Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN APRIL 2025?

On Thu, 1 May 2025 14:54:12 +0100, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:

It's been another month where I've played basically nothing on the PC so
I'll talk about other things.
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The Spectrum - Retro
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>
I picked up one of these in the second production run and I've enjoyed
it so far. It's a Raspberry Pi in an 'original' Spectrum case running an
emulator. The additions are some more modern things such as controller
support, HDMI, USB (gotta get those extra games on) and a save and
rewind feature.
>
The downside is this really is for those of us, like me, for where the
Spectrum plays a huge part in their happy childhood memories and having
a physical Spectrum just takes it up another level that a PC emulator can't.
>
The plus side is that I both forgot just how hard the games were and
also how much that feds into to that almost addiction of just one my try
as you failed that pixel perfect jump on Manic Miner.

Yeah, the classic 8-bit games really fail on a gameplay front for
modern-gamers. They were designed in an era when the goal was to steal
as many quarters from you as possible (even if a computer game where
quarters weren't involved, that philosophy remained engrained into the
mechanics) and weren't meant to be easily finished -or even help you
get past level one. Plus, memory and storage requirements were so
strict there was only so much game you could stick onto a tape, so it
was beneficial to both developer (and player) to throw up as many
obstacles as possible so that the game couldn't be finished in five
minutes. Once you realize this, you see how /cheap/ a lot of the
mechanics are, especially compared to modern titles which actively
WANT you to see the end-game.

Nostalgia only brings you so far with these games.

>
Call of Cthulhu (TT RPG)
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>
Well we finally finished our first campaign (roughly eighty hours spread
over nine months) and we had a fitting end with one character making a
defiant last stand against a Dark Young (that didn't end well - I'll
shoot it, me - well if you want to) and the other going totally insane
and now living out their live as a brain in a jar after being
transferred into the 'care' of the big bad evil.

Didn't end well? Isn't /not/ ending in a TPK the 'good ending' of a
CoC game? ;-)

As one of the players
said it was probably best that they 'retired' as their characters would
never get over being in a town full of killers that are children.

Are... are you Richard Garriot in disguise?

It did give me a gentle reminder of just how cheap RPG's are so the
campaign cost less than £40 which gave three people a play time of
eighty hours and that didn't include any fluff that PC games often pad
their content out with.

Obviously you didn't invest in the Premium Dice ;-)