ArbitraryWater

There are buttons and a control stick on the Guncons, IIRC. Think of it as being similar to that absurd Wii Zapper shell that came with Link's Crossbow Training.

I'm looking forward to getting deeply frustrated by Clock Tower's particular brand of weird hide-and-seek nonsense. That said, I get the impression Clock Tower 3 is at least going to be a better time than Ghost Head, (which came out over here as Clock Tower 2) which seems especially awful. And then there's NightCry.

I remember liking that versus mode in Episode 3! Vaguely remember Greivous being the best character but couldn't tell you another thing about it.

Will you also bring over a CRT television and a mountain of regrets?

I think playing through each of the cases in one sitting probably helped me with the deduction side of things; I managed to get most of them right the first time through. It's weird though. Some of the cases very much hang on very circumstantial evidence that you have to intuit, like the one with the train, while others basically spell out the correct answer.

Anyway, I think I liked this one more than you did, but I hear the follow up, Devil's Daughter, is a lot more uneven. I'm... interested in seeing how it pans out.

I'm very excited for this mild-mannered Canadian man to give the same level of bland brandthusiasm to everything covered on his show, from DLC trailers for service games I've never heard of, to teaser trailers for big publisher titles that won't come out for another 2-3 years, to awkward lip-service about how we're all united by a love of video games.

also I'll likely end up watching it live because I live a life of self-inflicted pain

My most recent stream was a handful of PS2-era licensed games and the answer is "yes absolutely they were almost always that bad."

The consistency at which Sony fucks up its back compat stuff even when it makes the slightest of efforts is impressive.

I mean... it's gonna launch on Game Pass. That makes any concerns I have about the game entirely nil because I'll just play it for "Like a dollar" when I re-up my subscription in like November

Of the three games, I think Call of Pripyat seems like the most accessible by a pretty serious margin, even in its vanilla form. For one, you start with an AK-74u, which you may recognize as "A compact assault rifle capable of killing things" and not "a limp, inaccurate nerf gun." That said, oh god when that comes up for this feature I hope you're ready for a dissertation on what it's like to peek one's head into a modding scene that has been incredibly active for more than a decade and often in a language I don't speak.

That also said, STALKER 2 is ostensibly still coming out this year despite... you know, the part where most of the developers are (were?) located in a country currently being invaded. If it does end up being a real product, I'm interested to see how they try to make it more approachable, if at all.

I own a RetroTink 5x and if you like throwing money in a hole and having original hardware look good on a HDTV that is a good way to do it.

I do wonder how enthusiastic I'd be about trying to get all the Jiggies in Banjo-Tooie. As you said, a lot of that game is just *finding* how to get them, and some of that stuff is involved in a way that's downright impressive for a N64 game. The flipside of that is you can spend a lot of time in earlier levels running into stuff you have no way of solving, which definitely makes it less of a "gratification per minute" deal compared to its predecessor. Some of those later levels especially make you work for that stuff.

I remember finding Bomberman 64 more-or-less indecipherable as a kid, though this is one of those things where an instruction manual probably would've helped.

anyway, our most recent podcast foray into the Nintendo 64 Hole, covering the three RPGs of note for the system not named "Paper Mario" or "Ogre Battle 64" has thrown me into an existential despair regarding the idea that maybe most of the games for this system were bad, actually. Please look forward to Off the Deep End's new worst game: Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage