I hope that while I'm making time to play all these games that I make
time to play just one of them to completion.

Play:
--=--

Phantasy Star Nova (Vita) - Did I mention that my latest Solaris order
came in? This is a lovely game that is nearly the entire PSO2 engine in
portable format, just offline and also all in Japanese. It is a
veritable crime against humanity that they did not localise this game or
see fit to port it to any other platform, and there's a really solid
single-player action RPG hiding in here that's balanced and refined. But
there's no money in single-player games, or so Sega seems to have
thought when this came and went. I got it for $10 pre-owned
incidentally, which is a testament to how many copies of this thing sold
in the JPN region and how many are available presently in that state.

Ryu Ga Gotoku Kiwami (PS3) - It's the first Yakuza game, but in
low-resolution and thirty frames-per-second and with shockingly low
numbers of polygons on anything that the player isn't moving around.
I've glad I got to see it for myself, but the thing I'm most likely to
do at this point is go back to Kiwami on the PC or the PS4 because it's
really the narrative I'm fond of no matter what the format happens to
be. It's sort of a mystery why they didn't release the PS3 disc in the
west either.

Biohazard Remake (PS3) - Now this is the stuff. This is literally the
whole game in all available languages, but on a disc where the game
application detects your region and sets everything for your interface
preferences right away. I bought the disc because this only got released
digitally in the west, but I'm not really having fun and I keep having
to remind myself why. I own nearly every Resident Evil game on every
platform and the remake on Gamecube, and I keep forgetting that I like
my zombie horror to be camp and silly rather than stiff and frustrating.
Maybe I'll work through some sunk cost fallacy and actually play through
this game with save scumming like Capcom meant for everybody to do.

Pokemon Pinball (GBC) - One of those games that's been lying around the
house waiting for me to get back to it after I pulled it out of the box
some ten years ago and said "Hey, maybe I should give this a go." The
physics are shonky and the colours are more than a little distracting,
but it's a nice low-calorie distraction. Wish it were possible to view
the whole board rather than flipping between two separate halves, or to
at least be able to scroll smoothly. This is like the problem of Pac Man
ports where you don't get to see the whole maze at once and so you're
blindsided by something that you should have had ample warning for.

JPN-region Playstation 2 (PS2) - My old JPN-region PS2 was a
bodged-together affair, with some dodgy repair parts and a tendency to
stop reading discs unless you tapped a corner just right. It finally
died, and on a regretful whim I bought a cheap one from an Amazon
seller. It's *pristine* and comes with the cleanest first-party-but-
second-hand PS2 controller I've ever seen. I'm so leaving a positive
seller review. Oh yes, I bought this thing to play all my brand new
JPN-region PS2 games. I can only claim to have watched the opening FMV
of Shining Wind. The Sega Ages build of Alien Syndrome is soooooper hard
and I can see why they didn't bother localising it. The JPN-only Point
Blank collection (with bonus Time Crisis) all on one DVD is phenomenally
fun even without the Guncon plugged in and now I have to get a CRT going
again to play this properly. But the star of the retro and Sega Ages
show is always and forever going to be Virtua Fighter 2, which feels
completely wrong with the Dualshock 2 and always has done. Where's me
arcade stick?

Fantasy Zone Complete Collection (PS2) - Sega released this twice as
part of the Sega Ages series on the PS2, once as just the core arcade
game and the once with all of the sequels and home ports. This is the
second thing, as the 'Complete Collection' part of the title indicates,
and I don't think I really "got" Fantasy Zone until now because the
arcade game makes a better point of telling you what's going on. Seeing
the scrolling world map with indicators of what giant enemies are still
present is informative without requiring any language or funny cut scene
or tutorial bits, and I genuinely never understood it until I was able
to experience the arcade version.

Want:
--=--

More JPN-region Playstation games (PSX) - One thing I never did with my
old JPN-region PS2 was play many import original Playstation games. I
think I own exactly two, and I feel like that's a gap in my unwieldly
collection that needs some addressing. Because I have room in my house
for more of that crap.

Bin:
-==-

Nothing game-related

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

Balance forward - $2,027

JPN-region PS2 75xxx series (PS2) - $150
Another Playstation 3 (PS3) - $70
Captain Morgane and the Golden Turtle (PS3) - $25
Captain Morgane and the Golden Turtle (DS) - $15
Tales of Zestiria (PS4) - $18
Tales of Vesperia (PS4) - $18
Tales of Symphonia Chronicles/Tales of Graces F (PS3) - $70

Total to date - $2,391

-KKC, who has to put in a couple of work hours on a Sunday night before bed.

Kendrick Kerwin Chua <kendrick@nospam.io-nyc> wrote:

> Play:

Tetris Attack (SNES) - a bit more of this.

unlimitedgpt.co (Web) - I know it's not a game, but I've certainly
been playing with it and I can't resist giving it a mention. :-) One
of the surely-temporary benefits of all the VC money being sprayed at
every AI project going right now is that some things give free access
online, and in this case without any sort of registration/login even.
(Which is perhaps reason enough to be a little bit wary, and I'm not
necessarily recommending this website. Also, to be fair I haven't
actually looked into how the site's funded.) This one seems to be
using OpenAI's ChatGPT but not based on the newer GPT-4, so it's
presumably based on GPT-3.5. I've mostly been trying out some prompts
I meant to try on the older GPT-2 on my Pi last year, but never got
around to. (With some rephrasing to fit the older prefix approach to a
chatbot setup.)

For example, in response to 'Write a text in the style of Dr. Seuss
based on the title "Is this a prompt enough prompt, or is a slow
prompt prompt enough?"' it gave:

"Oh my dear, have no fear
For your prompt is quite clear
But do you think a slow prompt
Is enough to get the job done?

Is this a prompt enough prompt,
Or is a slow prompt prompt enough?
I say to you, my dear friend
It all depends on how you spend

Your time, your effort, your skill
If you have the patience and the will
A slow prompt can do the trick
But a prompt enough prompt is quick

So don't fret, don't fuss
Just give it your best plus
Whether slow or fast
Your prompt will surely last

And in the end, you'll see
That it's not about speed
But the quality of what you do
That will make your prompt shine through

So take your time, be steady and true
And your prompt will impress, it's true
Is this a prompt enough prompt?
Yes, my friend, it is, it's top!"

I particularly enjoyed the... creative... rhymes for "prompt". I also
tried "How do you make an apple pie from scratch?", where it
understandably was keen to give a recipe rather than spotting the Carl
Sagan reference, but even after I tried repeatedly to point it in that
direction it still ended up somewhere in the middle:

"To make an apple pie from scratch, we need apples, flour, sugar, and
butter, all of which come from the Earth and ultimately from the
stars."

Anyway, while IMHO playing around with the chatbot soon makes it clear
that it's not exactly intelligent as such (it's more like a weird
reflection of much of the internet, many books, etc., and roughly
speaking it seems to work by effectively guessing how the script is
likely to continue based on the training data plus extra tuning, with
the chatbot being like a role the language model is playing as
instructed by hidden prompting AIUI) - and the endless confident
"lying" (hallucination) does get wearing - it's hard not to think that
while this is quite good in some ways, the current state of the art is
better, and future models may be better still. Or to put it another
way, I don't know how far this approach can go, but it's already going
pretty far. Interesting times.

> Ryu Ga Gotoku Kiwami (PS3) - [...] It's sort of a mystery why they
> didn't release the PS3 disc in the west either.

I expect the PS4 was taking off too much by then to justify it. The
US/EU PS4 releases were apparently 2017, and I mean, even I had a PS4
by then. :-)

> Want:

Nothing.

> Bin:

Chatting to (in some limited sense) a representation of much of human
knowledge/output, then basically asking it to write a nerdy knockoff
of Green Eggs and Ham. :-)

-Rus.

On 15 May 2023 at 00:15:14 BST, "Kendrick Kerwin Chua"
<kendrick@nospam.io-nyc> wrote:

>
> I hope that while I'm making time to play all these games that I make
> time to play just one of them to completion.

Yes, that seems like a thing that could potentially be possible.

> Play:
> --=--

Gotham Knights (PS5)(PMG) - Gus and I got rather surprised by bumping
into the end of the game. Apparently last session (a month ago for the
usual assortment of reasons) we'd completed two of the side-story quest
lines and only had the mainline to do this time - and within two hours
we'd caned it. Despite earlier complaints, it did actually tie some of
the story threads together - but in the manner of a comic miniseries,
*apart* from the primary premise of the game (Bruce is killed off and
the batminions need to go it alone, together) this is an "effectively no
change for the villains" stories where each starts and ends incarcerated
or otherwise unchanged so it was fairly unsatisfying. Was a solid 7/10
game as a multiplayer, probably a 6 solo I'd think.

Zelda - Tears of the Kingdom (Switch) - I had nabbed the pirate
pre-release to get into the game a bit ahead of the little sister I
share my Switch account with, which was fun if crashy and buggy, but I
restarted on the Switch on launch day. I shan't go into the story or
other spoilery details, but I'm kinda enjoying this. It's got the
"changed Hyrule after BotW" we all wanted at the end of BotW, for a
start. Worries that it'd be a map retread were unfounded. It has an
almost completely different set of magic skills. It does have a
significant Nuts'n'Bolts-ness to it, building crude assemblies is very
much a thing, and for lore reasons base weapons are even weaker than
BotW - but due to upgrade abilities that's a fixable issue. It feels
like a really serious evolution of BotW in the good directions. It also
performs startlingly well - I *am* playing on an OLED switch so if it's
doing any overclocking I'd be getting those benefits and won't be at all
surprised. I'll give it a try on my launch-day switch to see, sometime.
Anyway, well stuck into this.

> Want:
> --=--

A new future game to want. TotK was it.

There's the generic "more time/health/attention to play games" I guess.

> Bin:
> -==-
>
> Nothing game-related

Same.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
"The polar opposite of cinnamon is frogs."
-- Mandy, in "Mandy the Merciless"