I'm hopping back for my second playthrough for pathfinder wotr, this time on core diffiuclty. As for non-gaming, my weekend was pretty much spent on an unplanned visit to the vet.

Quoting: itscalledreality> (initramfs) exit
> Gave up waiting for root filesystem device. Common problems:
> - Boot args (cat /proc/cmdline)
> - Check rootdelay= (did the system wait long enough?)
> - Missing modules (cat /proc/modules; ls /dev)
> ALERT! UUID=1234-5678 does not exist. Dropping to shell!

Literally had this happen last week on my server!! FSCk to the rescue! Literally no idea what happened, only figured it out through some errors in dmesg that / mounted ro. Everything but my Logitech Media Server install seems to be working.

I only have 1 day off this week, so I tried to fix my TV. Replaced the TCon board. No change. So I'm thinking it's the panel, which means new TV, so maybe January or February (I hope)

G'Day everyone....... Its a rainy Sunday morning here right now.........

Its been a quiet week....... not much has been going on........ Did some work in the garden......... Took the dog for walks........ Worked........ Played video games....... Been on the treadmill every day........ Been a pretty quiet week which is good for a change........ Up until today the weather has been nice this week.........

As for gaming....... Its the usual Halloween theme and NFL and a bit of NHL this week...... I finally decided to setup the Dolphin Emulator....... And I tested that out with some NHL Hitz 20-03 (2002 Midway)...... I also have had PCSX2 installed since day one of being on Linux nearly 5months ago....... But I still have not set that up eaither...... I might get around to that this week.......

Some screenshots from this past week......


Probably the most iconic scene from the game.....
Screenshot from - Clock Tower (1997 ASCII Entertainment) - Sony PlayStation


Some nice art work in this game........
Screenshot from - Zombie Raid (1995 Sammy) - Arcade


The whole game is setup like a play/movie......
Screenshot from - Hammerin' Harry: Ghost Building Company (1991 Irem) - Nintendo Game Boy


The always loveable Felicia.......
Screenshot from - Vampire Savior: The Lord of Vampire (1997 Capcom) - Arcade


Arcade

Vampire Savior: The Lord of Vampire (1997 Capcom) - Fighting
Zombie Raid (1995 Sammy) - Shooter (Light Gun)


Console

Castlevania Legends (1998 Konami) - Nintendo Game Boy - Platformer
Castlevania: Rondo of Blood (1993 Konami) - NEC PC Engine Super CD-ROM² (Akumajou Dracula X - Chi no Rondo) - Platformer
Clock Tower (1997 ASCII Entertainment) - Sony PlayStation - Survival Horror
Hammerin' Harry: Ghost Building Company (1991 Irem) - Nintendo Game Boy - Platformer
NFL Blitz (1998 Midway) - Nintendo 64 - Sports (Football)
NFL Blitz 2023 (2022 NFL Blitz Resurrection) - Nintnedo 64 - Sports (Football)
NHL Hitz 20-03 (2002 Midway) - Nintnedo GameCube - Sports (Hockey)
Shadowgate (1989 Kemco) - Nintendo Entertainment System - Adventure
Splatterhouse 2 (1992 Namco) - Sega Mega Drive - Beat 'em up
Tecmo Super Bowl 2023 (2022 TecmoBowl.org) - Nintendo Entertainment System - Sports (Football)
Zombie Revenge (1999 Sega) - Sega Dreamcast - Beat 'em up


PC

Terraria (2011 Re-Logic) - Survival


The two best games I played this week were............ Hammerin' Harry: Ghost Building Company (1991 Irem)....... This was a really fun game..... Excellent tight controls........ Really nice sprite works for the Game Boy....... Some really nice looking enemy designs too for the Game Boy as well........ Its just good goofy fun....... Its got some weird difficulty spikes...... And the storyline overall is a bit shallow...... But its still great fun and I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants a Halloween themed game to play.......

The other one was............... Splatterhouse 2 (1992 Namco)......... I had never played Splatterhouse 2 before......... Even though I adore the original arcade game and play it every Halloween night........ And this is what fans really want........ More of the same...... Simple tight controls.......... Excellent gore....... Weird bosses....... Flimsy storyline..... Its got it all...... Its a bit on the short side coming in at around 50minutes....... But for a game that is as repetitive as this that could be seen as even more of a positive...... If you loved the original Splatterhouse arcade game you need to give this a playthrough........

The two worst games I played this week was going to be really hard to pick........ But yesterday I played what is the run away winner of the worst game I played this week and that was........... Zombie Revenge (1999 Sega)....... This game........ This fucking game......... It tires so hard to be a House Of The Dead spinoff of Die Hard Arcade/Dynamite Cop and it fails in EVERY aspect......... Terrible controls........ Boring repedative fighting....... A camera that might as well be controlled by someone who hates you......... Shooting has very little feedback/impact........ A time limit that is tighter than a nuns nasty......... A storyline that makes little to no sense(Im guessing House Of The Dead fans will probably understand it but I sure didnt)........ Terrible AI....... The game looks decent enough and has some interesting boss designs....... But thats about as much praise as I can give it...... This game is offically certified C for C.Rap Boys.........

The other one was no where near as bad........ And that was......... Clock Tower (1997 ASCII Entertainment)....... This game is not terrible........ Its actually not that bad........ Its just got some weird storyline and design choices that knock it down to many points to be concidered good compared to the other games I played this week....... This is actually the second CLock Tower game....... The First ebihg Clock Tower on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System....... That game never left Japan........ There is a fan Englih translation patch avliable though......... Clock Towers naming convention is VERY confusing.......... Anyway Clock Tower on the PlayStation has got your typical horror tropes like a main character than can be the most stupid person on the planet at times.........

Spoiler, click me

Jennifer is the "ONLY" survivor of the first Clock Tower massacare but then suddenly they find another surivior a little boy and Jennifer cant put 2 and 2 togther than the boy is Scissorman........ Even though the boy is the right height and build to be Scissorman....... And she knew the only little boy there during the Clock Tower massacare was Sciccorman.........

And its really annoying cause for the most part she is written quite well but has these really dumb moments that are really out of character for her....... If you click on an object a second time and get the same text as before you cant click past it and have to wait for it to scroll through to the end which can be annoying........ The Scissorman enounters are good and there are many ways to hide/get away from him and some of them are freaking hilarious........ The penalty for dying is almost none........ The game reloads you at the point you entered the last room and you can continue to try and get away from Scissorman........ Overall its not that bad of a game........ But its more fun to watch someone else play it than to play it yourself.......

A quick shoutout to Vampire Savior: The Lord of Vampire (1997 Capcom)....... Also known as Darkstalkers 3 on consoles......... This game is great....... I always prefered the Darkstalkers series over the Street Fighter series........ I either play as Felicia a mostly naked cat-woman hybrid or Morrigan a mostly naked succubus..... Excellent tight controls......... Great artwork and character design........ Fantastic animations and lots of cartoon goofyness....... The series has never taken itself seriously and this game is no different....... Well worth play if you into 1 on 1 fighting games......

As for the upcoming week the Halloween theme continues....... I will play Splatterhouse 3 for the first time ever....... Also the original Clock Tower....... Porky Pig's Haunted Holiday........ Vampire Savior 2: The Lord of Vampire......... and a few others........

As for non gaming..... Well the rain is ment to be here most of next week so I dont know what I will be doing........ I could work on the garden some more and hopfullky get the dog out on more walks...... And as I said above I will hopefully get around to settin up PCSX2........

Quoting: itscalledrealitySam & Max: Beyond Time and Space

What are your thoughts on this game????
I only ever got Season 1 and didnt like it much so I never got season 2 or the others.......... The original Sam & Max: Hit The Road is my all time favourite point and click adventure game.........

Quoting: dvdAs for non-gaming, my weekend was pretty much spent on an unplanned visit to the vet.

Oh damn..... Hope your pet is doing ok.......

Quoting: denyasisI only have 1 day off this week, so I tried to fix my TV. Replaced the TCon board. No change. So I'm thinking it's the panel, which means new TV, so maybe January or February (I hope)

Im going to sound real old but I am genuinely curious...... Do people still watch TV these days??? Or is it mostly used for gaming now??? I only watch TV once a year and thats for the Super Bowl........ Anyway good luck finding a new TV hope you get the one you are after......

And thats it from me for now...... Hope you all have a good week........

Since picking it for last weekend's thread, I completed Bomberman 64: The Second Attack! on Friday. I normally don't post commentary about games that I've completed (I usually just make a note in my clear-list text-file, because statistics are fun - I track what I've cleared, the order I've played my chosen games in, and on which machine in my Linux fleet I did so ), but this one warrants sharing some thoughts. There's a couple of screenshots of the final boss in here, though to be fair this game's 23 years old now so the statute of limitations on spoilers is probably up at this point.

Spoiler, click me

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Apparently he's not allowed to be a Bomber Knight, then.

Bomberman 64: The Second Attack! has a bunch of really fun ideas that are executed well (particularly the game's main hook, the Elemental Bombs, which I would love to see return, though preferably a bit more streamlined than here, and without this game's unintuitive ideas like ice-platforms spawning if you put Ice Bombs in lava that's enough to melt our robot hero but not a piece of ice), but it's simultaneously a product of its time with plenty of unintuitive or outright obtuse segments, which was the done thing back then in order to sell players' guides. It's a gruelling slog at times (including, but not limited to, the final level, which massively overstays its welcome), and each stage requires at least an hour or two, or sometimes even more, of your time - if I'd've picked something else, I could've completed multiple entire games per stage of this one*! This bumped it down from what could've been a great game to a merely ok one for me, as I have little love for the PSX/Saturn/N64 era of gaming and no tolerance for bad game-design and "games are slow movies" pacing. I'm not here to watch a movie, after all - though if anyone's going to adapt Bomberman to the silver screen then by all means use this game's story as a basis, because it's good!

*If this had been around when I was a kid I never could have finished it - I was only allowed an hour of video games per day, and only slightly more on weekends, and this game demands a much bigger time-investment than that.

On that note, the story is a bit on the darker side at times, which contrasts strongly with the series' usual optimistic nature, but it's more in the classic Don Bluth sort of way (with determined, endearing protagonists dealing with high stakes) rather than the Bomberman: Act Zero one (with nothing but endless post-apocalyptic grimdark "attitude" and stock horror-movie screams), which works to its advantage. Also, the villains are allowed to be genuinely evil and scary, and their boss-battles and harsh special-attacks match up well with their big personalities, making the game's antagonists really stand out; I found this really refreshing considering how these sorts of villains seem to be a dying breed in modern media. This was a genuinely great element, and something that helped to offset the game's design problems for me - if it didn't have such strong writing and a charming English translation, I probably would have abandoned the game and never finished it. I ditched a number of games back in that era for that reason - at least this didn't end up being one of them. Props to the writers and translators, here - they did good work.

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Not at all what you would expect from the final boss of a Bomberman game.

I won't recommend the multiplayer mode here because this game doesn't use the series' usual grid-based movement. However, it does feature a neat "Custom Bomberman" feature where you can dress Bomberman in various outfit-pieces that you can unlock during the main game. This element has been making its way back in the modern-day Super Bomberman R games, and understandably so because it's a cute and popular feature.

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Behold! Boxing-Cowboy-Cat-Jogger Bomber!

All in all, Bomberman 64: The Second Attack! is an experience that I'm glad that I persevered with, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you REALLY love often-unintuitive and heavily-padded 3D games that frequently threaten to outstay their welcome. I wish that it hadn't left me with such mixed feelings - I really wanted to love this one (after all, there really is a lot about it to love), but it ultimately didn't change my mind about that era of gaming or about the N64 library in particular.

With that out of the way, these are my picks for this week;


First up is my current Halloweenish pick, a modern Commodore 64 title called Guns 'n' Ghosts. It's an arcade-style platformer where each stage is a single-screen affair, in the style of Bubble Bobble or Snow Bros., except you have a choice of two characters with different weapons - Georg who uses a gun, and Trev who uses psychic beams. Though it's a modern release, it doesn't feel out of place amongst the classics of the genre from the C64's commercial lifespan - it's good value for money and well worth a look.


Bomberman 64: The Second Attack! is a bit of a spacefaring adventure but you never get to pilot Bomberman's ship (or the enemy ship that he commandeers early on after his is confiscated) even though you see it often, and as a result I felt like revisiting the classic SNES space-shooter, Star Fox, which will be turning 30 next year. This is one of my favourite games of all time, and though the 3D looks very primitive by modern standards, I feel that its looks have aged pretty well because it had good art-direction that leveraged the "alien" look of early 3D games really well. I'm really looking forward to digging into it again, and will be following up with its sequel in short order.

Last edited by Pengling on 23 October 2022 at 12:24 am UTC

Quoting: StoneColdSpiderIm going to sound real old but I am genuinely curious...... Do people still watch TV these days??? Or is it mostly used for gaming now??? I only watch TV once a year and thats for the Super Bowl........ Anyway good luck finding a new TV hope you get the one you are after......

Streaming TV/etc mostly for the kids, the Nintendo Switch, and the abandoned but, mostly working Steam Link is what we use it for.

I think the picture is worse after my "repair" it's super weird and the internet's aren't great help with it. I get horizonal lines and image distortion, which, for a Sony, is the Tcon board or panel. But the symptoms aren't exactly like what the Internet says. After some time (seems to be getting longer, but around 30min), the TV corrects itself and works fine. The issue only presents after the TV is turned off and turned on again (after being off for a bit).

I've narrowed it down to the left side of the panel (or left data cable), but I'm not sure what to do with that info, lol.

I can't find anything on the Internet describing that problem and a fix. It's almost like the TV needs to "warm up". I'm almost to the point of letting it run all the time with the screen saver on, lol.