, because you'll miss all the Augers creeping around. So you know these teenage girls are having a dance party in the living room, and you know the vampire family are talking about plot stuff in the kitchen, but you can't afford to watch that -- instead you have to keep flicking between the empty rooms to look for Augers. At the same time, if you miss the vampire family talking about the access code colour you're screwed. Mr SCAT Moustache Douche gives you an abrupt Game Over for letting too many Augers in the house, or for not seeing a girl get murdered. It's another game that likes to tell you off for doing a bad job when you fail. Yeah, no, stick your job.

An uncle is just like an extra cheeky father, but weaker and in the distance.

Hoping a European version gets announced. It would be more convenient than importing one. If importing has to happen, I'd rather get the Japanese version because you obviously wouldn't want a big ugly "GENESIS" logo spoiling the look of it.

I hate having to choose who to watch Summer Game Fest through. One Jeff is worth several Nu-Bombers, but... Twitch is annoying, and GB also streams on Youtube which allows for timeshifting (pausing, flicking back through the video streamed so far, etc).

I don't even have a WH Smiths in my town now. It stopped stocking any magazines I liked to buy anyway, as she shelves shrunk. Always plenty of gardening and cross-stitch magazines and TV guides, but the gaming and science fiction section all but disappeared. I couldn't find Retro Gamer there since about 2014 (I was still buying most issues off the shelf rather than subscribing). The meager selection at my struggling WH Smiths made me go all-digital and I've never looked back. It's a shame, I kind of miss real magazines.

I was pleasantly surprised by how good it holds up as a Doom clone. And it most certainly is a "Doom clone"! It's got cacodemons and different coloured keys and all the same weapons and everything. It's a lot more impressive and playable than Gloom. I say "playable"... the trouble is that the gameplay takes place in a small square using about 20 chunky pixels. I couldn't stand playing it for long and only saw the first few levels before I'd had enough. Apparently you could make the gameplay window fullscreen with a certain key (though it didn't increase the pixel detail), but this seems to be disabled with the A500 Mini's virtual keyboard. I couldn't make it work. I think it's as fast as possible on the A500 Mini... 50fps? Maybe some slowdown happens, but it doesn't chug like it would have done on original hardware. Alien Breed 3D was just a 15-minute quick look for me, and it probably shouldn't have been on the mini.

They recorded a whole new voice performance and changed the character likeness for the Yakuza 4 remaster, just like they did for the villain in Judgment. Actors who have drugs scandals in Japan get erased.

That reminds me -- after I finished Cyberpunk 2077 I watched the 48-minute gameplay demonstration from 2018, and it was fascinating. Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjF9GgrY9c0 This covers the first set of missions - Sandra Dorsett, Dex, Meredith Stout, Maelstrom. You learn so many interesting things about CDPR's ambitions for the game compared to how it turned out (or at least their marketing spin). If the Maelstrom mission seems more complex than anything else in the game it's because they clearly designed it first, as a kind of vertical slice of everything they hoped the game could do. The narrator heavily implies that you'll have to do your research before each mission, investigate all possible approaches, then use the contacts you made and the things you learned to play the mission your way. In the end, the Maelstrom mission is the only one that worked like that. Also: - The demo had cutscenes! In the final game these all played out while you retain control in first-person. - Jackie calls female V "jaina" throughout instead of "chica". - In fact nearly all the dialogue is different, whilst being essentially the same, which shows how much extra work the voice actors must do. - V can use an inhaler to give themselves temporary Kerenzikov ability. In the final game it was a cyberware implant. - That first mission at the Scav building shows off destructible environments. The scav with the heavy weapon blows holes in the walls and pillars. But in the final game this is pretty much the only time you see a destructible environment... because it was scripted just for here. - The scene where a guy gets out of V's bed, to show that she sleeps with random dudes. - Clothing could give street cred buffs and other status effects. - An item inspection system in the inventory where you can look at 3D models of inventory items, and some inspections would "reveal details that can help in solving quests." - The Flathead spider bot was probably intended to be usable throughout the game. - The demo shows V stealth-grabbing an enemy and using the wire that comes out of their wrist to jack in to the enemy's port, in order to hack the network the enemies are on. (The early version makes so much sense. In my playthrough I was so confused about breach protocol and what made it different from quickhacking. Also wondered why V needed a physical wire to jack into anything when all hacking is wireless). - Not show in this demo, but other demos showed off the wall-running, and ability to perch on a wall with your mantis blades. This allowed you, for example, to spy on enemies from above and get a killing angle on them.

When I started, I played the first act of the game twice - and the mission where you get the bot from Maelstrom multiple times - because I found everything so hard to understand. I lay most of the blame for this on the car ride with Dex. Dex is describing THREE jobs at once, with a lot of characters for you to meet: Ultimately he wants you to do a heist to steal a biochip from Yorinobu Arasaka at Konpeki Plaza. But first he wants you to obtain a Flathead bot that will be useful for this heist from the Maelstrom gang - with an infodump about how their leader Brick has been replaced by Royce. Dex also tells you about a corpo called Meredith Stout who had the Flathead stolen from under her, and you should set up a meet with her. Dex also tells you that the woman who commissioned him to set up the heist - Evelyn Parker - also wants to meet you personally. Phew - that's a lot of info. The trouble is that Dex talks with a sub-Tarantino slang-talk that makes it quite difficult to understand what he's saying most of the time. I think the game does a pretty poor job of helping the player to understand the sequence of events Dex has hired you for, considering it's the most tangled sequence of events in the game. Thankfully, nothing else in the game is as complicated as that first sequence of missions. Some of it is pretty mind-bending and thought-provoking, but at least on a narrative level it's fairly straightforward. I read the manual and most of the shards in the game, and it was very useful to understand the backstory and the history of the Cyberpunk world.

I looked at all the 25 included games - some greats, and some worth a quick play. I actually got past those leeches at the start of Another World, and played Simon the Sorcerer for two and a half hours. Zool can get fucked though. Now I'm checking out WHDLoad compatibility. One small annoying thing is a controller inconsistency between the supplied games and the WHDLoad games on a USB stick. For the 25 games on the carousel the default controls usually have A=JoyFire1. But for WHDLoad games the default is X=JoyFire1 and A=JoyUp (it's good to have Up mapped to a button, but I don't want it on A). You can thoroughly remap the controller on a game-by-game basis, but not globally as far as I can see. I wish I could set global controller defaults. Another thing: I'm in a goldilocks situation where I don't like any of the display sizes. The A500 Mini has three display size options: "Fixed size" seems to be a 2x integer, "Moderate zoom" is 3x integer, and "Screen fit" blows up the game to fill 720p. Some problems with this: The non-integer fullscreen mode has hideous pixel scaling in dire need of some interpolation. Some people don't care, but it always irritates me! The "Moderate zoom" is my preference, however it doesn't work for the games that use 256 lines because that's too much for 3x integer at 720p, so it displays those games at the smallest size instead. So I often feel stuck between choosing the postage stamp option or the mishapen pixels option. 1080p output would have helped the A500 Mini to use bigger integer scales and look better at fullscreen. Also some kind of on-the-fly smart border cropping would have been good.

Is episode 7 late? It should have been on Amazon Prime yesterday, right? Or am I as confused as an elderly robot.

This might be a good place to ask some nerdy things about WHDLoad files and their version numbers... I've been using WHDLoad games for a few years now with the FS-UAE emulator on my PC. They were a revelation when I discovered them! So much better than floppy ADF files. They made Amiga emulation almost as easy as console emulation. I know two main places where to get WHDLoad games (I won't be specific of course). One source is very old: an archive from 2016 where all the games are in .zip format. The other source is very up-to-date, with all files in .lha format, and it's frequently updated with new game version number replacements (for example, "Knightmare_v1.1_0966" gets replaced with "Knightmare_v2.1_0966", then recently replaced with "Knightmare_v2.1_Mindscape_0966") However, I worry that the newer source is too up-to-date, and it takes databases a few years to catch up. The database used by FS-UAE tends to not recognise some game version numbers if they are too old or too new. I also just downloaded the A500 Mini's "WHDLoad Package" required for the memory stick, which includes an xml database of preconfigured game settings... I looked inside the xml out of curiosity to see how up-to-date it is... and it doesn't seem to have entries for very recent version number games. I haven't tried it yet, but I assume if you load up a game that the A500 Mini's xml database doesn't have, it will just load the game with default settings. Or not load at all? I'll have to see.

And of course the city pics