Repair Complete

Aveum is almost really good - weird weapons but also genuinely interesting replayability because of them; don't want to replay it because of the awful writing for the main character and one supporting character though. Tonnes of optional content too, but there's such a difficulty gap for some of it that people adopted Soulsborne-style strategies that exploit things like geometry and pathfinding bugs. I did only pay a few bucks for it though, so overall pretty happy with my purchase and time spent.

Speaking of time spent, Druidstone wastes a lot of that, but I'm still enjoying it - not Grimrock levels of fun, but engaging enough that I'll come back to it after rage-quitting.

Doom Resurrection 3.5 and CD32X Fusion 3.0 (Arch-vile!) are out, and the latest PocketDoom feels pretty complete.

Junkrunner64 is really impressive and surprisingly full-featured for something developed over what appears to be only a few months. Also kinda just makes me wanna play ReCore again... I really did enjoy ReCore.

Polymega Remix is interesting, but complicated - no upgrades for original Base Unit owners? No Remix capabilities for either Base Unit? I get the potential for abuse, so at least some kind of chart outlining hardware/physical-media/software/account/cloud validation requirements or something would go a long way to selling the idea of a legal and reliable backup ecosystem.

Neo Geo AES+ is neat, but will an MVS-to-AES cartridge adapter allow old MVS cartridges to run on the new hardware and how are refresh rates gonna be sorted-out? Regardless, I do appreciate that the launch library includes some of the traditionally most expensive titles, and I'd honestly buy four of them right off the bat if I didn't already own MVS copies.

Anyway, found decent prices on:

• Omega Boost and Treasures of the Deep for Playstation
• Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max on PSP
• Tony Hawk 3 and Wakeboarding Unleashed for XBOX
• Shape Up for Xbox One - I think that's all of the Kinect exclusives now!

Act 3: Junk

Spoilers here, but I'd always wondered why Snatcher's third act kinda sucks - mostly because of the absolutely ridiculous jilted-lover contrivance - and now I know that it's 'cause it was supposed to be five acts :(

Found a positive-tipped, 9V, 1.5A power adapter at a thrift store for $4 that works with the re-capped Game Gear, so that's nice.

The Eternal Life of Goldman demo is one of the best games I've ever played.

Found-out about and bought Druidstone - I'd wondered what happened to the Grimrock devs. It's tricky.

Immortals of Aveum is totally decent - the ~7/10 average out there feels about right. Way more Metroid Prime than I expected; lots to do, though it's all pretty janky - the usual Unreal quirks, inconsistent performance at any setting, keyboard gymnastics, unnecessary random powerups, the main character, a lot of the dialogue - but nothing show-stopping.

Bought a random copy of Jeep Thrills for Wii from a thrift store because of that stupid name... I guess I should bite the bullet and finally buy Ninjabread Man :)

Virtua Racing Deluxe was my first 32X game, it still holds-up incredibly well today, the idea of an optimised version running at 40FPS is really exciting, and sega-vr-disasm promises just that. The GitHub project is missing required files though, and the documentation is inaccurate... On-purpose or careless? Even after 20+ years in DevOps, I can never tell. I sussed-out and built a compatible environment (WSL 2 + Arch + marsdev), wrote the missing .lds files myself, and made the latest ROM in spite of everything - and I honestly don't really notice a difference. It doesn't seem to run on actual hardware, and reported bugfixes don't seem to be present; but there's also no kind of build validation in the repository, so maybe I've done something wrong.

I'd heard CachyOS was fast, so I tried it with Xfce on that awful dual-core, single-thread, 1.6GHz Celeron, 4GB of RAM, eMMC, HP Stream - 14-ax010ca (ENERGY STAR) laptop... And it's not that bad as long as I don't try to do too many things at once. EndeavourOS is still a more cohesive overall experience (with Xfce, anyway), but no real complaints.

Also, PocketDoom upgraded to OPL3!