Old & New

 Yeah it's made a good first impression. Astro's Playroom was absolutely fantastic and I'm loving Miles Morales. The pad is a step up from last generation and I love that you can play just about any PS4 game on it.

 I somehow managed to format my 2TB HDD instead of the 128GB flash drive I was looking to use. I want to give myself a massive slap right now. 20 years of curated roms, isos, emulators and videos gone in an instant. And yes, I can use recovery software, and I am, but it's not as easy as clicking 'undo'. It was stupid and while I do have a 1TB HDD with some of the files on it, I haven't used that drive since 2014 at the earliest. I suppose its time I looked into a backup option, more to protect against my own stupidity than anything else. It's be nice to have something setup that I can connect to using any device int he house and stream movies/music from tbh. I'm going to look into it.

 It's almost here. I have the disc version pre-ordered. I don't have any games pre-ordered but I will be picking up Miles Morales.  I'm hesitant to start any new games now since it comes out so soon. I did pick up a copy of Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise to play on it. Hopefully the backwards compatability holds up and its not in that 1% of games that don't work.

Nintendo have a bit of an Atlus sale going on via the EU eShop so I picked this up for practically nothing. I briefly searched eBay and said nah, I'm good going digital here. Strangley, the game seems to be dpad only which I don't think I've ever seen before with a 3DS game.

I'm 5 hours into Seal of Evil. The game doesn't explain any of its mechanics in-game so you have to read the help menu/manual and kind of figure it out as you go. Essentially, everything from attack to defence to individual enemies comes down to being one of five elemental types: Metal, Wood, Earth, Water and Fire, with each element being stronger than the element after it and weaker than the element before it. Mixing and matching equipment and skills/spells helps you take on different enemies in each area. I'll be honest, I was fumbling at the start; combat felt boring and slow initially and it was the artwork, music and wuxia setting that kept me going. Then I had to fight two giant spider bosses with two health bars each, who spawned smaller enemies in an enclosed, blocked space and found myself woefully unprepared. I did a little bit of levelling and looked into the crafting screen, which is just labelled "Creation". By mixing and matching different item...

Getting this running was a little bit of work but it's not impossible. Firstly, you may need to temporarily disable Windows Security's real time protection to get the installer to run. If you don't, you may get corruption issues. Once the game is installed you may as well grab the NOCD. It's probably not essential but it does make things easier. Next, you need to add the game's exe file as an exception in DEP (Data Execution Protection). DEP can be accessed via Control Panel > System > Advanced System Protection > Advanced > Settings button in the Performance box > Data Execution Protection tab. From there add the game's exe file. If you don't do this then Windows 10 will stop the game from even running. Then you need to add three .dll files to the game's root directory which can all be found in 'WineD3D For Windows'. The three files you need are d3d8.dll, libwine.dll and wined3d.dll. If you don't add these three files,...