Prison Wall Breakout (PWBE 11 Sep 2023)

[Kendrick Kerwin Chua]

No door can stop me and no fence can hold me in! Because the people who
work in the prison system all over the world are just as overworked and
underpaid as the rest of us.

Play:
--=--

Tokyo Xanadu EX+ (PS4) - Of all the retro crap I've bought lately, this
is the thing that made the biggest impact on me. It's set in a district
of Tokyo, so of course it has arcades and pawn shops and mini-game
entertainment like Yakuza does. Its heroes are high school students
faced with supernatural opposition they barely understand, so of course
it's a bit like Persona. But weirdly, as an action RPG the thing it most
strongly reminds me of is Phantasy Star Online. The original one, not
the lesser sequel that's clogging up current-gen systems now. It's
charming and too clever by half and I can't believe I didn't give this
enough of a chance when I bought it on Vita all those years ago.

Conan (PS3) - I finished the 360 version and I seem to recall that it
seemed much more thrilling and smooth on a CRT in SD resolutions at the
time. It's crude and sexist and not clever in any way, apart from that
Ron Perlman plays the title role and you can tell he's having the
biggest laugh of his life using only four or five brain cells to do it.
This is probably the best bad God of War clone they ever made and I wish
they'd remaster it so a modern audience could see it for all its rough
and tumble glory.

Outrun Europa (GG) - I regret to report that this game is terrible. In
principle it's not a bad idea to attach a crime story to the premise of
Outrun but the execution (on the tiny Game Gear screen) is rough. Even
for the time this wasn't really enough frames to convey a sense of speed
and thrilling chase excitement. There were ways to make racing work in
this format and this, sadly, wasn't really it. Although seeing that this
particular spin-off game came out for nearly every home computer
platform of the period I wonder if I'm missing something that isn't
better presented on a different platform.

Defender/Joust (GB) and Joust/Defender (GBC) - Hee. I thought I'd done
that thing where I bought a game I already owned, but it turns out that
these are completely discrete Gameboy and Gameboy Colour carts.
Different code too, it's not like they just slapped new pixel data on
top of the old 4-bit greyscale data. The older cart has nearly-original
conversions of the old arcade games that are scaled to work on the
square-ish Gameboy screen, and so they play significantly differently.
Joust in particular has really detailed pixel art that you don't get in
the original arcade version, which is a lovely difference to notice for
the first time. I popped in the GBC cart to compare and the two games
are just straight down-scaled versions of the arcade games, which is
fine but which is also less interesting from a historical perspective. I
need to look back at all these old arcade ports now and see if there are
other unique features that make them worth owning.

Want:
--=--

Conan (PS2) - This EU-exclusive game wasn't good enough to get localised
in any other region. Still, I'd like to see what it was all about and
whether there's anything meaningful there that you don't get from the
current crop of modern Conan adaptations.

Bin:
-==-

Nothing game-related.

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

Balance forward - $3,830

NFL Quarterback Club (GB) - $4
NFL Quarterback CLub II (GB) - $4
NFL Quarterback CLub 96 (GB) - $4
Defender/Joust (GB) - $8
Conan (PS3) - $12
Dance Dance Revolution Supernova 2 (PS2) - $9
Outrun Europa (GG) - $16

Total to date - $3,887

-KKC, who needs to do some cleaning up.

[Russell Marks]

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

> Play:

Minecraft (PSV) - one thing I never did in my newer map on this was to
clear out the mansion to the south-west, i.e. the one I initially
spawned by. For this one I decided not to burn it down (the usual
approach then being to light up dark areas while fighting any
baddies), and it actually wasn't too bad - despite my having failed to
notice that I mostly only had iron armour, which was definitely not
ideal. I did just about manage to not die. :-)

> Outrun Europa (GG) - I regret to report that this game is terrible. In
> principle it's not a bad idea to attach a crime story to the premise of
> Outrun

The crime in question presumably being the making of Outrun Europa. I
still remember the infamous colourful screenshot Your Sinclair
published for the speccy version. It was... a bit less colourful when
it actually released.

> Want:

Nothing.

> Bin:

Losing some progress on my Minecraft save (though luckily not that
mansion-clearing) - at times it seems to have issues saving, without
giving any obvious indication of this. While the game will revert to
an earlier save rather than losing everything (or has done so far at
least), and I make occasional save backups anyhow, the way this
problem will undo a bunch of changes can still be quite annoying.

-Rus.

[Jaimie Vandenbergh]

On 11 Sep 2023 at 00:05:21 BST, "Kendrick Kerwin Chua"
<kend...@nospam.io-nyc> wrote:
>
> Play:
> --=--

Paper Mario (N64), realised I'd never played this one and thought I
would. It's quite simple and basic compared to the later installments,
but fun enough. Not much comedy writing, apart from one quip about how
Peach seems to get kidnapped by Bowser *a lot* by a random koopa. I'm
already two star rescues in out of 7. I may or may not continue.

> Want:
> --=--

Finish off Pikmin 4 before I get bad at it again; then go back to TotK.
Or maybe finish Ghostwire Tokyo.

Also rather want to play Sea of Stars.

> Bin:
> -==-

Mmmm maybe Bethesda's release policy. 25 years in the making, but we
didn't bother to look at any games made in the last 10 years to see how
a giant space game might be made to actually feel like a giant space
game and be fun.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
"We don't stop playing because we grow old; we
grow old because we stop playing"
-- George Bernard Shaw