Steve

I've been playing a racing game called Trail Out. It's a budget game created by a core dev team comprised of just 4 people. It doesn't have particularly high production values, but it reminds me of older arcade racers like Burnout and FlatOut. It's just silly mayhem a lot of the time, ramming other racers until their cars blow up, and using nitrous to fly past everyone into first place. The story and voice acting are bad in a good way; the game feels like a parody, even if that was not intentional. There's a bunch of stuff to unlock, various different types of races and events, including demolition derby, and overall you get a decent amount of content for your money, with more supposedly on the way. A large free update to the game is supposedly coming very soon that will add new modes, a new map with dynamic weather/time of day, new cars, and various other improvements. The main focus is on the single player campaign, but there's also other single player modes and local multiplayer for 2-4 people. The game has no online racing at all, which kinda sucks cos I think it would be a ton of fun to play with/against real players, but as far as I can tell, they have no plans to add it. It's been out on PC for a while, has just come to Xbox Series consoles (although unfortunately, not on Game Pass), and is supposedly coming to PS5 later this year. If you're looking for a highly polished experience, you want a sim racer, or you want to play online with friends, this won't be for you, but if you want to reminisce back to the days of fun arcade racers it's worth picking up IMO. Trailer: - This is the original trailer from 2022. They have improved the game's performance a fair bit since then, although it's still kinda janky at times, particularly when there's a ton of stuff going on.

I understand the vision, which is going beyond the smartphone and replacing it, but I can't see the tech getting there any time soon. MKBHD's review led to a wider conversation about the ethics of reviews, given that people with his level of influence could potentially kill a startup, but to me, as long as there's no conflicts of interest and the reviewer is behind honest, I have no problem with a small company getting their product stomped on if it sucks ass. That's what reviewers should do - not make excuses based on what a future version of the product might be like (and probably never will).

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Not DJ-related, but a pretty cool, albeit expensive record player. Shame you can't swap the cart and you can only get replacement styli from Miniot though.

He passed away yesterday, aged 57. No cause of death has been given. R.I.P.

I posted this in the thread earlier, but I'll post it again. This guy was a pro player in the Overwatch League, so he's certainly good at video games. Check out how hard he finds beating this boss (she appears about 2 minutes in): - There are definitely times when I like games to be challenging, but this is just too much for me.

It looks amazing, but I just know I would find it frustrating. I'm not into super-hard games where you have to repeat the same boss fight over and over.

I finished my first play through of The Quarry, and it was great! The latter part of it I streamed on Twitch so a friend of mine could watch and take part in the decision making, which was cool. One major criticism I have is that if you're someone who likes to mop up missing achievements after an initial play through, the way this game handles chapter replays fucking SUCKS. Once you complete the game, you unlock the ability to replay it starting at a particular chapter, but it wipes out all of your progress beyond the chapter you select, including the chapter replay ability! For example, if you go back to chapter 5 to collect some items you missed, the game basically forgets everything you did from chapter 5 onwards, including the ability to replay chapters, so you can't grab the missing items from chapter 5 then back out and jump into a different chapter; you have to play all the way through the entire game again! That aside, I loved this game. As long as you're more into the horror-based story than challenging game play, you will likely love it too.

I've been playing The Quarry, which is an interactive horror game. You get to play as 9 different characters who are trying to survive their last night at Hackett's Quarry summer camp. The decisions you make along the way affect the ending of the game, and there's a whopping 186 different endings. It's primarily a single player experience, but it can be played in local co-op where you take it in turns to play different characters, plus there is an online mode where 1 person plays the game, and up to 7 other people get to vote on what decisions are made, which could be pretty cool if you're streaming. It takes about 9 hours to do a single play through, but there is obviously a ton of replayability due to your decisions affecting what happens in the story. On Xbox Series X, the graphics are excellent, particularly the character models and facial animations. The writing is also really good and draws you in pretty quickly. I would say the only minor negatives are that sometimes the camera can be a bit quirky, plus it would be nice if there was a run button so you could get around a bit faster when you're exploring. The game is currently part of Game Pass on Xbox One/Series consoles, and it's also available on PS4, PS5 and PC. I highly recommend it if you like story-driven games, particularly if you're into horror.

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IIRC, the first one I played was Super ZX80 Invasion, which was a clone of Space Invaders for the ZX80. It was shite, due to the hardware being so weak; a 3MHz CPU with 1KB of RAM and no sound chip!

If you're an old bastard UKer like me, when you were a kid you might have had one of several available home computers, the most popular for a time being the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, due to its low price. For many kids, it became their first time playing games that weren't on a console such as the Atari 2600, but it also opened up the doors for anyone to make and publish their own games. At the time, most games were produced by a single programmer over the course of a few weeks/months. Jet Set Willy was created by a guy called Matthew Smith, who had made a couple of games previously, including the legendary Manic Miner, which was the first game on the Spectrum to have in-game music; something once deemed impossible due to the hardware limitations. I remember Jet Set Willy fondly, but it was STUPIDLY hard, as almost all games of that era were. It was an action/adventure platformer, but to me it was more about discovering new rooms that your mates hadn't discovered than actually finishing the game, cos the latter felt so out of reach. Here's a good video about it: -

@djdiggla Are you sure that's new? Anbernic bought one out about 3 years ago that looks like the Micro, but is a fair bit bigger: -

I remember when those fake viruses were popular, especially this one: -

I only had 56Kbps dial-up for quite a while, so it would take about 3 minutes per MB to download anything. I had to pay per-minute too, so it would be 3p per minute at peak times and 1p off-peak, on top of the phone line rental charges. The first time I got "broadband" it was 300Kbps, which got doubled to 600Kbps, which is about 450 times slower than what I have now, but at the time it was amazing. "PimpDawg", haha!

Oh shit man, Dave The Ruf! I completely forgot about him. I also bought some records from him way back in the day.

A new gameplay trailer: - I'm glad they're doing something a bit different with this, rather than standard hack/slash gameplay. I like the idea of rescuing and recruiting villagers during the day, then settings up your defences ready for the monsters to attack at night. Oh, and it's gonna be on Game Pass on day one! Excellent news.

When did you first get internet access at home? How much of the early days of the web do you remember? I distinctly remember one of my friends showing me Google for the first time. I remember when Napster launched. I used to regularly chat with people in Yahoo!'s chat rooms using a third party program called Cheetah Chat. But pre-1998, I don't really remember anything, other than looking at porn sites where it took 5 minutes for a 10 second low-res clip to load.

This is wicked: - https://app.suno.ai/ It will create songs for you based on the info you give it.

Tonight I've been playing a F2P game called Queen's Quest 5: Symphony of Death. It's a point and click puzzle game. You play as an alchemist who is investigating the kidnapping of several children. You have to collect items, craft potions, and solve puzzles to progress through the story. On PC it's $15, but it's free to play on other platforms, including Xbox. You start off with 5 free hints you can use if you get stuck, then you can pay to get more if you need them, but given that there are walk-throughs on YouTube, you don't really need to do that. If you do want to support the developers the price of buying hints is super-cheap anyway, plus they give you 1 extra free hint every day. If you like chilled puzzle games, I'd definitely recommend it. Apparently it's 3-4 hours long, which is perfect for a game like this.

What were you gonna do with that PDX-2000 anyway? Were you gonna get it out of storage and use it?

Damn, I've never seen anything like that before. I wonder if it has anything to do with the foam/sponge part of the case lid that presses down on it.

Google's AI is fucking jokes..... Abigail Shrier is the author of a handful of books, none of which have been shown to have killed anyone. Mao Zedong was a totalitarian politician whose policies were responsible for the deaths of an estimated 40-80 million Chinese people.

I've been playing around with this today. To play games I was initially just clicking on "ROMs", picking a system, then picking a game, but if you click on "RA Games", it launches RetroArch and you can pick from a whole bunch of other systems, including Dreamcast. Pretty cool. Performance has been OK to excellent in the games I've tried. The Dreamcast version of Crazy Taxi was probably the most demanding game I tried and it ran pretty well, but the framerate was not the best. It was certainly playable though. The screen size is OK for a lot of games, but in some games it is hard to read text or see smaller objects. The original Game Boy only had a 2.6" screen, but obviously the games were designed specifically for it, while this runs games from systems designed to be hooked up to TVs. I think the only thing that I don't like is the system software and how much of a pain it is to tinker around with custom operating systems. The custom OS I wanted to install does not work on my "Plus" model, only the standard one, but I found some other options. I messed around with one for an hour or so but I couldn't get it to work. It would just say "No ROMs found", even though they were all there in the correct folders. Also, using a custom OS, or upgrading the official one, typically requires you to download a HUGE image file, split into a bunch of smaller files, which you then have to unzip and flash to your microSD card. I ended up installing the latest version of the official OS and the download was just under 40GB, then you have to unzip that to an IMG file, then flash it, which all takes time. These retro handhelds that run emulators all seem to require some tinkering to get the best out of them, and the guides you can find online often seem aimed at people who have experience with them, rather than n00bs like me.

An Anbernic RG35XX Plus: - It's styled like a Gameboy. It has a 3.5" IPS screen, 2 microSD card slots, 4 rear paddles, USB-C charging, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, HDMI out, vibration motors, and a 3,300 mAh battery that lasts around 8 hours. You can pick one up for around $65. You can wirelessly stream games from PC to it, and if you have a friend who has one, you can pair them up wirelessly and play certain 2 player games. It supports a ton of different systems up to and including PSP, such as NES, SNES, Megadrive/Genesis, GBA, MAME, PS1, PC Engine, and about 10 more. The version I bought comes with 5,000 games on a 64GB microSD card. There are a couple of negatives to it. The microSD card(s) that come with it are supposedly awful quality and won't last long, so you'll need to purchase 1 or 2 better microSD cards for it. Also, the OS isn't the best, however, there are a couple of other operating systems you can install on it, including one called GarlicOS which seems highly rated, so I'll have a tinker around and install that at some point.