Rsdio

Of course, I'm well aware of all that. It's just you see it thrown out pretty often as an absolute, the medium is imperfect therefore it's unreasonable to demand that the standard should be better. Things won't ever begin to improve even in more favourable conditions if everyone just shrugs their shoulders and says "Well, it's vinyl innit? What can you expect." It's always frustrating to see people make excuses for companies to sell them ropey product at premium prices. Even now it's a choice that's actively being made to rush through more orders vs. doing a better job. Obviously I'd realistically expect almost no-one running a modern business to favour the latter (and there'd likely be other undesirable consequences if they did) but still, it's their choice. Take GZ for example, refusing to press mountains of obvious bootlegs/pirate editions would help but they're not going to. As always it's a YMMV with these things - some are just luckier than others for whatever reason or their setups are more forgiving - but most (all?) of the 80th/Classics have been done at Optimal who've been specialists in non-fill for years and as with every other plant their issues have become more prominent during the pandemic. Most of mine haven't been too bad so I've been more fortunate than most for a change, but there's been a lot of 'I don't normally complain about vinyl but..' type patter with these on Discogs and the Hoffman forum, which had some pretty comical photos of crazy amounts of non-fill too. There are others saying theirs have all been fine as well, but complaints have definitely been noticeably higher than usual. The Tone Poets are done at RTI I think unless they've changed recently so they're a different ball game. As an aside, while it's definitely a very good idea to check around when weighing up whether to drop some cash on a release I'd suggest taking comments specifically about skipping on Discogs with a massive grain of salt. You see them a lot on there but I'm guessing it's mostly down to setup because in all my years of buying and working with records I could probably count the skips I've heard on new releases on one hand (I actually can't think of any off the top of my head but I feel like there must've been one or two). Quite a few times I've warily bought things that had a lot of those complaints and they've always played through totally fine.

I'm not sure there actually are any pressing plants in Russia, are there? IIRC DOL are sort of a sister label to the older and equally awful/legally dubious Vinyl Lovers and Lilith. All of them specialise in pressing up whatever they think they can get away with from CD sources, pressed up as cheaply as possible - usually at GZ in the Czech Republic. The current Blue Note pressings done by Kevin Gray have had various problems (tape/mastering issues and being affected more than most by current horrendous quality control that makes every purchase a massive roll of the dice) but if you get a good one they're excellent and a godsend for us in the UK who've been starved of decent issues of the Blue Note catalogue basically forever. The old Japanese Kings are definitely the next best option but have always been a pain to get hold of here with import duty etc. and have become much more expensive than they were. Speaking of those, anyone who waves away QC complaints with stuff like 'vinyl is an imperfect medium so we can't demand better' should buy some of those old Japanese pressings. I've never seen a single one that wasn't perfectly flat, perfectly centred and completely free of non-fill. Quality vinyl manufacturing was a solved problem for them decades ago.

Decent bundle at Humble with SCVI, Power Rangers, Injustice 2 etc. for £9. The rollback beta for KOF98UMFE is live at the moment, fair player bump but there were only about 30 people in the online mode just now. The few matches I had were pretty rough so probably across the other side of the world and the lag was absolutely the reason for me getting utterly toasted in all of them. To be honest I was happy enough to take a character a couple of times since I have no idea what I'm doing. Gonna keep checking in with it to see if it gets a bit more of a viable population for those of us in Europe, not sure it'll ever happen with a legacy SNK game though sadly. MotW looked promising for a while after the rollback patch but died off pretty quickly.

And Fei Long. And Law in Tekken. And, and..

I haven't had a Microsoft console since selling my 360 in about 2013 so my only experience of Game Pass has been for brief periods on PC. I kind of assumed that if something wasn't on there day one that it probably wouldn't be for a while so at least I've learned a valuable lesson

Top marks to me for buying The Forgotten City this morning (at least it was only a fiver via the sketchy VPN method)

My first Monster Hunter was 3 and I did about the same amount of time not knowing that the cart existed. I thought if your health bar depleted that was it - attempt over. It made for some amazingly tense moments, especially with the timer running down. I've kind of missed that since, to be honest. I guess a bit like the Dark Souls bonfire thing and some of these others, playing the game in 'accidental hard mode' does at least have the benefit of forcing you to improve pretty quickly.

Yeah, as far as this series goes I think it'd be pretty rough jumping into the shark-infested waters of something like AC+R which is also more complex and has more difficult execution. Heads up that if you did go for Xrd and wanted to play online you'd want to get the Rev. 2 upgrade as well. It doesn't have rollback either so would probably be pretty rough online especially now with a lower pool of players due to the other games having better netcode. I was more pondering stuff like Super Turbo, KOF 98/2002 or whatever. Obviously you're gonna get mauled by experienced players but at least you can be confident that whatever you learn about them, you learn for keeps.

Yeah, this all looks kind of drastic for such a young game when it seemed from watching stuff like it was in a relatively good spot balance-wise just beforehand. I've spent the last few months being frustrated with myself for barely getting the chance to play but now I'm like 'Well, glad I didn't spend all that time learning stuff I'll now have to unlearn!' In one way I do quite like the idea of playing a game as it evolves but for someone who only has the opportunity to dabble I wonder if it might make more sense to get into an older game that still has a bit of a player base but is at least pretty much set in stone as far as the gameplay goes.

Wow, no idea if I'll actually spend much time with it at this point but I'll buy it anyway purely because I spent so many hours playing his old free stuff. Torus Trooper pls. I feel bad saying it since Jeff Minter has made it pretty much his life's work but that's my favourite spin on Tempest.

It's actually both - teal means it's selected but only when the 'cursor' isn't over the option. For the option that's highlighted teal means it's deselected. Took me all of five seconds to facepalm after checking the options menu (the first four of which I felt like I was fighting off a stroke) so god knows how it's survived so deep into development. I had a go at Flight Simulator on the Series S the other day and that must be one of the poster children for 'bad mouse-style input in a console game'. In theory you can use the D-pad too but it only seems to work on certain menus and with varying degrees of usability/lag.

I've never really had much fun with a Battlefield game since the PS3 days of 24 players on a map. You actually felt like you could make a real difference even solo or playing with one mate; with 64 players if you're not in a full, mic'd up squad it's hard to escape the feeling that it matters very little whether you play well or not. By the time you get to 128 you're such a tiny factor in what's going on. Them constantly dialling back on the destruction hasn't helped either but I wonder if that's a symptom of the same thing since with more players the maps (even if expanded a bit for the player count) are obviously going to get levelled all the more quickly.

KoF 98 Ultimate Match Final Edition is getting a rollback patch in the winter Pretty excited about this one since it's always been the KoF I've fancied trying to get into the most. I think it'll probably stand a chance of retaining a decent amount of players too since UM isn't available on Fightcade, Mark of the Wolves dropped off a cliff pretty quickly but 2002 UM is still getting peaks of 150+ players daily a year later. No idea how many of those would be far enough from the usual KoF hotspots to have good connections with but better netcode will certainly help in any case.

Well that's the 360 mode of Guwange 1cc'd - almost comical difference between that and my previous 'what is going on' attempts at playing the arcade mode, I was a fraction of the last boss' health bar from getting it on the third attempt. It's weirdly relaxing just cancelling the entire screen with the shikigami, almost like colouring in maybe. Mindful shooting. I do kind of get how the game works now too so I'll be returning to the arcade mode of it through Retroarch at some point in the future for sure. Really love how crazy they went with the whole thing, the setting and mechanics would've been enough to mark it out as unique but they also chucked in the lesser spotted environmental hori-style elements for good measure. Hoovered up 1ccs with the other three characters in Omega Five yesterday too so I think that's me about done with decent backwards compatible traditional shooters. On to revisiting Panzer Dragoon Orta and Hard Corps: Uprising now I guess, been looking forward to those.

Circle of the Moon is also great and has always been pretty underrated, I feel. The visibility issues on the original GBA screen definitely didn't help the way it was received at the time. Gameplay-wise it feels the most 'Classicvania' of the Metroidvanias.