The Rice Digital Friday Letters Page, October 29, 2021 – the horror of beans on toast

Good afternoon everyone, and welcome to the weekend. Before we all clock off for the day, though, we’re positively tumescent at the possibility of reading through all your letters from this week and providing some appropriately pithy (if necessary) commentary. So here we are, once again, with the Rice Digital Friday Letters Page!

Don’t forget you can submit letters at any point throughout the week using the “Write to Rice!” widget over on the right. You can write to us about absolutely anything you want — it doesn’t have to be related to a specific article on teh site. So let loose and give us your best!

Anyway, here is what is apparently “your best” for the week just gone by.

Every week

Dear Rice,

I love you

Shivu

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I genuinely don’t know if shit like this is done by spambots or actual people with nothing better to do. Either way, I thank you for your love, Shivu, but would encourage you to submit a message with a little more substance next time you get in touch with the Rice Digital Friday Letters Page. You’re not giving me a ton to work with, here.

Nintendo rage

Dear Rice,

I was surprised to see you praising the Nintendo Switch’s new N64 and Mega Drive offerings. Seems a lot of people on social media have been having problems, and the YouTube videos have had a lot of dislikes. Care to comment?

ItsAMeMaury

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Hello, ItsAMeMaury, and welcome to the Rice Digital Friday Letters Page. When it comes to stuff like this, all we can go on is our own experiences — and our own experiences with the new service have been all but flawless, even with extensive testing.

As we noted in the article about the new Switch apps, the Mega Drive emulation is especially astonishing; N64 performance is a lot more variable, but having been there for the machine first time around, I remember all too well that its performance was always variable, so that’s not the fault of emulation — that’s just how it was!

The only thing I found a little jarring with the N64 emulation is the “seams” visible in 2D art — this can be seen in Mario Kart’s character icons and any static pre-rendered backdrops in Zelda. The console was never particularly good at 2D though — that’s why its library was so heavily reliant on polygonal titles, even in genres that were historically sprite-based such as shoot ’em ups and platformers — so I suspect all we’re seeing is something that our old CRTs hid from us with their distinctive standard-definition fuzz.

Even online play has been absolutely fine. I see loads of people whinge about Nintendo Switch Online’s performance, but the only game I’ve had real issues with is SNK Heroines, which struggled to keep up with any online matches I tried. Smash has always been fine for me, stuff like the Capcom Beat ‘Em Up Bundle is a pleasure to play with friends, and the few Mario Kart 64 matches I had with a friend the other night were similarly just fine.

To be perfectly blunt, I’m immediately skeptical and suspicious of any sort of “controversy” that arises suddenly on social media these days — particularly when people start parroting it uncritically based on a single screenshot or video. We’ve seen all too many times that a completely fictional scenario can get completely out of control — so I always prefer to check for myself these days. And my own experiences have been that the Nintendo Switch Online apps are just peachy.

I suspect the people trying to drum up controversy are, more than anything, just trying to get their social metrics to improve, or whatever shit people say these days. Here’s my Soundcloud and a pink vibrator I’m selling.

Feeling sleepy

Dear Rice,

Thanks for the recommendation of The Coma as a horror game, I played it through this week and really enjoyed it. I think I saw that Limited Run Games is doing The Coma 2 soon, is it worth picking up?

GhostWaffle

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Hi GhostWaffle, and thanks for your contribution to the Rice Digital Friday Letters Page! I am sorry to report that you have missed your chance to pick up a Limited Run Games copy of The Coma — it was up for preorder last week and has sold out! Don’t despair, though; Play-Asia actually has a physical bundle that includes both The Coma and The Coma 2 which features full English support. Alternatively the game is, of course, also available digitally.

In answer to your question, you may have already surmised that yes, The Coma 2 is very much worth playing, particularly if you enjoyed the first one. Its overall story stands by itself, but it also follows on from Youngho’s adventures in the original, as the protagonist is a friend of his keen to find out exactly what happened to him.

Pretty much everything about the game has been improved over the original; it has better graphics and animation, more responsive controls and somewhat more varied gameplay, too. There are also several endings according to the things you do over the course of the game, so there’s some replay value, too.

We actually talked a bit more about The Coma 2 in our “6 of the best games Metacritic says are rubbish” feature from last month, too, so be sure to check that out too.

Good for your heart

Dear Rice,

Do you Brits really eat beans on toast all the time or what?

ReimuLovr

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Yes. Every meal. Nay, constantly. There is never a moment that goes by where I do not have a plate that contains two slices of cheap white bread and an entire can of Heinz Beanz in front of me. It’s a constant assembly line process. Beans on toast goes in, chronic flatulence comes out, without cease. It’s like being accompanied by a brass band made up entirely of trombones all day, every day. Please help me. I want to die, but I can’t. The beans just keep coming. Beans.

Maiden of cack porter

Dear Rice,

Was thinking about grabbing the PC version of the new Project Zero/Fatal Frame after your glowing review. I heard the port is a bit shit though, have you tried it?

PCPCPC

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Hi PCPCPC (my cat is coming now), and welcome to the Rice Digital Friday Letters Page. We played the PlayStation 4 version, so no, we haven’t given the PC version a shot. Steam reviews seem to indicate it has some issues with high frame rates, though, with players recommending you force the game to cap its frame rate at 60 lest it runs too fast. Back in my day we’d just hit the “Turbo” button.

Koei Tecmo has put out a patch that addresses issues with “high-spec monitors”, whatever that means. Hopefully that fixes the problems; I would assume that “high-spec monitors” means “high refresh rate”, which is where the issues have been coming from.

In general though I would tend to recommend playing Koei Tecmo games on consoles; while performance may not be quite as nice as on a top-end PC, these games were always designed with consoles in mind — and this certainly isn’t the first time a Koei Tecmo game has had a dodgy PC port!

However you choose to do so, though, enjoy Project Zero: Maiden of Black Water. It’s a superb game, and deserves to be seen at its best!

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And that’s that for another week. Time to go home, spend a weekend playing horror games and not answering the door to trick-or-treaters. Pretty much a normal weekend, then.

Do you have any fun gaming plans for Halloween?

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