Be Excellent To Each Other

Plodding through Tunic on Steam Deck. It’s lovely, great art, some clever game design. The boss fights are a bit grindy, though

Astro Bot (PS5) this game is an absolutely joy filled masterpiece

Antstream has launched on PSN so I'm playing that. It's quite weird playing Manic Miner and Quazatron on a PS5.

Pretty decent service overall though.

Star Wars Outlaws is keeping me entertained. It’s got a horrible stealth mission early on that annoyed me but it’s opened up nicely now.
The gameplay is good and the look and feel of a real world is spot on

Nice to know its finally out , I do like the challenges / high score tables on it
I don't see a 'blucey' on there if you want to post your ID (Mines is just Zaphod79)

Cult of the Lamb - it's getting good, quickly. I really enjoy it.

Hitting a wall with two bosses in Elden Ring DLC...

A 'hippo' and a tree.

will do. I'm squiddycr4 as it makes you use your PSN name (even though I previously had my own Antstream account that I used on PC for a week or so).

I have a paid antstream account on PC (well Mac) , but it wont let me link on PSN and wants me to pay for a years sub on there as well :-)

FYI on the PC side you show up as Squiddycr4 (PSN) , but I can still follow you and send you challenges , you'll win both of the ones I've sent since my controller doesn't seem to want to connect :-)

There's a trophy for winning 50 challenges so I'll appreciate the easy 2. Who knows though. If it's Burger Time, I've lost!

Hippo dead!

Some of the missions were horrid. I have sunk about 50 hours into it.

I'm "helping" with a Star dew Valley run through. There always seems to be so much left to do but by the time you grid for the conditions to meet a quest it's almost not enough of a reward

I fixed my problem which was the main Antstream application was out of date and had not automatically updated so did yours and sent you a few more challenges last night - i do like the challege section of it and there are some nice modes with modifiers

Since you called out Burgertime there has to be one of those and one mode is just a score challenge for one level , your invulnerable (so can just run through the enemies) but its all about getting the maximum amount of points in the time available.

Annoyingly it freaked out when I accepted your Burgertime challenge and now I can't actually accept it properly.

First time playing Splat. Bloody hell that's a rough challenge! The controls weren't very tight on that one. Streaming didn't help.

I'm AWFUL at Nebulus on any format!

You'll find it will just eventually time out a challenge and it will vanish from your view.

Splat! is a game i never played when it came out but stumbled over it playing retro games and love it - you should have a few more now and i'm still getting games with non working controllers (Rally-X just did that to me where it just wont turn / move)

Thanks for the challenges, Zaph. I'm enjoying doing them. That Lunar Rescue is a prick!

It’s nice revisiting OG areas of Elden Ring with new weapons from the DLC.

I found a really horrible holy man.

Really, really, enjoying it now. It's like Animal Crossing with ritual sacrifice.

I feel bad for winning the Metal Slug one but i did realise that its how long you can stay alive and if you just stand still at the start nothing will hit you so the timer runs out.
The high scores on there are from people clearing the level and going further on but if you just start / not move at all you'll get 360odd seconds survived when the timer runs out :-)

Feel free to keep sending challenges my way.

Man, it's weird playing C64 stuff.

I've got myself Antstream!

I signed up for a year for £12 on a special deal and so far, it's alright. Anyway, can you add me as a friend? I'm 'RossoftheRobots' on there.

will do. I'm squiddycr4

I've added you , and will send you some challenges and now i need to practice the one I sent to Blucey yesterday as a joke again (its how fast with 1 life can you do the 9th key pattern on Pac-Man)

yeah I'm going to fail to complete that 100% of the time!

I used to have the pattern memorised for the later levels of Pac-Man but it's been so long, I wouldn't know where to start... Also, the tiny bit of lag doesn't seem to help either as I can't get the one pattern I do know to work.

Yeah the lag is what makes it difficult , I played about 20 minutes yesterday and then starting consistantly getting throught it so sent the challenge to Blucey with a score - I tried once this morning but then failed when I sent it to you :-)

You should have a few challenges from me to get started with

I was really interested in the whole Pac-Man perfect game thing. On the PSN port of Pac-Man there's this trophy.

"Om Nom Nom
Eat 2 fruits and all four ghosts in succession four times in a single round!"

And that was a major ball-ache! So when I heard about the "Perfect Pac-Man Game" I was sort of blown away by the idea of someone getting every ghost and every fruit across the whole game. I met Jon Stoodley who was like the 8th guy to ever do it and I'd actually pitched to Retro Gamer about doing a feature on it (pitching to RG is just about the most pointless thing ever as they always say no and then just do the article a year later anyway).

But anyway, Jon's approach was mad. He'd only ever do it at a live event on a real cabinet. So his opportunity to achieve it was already limited. Also, unlike all the other players, he didn't use the patterns (I think there are three that'll sort you for the whole thing). He did it all freehand so to speak.

Watching him play was unreal. It's incredible to watch that level of play.

Obviously after a few levels, eating ghosts becomes impossible as the blue pills don't make them vulnerable and instead just change their direction but even so the whole thing is mad. Especially when you factor in having to negotiate the 256th level where you can't actually see anything.

Yeah Perfect game and kill screen is fascinating , even down to why it actually happens a number of these early 80's games just get too confused when 8-bit counters clock back round to zero , Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong JR kill you because of a timer glitch , Asteroids gets really confused trying to draw too many lives on the top of the screen , Missile command also has a weird level where it tries to draw too many bases , etc etc

FYI here's a good blog post (from Tony Temple who is one of the high scorers on Missle Command) about Jon Stoodley and his perfect game :

https://arcadeblogger.com/2015/08/23/pa ... fect-game/

I’m playing the new Zelda, but I keep on getting stuck. Not just due to lack of skill, but due to lack of skill AND imagination.

I’m also playing the Happy Birthdays game I mentioned on a couple of other threads. I don’t want to boast, but I got from a primordial soup to modern humans in 1.5 million years. Take that, Mother Nature/God.