Whirlwound

Been at this a week or two now, still showing 1.0.0o-FULL (no sign of [i]any]/i] updates yet either 1.0.1 or 1.0.5?). Still got to win my first run, but got the closest I've been so far. Blue Joker, Joker Stencil, Chicot (my first Legendary!) and Mystic Summit got me within 30,000 of getting over The Wall in the 7th ante.

Thought about Misprint for a spell, but that would have been too chaotic, would have likely screwed me over earlier.

Pfft. Not even freaking close. By the time I get back from work I’m knackered, and in no mood for the slog.

I’ll get back on it one day - hell, I got to retire sometime, right?

Might do, I dunno. Closest we’re gonna get to a new NES Remix by the look of it. £25, 18 July… hmm… I mean I’ll have a bit spare cash, there’s three paydays before then including today (and next month it’s also my birthday - be nice if it worked as a multiplier), so I’ll see how I feel then.

One thing itching in my head though.

“NES Edition.” Why add that to the name? It was only ever based on NES titles, wasn’t it?… (yes I know, Mario Maker in 2015, but that aped mostly NES games and it’s dead now anyway)

… unless…

Are they thinking about a future SNES Edition… or even N64…?

Final Burn Neo is there as well! Nice!

Never thought I would be able to play the Parodius games on my phone before the Switch [glares daggers at Konami]…

Going the other way (it's just as good to highlight the bilge as the brilliant), avoid Might'n Mow'Em like the absolute freaking plague. I got caught by it in my current roguelike kick. Bug-ridden as absolute balls, slows to like FIVE FRAMES A SECOND when it gets busy, freezes at the end of the run if you actually persevere that far, and the devs are showing precisely zero inclination to rectify any of it.

Ditch AI and NFTs and I’ll think about it.

“Zelda”’s turn. The whole time after she first reappeared, I was giving her some serious side-eye. Not so much heel as full-on yandere.

Should the occasion occur that I actually manage to crowbar myself away from Balatro, I’ll be starting on Little Kitty Big City. Duck Detective’s demo might get a look as it seems interesting, and I’m trying to play a game of Smash Ult Classic each day to unlock as many characters as I can.

Oh yes - played a bit UNO last night in a mate’s Twitch stream. Dark Heresy is Sunday this week because our New Yorker was at a thing last night, so I was able to get in on it. Got done over by a very well-timed red Zero, out I’d have won.

Dammit Konami, WHERE’S THE PARODIUS SERIES?!

Given we’ve got Spyro, can we not get Jak & Daxter? I loved that series - way better than Ratchet & Clank.

I just got another four JoyCons for something I’m looking to run next year, so yeah, I would like to use them with my S2 when it eventually drops. Just not physically connect them, obviously.

I have a Dan Marino, Tracer, Limited Edition Widowmaker (because my workplace was selling them for a fiver) and the full Vox Machina set, with Trinket and both Vex’ahlia types (because a mate gave me them for my birthday). Outside of that, I’m not fussed about any more - there are no signs of any Mighty Nein or Bells Hells Pops coming.

The Marino one was a piece of cake to find actually. I was after a Ryan Tannehill one as well to bookend 40 years of Fins fandom, but that turned out to be a bugger to find, and then he got traded to Tennessee…

@AfroMario To be fair I’m also a Critter, so I’m probably emulating in the wake of FCG’s permanent shutdown…

Tried to get it, but Shop kept screwing me over at the Captcha stage, refusing to accept my ability to recognise a sunflower or bumblebee.

Apparently I am now a robot. Beep boop.

I’ve got a PDP Afterglow, and it falls into the same category of pretty and functional, but little else. I still usually default to my 8Bitdo controllers unless they’re on charge.

This feels for all the world like a thatgamecompany title. Wish they could bring Flower and Journey over, they were amazing.

Will some hecker PLEASE light a fire under Deep End & 2124 and get a rattle on with Romancelvania‽

If only they’d updated Animal Crossing this much…

Clear my backlog. Pfft.

Which one?

I have GENRES with their own personal backlog now.

@stronglook The only thing I’ve seen anyone get in there that was interesting were some sets of PolyHero dice for a fiver apiece. For the uninitiated, these dice aren’t in your usual Platonic solid style, but themed to various RPG classes.

I used to back them over Kickstarter until they stiffed everyone outside the US over the Bard set.

Just saw another report that everyone got told about the zero-hours BS after their “Cluster Managers” (four letters missing there methinks) were told about it in… a mass conference call over Teams.

Seriously, £₽₩$ GAME (expletive masked by currency symbols as they’re there only things Ashley cares about).

Yeeeeeesss, I was hoping this was going to make the jump.

Damn sight sooner than some an’all [cough]romancelvania[/cough]

Mike Ashley can go get in the sea.

Said it before, saying it again, and I’mma keep saying it until some hecker answers…

WHERE
THE
HELLS
IS
R O M A N C E L V A N I A ?

It’s been a year since the last visible update on Kickstarter, the latest one is walled off because I missed the campaign, and not-good noises are emanating from those who were in on it.

Howay, 2124, take a dump or get off the pot.

@Zeebor15 If they’re bringing Super Woden GP2 To the Switch, they can do no wrong. Don’t care how many suspiciously-easy ecchi games they pump out.

Next level April Foolery - make a ridiculous claim that has to be an AF gag, then follow up on it.

Following the runaway success of their new magazine dedicated to the ZX Spectrum NEXT, Fusion Retro Books are merging CRASH & ZZAP!64 to make room.

It’ll be called CRAPP! and the first issue will feature listings to double your Speccy or C64’s clock speed.

The Hewson/Graftgold Years. The works of Braybrook, Turner, Phillips, Tapanimaki et al are almost demanding of it.

Obviously, no Super Off Road or Rainbow Islands, but Uridium, Paradroid, Gribbly, Alleykat, Nebulus and Zynaps would make this essential for me. Stone cold classics, Sizzlers & Gold Medals abound.

Nintendo up to SNES: VI/III.
Everything else: VII.

Surprise Attack. Konami's space not-Shinobi. First time in a while that Hamster's actually listened to me. There was a coin-op of this in the arcade when the MetroCentre had its own theme park. Great days.

Outside of that, I'm kicking around a gaming panel for Minami Con 30, so I'm going through which games in my backlog are 1-screen multiplayer.

Can’t vouch for the NES version, but the David Crane original was a cracker on the C64. One of the earliest games I ever owned.

Romancelvania,
any Parodius or Otomedius at all,
Chibi-Robo.

Totally misread that as Beetlejuice Alchemist, and I know for a HARD FACT that I would play the hell out of that.

For crying out loud, where’s Romancelvania? Is 2124 the publisher or an ETA?

Galaxy. And it’s not even close, not even for Galaxy 2. It radiates pure joy; I had a grin a mile wide plastered on my mush just dicking around in it.

If we’re going right the way back, my favourite 2D is the original Mario Bros on the C64. The Atarisoft release though, not the Ocean one; that was blocky as all hell. The Bracey Bunch didn’t know what they were doing with Nintendo games; Atarisoft stomped it. Their version might not have had platforms that bumped as you hit them, but made up for it with the ability to jump backwards. That was probably the first ‘oh Christ on actual Fire that is SO satisfying’ moment i I ever had in my gaming career.

Nah, I got Hover Bovver in the Minter anthology. Not gonna top that.

If I might (narf) suggest it, I'd add Might'n Mow'em to the ones to give a body swerve. It's not even properly playable on the Switch due to a horrendous frame rate that goes single digits late in a run. The publiishers are also full-on Web3.0/blockchain/crypto/NFT cultists, which raises a hackle or ten.

Or, if you remove all the non-games, keyword bingo titles, scams and attempts to dilute the meaning of the word 'hentai', 7,500.

Actually owning what I’ve bought, being able to make my own easily-restorable backups, and it still being available when whatever service I’ve bought it from sunsets.

THE Table Game from D3Publisher.

I actually had to wring it out of them with a few emails after they plum-ass forgot to release it, but it unlocked hana-awase. I’ve been playing that almost as long as koi-koi after discovering hanafuda cards back in the early 2000s.

While I'm loving the Survivor roguelikes - Vampire / Twilight / Geometry Survivor(s) - there is one such title that I cannot recommend anyone touches with a ten yard bargepole.

Seriously - GO NOT WITHIN A NORWEGIAN MILE OF MIGHT'N MOW'EM ON THE SWITCH. IT IS ABSOLUTELY CHRONIC.

It takes the sprawling, gargantuan maps of its genre-mates and shrinks them down to a few screens'-worth of real estate. And then it starts t o s l o w d o w n to an absolute crawl. You might not believe it to look at YouTube or Twitch, where it zips along at a speed such a game would be expected to on a PC, but you get a decent way through a run and you will wind up looking at - and I am NOT kidding here - five frames a second. F I V E .

It does not help that the publisher, Eleet Games, are fully Kool-aided passengers on the Blockchain/Crypto/NFT train. They barely look at their online presences, never mind update them - some have gone years without new content - and their Discord link has just been left to die.

I am not hopeful that this game's - I would say issues, but the damn thing has subscriptions - will get addressed any time soon, if ever; as such, I'm telling you now. DON'T.

Not great, I’m afraid. Very little I’ll be getting out of that.

Monkey Ball I might go for once it’s discounted, Pocket Card Racer depends on what I get out of the demo, but… eh. Nothing really grabbed me and shook. Just about the only thing that’s even a possibly-at-release is Tales of Kenzera: ZAU.

Dammit, where’s Romancelvania?!

@joey302 Yeah, it's near as dammit everything Jeff's done, covering everything he worked on from ZX-81 to Jaguar, as far as Tempest 2000 - he was by far at his most prolific on the C64 - and Gridrunner Remastered. It's all listed on the Digital Eclipse website.

Have they addressed the strobing in some cough*most*cough of his games? I wanted to use Iridis Alpha in a panel not so long ago, but couldn’t in case of light-sensitive seizures. There was no off switch for it back in the day - we weren’t nearly as aware of such things then are we are now.

Tried asking Jeff himself if some kind of POKE could have done it, but he couldn’t think how to pull it off.

Need some NBA Jam somewhere - image rights will probably mean that’ll never happen though. 💧

Having sampled the ridiculously simplistic splendour of Vampire Survivors last year, I figured I’d take a look at some others in this seemingly emergent roguelite survival danmaku shmup Frankengenre. Twilight Survivors is one I have lined up for later this week, which looks a lot sillier than its counterpart, but in the meantime I tripped over Might’n Mow’em.

And I have to say, in all honesty, I really cannot recommend that anyone else even casts an eye over it, never mind drops coin on it. Not in its current form.

Right from installation, there were problems. I couldn’t even get it to play ball in the title screen. This, it turns out, is because Docked mode is not supported - and that’s how my Switch spends the vast majority of its time. Didn’t exactly shout that from the rooftops on the eShop website.

So I had a bash at handheld mode - and to put no finer a point on it, this game pales in comparison to Vampire Survivors. Rather than being surrounded by enemies from all angles, you find yourself playing the part of Benny Hill being chased around by a much smaller group at the end of the show. However, while the bawdy British comedy legend tore arse around the scene like Speedy Gonzales after six cans of Red Bull, here your rate of movement is that of a snail on Nytol. You often find yourself confined to a small portion of the map trying to suck up XP exposed on the edges of the crowd, instead of being encouraged to explore a level in search of nicer goodies.

And then there’s the frame rate. Oh, Christ on Fire, the frame rate.

When it gets going (or attempts to, let’s be polite for a moment at least), Might’n Mow’em slows to the kind of crawl I haven’t seen since Space Rogue on the C64 over 30 years ago. And that’s with an enemy count not even in the 50s. Granted, the side-scrolling overworld is silky smooth, but once you’re in the game itself, 60fps is almost a pipe dream - hell, just a few minutes deep and you’re struggling for 10fps. Make it to the latter stages of a 20-minute run and you’re looking at sub-5fps. When Vampire Survivors barely drops 0.05 below 60fps even when the screen is absolutely raging with enemies, there really is no excuse for a similar title to not so much run as walk.

Oh yes - and now that I’ve had a play in handheld mode, apparently now it isn’t so fussed about being docked. Shame that playing on a larger screen amplifies how slow it is.

The tin hat on it all occurred when I finally managed to complete a run - when the portal back to the overworld appeared, the game just froze. Absolutely rock solid. No response from the controller at all.

Dopamine rush? Pfft. I’d get more of a kick out of sitting in a freezing York train station waiting room at 2am. (Which I’ve done - being a convention organiser isn’t all it’s cracked up to be sometimes.) Go nowhere near.

@wuntyme8 The way the Mario Strikers games play, I’d say we’re halfway there already…

Kinda hoping that Hamster get round to the High Impact games that Midway/Williams did.

And NBA Jam as well. I think that benefitted hugely from High Impact, since it helped Turmell & Co figure out what they were doing and how they wanted to do it.

Parodius Collection next plz kthx.

I think I only ever completed World Champs 2004 on the GBA. Then, as with most CCGs, the cards and mechanics just ran away with themselves and I couldn't be arsed keeping up.

Magic was the same. I had a belting blue-white 4th Edition deck (Orlando Magic) and a half-decent red-white one (Sunderland 'Til You Die), but when Fifth Edition happened it just skyrocketed from there.