Episode: 3699
Title: HPR3699: Old and new videogames/board games with guest binrc
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3699/hpr3699.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 04:18:26

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3699 for Thursday the 6th of October 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Old and New Video Games and Board Games with guest bin RC.
It is hosted by Celeste, and is about 43 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is…
We will dive into our favorite games or others with interesting mechanics.
No one thought that I would have a new episode, maybe Neether Eye.
But we have a special guest today.
You know him from other podcasts on HPR.
He's bin RC.
We recorded some episodes about Plan 9 and one about how I got into computing.
So, welcome.
Hello.
So, for today we decided to talk about our favorite games.
Just that.
I think we might find even little games that are curious to look at.
Yeah, I think a game's episode is easy to record and easy to listen to.
It doesn't really require a lot of preliminary note-taking and research.
And I can still talk for about 5 hours on games without having to write.
Or write a small novel of notes for it, you know, just include links, maybe.
Well, you can even talk for hours about Plan 9 without notes, so I'm pretty sure that we…
Yeah, these episodes will be really long notes for the audience anyway.
Okay, let's start with you.
What is your favorite genre about games and…
My favorite genre of games.
Yeah, and then one of two examples about that.
Two examples.
So you can open my Steam library here and look through it.
Lots of shooters.
Lots of rogue lights and rogue lights.
And it games look like some RPG elements, but not too heavy.
I don't like the type of gameplay where it's like, get the thing to get the thing to get
the thing to get the thing to progress the story.
I guess like arena shooters with a little bit of story.
Our games that I like a lot is kind of a weird thing to say.
And also, rogue lights is like…
Like the command line rogue game, except the more times you play through, you unlock more
things.
That's why it's a rogue light.
And then RPG games, I enjoy.
For people who don't know, rogue like games are a type of games where you have random
dungeons with many layers and you have to explore every map and progress to the new one.
And everything is generated every time different.
Yeah, it's typically randomly generated.
Although not all of them are dungeon crawlers, it's really the gameplay loop is you have
a randomly generated thing before you.
And that random generation either makes it a really easy playthrough or really hard
playthrough and different things you unlock as you traverse through the levels will either
help or hinder you.
The rogue light aspect is kind of interesting because sometimes in different rogue lights,
you will have like items persist.
So if you like complete it, you will get a special item that persists across or like game mode
modifiers, things like that.
You just made me remember a similar game which is a mix of rogue like mechanics with
the rhythm games.
So one aspect in a rogue like games is that everything is third based.
So the whole world stops, you decide what to do and then you do a move and then the
old game progresses.
So there is a game and indie game called Crypt of the Necrodenser.
You can find it on Steam and I guess other platforms too.
So they mixed those aspects and it still turned based but each turn progresses at each
music beat automatically and you can only move in time following the beat.
Some people even play that with a dance pad.
I think you told me about playing this game with a dance pad.
I just looked at it and it must have been early release or something and I said early release
game for playing on Linux, either it will work now and what will work in the future or
it will always work or it will be unreliable the whole time through.
Well for me actually it always worked so I'm quite happy even on the laptop it works fine.
Yes, Steam play is really good I think.
I've only had a few games for problematic with Steam play on Linux.
Yeah also they recently added the proton compatibility layer which is based on wine and
let's you play Windows games on Linux machines.
Clearly they did it and they founded it for aiming at their Steam Deck platform which is
based on Linux too so they had to find a way to instantly make most of their games compatible
with Linux. I think a lot of it is too you know Microsoft is buying up all of these game companies
and as a business decision it makes sense to make anti-Microsoft moves when your competitor is
buying up all of the gaming companies and building games that are deliberately very difficult to
run on a non-Windows operating system and you know even like difficult to port to consoles right
like Xbox and PC exclusives, things that you couldn't port to a PlayStation or play on any other
platform. Yeah there is a nantitrust debate between Sony and Microsoft now but there's just
company versus company. Yeah but we'll see how it goes. We'll see how it plays out.
Okay so yeah I really suggest to play Crypto the NecroDancer it's not that long but it's a great
mix and one cool thing trivia about this game is that Nintendo found it and they asked the original
developers to create a Zelda themed licensed game with the same mechanic.
I can't remember the name.
um
Cadence of Hyrule. So it's just like a
an intended themed version of the game. Exactly. Exactly. And they added a bit of the Zelda gameplay
so you have little dungeons. You have an overwork to explore and the little dungeons. Yeah exactly
the Zelda themed one. Okay so I see many games in your Steam library. Yeah do you want to go
through them? Maybe not all of them because I'll go through the good ones. Okay so I've been playing
uh take the best recent one and the best old one. The best okay I'm gonna have to pick a few so
the game I was playing earlier today followed three on Linux. That's somewhat difficult to get
running. The like game of the year edition wouldn't run but for some reason the regular one runs
it's mostly reliable but as with all Windows games that are old they randomly crash.
I was talking about the publishing date not about when you published it. Yeah but as you wish
as I was to see some new games and some retro gaming. I don't think that I can sort by publisher date.
Other games I like Team Fortress 2 let's go through the old game so this will be the old game
section.
Deus X I really enjoyed playing Deus X if you've never played Deus X. It's almost like a stealth
game although as soon as you unlock the laser sword it becomes a stealth followed by
kill all the enemies as fast as you can game. Of course just for the audience what the game what
is the game about? Deus X for the audience. It's difficult to describe. It's like a stealth shooter
in the future people have like cyborg modifications. You go through the game you have to
complete various missions sort of finding the cure for the great death.
The plot is difficult to describe but gameplay wise it's really just a stealth shooter.
Okay and then half life one and two of course and then we'll look at my non-steam games.
I know one. RuneScape of course old school RuneScape.
I was the song called C-Chanty 2. I'm not sure the royalties on that but that could be a thing we
put in the episode. I don't know. So we will have to check. This music is cursing me because when
I remember it it starts playing all the time in my head. We could at least link it in the show
now. So of course Quake is a fun game. Doom I believe I have blood installed also.
Quake 2. Quake 2 is not really a Quake game but I like it anyway.
Yeah and now we can talk about I guess new or games other than old shooter games.
As you wish maybe I can go with the old games. Yeah you can go with your old games.
For me about old games I mainly play on emulators especially the Nintendo 64 games.
One of the best games I've played of all the old games is Banger Kazooie for Nintendo 64.
It's a 3D platform. It's one of the very first three roaming platforms because unlike
Crash Bandicoot on the PlayStation where the 3D was fake. It did use polygons but it was almost
a 2D game on fixed rails. Whereas Mario 64 and Banger Kazooie are you have they give you a giant
word to explore. I mean giant for the capability of the platform but that's fine because they
I have to check a word. Dispersive.
Dispersive okay it exists. They are not disperseive because you can explore but the word
is more enough to fill it with secrets and puzzles. Yeah it's not like something like Fallout 3
where the gameplay loop is wander for an hour and then kill a few enemies and wander for an hour
looking for secrets. Yeah one of the problems of recent open word the games is that they are empty
or they are they have our full of useless missions just to fill in some content.
And also recent open word game they have a storyline problem where
they give you a non-linear gameplay where you can go wherever you want but the storyline is
still completely fixed. You just have to go from point A to point B to point B to point C
with no choice. Yeah yeah actually the storyline feels so linear.
It feels almost forced right like if you take a certain action before another action
it just jumps to a different node on the dialogue tree and I actually did I guess break the
Fallout 3 storyline in that way. I sort of completed the like the first main mission completely
at random and now I'm going back and filling in all of these like preliminary quests to get
experience points to proceed to the next one because my character is really underpowered.
It breaks continuity when you allow for that and don't sort of program in
I guess a softer storyline but not something so heavy-handed.
Yeah yeah that's really difficult as I said because on one hand it doesn't have to fill linear
so you don't have to force the player to go from in exact sequence of events but on the other
end the possible endings they increase so much in number that it becomes not manageable if you let
the user the player do too many choices. What they did in the latest Zelda game is that they
splitted the events across the land and these events these videos they only gave you more insights
more insights into the story but you are not mandated to find them and there isn't an exact order to do
to find them you are really free to. I think a non-open world game where the story evolves
based on player choice DSX again DSX is a game all about choices so
for example there's a part where your brother gets ambushed in his house by like
federal agents and if you stay and fight all the federal agents your brothers with you for the rest
of the story right it's a hard fork in the in the story tree but if you leave your brother he dies
and he's not in there for the rest of the story so you can get slightly different endings but the
main storyline still persists and you know although you take actions that change the storyline they're
not you aren't sort of under the impression that any action you take might break continuity.
Another game similar where you have to do many choices all the time is life is strange have you ever
played it someone told me to play it I think I may or may not have installed it and it didn't run
very well I think I actually tried to play it on my think pad x2 20 because you know you read the
hardware requirements hey that's my think pad x2 20 turns out no you need a big GPU but yeah it's
pretty heavy it's pretty heavy I think my laptop's doctor diabetes and my desktop works fine but
yeah it's pretty heavy maybe it's the Linux port I don't know I think either there's a little bit
of performance decrease playing playing through sort of like steam play on Linux but it's not
noticeable if the game is well optimized right so like if the game is well optimized it will play
just fine you won't even notice a difference but the game is poorly optimized you know it doesn't
really run well on windows really and then we try to play it through compatibility layer and all
the problems on windows are only amplified through steam play on Linux you know my example of
this is one of nightmare is something like bio shock you know bio shock is a buggy game you know
follow through is a buggy game even on windows they randomly crash and then you play them through
steam play on Linux and the frequency of random crashes just seems to increase exponentially
oh I was talking yeah I forgot to finish the sentence
what I like about Benchakazoo is that it aged well and that's not easy to do many old games
that suffer from the old age maybe you have really old mechanics for instance ductays and other
games like that have a lot of influence from arcade machines of that time and in arcade machines
you had random obstacles you cannot even you cannot really avoid random enemies
spawning next to you so you cannot really avoid them because in arcade games you have to make
the player play again and play a game and play a game and play a game to get more coins
yeah the game play is allowed the player to play long enough to want to keep playing but not
long enough to where they complete the game so you have to add some randomization to
and the game prematurely exactly so some of the NES games from the late late 80s suffer from
that influence from the arcade games but really in Benchakazoo the difficulty level is very
well tuned I think that's sort of prematurely ending a player's game that's also something you see
in in rogue type games right because it's purely random and you might have a very difficult
boss on the first floor of the dungeon although if the game is well optimized and sort of designed
around progression rather than getting money you know you might have an unwinnable game but most
of the time it's not an unwinnable game unlike an arcade machine okay new games new games you get
let's see this time we're gonna start with the games I have not installed in steam
endless guy that's a Linux game endless guys really it's a fun game I don't know what it is
endless guy it's a classic Linux game are we gonna mention super tux cart here too maybe I'm
a big fan of super tux cart yeah and endless guy is a game you fly a spaceship around it's like
3d space trader game almost and it's open source it runs on Linux quite well and the story is
very good I didn't expect to sort of become invested in the storyline but I ended up becoming
invested in the storyline when I was playing it I thought it was just sort of like a space trader
simulator where there's not a whole lot of story but you know I became very invested in the story
very good never heard of it really never heard of it I'm surprised it's one of the classics
well if we are talking about classingly next games I will say power manga which is a arcade style
spaceship shooter in 2d I think expel did you ever play expel poor wheelgates yeah for the audience
who doesn't know it shall we explain what actually I might have it installed an example of the hatred
of the Linux community against the poor wheelgates well you know you only do oh that's cool it is
in the fedora repose so yeah so I will I will play it real quick and sort of narrate
game so basically expel you have to build gates tries to install windows on various unix systems
and as he comes to these various unix systems you have to click on him to turn him into a puddle of
of guts and when you let him get to a Linux system if he installs windows on one of these Linux
or unix systems it will create like a network effect and then it will infect the other systems
connected to it exactly literally as a spyware it's quite literally spyware but
can I work to level 99 yeah so level 99 Bill Gates comes running in examples of the unix systems
you know like old Macintosh Linux next silicon SGI that one
Solaris BSD even no plan 9 no plan 9 but we have to we have to make a gtub mean gt issue
we'll just fork fork x bill yeah we'll fork x bill call it x storm and enrich it
storm and tries to install canoe on all the non canoe unixes you know I don't want canoe on plan 9
and you have to squash Richard storm maybe a parody game I don't know he's not a I don't know
that was just a fun idea I thought of right because you know viral gpl
oh maybe one time I will tell about the time I met staldman did he ask to borrow your phone
no no no he did it in a friend of mine but maybe for an x-tap episode
anyway new game new games I'm almost or maybe with new game say a game where you really was
you were surprised by your very smart gameplay mechanics a game that I was surprised by gameplay mechanics
yeah um
um
new games were also surprised by mechanics okay so there's a game called
well you even old yeah even just even old games so a lot of the like arena type shooters
I play are pretty predictable although half life 2 has a lot of novel mechanics and you can
see a lot of newer shooters taking inspiration from half life to half life 2 it's like the gameplay
is fairly fluid it almost feels like an arena shooter but um
it's sort of the gravity gun mechanics are kind of interesting um
but the game that surprised me most with gameplay mechanics is a game called cruelty squad this
I believe this is a go dot game actually but but cruelty squad is a game it's it's almost
takes inspiration from these old shooters uh but but you know it's in the name cruelty squad it's
a very difficult name and right off the bat you're sort of punished and every action you take
is punishing and it's difficult and your player dies very easily and there's like a stock market
mechanics so how you make money is by putting your money into the stock market and uh there's also
like a what what what is about what is it about I see it's very colorful uh very uh
cruelty crazy cruelty squad is hard to describe um it's uh imagine like like the the
Gore levels from like Doom 3 combined with like a vapor wave aesthetic combined with like
a lot of other things um I'm gonna start the game and see if it gives me a better gauge on how to
describe it I guess your laptop will just crash yeah it's just gonna crash goodbye
well if the laptop crafies uh thank for leaving you we'll be able to patch you in the next
episode so cruelty squad's a very colorful game um
just just the mechanics are so strange like the entire uh the entire idea behind the game is to
make the player uncomfortable with the idea of playing the game right it's it's some of the mechanics
are familiar but like the reload mechanic instead of just pushing R to reload the gun you have to
hold right click and drag your mouse down and then up right even that mechanic is so strange a lot
of the mechanics are really strange and unfamiliar and uncomfortable and I think uh it's really
surprising to play just because of how difficult it is to get used to it it isn't that difficulty made
for a reason for a maybe uh storyline reason or is it just uh it's uh it's not interface design
uh I think what was what's the bad the bad interface design is intentional the whole the whole
design behind the game is to make it difficult to play right from a controls perspective and to
alienate the user from the concept of playing a game so it's really refreshing although somewhat
frustrating until you sort of uh get used to it and then it becomes uh quite fun to play
um okay so we have a very good suggestios for uh for everyone listening yeah we can put a list
and you can find it on steam too I think a lot of these are on god too
okay uh yeah maybe uh for people who don't know it god uh is a platform similar to steam where you
can buy games but they are they are DRN free DRN free so you can get the full executable of the game
without restriction and without uh having to log in just to play your game and similar yeah
I typically just use steam although I have a few god games floating around but I typically just
use steam because of uh the community and steam play on Linux makes it really easy to run games
that are not officially supported on Linux okay well for me instead uh a cool gameplay I found
the uh I really enjoy where when uh developers experiment with new local multiplayer ideas
I like the concept of uh making people play together instead of making people play with the screen
so you know when you are playing with some friends and everyone is watching
the TV in order to interact but there are some video games where you need to interact
with your peers directly face to face and one of these uh it's a very strange party game for
you uh it's called spin the bottle bump is party and they really use every possible sense or every
available sense around the console for uh to to make uh the group of friends interact uh and
another one I guess it is from the same developers or I'm not quite sure it's called affordable
space adventures and uh it's interesting because it has the it pushes strongly uh for the concept of
asimetric multiplayer which is multiplayer where each player has a different uh goal uh has a
different uh uh controls has different uh tools to interact with the game so you have to
control a spaceship all together as you wear uh I don't know the term uh as a cube
uh so one is driving only the direction one is driving only the activation of the engines one is
driving only the light sensors one is and you split the tasks between the uh the players and you
have you are forced to collaborate to succeed you are forced to interact and talk to the other
people in the room to succeed I think I like I like the idea of games like that although I don't
play many of them because it's almost like like a digital version of a cooperative board game um
if you've ever played a board game where sort of the wind condition is cooperation um rather than
beating the other players that's what a lot of those games feel like and they're really fun to play
with friends because at the end of it nobody loses right uh they're also the only types of games you
can play with people who get mad and sort of flip the table when they start to lose uh and you know
throw throw controllers when they start to lose but I I don't try to surround myself with those
types of people they're not very fun to play with uh but I think you mix the up uh
cooperative multiplayer and as a metric multiplayer uh cooperative multiplayer is the one where
you have to collaborate with the other players but maybe you can do the you have the same tools
you have the same ways to interact with the game uh it it just means that you have to
cooperate to succeed uh whereas as a metric multiplayer it means that every player has different
available actions in different times of the uh of the game don't think I've ever played an
isometric board game uh I don't know if those probably exist but uh um I would need to think about
that yeah it's kind of a strange concept to think about sort of digitalizing these sort of game
mechanics uh but even like children's board games like cooperative children's board games those
are kind of an interesting uh way of thinking about playing games because you know it's sort of
designed to make siblings not fight each other but uh you know playing playing it as an adult
there's a lot of interesting game mechanics that you haven't seen before uh I can't I don't have
my my game shelf next to me I don't play a lot of board games anymore but I start to play board
games again because we have a local pub uh where they have board games so you if you pay more than
the five euros you can play for hours yeah every available game they have uh one of them
isn't have video games we have a couple we mostly go them with uh we go them for board games
we have a couple local games stores they do like you can just go in and play games um I don't
go to those the types of people who are there are not typically the types of people I enjoy being
around you know a lot of people who are kind of uh really hell bent on winning and it's not really
a relaxed environment you know people play like like like Warhammer really seriously oh no
and getting out the rulers and you ask you try to ask them a question about the game and you know
uh they're like why don't you know this it's like I've never played this game before I don't
as far as I can tell you guys are just playing with action figures I'm trying to learn the
the math stuff looks like something I'd be interested in uh similarly uh other card games um
I guess we're going to be tough topic uh that's okay that's okay it's just a game show maybe
we can uh yeah we can use these as a second episode or we'll just put it all we'll just put it
all together anyway you were talking about Warhammer Warhammer I've never played it I know of it
uh all I know is you have like a ruler and a protractor or something and you do math uh I don't
go to game stores very often sometimes they'll have interesting games there uh but typically the
types of board games I find myself buying are more like uh almost like I said children's
board games uh largely because they all have an interesting mechanic uh I actually might go
raid my board game shelf and just talk about some of those games uh okay so I'll be back
he's going away the guest went away and really I'm serious he left the room to see the games and
uh
what while I was gone all of the uh personal information was shared
my privacy was violated perhaps I will never know I would feel the publishing of the show yeah
I will live in fear tell that day so the first game I have is a game called uh labyrinth from
ravens broger this is a children's game it's tile based strategy based um it's really fun
is it the is it the one where you uh push one tile on one side and then it yep you you move the
tiles yeah I know that I know that you get to get to the goal it's it's quite a fun uh
a game and it's very simple but cool yeah it's quite simple um I grabbed three I'm only going to
talk about two I haven't I think I've only played this game once and then someone got hot blue on
the cover uh this game is see that's the problem I buy board games and then I only play them once
because I have no one to play with if I have to remember this game
yeah so this game is kind of interesting it's called uh tow kaito the wind condition
really there isn't a wind condition right uh you win by moving across the board and back
and you can collect various things uh for scoring purposes
and you you win uh you win the game by sort of uh removing all of you the resources you collect
along the way right so the more the more resources you get rid of the more you win
I can't like it it was years ago I played this game but I I remembered enjoying it a lot
uh but yeah sort of you can buy things to increase your own score or you can increase your score by
not buying things and instead getting rid of your money without anything in return uh I remember
enjoying it quite a lot I'll probably have to play it again but like I said the issue is not
having anybody to play games with um and that's always sort of the problem isn't it
and that's why I mostly play single player video games now is because I can have fun then
strategize something uh or like card games you know
Yu-gi-o no Yu-gi-o this is the Yu-gi-o episode we will now talk about Pokemon and Yu-gi-o for the next
six hours I have the cards here anyway next episode really next episode so thankfully
and uh well let's thank the our guest binar-c for joining us
uh yeah I guess thanks for having me thanks for the nonsensical drowning about video games
uh I think I think I'll make a list of the games I recommend and send it over before you edit so
then I will also link in like any game board games we talked about in case people want to buy them
absolutely we can put that into the notes yeah we'll make a link list for the notes
and I might I might include some I didn't talk about either just because I think they're fun
okay thank you and see you in the next episode yep thanks for listening
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