Precious

[prog]

The new thing I say when a video game ceases to be fun, by making me do something I already did over and over, is: This is not treating my time and attention as precious.

Why, yes, I did just finally get to the Meat Circus stage in Psychonauts...!

While I'm here: any game recs I need to know about? Know ye that I really really want to play Dwarf Fortress, but ffs, I cannot get past the interface. I just can't do it. It's like trying to read a really smashing novel where all the text on every page is encoded as a stereogram. And covered in bees. I don't know.

What are you playing?

Comments

[rserocki.livejournal.com]

I'm still playing Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection.

Why don't you pick that up for the wii?

Warning: I can't really recommend the predecessor, which was simply "Pinball Hall of Fame" which had the Gottleib collection. Worse physics.

If you get the wii version of Williams Collection, you get two extra games PS2 (and PSP? Not sure) don't have. One isn't worthwhile really, but the other is a game from the '80s called Sorceror.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I second the recommendation for PHoF: Williams, which I think he's seen me raving about before. It completely ate my brain for a while before I went on to obsess over Mario Kart Wii and then Geometry Wars: Galaxies. Just today I started itching to go play it again, because I saw something called "Sorcerer" somewhere and it reminded me of the pinball machine of the same name, which is one of the less memorable games in the collection but is still good.

If you ever liked Eighties-early Nineties solid-state pinball machines like Black Knight, Pinbot and Funhouse, if you ever think you might have liked them if you had the chance, this is the game to have. It seems to have received very little publicity and gone straight to bargain racks on release, hidden among pathetic dumpware. Which makes some sense, I guess, since the demand for pinball is limited, but that raises the question of why so much effort was lavished on it--the overall presentation is a little cheesy but the games themselves have been lovingly simulated.

While I didn't like the tables in the Gottlieb collection as much, some of them were potentially interesting (if you prefer pre-1978 electromechanical pinball, it has more of those), and it's too bad that the game was buggier. It'd be nice if they came out with a refresh of that using the Williams disc's engine, but I'm probably dreaming here.

[rserocki.livejournal.com]

Did you notice how some sounds are missing from at least Black Knight? Unless my memory is wrong. On the left-hand ramp spinner, when it's lit, it is supposed to sound similar to the sound effect for when you go to the next wave in Robotron. Also, when you win the right to fight the B.K. again in multi-player mode, a kind of rhythmic clock sound is missing. Did it seem to you like the points in bonus are tallied more quickly in the sim than they were in the B.K. game itself? Or maybe it just seemed longer in my memory.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I didn't spend enough time playing Black Knight back in the day to be able to tell. My big pinball period was a few years later, and I played Star Trek: TNG and Twilight Zone more than anything else.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...That other bonus game is an early 1970s electromechanical game called Jive Time that is evil. I started out just being frustrated by it (while admiring its deceptively sunny Yellow Submarine-ish styling), but eventually came to a perverse appreciation of its random cruelty.

[rserocki.livejournal.com]

I hope they put out Stern and Bally collections. And more volumes of Williams and Gottleib and and and.

Littlewing has made available a language designed for pinball construction, but I think it's a little beyond my ambitions right now. http://code.google.com/p/ypsilon/