Oooh, another one for the patch list. Thanks!

Things are still pretty rough and busy on my side so I don’t have much to write about, especially in terms of new VN playthroughs. This probably won’t change until the end of the year but we’ll see how it goes.

The only update I have for this month is the addition of the recently released unofficial translation for Folie Fatale to our VN Patch List. Once again, thanks to @Berin@discuss.tchncs.de for posting about it.
If anyone else knows about any unofficial translations or patches worth adding to the list, please let me know. We can always use more of them!

That’s all for today. I can’t way until I’m in shape to read… anything really.

What else would it be?

I love Croc. I played it multiple times throughout the years and yet I never had a legit copy of the game until now. Seeing its Platinum Edition (remaster) on sale finally made me pull the trigger. It runs great, it plays great and the trove of bonus content is wonderful, even if it has a few minor issues that quickly caught my attention. These being:

• Remastered soundtrack reminds me of The Sims 2 - it’s not bad but it’s something I never thought while playing the original.
• There’s no option to switch between different versions of the soundtrack - Croc64 (an unofficial patch bringing modern features to the original version) has PC, PC demo and PS1 to choose from.
• There’s no option to rebind controls (something that already exists in the classic version).
• Updated graphics look weird. I know they said they didn’t use any AI for the new assets but some of the textures definitely feel that way. It’s fine though, I’m playing with the old assets anyway.

I’ll be sticking with Croc64 for my Steam Deck setup as it requires less disk space and I already have it set up but I am playing the remastered version on my desktop. I’ve been going back and forth between the two to compare them and playing on Deck made me realise it’s one of the few platformers I prefer to play with a keyboard - tank controls just key binds make more sense for me this way.

Anyway, I’m glad to finally buy the game that game me so much fun. Another one off the list!

Edit: Speaking of Croc, I just found out there’s an official trailer for a Croc 2 remaster. I might prefer the first game but this is great news!

Manhwa version of The Ramparts of Ice ended last weeks. It was a fun read but boy did the last two chapters felt like the team was told to wrap it up as soon as possible - time skip after time skip just to reach the end of the source material (I presume). I don’t know if it was the same in the original but it definitely caught me by surprise.

Felt a bit rushed, but it wasn’t terrible. Especially as a whole.

It’s so easy to just keep going. It’s great!

It’s been so long since I played this game I genuinely forgot about the gacha store. Shows how much I interacted with it (maybe I was just lucky enough to get by with what I got). At least most other things can be bought normally.

It’s a silly and light hearted romp about a golf tournament, with a cast of weirdos as your rivals. It’s pretty fun as long as you don’t mind anime aesthetic and tropes (it’s not egregious or anything, I just know some people are allergic to anything anime adjacent).

There are plenty of good titles already mentioned here so I’ll go with something less popular.

• PangYa: Fantasy Golf - it’s a golf game, as you can guess from the title. It has simple but really fun gameplay with customisable characters (outfits and equipment, the latter affects character stats). It also has a story mode to get you started.
• Puzzle Quest - RPG with match 3 gameplay for combat. Really addictive in a “just one more quest” kind of way.
• Ridge Racer 2 - it’s Ridge Racer. Riiiiiidge Racer! Tons of content, bunch of modes, fun to control - it’s great! Might be my favourite handheld racing game (and definitely one I spent the most time with). It’s pretty much a celebration of the franchise until that point, especially the classic era.

That’s good to know. Hopefully they’ll be able to come up with a decent solution that’ll fit their community well.

Better late than never, I guess. Now if only they could provide proper in-game info about… anything really, that would be great. It’s a step forward.

Since I have trouble playing things I was planning to play I decided to go with something outside of my usual ball park: Syberia.

It’s my second or third attempt at the game and this time I was be able to actually finish it. I completely forgot that the main character is a lawyer trying to buy a small local company for a huge corporation so hearing it again made me want to stop playing right away to make sure she fails at her job.
Seriously though, game is good. It’s also not for me. While I can appreciate its quality, the whole thing failed to grab me on a fundamental level, leading to an enjoyable but somehow hollow experience.

Characters work well as, well, “characters” though I can’t say they are enjoyable as people. I especially couldn’t care less for Kate’s personal and professional drama. Story chapters felt less like a cohesive whole and more like a bunch of ideas devs thought would be cool. Not to mention the ending which came pretty much out of nowhere. It wasn’t terrible, no by a long shot but it never managed to get to a point where I cared about what’s going on in the story.

On a more positive note, both puzzles (for the most part) and graphics hold up really well. I was a bit worried about the former since I’m not too experienced with point and clicks but I managed to finish the whole thing with very few issues. On the other hand, Syberia’s graphical prowess wasn’t too surprising - both the beautifully animated backgrounds and pre-rendered cutscenes survived the test of time, resulting in a game that looks fantastic to this day.

As mentioned before, it might not rank among my favourites but it was an interesting experience nonetheless. That said, I don’t think I’ll be playing the sequel any time soon. I’ll get to it eventually, I already have it after all, but I’ll have to wait until I’m in a mood for another point and click adventure. I might even try something else before that happens, we’ll see how it goes.

Grid 2 - I played the first game a few months ago and came out of the experience happy but a little unsatisfied due to limited content. Decided to give this one ago as, like with Syberia games, I already have it in my library.

Long story short: I’m way more mixed on this one than I ever felt about the original. Probably won’t be staying with it for too long. Here are some initial thoughts:

• No access to option on launch ain’t great. For some reason one has to wait until the first race before being able to access them.
• No interior camera is also a big negative - it’s how I played vast majority of the original.
• Driving feels a bit weird, more… floaty? Not floaty, understeer heavy. Getting into a habit of drifting into (almost) every corner helped with that a bit but it’s still weird.
• Why did we replace car purchases with gifts and unlocks?
• On the same note: why did I get a bunch of free cars in the first place?! I had 8 after finishing 2 races.
• Why do you get access to sponsors right away?
• Car customisation is also not great. Camera is stuck pointing at the front at lights level and to see anything else you have to switch to the automatic display mode which blocks you from doing anything other than watching a set of slowly changing camera angles.
• I like that damage has noticeable effect on driving.
• There are no female names when creating your characters. It’s a much smaller issue than everything else but it’s a weird omission considering they were present in the first game.

As mentioned at the start, game didn’t leave too great of an impression on me so far. I’ll play a bit more to farm some steam cards to sell (and to give it another chance, I guess) but I won’t be playing it to completion like the first game.

Have you checked the “sc-launch.log” file? It should be in the root of your prefix folder, might have something useful about the crashes.

Does the issue happens on the same version of the launcher or was there an update between both of your installs? Maybe something changed since then causing a new bug?

Can’t say I had this specific issue with the RSI Launcher but I had something similar happen with The Elder Scrolls Online one (just with constant freezing instead of outright crashing). In my case the reason is download speed - if I leave it uncapped, the whole thing gets bogged down for some reason.

No idea if it’s the same problem here but you could try changing either the speed limit or the max concurrent download value.

It’s a bit of a double edged sword. If you’re too vague it’s easy to allow for overreach but if you’re too specific some people will try to skirt the line on technicalities. The final comment in the linked discussion promised to clarify this point in a future blog post so I guess anyone who might be affected by this change should keep an eye for that.

Don’t ask me. I have nothing to do with Codeberg and I’m not involved in the process itself, I’m just speculating. I would assume that if they’re against hosting AI projects they won’t try to hunt for them using AI screening and stick to a honour system + reporting instead but I know nothing about Codeberg’s inner workings to say for certain.

There will probably be more info on that once the official announcement drops so I guess we’ll see.

I don’t think anyone expects to catch every vibe coded project that might end up on the site. It’s seems to be about nurturing specific direction for their community, giving admins clear rules on this issue and making their decisions easier in case they do find (or get a report about) a clearly AI “led” project.

Even if vibe coder manages to stick around, they can’t be sure their projects won’t disappear at random due to the new rules. Might be enough to prevent some of them from using the site.

Jumped in for a moment to see how things feel compared to 4.8 and the results were… mixed to say the least.

Some highlights:

• Performance is slightly better (at least until I went to Area 18 to do some shopping).
• All of the UI screens with character in third person (character creation, inventory) capture my mouse input at random, turn the camera on mouse movement until I right click.
• Constant audio issues - I spent more time without any sounds than I have with, most likely related to A18 performance.
• Shop UI just won’t cooperate - I have to click multiple times for any UI element to react and even then, there’s a high chance it’ll select a different item than I tried to click or select something instead of changing the store page for example.
• Cubby Blast STILL doesn’t list all of the items available there - things like TRUEDEF set won’t to show up without using search for example.

The last one one is especially mind-boggling both because it’s been a problem for years but also WHY IS THAT EVEN A THING?! These items should be assigned to a store and all of the operations (listing, search handling etc) should be managed automatically by the store system. This? This feels like they manually set up all of this stuff for each individual item available at the store. I don’t want to believe that’s the case as it would be too depressing but it’s really hard to think otherwise after all these years.

Can’t say I’m too thrilled based on my first impressions but I’ll try to give it an honest shot over the weekend. Hopefully the rest of the game will leave me with better feelings than this.

I’m not too hot on the use of AI for a translation patch but it was pretty limited here so I guess it’s fine. I’ll add it to our VN Patch list. Thanks!

Things didn’t really improve on my side so a focused playthrough of anything in particular is still a no-go, I did however manage to fix my issue with Division 2.

For some reason, installing Ubisoft Connect through Lutris makes it only work with specific setup and specific version of Proton (GE-Proton 9.27) - that however no longer works correctly with TD2. The app itself launched fine but the game wouldn’t run due to issue with Easy Anti-Cheat not booting. At the same time, changing WINE version failed to launch UC in the first place so I couldn’t even check if it would help with the game.

What was the solution then? Just install UC through the Heroic Launcher, that’s it.

I’m now using GE-Proton 11.1 and the game runs without any issues. I spent so much time trying to make things work as usual and it turned out the solution was this simple. Ehh… At least it works. Mindless slaughter it is (for now)!