Kendrick Kerwin Chua
2024-08-19 09:12:36 UTC
Well I guess it beats not being employed.
Play:
--=--
Spider-Man vs The Kingpin (MD) - Oh! You have to hold down the jump
button to crawl up walls or on the ceiling. Well that's silly. I can't
believe this was the height of media adaptation 30 years ago.
American Gladiators (MD) - A US-exclusive cartridge, and I can see why.
It has the worst loading times of any ROM-based game I've ever played,
and that's setting aside that it's one of the carts that refuses to work
with the six-button controller. I see a really old design aesthetic at
work here, in that this is exactly how they adapted beloved television
programmes for games back in the C-64 days. Every last level is a
different game genre, poorly adapted from the real event in the show.
Arc Rise Fantasia (Wii) - This is a really nice RPG and one that I'm
surprised I didn't get hip to before. Yes, the English dubbing is
terrible and the graphics look like an unpolished first draft, even for
the time. But the encounter combat is super original and there's a
complex story about war and government hiding here under all of the
rough edges that I'm interested to check out. Although I've said that
about a lot of RPGs lately, so we'll see if it lasts.
Time and Eternity (PS3) - Been meaning to get to this forever now. The
most notable delisting from the digital PS3 library, you can't even get
the DLC anymore because Sony wants to pretend the game never existed.
It's a weird hybrid of animated television program and RPG, and the game
is trying to simulate all of the tropes and events that would go on in a
show that wouldn't happen in a game. It doesn't quite work (and the game
reviews bear that out) but there's something worthwhile hidden
underneath all of this weirdness that I want to try and understand. The
art style alone is remarkable, with a 3D polygonal background rolling
along as 2D hand-drawn animated figures run back and forth along it.
It's sort of like a super expensive riff on what we'd see later with
sprites in Octopath Traveller.
Want:
--=--
Moar Thyme (RL) - I made sure to get all my gardening done late at night
on Saturday so that I could have the whole of Sunday free for gaming,
and it was still carved up into little ten-minute intervals because of
parenting and real life. I'm about ready to fake my death at this point
and just go run off somewhere with a generator, a supply of army
rations, and a sanitary way of enclosing my body so that there's no mess
when I actually die.
Bin:
-==-
My project to create a standard input mechanism for Steel Battalion
Heavy Armour (360) - So this game is well-known as a Kinect-exclusive
that tried to substitute motion detection for the expensive and heavy
custom control panel used for input in the original two Steel Battalion
games. I originally had the brilliant idea to map all of the input
possibilities to actual buttons to fake the Kinect interface back to the
360, and in so doing substitute an expensive and heavy custom control
panel for the flaky and unreliable motion detection Kinect camera. What
I've discovered (after six years of casual research on and off) is that
this isn't possible because of the stupid 'modes' that the game forces
you into. It's a different set of motions being detected when you're
sitting in the cockpit, versus moving around inside the mech, versus
moving around outside of the mech. The game is trying to do something
much more ambitious than I had anticipated and it failed in so many
spectacular, cringeworthy ways that there's just no room to bodge in a
fix externally. There's an informal rule that you should only spend time
on remaking the bad motion pictures, and I think that the rule for games
should be largely the same. This is by way of saying Heavy Armor needs a
remaster now so we can see what in the world it was they were actually
trying to do here.
Expenditure:
-----=-----
Balance forward - $2,054
American Gladiators (MD) - $4
Sports Talk Baseball (MD) - $3
Jeopardy Sports Edition (MD) - $4
Arc Rise Fantasia (Wii) - $48
Total to date - $2,113
-KKC, who hopes someday to play for more than a few minutes at a time.
Play:
--=--
Spider-Man vs The Kingpin (MD) - Oh! You have to hold down the jump
button to crawl up walls or on the ceiling. Well that's silly. I can't
believe this was the height of media adaptation 30 years ago.
American Gladiators (MD) - A US-exclusive cartridge, and I can see why.
It has the worst loading times of any ROM-based game I've ever played,
and that's setting aside that it's one of the carts that refuses to work
with the six-button controller. I see a really old design aesthetic at
work here, in that this is exactly how they adapted beloved television
programmes for games back in the C-64 days. Every last level is a
different game genre, poorly adapted from the real event in the show.
Arc Rise Fantasia (Wii) - This is a really nice RPG and one that I'm
surprised I didn't get hip to before. Yes, the English dubbing is
terrible and the graphics look like an unpolished first draft, even for
the time. But the encounter combat is super original and there's a
complex story about war and government hiding here under all of the
rough edges that I'm interested to check out. Although I've said that
about a lot of RPGs lately, so we'll see if it lasts.
Time and Eternity (PS3) - Been meaning to get to this forever now. The
most notable delisting from the digital PS3 library, you can't even get
the DLC anymore because Sony wants to pretend the game never existed.
It's a weird hybrid of animated television program and RPG, and the game
is trying to simulate all of the tropes and events that would go on in a
show that wouldn't happen in a game. It doesn't quite work (and the game
reviews bear that out) but there's something worthwhile hidden
underneath all of this weirdness that I want to try and understand. The
art style alone is remarkable, with a 3D polygonal background rolling
along as 2D hand-drawn animated figures run back and forth along it.
It's sort of like a super expensive riff on what we'd see later with
sprites in Octopath Traveller.
Want:
--=--
Moar Thyme (RL) - I made sure to get all my gardening done late at night
on Saturday so that I could have the whole of Sunday free for gaming,
and it was still carved up into little ten-minute intervals because of
parenting and real life. I'm about ready to fake my death at this point
and just go run off somewhere with a generator, a supply of army
rations, and a sanitary way of enclosing my body so that there's no mess
when I actually die.
Bin:
-==-
My project to create a standard input mechanism for Steel Battalion
Heavy Armour (360) - So this game is well-known as a Kinect-exclusive
that tried to substitute motion detection for the expensive and heavy
custom control panel used for input in the original two Steel Battalion
games. I originally had the brilliant idea to map all of the input
possibilities to actual buttons to fake the Kinect interface back to the
360, and in so doing substitute an expensive and heavy custom control
panel for the flaky and unreliable motion detection Kinect camera. What
I've discovered (after six years of casual research on and off) is that
this isn't possible because of the stupid 'modes' that the game forces
you into. It's a different set of motions being detected when you're
sitting in the cockpit, versus moving around inside the mech, versus
moving around outside of the mech. The game is trying to do something
much more ambitious than I had anticipated and it failed in so many
spectacular, cringeworthy ways that there's just no room to bodge in a
fix externally. There's an informal rule that you should only spend time
on remaking the bad motion pictures, and I think that the rule for games
should be largely the same. This is by way of saying Heavy Armor needs a
remaster now so we can see what in the world it was they were actually
trying to do here.
Expenditure:
-----=-----
Balance forward - $2,054
American Gladiators (MD) - $4
Sports Talk Baseball (MD) - $3
Jeopardy Sports Edition (MD) - $4
Arc Rise Fantasia (Wii) - $48
Total to date - $2,113
-KKC, who hopes someday to play for more than a few minutes at a time.