Dreamcast Anniversary Play Want Bin (PWBE 9 Sep 2024)

[Kendrick Kerwin Chua]

Twenty-five years of Dreamcast, or at least that's as far as the release
date in the US is concerned.

Play:
--=--

Valkyria Revolution (PS4) - It's not working for me, and it's taken me
ages to work out why. The game intersperses tiny, brief core gameplay
combat segments in between long drawn-out bureaucracy and paperwork, all
of which is of the numbers-go-up variety in order to confer combat
bonuses that are poorly explained and probably don't make any
difference. It's basically and MMO without the M or M parts, and that's
also borne out by the generic character animations and the strange lack
of anything to do in the otherwise very interesting set pieces (an
elaborate cemetery and a bustling pub among them). It feels for all the
world like somebody wanted to redo Phantasy Star Universe but without
the need for servers or other players, and as compelling as the story is
the gameplay just isn't good enough to drive it along.

Castlevania Legend (GB) - I've owned this cart for about 15 years but it
mysteriously stopped working not long after I bought it, and the
aftermarket for this flawed gem means game stores charge something
upwards of $200 for nice clean copies in the States. I whipped out the
SMD reflow station on my week off and taught myself how to use it again,
and now I have a working cart again as all the gods intended. It's
really not a bad Castlevania game, possibly a bit more
precision-platformy in what it demands of a player than other games in
the series. It's certainly not worth hundreds of western monetary units
but there's something charming and appealing about the protagonist and
the setting, and you wish Konami would see fit to make Legend more
available to a wider audience in the form of a retro release or a
remaster.

Want:
--=--

More Game Gear Games (GG) - Can I buy some for cheap that I don't
already own? Surprisingly yes. The trick is timing, and being willing to
pick up big lots of games that are also filled with crap sports titles
that are actually more entertaining than I remember them being.

Bin:
-==-

Nothing game-related.

Expenditure:
-----=-----

Oh gods, I've bought so much over the last week. I'll do this part later
when I have the mental capacity.

-KKC, who also has a pile of cheap Xbox discs coming in the same order.

[Russell Marks]

Post by Kendrick Kerwin Chua
Twenty-five years of Dreamcast, or at least that's as far as the release
date in the US is concerned.

I'm tempted to say it was the birth of noisy consoles, for better or
worse, but I suppose CD drives had already taken us down that path.
Albeit rather slowly.
Minecraft (Linux) - investigated the nearest stronghold, managed to
get killed by... a cave spider (those pesky poison attacks again),
then lost everything I'd been carrying due to it being a really mazy
area and my respawn point not being quite as near as I'd have liked.
So while I couldn't find where I'd died (and still haven't) due to the
close-knit maze, the five-minute timeout before the items vanish
presumably got to merrily tick away while I was failing to get my gear
back.

Eventually I found the End portal in the stronghold, remembered I
didn't actually have all the stuff needed to get it working, and set
about getting that. Item type 1 was obtained via kind monster donation
at the nearest Nether fortress. Item type 2 was troublesome due to a
crappy Nether biome layout, making the modern "easy" way to get these
rather less easy than usual - the nearest suitable area was tiny, yet
even that was a good 500 blocks away from where I was starting with no
good way to reach it short of very optimistically building narrow
bridges (with giant lava lakes far below) across a series of quite
small monster-heavy islands. And all these unnerving bridges got built
while facing backwards and hoping I didn't get shot at too much,
because Java edition loves forcing you to do it that way.

As you might imagine, this is when I started dying rather more. After
a few deaths reaching the right area and coming back with the loot, I
was ready to activate the End portal and fight the dragon. Which was
horrible. I don't know if it's just downright nasty on Java or if I
was somehow doing it even more amazingly badly than usual, but I got
killed so many times - I think at least 15 times in the end, so to
speak. Still, Java edition finished, and with zero mouse usage. :-)

Hitman: Blood Money (PC) - I figured a variant of the qjoypad setup
I've been using for Minecraft might work for this, and it does. But oh
boy, the game doesn't make it easy. There seems to be different key
bindings for character movement and cursor movement in the menus
(though they can be redefined), an apparent bug where the default key
bindings return when you quit a game unless you enter and exit the
redefine-keys menu, a profile-loading screen and pre-level briefing
screens that seem to ignore all key-redefinition no matter what, a
post-level newspaper screen which seems to require Enter to exit (Esc
won't do it, nor any mouse controls)... it's actually quite impressive
how much of a mess it all is. It's just as well all the menus can be
navigated with the mouse (i.e. right-stick plus the fire button) or I
don't think any controller mapping could possibly make sense of it.
But as it is, it's somewhat doable. So I managed to clear the tutorial
level at least.
Nothing.
That Minecraft qjoypad setup almost requiring d-pad usage for the WASD
movement, IMHO. Stick-based movement is vaguely usable to some extent
if you give it a really big dead zone, and I have used that at times,
but I always seem to end up back on the d-pad. (One problem with the
Hitman setup I did is that movement has to be stick-only because so
many buttons are needed, which isn't great.)

-Rus.