Surprisingly for a very well know game, it isn’t emulated well at all.
MAME has collision issues. And I mean real issues, like a lot of strikes passing through opponents. Saturn emulation is iffy as well.
The game is impressive to this day, though. It’s a game from ’93, and they modeled all fingers, animated hair and fabric, like Sarah’s ponytail or Akira’s headband.
Unfortunately all of the versions lack training mode. It’s pretty hard to practice moves while fending off the opponent.
My impression is that although animations are super impressive, the mechanics are somewhat lacking. I was able to beat most of the opponents by simply crouching, and many of them, except Akira, Jeffrey and maybe Sarah, had a hard time hitting me.
Black Ops is probably my favorite part of Call of Duty series. At least the first two. And Cold War doesn’t disappoint.
It’s 1981, but we deal with an KGB agent that was active since 1943. Must be quite old by now.
Interesting that there are two perks you can choose at the beginning of the campaign. You can also customise your character a bit. Not a fan, I prefer the approach some other Call of Duty games took, where you switch between predefined characters. But whatever.
We go back to 1968, Vietnam, of course. I like how the weapon choice is more subtle: you’re given M16, but if you look around the base, you can find a Stoner 63 and some other arms.
I’m not sure the part where you pilot a helicopter was necessary.
It’s a dating sim, but with cute teenage monsters. You have a werewolf athlete, a hipster vampire, slutty ghost, prim mermaid, and bunch of other characters.
Probably my favorite is the Elder Godess Zoe:
The narrative is suggestive, but not explicit. And nonsensical, as any dating sim goes. Nobody asks why a four hundred year old vampire attends college, or how a ghost girl gets drunk every night (ok, she actually posesses people and makes them drink).
What makes it slightly more interesting than a visual novel is that your character has stats, and they are visual. So you can see how much “Charm” your character has, and by picking certain activities, you can boost stats accordingly. Which makes it into a bit of a management sim, I guess.
As far as the gameplay goes, though, I found it quite tiresome. In visual novels, even if you don’t strike the right answers, you get some ending. Here, even though I knew already what I was doing, I would still get “fail” all the time. So, it stopped being fun for me pretty quickly.
This weekend we did 2 urban walks. The walks are the highlights of my weeks. Saturday – Crystal palace to Streatham common
Crystal palace is very “family-oriented” which means a lot of miserable 30+ with strollers and sitting on the benches around kids’ playgrounds (I think we passed 3 of them).
The streets are not very interesting architecturally, but we spotted some cats and Rockery is a pretty garden within Streatham woods.
We didn’t walk up to the official end at Streatham common, but took a bus from Rockery to Tooting bec. There we had a tasty lunch in The green monkey.
Sunday – Capital ring walk section 5 Streatham common to Wimbledon-park
There are two train stations – Streatham and Streatham common. According to co-author measurements, getting from one to another takes less than two minutes of very slow riding. And our train stopped at both of these stations.
The walk is very urban or rather suburban, the same as previous one. But I liked it. The architecture of English row houses varies a lot in this part of London. How much do these houses cost? Millions, literary. Or, rather, the older the house, the more expensive it is. Edwardian period houses are all above a million. Mid 20th century small boxes can cost “as little” as 700k.
None of them represents a good choice to live in, in my opinion.
We didn’t go until the official end of walk at Wimbeldon part station (it’s hard to get home from there). Instead, we called it a day at Earlsfield station. We had a lovely brunch at Bean&Hop before going home.
Another reason I stopped writing for Russians was that during the first days of the war, Russian MoD was continuously reporting that “there are no casualties”.
Meanwhile Ukrainians were posting photos of Russian soldier corpses, including pilots (rare, easily identifiable), and videos of Russian soldiers taken captive.
I was reposting some of those. Thought it would change the attitude of some of my readers. Cause a cognitive dissonance between what they see and what they’ve been told.
It didn’t.
A year later, I see Ukrainians mourning people they never knew, but I don’t see Russians doing the same.
A very good Imperial Stout. And by “good” I mean it is smooth, and make you calm as a cucumber. A bit oversweetened, to my taste, but hey, it’s an Imperial Stoud available from supermarkets.
Available from Tesco, and maybe Waitrose as well.
I’ve been carrying that thought through the year.
My family always spoke Russian. And I have been writing my blog in Russian for 20 years. But since the war started, it became obsolete.
What’s the point of writing about games in Russian, if most of those that stayed in Russia soon won’t be able to afford playing them?
Then, a lot of the people I spoke with during those 20 years turned into fascists. All that talk of “liberating Ukraine from Nazis” that I started hearing from housewives and amateur photographers that actively dodged army service made me sick. Even sicker made me some Russian speakers from the States, that “trusted only Russian MoD” and started claiming how Kyiv will fall every day now, and that Zelensky has already escaped to Moldova/Spain.
I knew those people were nostalgic about USSR, had half friendly banter with them about it for years, all that “tastiest icecream in the world” kind of stuff. All that talk that “USSR had to invade Finland to protect itself from Hitler”, “USSR had to invade Afganistan to protect itself from the US”, and “did you know jews in Israel even made a medal for Hitler before WW2 started”.
But I always assumed that if a real war started, if somehow USSR would ever come back, they would immediately understand.
It did, it did, and they didn’t. They happily embraced the war and “you should have kept the President we chose for you” narrative.
So, there’s no point in writing in Russian for me anymore. I’m not interested in that audience. So, that’s why for a year now, it’s English for me.
Another game I couldn’t play back in the day because my PC couldn’t handle it.
From the authors of STALKER, no less. And you can see the ambition. You have a teammate who you can command or control directly. There are multiple soldiers you can pick before your mission, with slightly different stats. There’s inventory system, and you can and sometimes have to loot corpses.
Your health is displayed on the armor vambrace, and there’s visual ammo counter on the weapon, not part of the interface overlay. Speaking of weapons, the game uses a transformation mechanic, where you have just a single rifle, but it can become an assault rifle, a shotgun or even a rocket launcher, depending on the ammo type. I think they got it from Redline, another rather obscure FPS.
And of course open areas. Those do pose gameplay problems, though. Enemies can see you from afar, and they don’t use tracing rounds. Sometimes I would die still not knowing where it came from.
You might associate ambient interfaces and open areas with Halo, but it came in November 2001. Codename Outbreak was release a month earlier.
The game will run on Windows 10, but there are some issues, like smearing menu and half of the objects being fully transparent.
This can be fixed with dgVoodoo in D3D mode.
Something I think I knew, but forgot, and rediscovered only with Rival Schools. MAME is extremely sensitive to ROM quality.
Some ROMs will play on some versions of MAME and crash others, because someone didn’t put all the right files inside.
The correct albeit slightly more annoying way is to get an entire romset, look up the names of the games you want (they are usually 8 characters long and not very descriptive, so you’d better use an online DB) and keep only those.
Another peculiar bit is that MAME doesn’t differentiate between BIOS and ROMs. So you need to put your BIOS in the same directory. And of course you need a lot of BIOS, for different platforms.
Also, Retroarch by default doesn’t write logs. Which is a problem, since different games crash MAME for different reasons. Logs can be enabled in Retroarch settings, though.
We have not one but three large Asian supermarkets in our neighbourhood that are extremely popular.
So today I tried Nongshim Chapagetti noodles that seem to be very popular. To me they tasted bland and not very special, despite all the praise.
Later I discovered that Koreans indeed consider them bland, and mix them with NeoGuri, which is another type of noodles from Nongshim.
Completed ArmA 2.
Another game I never expected to complete.
There’s a mission where you need to capture four villages. It’s literally “capture the flag”. Around each village there are a few bunkers, and after staying in one for a minute, its flag is changed. The fun, albeit unrealistic bit, is that you can construct defences immediately. Dropping Zu-23 by a recently captured bunker allows you to mow down any and all resistance.
You also get opportunity to buy weapons, including anti-tank ones. This is important, because no one in your squad is equipped with one of those. And while you can beat technicals or even a helicopter with a light machine gun and some luck, you can’t do anything to an APC.
Russians send their army. Interestingly, they also block off some of the roads. Razor Team is officially declared MIA.
We help the partisans. Although they also ask to kill their leader. Turns out to be the same “priest” we helped out earlier. He’s a radical, and is not very helpful. We leave his corpse in the forest.
Last mission is a slog. Your goal is to capture an entire region, some 20 villages, instead of just 4. You’re given access to BTR2, T72 and helicopters, though. But still, enemy base is crawling with those T72s as well.
Interestingly, in this mission your team mates and you switch to Russian weapons.
Also, I’ve read that if you collect all evidence in all missions, NATO sends you some tanks to help. I didn’t manage to do that, though. Had to resort to offensive defence tactic instead.
The problem with destroying the enemy HQ is that this game is not built for enemy APCs popping out of thin air in front of you. Your tank runs out of ammo. They don’t. HQ is also extremely sturdy, Took more than 5 direct hits from T72 to destroy it.
After that, the mission is half broken. No one explains to you how to negotiate with Russians. Marny, despite what the mission says, doesn’t have any dialogue lines. If you take a chopper to a remote island, you’ll find Lopotev there. But your teammates will shoot him, because someone forgot to designate him as neutral NPC. And once you manage to capture him all by yourself, half of the time he won’t get into the helicopter.
One last fun bit. You’re tasked with transferring Lopotev to Russians for interrogation. But they set an ambush for you. But I had a chopper nearby, and that was the only time it worked well. Spetsnaz didn’t know what hit them.
Speaking of Spetsnaz, they have nice toys on them, like Bizon and Vintorez. A bit of a shame, really, that’s the last minute of the game, so you never get to play with them. Same with 12.7 rifles. Seen some ammo, never seen the rifle itself.
I mentioned that the game is still extremely slow even on the strongest PCs. Well, not if you reduce the draw distance. You cannot hit anything beyond few hundred meters anyway, so 2km should be fine. Also, I completely disable grass in the last mission, simply because I couldn’t see all those soldiers protecting Lopotev.
As flawed as this game was, especially the last mission, I still greatly enjoyed it, though.
Garmin disappointed me with the fact they can’t connect to two phones simultaneously.
For me it’s important, because I have messengers on one phone, and work emails and Slack on the other. And I asked for a work phone so I wouldn’t need to mess with an Android work profile, which I knew wouldn’t allow me to receive both simultaneously.
What Garmin means by saying that you can connect two devices, is that you can pair both, then disable Bluetooth in the one you don’t want to sync at that time 🤡
Was delighted to find out that iPhone SE supports wireless charging out of the box. Now I don’t need to mess with clunky Lightning cable, or whatever it’s called.
Reminded me of Sex Education in many ways. Same artificial school, with lockers, beer in red plastic cups, varsity jackets, everyone living in huge houses and all that.
I feel zero sympathy for both main characters. The girl, Hannah, neglects the Nice Guy and decides to date an athlete instead (because he has a nice smile and body).
Then complains that the friendzoned Nice Guy is not nice enough to her anymore.
The Nice Guy, in the meantime, decides to steal a walkman from what seems to be his only friend.
Also, not sure at whom all the nostalgia is aimed. Maybe Gen Z find Walkman appealing somehow?
