Does anyone here actually PLAY the games anymore?

Darksavior

Once it's "done", I'll start playing more than testing. It's been a long adventure with the pi4. I could not close up my case because I was always testing out images but now I can thanks to usb boot.

I'm slowly deleting games I'll never play. The most annoying work for me has been the scraping. The scrapers are sometimes inaccurate and have the worst possible art available. I had to hunt down high res art and resize to a res that won't make the pi lag. I used a batch converter in photoshop, but it's still a long process. Then used an auto renamer to match the scraped art names but that only worked on arcade romsets and not the rest..
My arcade system menu (minus cps and neogeo) are marquees so that required all to be resized and sometimes I had to make them since none are available.

Clyde

@Clyde said in Does anyone here actually PLAY the games anymore?:

@VictimRLSH Welcome to the club. 😉 It's the same with me, though it helps a little that my upright arcade cabinet is running most of the time. So I actually play a game on a whim sometimes.

I forgot to mention that I am occasionally motivated to play certain games by retrogaming videos or podcasts. Recently, I started to play Snatcher, which is often praised as one of the best cyberpunk games of the retro era, but which I never heard before. 😳 As far as I know, the Sega CD version is the only official English version and has English voice acting at several occations.

retropieuser555

@Clyde same here! Whenever I see a particular AVGN video talking about a game and how awful if it, I feel compelled to dig it up and try it for myself!

Darksavior

@retropieuser555 When they played goonies 2, I wanted to play it and in my search there's a fan patch to make it slightly easier.

retropieuser555

@Darksavior yeah it's incredible that people take the time to modify games to make the mechanics or gameplay actually work.

Like that ET game on Atari, regarded as one of the worst games ever, someone made a patch for that.

The rabbit hole of playing is absolutely incredible in pi for me. Games I played as a kid, games I missed out on, hack versions of games that didn't exist, import exclusives, the list goes on and on.

dankcushions

i try to! but the docs/support/developing is as fun for me as the games, so i try not to feel bad about it :)

i try to be working on one game at any given time. right now it's castlevania - harmony of dissonance on the GBA (which is apparently the weakest vania on the GBA but i'm having some fun with it!)

Thorr69

@Darksavior said in Does anyone here actually PLAY the games anymore?:

@retropieuser555 When they played goonies 2, I wanted to play it and in my search there's a fan patch to make it slightly easier.

Easier? Why? I remember buying that game on release date and I finished it over the weekend. (I was stuck on getting the ladder. Once I had it, I finished it 10 minutes later) It is definitely counter-intuitive to 'HIT' walls and stuff, mind you, and the translation errors are annoying. This is still on my all-time favorite NES games list.

IanDaemon

The ability/freedom to customize is fun. Cue this graphic...and apply it to RetroPie/EmulationStation/Retroarch:

dionmunk

@IanDaemon Spot on!

simpleethat

@IanDaemon That should really be a gif

Clyde

@IanDaemon said in Does anyone here actually PLAY the games anymore?:

The ability/freedom to customize is fun.

Indeed. That's why Minecraft is such a big thing.

ecto

I think the most important part is having fun.

What I like most is learning the history of the games: how some of the gaming series started out or moved from one system to another, etc. I usually only try to keep the games that are exclusive to a system. That alone is very telling.

Also, trying out systems I never had at home is quite interesting, too. Or re-trying games I have long forgotten (like ET but now with some QoL hacks).

But mostly real gaming is maybe 5-10% of the tinkering.

windg

For me is 80% gaming and 20% tinkering (until the system is not usable anymore).

IanDaemon

@simpleethat Just to be honest...that's not mine. I'm just posting something that I found that applies to the conversation.

VictimRLSH

@windg said in Does anyone here actually PLAY the games anymore?:

For me is 80% gaming and 20% tinkering (until the system is not usable anymore).

Actually an issue I worry about so I backup and mirror my image on another every few days. While the Pi 4 is now my primary computer, I do have an ancient netbook PC with an SD card slot that can run Etcher.

Darksavior

@Thorr69 Maybe that's the wrong word. More like, accessible and enjoyable. Here are the changes: https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/4363/

Clyde

@VictimRLSH Although I do not worry so much, my Pi is part of the weekly differential network backup of all of my machines.

simpleethat

@Darksavior Those seem like pretty solid changes. I still think Goonies 2 held some sort of record for number of doors for a long time.

VictimRLSH

@Clyde Another issue is I am trying to learn how to develop install scripts for Retropie and in order to do so, I need a freshly burned image of Retropie to make sure I include the proper dependencies. As I compile more and more into the system, it is satisfying dependencies for future builds too and I need to know what new installs are looking for if I am going to create install scripts.

Clyde

@VictimRLSH I know that problem from another perspective. When I'm helping people here with the Retropie shell, or publish small useful scripts, I often put a sudo apt install line before it for packages that I'm not sure about if they're included with the fresh RP image.

As we're drifting slowly out of the topic orbit, I want to mention that I recently discovered the vector-based 2.5D (?) shooter Einhander for the PSX. It's graphics blew my socks off, and the gameplay was easy enough for my slightly-*couch*-more-than-middle-aged reflexes. But that said, I also tinkered with my cab a good deal more afterwards than I played the game. 😇 But at least I played something!