Regime Change Play Want Bin (PWBE 9 Dec 2024)

[Kendrick Kerwin Chua]

I wonder if Russia kept the receipt from the 50-year lease agreement on
those two Syrian military bases.

Play:
--=--

Fairy Fencer F (PS3) - Hah, this is amazing. What if a King Arthur type
pulled the sword from the stone, but his reward was to have to go find
99 other swords Suikoden-stylee? And what if he didn't want to be the
prophesied king but just wanted to bugger off and eat well for the rest
of his life? That's the working premise here and it breathes a lot of
life into what are otherwise tired RPG tropes. I wish the combat were
more engaging though.

Kirby's Return to Dream Land (Wii) - My kid is getting another Kirby
game for the festive gift-giving season, but he saw this in a store and
had to have it. I can't recall that I have any other games that use the
sideways-wiimote method, since almost everything in my library generally
lets you use a Pro controller instead for proper input. Relatedly I did
just buy a little topper shelf to go on the gaming TV, which means that
my WiiU-styled adjustable sensor bar is now centered and viewable,
rather than being somewhat inelegantly taped to the bottom and being
uneven besides. So he'll play this game for about ten minutes and then
ask to go back to whatever he's been messing around with.

Shaman King Power of Spirit (PS2) - Well this is clever and interesting.
On the surface it's just like any other grid-based SRPG, with multiple
combatants and options chosen from a menu. But when combat begins it's
not settled with dice rolls, but with a harsh Bushido Blade-styled
fighting game engine with weak attacks, strong attacks, blocking and
dodging. It's not perfect, but I've never seen another game that puts
all those elements together in quite this way. I just wish I liked the
ridiculous Shaman King property a little more so I could get just that
little bit of motivation to want to see the absurd story through.

Want:
--=--

My Video Games Plus Order - We're on day 24 of the Canadian Postal
worker strike, and there's no end in sight. It's been reported that
regular Canadian citizens are using social media tools to solicit and
then make deliveries on behalf of their neighbors, undercutting the
normal postal rate and generally making it part of their commutes or
their other unrelated travel. It's a good thing I saved the biggest
order from VGP for the middle of this mess.

Bin:
-==-

Nothing game-related.

-KKC, who crammed a lot of weekend into his weekend this weekend.

[Russell Marks]

Lego DC Super-Villains (PC) - dating from 2018, and a bit of a stretch
graphics-wise for an N100-based mini PC, but still playable at 720p.
This is actually one I'd not played before, though it has clear
similarities to, say, Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2. The levels are good
as DC-based Lego games go - maybe not a match for Lego Batman 3, IIRC,
but decent enough. The combined Gotham/Metropolis sandbox seems really
quite small on this though, to the point that I initially wondered if
more would unlock somehow like in LMSH2.

Lego Star Wars - The Complete Saga (PC) - just did two levels so far.
Realistically I may not play this version much, as time passes it only
gets harder to overlook the game lacking all the improvements made in
later Lego games. But it looks nice in 1080p at least.

Monster Hunter Tri (Wii) - just a bit more, to finish off the village
story. It was maybe pushing things towards the end to stick to using
Qurupeco gear with a Barroth lance, but nothing an excessive amount of
mega-potion chugging couldn't fix. :-)
Probably some other PC games with a GTX 660 minimum-specs requirement
like Lego DC SV (well, technically that wants a 660 Ti), as I partly
got the game to see how it would run with the glorious Intel
integrated graphics I have available, no doubt the best that not much
money can buy. Games stating that GPU requirement apparently include
Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, Mafia 3, and... Farming Simulator 22. But I
suppose the inevitable question here is whether an N100 would also
have those games looking like Lego.

Post by Kendrick Kerwin Chua
My Video Games Plus Order - We're on day 24 of the Canadian Postal
worker strike, and there's no end in sight. It's been reported that
regular Canadian citizens are using social media tools to solicit

That sounds like a harbinger of something, I'm just not sure what.
Some surprising awkwardness with LSW:TCS on Wine - like having to
install a native 32-bit version of d3dcompiler_47.dll, and the game's
controller support seeming remarkably cumbersome, at least in this
context. Even deliberately ignoring that and taking the qjoypad route
proved unusually fiddly due to the way the game tries to autodetect
the device you're using, which is obviously really helpful when it
sees the thing as both a keyboard and a controller and takes that to
mean controller, then requires you to manually define what every input
on the pad does from scratch in a clumsy way which requires using both
the keyboard and the pad. At one point while testing my setup I ended
up with both players controlled by the pad, one as keyboard and one as
controller, even though no inputs at all were defined for the pad. To
avoid that I seemingly have to "press a mouse button" (via qjoypad) so
that the game sees this as meaning that I'm playing with the keyboard.
Then I can finally use the controller to simulate a keyboard as
intended, and play on controller. Fun.

-Rus.