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

On 01/05/2025 19:30, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

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.
>
The Spectrum - Retro
--------------------
>
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.
 

I kinda disagree as it was amazing how quickly many 8-bit games started coming out that arcade mentality and moved towards this is a home computer. I loved the likes of Arcadia, Manic Miner and Jetpac but I was really blown away with Lords of Midnight and only slightly The Forth Protocol and Enigma force to name but a few. This is the future of computer games is how I saw it.

>
Call of Cthulhu (TT RPG)
------------------------
>
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? ;-)
 

It's a bit of a trope but also now a bit outdated for how CoC is generally played. Great for one shots but not so good for long term play. This campaign, I looked at the finale and thought gee this is most likely going to be a TPK as both players were low on sanity and they are going to encounter something that on a failed sanity roll is a d100 loss and then also creatures that will rip them apart with ease. I did think about toning it down but then thought this is CoC and it will be a great ending to the characters that have survived for probably eighteen months of play.

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?
 

That went right over my head!

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 ;-)
 

I've seen some of the dice sets and just thought, well they saw you coming didn't they. Oh and we play on Quest Portal as one of us doesn't even live in the same country!