Fiction

His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
1 The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge
4 The Adventure of the Red Circle
2 The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans

Despite the title, this isn't the final volume of Sherlock Holmes stories (that's Case-Book), although maybe I should've saved it for last because, according to my Pocket Essentials guide, it has the highest concentration of five-star stories in the series. The numbering above is the order I read them in, because I began with the two stories said guide considers the weakest of the collection, rated three- and two-stars respectively.

I rather enjoyed Wiseria Lodge, though The Red Circle is one of those ones where Holmes basically hangs around, pulling off some very minor deductions, until everything has concluded itself and a participant explains the plot to him. The Bruce-Partington Plans, on the other hand, is rated five-stars by the guide, and has been well-regarded by both Doyle (he ranked it in his top 19 Holmes stories) and fans (who ranked it 9th in a 1999 poll). It is, indeed, a fairly clever mystery.


With a Mind to Kill by Anthony Horowitz
Chapters 20–23 [the end]

Fiction

With a Mind to Kill by Anthony Horowitz
Chapters 18–19

Fiction

With a Mind to Kill by Anthony Horowitz
Chapters 13–17

Fiction

With a Mind to Kill by Anthony Horowitz
Chapter 12

Fiction

With a Mind to Kill by Anthony Horowitz
Chapters 5–11

Fiction

The Swords of Lankhmar by Fritz Leiber
Chapters 12–17 [the end]

With a Mind to Kill by Anthony Horowitz
Chapters 1–4

With a new adult James Bond novel by Charlie Higson imminent, I decided it was about time I finally read the previous one (not that they're in any way connected), which (as usual) I bought when it came out... four years ago. Oopsie.

Video Games

007: Everything or Nothing
Over an hour spent replaying near-impossible bits over and over. Ugh. I'm not really enjoying this, which is such a shame after hearing good things about it for so long. If it was anything other than Bond, I'd probably just give it up as no fun.

AtmaSphere
Kind of a puzzle platformer based on rolling a ball along narrow paths. Enjoyed it at first, but got fed up with the challenge before the end of level 7 (of 30-ish, so not even a third of the way through). Maybe I'd just been playing for too long by that point — I should probably try again another day.

Video Games

007: Everything or Nothing
I didn't think it would take me so long to continue this, but, well, I've not been doing much of anything recently (see the general infrequency of posts the past few weeks). Also I wasn't enjoying it as much as I'd hoped. Games were harder back in the day! Or I'm just rubbish at them. Probably both. In that vein, I spent half-an-hour today battling through a single level. I did it on 'standard' difficulty, at least, rather than dropping to 'easy' like I normally do, so I guess that's something. I thought I'd switch back to 'easy' going forward, but I persisted on 'standard' through the next couple of levels. Is that some kind of personal growth? Let's not go too far.

Video Games

007: Everything or Nothing
Well, technically I played it — replayed one level to test all the additional fiddling I'd been doing! Basically, I had to re-do everything I did months ago (even more than I'd done yesterday; though it had remembered a few things I'd done to Wind Waker, at least), which involved copious googling and whatnot, because of course I couldn't remember exactly what I did before (I'd done it, I didn't need to still know it!) A bunch of time spent getting things exactly how they used to be — ugh. Hope it doesn't forget its settings on a regular basis, because I don't want to have to keep doing this.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Anniversary Edition
I'm about to be away for a few days, so I wanted to make sure to get some Skyrim in (after missing yesterday) to avoid another Situation. For once, decided to revel in enjoying the mood and atmosphere rather than worrying about Doing Stuff. Did come across some Thalmor and slaughtered them, though. Both were nice. If I ever get a VR headset, I'll have to get Skyrim VR... but then I might never leave...

Video Games

007: Everything or Nothing

Back when I got my Steam Deck, one of the first things I did was set up emulation to be able to play this Bond game — I’ve actually owned it for years (it was released on GameCube, though I can’t remember if I bought it then or picked it up later when I had a Wii) but never actually played it. I even spent a tonne of time fiddling around to make it nicer — not just living with the default settings, but getting the emulator to render it in HD, getting the widescreen working (much harder than it should be), and buying an adapter so I could use one of my original GameCube controllers. After all that tinkering, I got it just right… and then went and played other stuff. For eight whole months. Ha.

I’ve been meaning to get back to it ever since, especially with the new Bond game looming, and today I finally pulled my finger out. And immediately… spent over half-an-hour fiddling and faffing again because it wasn’t running right. I guess some update or other to the emulators broke it. (I dread to think that it’s done the same to my (also perfectly set up after much fiddling) copy of Wind Waker, but I didn’t dare check.)

But I got there in the end… although, to be honest, it didn’t feel as pleasant to play as it did last time. I don’t know if the emulator software’s changed, or if I didn’t get the settings quite as just-so as before, or if I just replayed the opening level so many damn times back then that I’m misremembering how easy it was because I simply got so good at it. Certainly, I found some levels more of a struggle than I expected — don’t know if that’s just my skill level, or the barrier of using old kit (the controller is quarter-of-a-century old and has spent most of that time in storage, after all), or just how game design has changed in the intervening years.

In fact, there are multiple ways the game feels odd beside from the gameplay / level design. For example, there’s a “level” which is just a series of cutscenes — no interaction, you just watch them. For no apparent reason, some are pre-rendered but some are realised in-engine. At one point, there’s a pre-rendered shot of Bond and Q riding in an elevator for a couple of seconds, which they exit and it cuts to the scene proper which is in-engine. Why?! I don’t know if it was always odd or that’s just a way things have changed since. Amusingly, the pre-rendered scenes were no doubt meant to be higher quality moments back then, but now they’re low-res and blurry and riddled with compression artefacts and glitches, whereas the stuff rendered in-engine is in HD thanks to my settings changes and so looks much better.

Still, I overcame all that to progress through 7 of the game’s 32 levels, about an hour of playtime, before — frankly — I’d had enough. Bit disappointing to find it so underwhelming and awkward after I’d been looking forward to playing it for so long. I do intend to finish it, but with a bit less enthusiasm now.

Video Games

Bubumbu
Played the entire game again to mop up all achievements. First time was on my desktop Mac, this time on Steam Deck — if anything, I enjoyed playing it with trackpads more than with a mouse... although my thumb felt surprisingly tired afterwards.

(Also, you'll be pleased to hear that Bond reward turned up in my IOI account today. I've uninstalled Hitman again already, probably forever this time.)

Video Games

Hitman: World of Assassination

After my disastrous first attempt at this game, I never thought I'd be back; but, long story short, there's a free Bond tie-in level that, if you play it, unlocks a bonus in the forthcoming James Bond game, and I'm told all you have to do is "play it" in the sense of "start it" (as opposed to "complete it") to unlock the bonus — so I did that.

The content isn't in my account yet, but I guess it takes time to sync up — hopefully that's all it is, anyway, because I don't want to have to work out how to actually complete the level or something. I did also give the game a go again... in the sense that I actually finished the tutorial this time, before heading into the relevant content, where I wandered around a bit, realised I had no real idea what I was doing, got into a shootout, and kept firing 'til I got killed, because fuck this.

I hope the Bond game isn't too much like Hitman, because this isn't really my kinda fun.

Videos

007 First Light Title Sequence
Watched some of the BAFTA Game Awards this evening, mainly to see the premiere of this — the title sequence for the forthcoming James Bond game. I wasn't sure about the song at first, but it plays really nicely with the titles, which I think they've done an excellent job on. Excited for the game... though not sure when I'll actually get to play it as I doubt it'll run on my Steam Deck.

Beyond the Light
Episode 4 Music
And to go with the above, they released the fourth instalment of their behind-the-scenes dev diary, looking at music and sound.

Videos

Beyond the Light
Episode 1 Gameplay
Episode 2 Cast & Characters
Episode 3 Story

Quite looking forward to the new James Bond game, so finally caught up with this series of behind-the-scenes promo videos. Not sure if the game will run on my Steam Deck so don't know when I'll actually play it, but someday...!

Video Games

Hitman: World of Assassination Free Starter Pack

So, the developers of this have made the new James Bond game, First Light, which naturally I'm looking forward to; and this game is widely acclaimed (PC Gamer regularly include it in the top half of their annual top games list), even though I didn't think it was really my kind of thing; but it has a free demo on Steam, so I thought "why not? You never know."

Well, what Steam calls a "demo" the game calls a "starter pack" — it makes you install the full thing, all 60-something GB of it. I guess the idea is you'll love it soooo much you just have to upgrade immediately. I spent 10+ minutes trying to log in online, because you have to before you can actually play anything, and it's not implemented in a Steam Deck friendly way so it took undue effort. But I persevered. Then I had to work out where the hell the actual demo/starter content was — not as clear as you'd think, because you've installed the full game, which after years of support seems to have a tonne of stuff on offer (they're still releasing new content for it regularly). But I found where I had to go eventually.

And then I got killed trying to do the fucking training mission.

I could've had another go at it, of course, but I hadn't really been enjoying it up to that point anyway, so why bother? I was right the first time: this is not a game for me. I hope I enjoy First Light more.

Games

007: Blood Stone
Steam tells me I've spent over two-and-a-half hours in Blood Stone, which is an awful lot for a game I'm "not playing". But, yes, this was even more controller setup. Having got it working with the Steam Deck's own controls the other day, I've since connected my Deck to the TV, so I wanted to see how it worked there with an external controller. Plus, the game does have a controller setting, so I thought I'd give that a go.

Well, it's shit. It still shows the keyboard commands on screen — lazy programming! — which means it's trial and error trying to work out what button does what; and some do nothing, making some actions impossible. So after battling away with that for a while, I gave in and remapped a la my Deck controls. Got it basically perfect that way, too.

After all that effort, maybe I should actually play the game... although Everything or Nothing is really a higher priority (it's been waiting for me longer, and it's meant to be quite a bit better)... and I kinda started the GoldenEye remake, too... Oh dear!

Games

007: Blood Stone
After some more — alright, a lot more — fiddling and tweaking the controls, I got this playing pretty well; to the point where I actually completed the first section (the driving controls really needed a lot of work, and I'd failed on a section like that multiple times before). The best hint I got from somewhere online: because the game has onscreen prompts about what button to press (at least during the training-like first level; maybe throughout, I don't know), ignore what would be sensible keyboard controls and set things up for the controller — i.e. map the controller's A button to keyboard-A, X to keyboard-X, and so on. It would be a rubbish control scheme on a PC (the keys are all over the place, and using A for the A button messes up WASD movement, for one), but it means you don't get "the game says press E, so that's X... or is it Y?" all the time.

Anyway, now that's all sorted, I need to decide what game(s) I'm actually playing — I mean, I've been through tutorials/first levels for three Bond games now! Speaking of which...


007: Everything or Nothing
I got an adapter that allows you to use original GameCube controllers with the WiiU, Switch, and PC — which also works with Steam Deck. Tested it on this a couple of times, plus a quick go on Zelda: Wind Waker, and got it working nicely (the D-pad doesn't work on menus for some reason, but does in game; but I did get the rumble working, so that's good). Also, hopefully this adapter will work with the Switch 2 when/if I get one (still leaning towards when, but when? I don't know).


3D Out Run
I've bought or downloaded a total of 33 games for my 3DS already, but this is first one I've actually played (beyond a minute or two to test carts work). This is a 3D port of a classic Sega arcade game (not to be confused with its original sequel, OutRun 3-D — the Wikipedia entry makes that mistake, in fact). There were a load of these conversions of Sega games made for the 3DS, and many of them are pretty well regarded — not always for the quality of the original game, but certainly for the effort and success of the emulation and 3D conversion. Out Run (aka OutRun) is one of the most recommended for its visuals.

Well, I agree that it's got a very effective use of 3D. It's almost hard to imagine playing it in 2D, so striking is the effect of the road and scenery rushing towards you. It doesn't feel like a particularly deep or long-lasting game, though — I mean, there's literally one circuit. Okay, that has different routes, adding up to 16 variations, but still. The only other customisation options are the difficulty (one to five stars) and a set of four unlockable modifiers for your vehicle, which you can mix and match. So, sure, there are ways to mix it up; and if this had been made in the era of achievements, I'm sure there'd be one for every possible combination of track, difficulty, and mods — that's 400 variants by my estimation. I didn't dislike it, but I'm not going to play this 400 times. But it was free, so that's fine.

Games

Steam Deck

This is the thing I alluded to recently* a couple of weeks ago: I won a Steam Deck! The 512GB OLED model, to be precise. And I spent most of today playing with it. Not playing on it — I played bits of various games, but nothing properly — but playing around with getting it set up and stuff.

Because, sure, my Steam library is all easily accessible and installable and whatnot (even if it doesn't all necessarily run, though there are websites to help with that), but I've got so many games from other places (mainly GOG, but others too) that I'd like to be able to play on there that I had to get some other stuff going. Those aren't much more difficult thanks to Heroic Games Launcher (which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago because it's also helped with my Mac. Also, that's how long this has been incoming!)

No, the thing that occupied most of my time was emulation. The Deck is basically just a PC in a console shell, which means it's very customisable, and that means you can run emulators on it. Considering my interest in the Switch 2 had reached a point where I was on the verge of purchasing one and had begun planning what exactly I wanted to buy (the console itself, obviously, but also which peripherals and games), plus the fact I'd already had a go at emulation on my Mac with an eye to playing more, and I was keyed up to get some classic games going — as if I don't have enough natively-playable games to be getting on with! (I do. I really, really do.)

There are various emulation solutions, the two main ones (it seems to me) being EmuDeck and RetroDeck. I'd been umming and ahhing about which to go for, eventually settled on the former, but over the course of today decided the latter was more my speed. And so I've been installing stuff and setting it up and testing out old games.

First up: James Bond adventure Everything or Nothing. Although I'd tried the GameCube version before, I read that the Xbox version was actually the best one, so I tried to get that going. Turns out, EoN doesn't play nicely with Xbox emulators — as in, it's entirely unplayable — so, after trial and error getting to that realisation (if only I'd found that link earlier and realised it was futile), I caved and went back to the 'Cube version. That runs pretty much perfectly.

In a similar vein, I tried GoldenEye 007 Reloaded, the PS3/Xbox 360 port of the GoldenEye remake originally released on Wii (which I owned on that console back in the day but don't think I even got round to starting). It runs, and while it's running it runs well, but then it will suddenly completely freeze up and the app has to be killed and restarted, and you have to pick up from wherever the last checkpoint was. Frustrating. I have tried to see if there are some fixes that can be applied (changing graphic settings, that kind of thing), but everything I turn up is related to getting an Xbox port of the N64 original to play. Grr. I've left it installed, just in case. So far I've tried the Xbox 360 version, because the controller layout matches the Deck (no silly circle/square/whatever PS BS here), but maybe the PS3 one is worth a shot if it's more stable.

Considering they always run such closed ecosystems, it's kinda ironic that the easiest of all was getting Nintendo stuff to run. Legend of Zelda games from both SNES (A Link to the Past) and GameCube (The Wind Waker) ran without a problem, as did the N64's Paper Mario. I also started up a couple of other SNES games — EarthBound and Super Castlevania IV — which also seem fine. Quite why I'm interested in Castlevania right now, I'm not sure, but I also popped on one of the most acclaimed, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night from the original PlayStation, which I got going easily enough. Finally, a couple of PS2 titles — ICO and Shadow of the Colossus — required some more fiddling (in part to set up some recommended graphics settings to ensure they ran well), but weren't too strenuous really. Well, that said, I wouldn't want to be having to faff with that all the time, but for a couple of well-regarded titles I've been on-and-off curious about for a while, I'm hoping it was worth it.

Obviously, as I said earlier, I've only touched on each of these games briefly — enough to establish they run at all, not that they won't break apart / crash / etc when playing them properly. I fully expect the Nintendo systems to all be fine, but who knows if those PlayStation ones (especially the PS2 pair) won't behave like GoldenEye Reloaded when I do more than run around the opening room for two minutes?

Anyway, I'm done with all that setup now (apart from maybe trying the PS3 GoldenEye), so maybe I'll actually get on with playing some of the games. Of course, I also ought to take the time to go back to Gray Matter and Dungeons of Hinterberg — although as the latter is scheduled to leave Luna tomorrow, it makes more sense to just quit now and start over on my Steam Deck. At least that makes it easier to know which game to start with.


* Two weeks! That's for two reasons: firstly, it took quite a while to turn up; and secondly, it came almost a week ago, but I've been too busy to sit down with it until today.

Games

007: Everything or Nothing
Continuing my Amazon Luna experience, I hooked it up to my Mac via Bluetooth and used it as any old wireless controller to have another crack at this classic James Bond game. When I tried it out a month ago, I struggled with keyboard-only controls; as hoped, using a controller made the world of difference. As discussed yesterday, I'm still finding the analogue sticks a little oversensitive (especially the one assigned to controlling the camera), but it was a huge improvement. Now I might actually try to play this whole game, something I've wanted to do for, oh, only twenty years.

Games

007: Everything or Nothing

Oh yeah, another new game. I'll spare you the details, but a perfect confluence of various different thoughts, impulses, and things I happened to see inspired me to get ahold of an emulation of this console game for my Mac (I actually own the GameCube version, so I can't say I feel too bad about 'pirating' this; also, it's 20 years old and not available in any form for a current-gen console nor on PC, so...)

Had a quick go at it, but the emulator doesn't seem to support using a mouse (beyond clicking) so it was a pain to control. I have old GameCube / GameCube-for-Wii controllers somewhere, but I'm sure there's no way to connect them up to a Mac (heck, if I was going to dig those out, I could just set up the console; though I think I'd need an adaptor to connect it to my TV nowadays).

I'd love to just dig into the game, but while the intro and tutorial were easy enough that I could take my time finding every single button I needed to press and slowly move my view around with random keys, etc, I doubt that would be sufficient for the game proper. Hopefully if I buy a controller it will be compatible with the emulator...