FreshHalibut

pizza tower GOOD

Well Windows 98 STILL doesn't recognize the disc as a data disc, but since it can handle filenames longer than 8 characters it recognizes the custom iso I made with all the files.  So it's now installed!
 
Even starting up the game is kind of sketchy as it says "PLEASE INSERT ED HUNTER DISC 2" even though the install disc is labeled CD 2 (from the 3 CD set) and you actually need to put int the third disc.
 
Click okay and get this beautiful logo plus a voiceover saying "Let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the beast, for it is a human number."  Not a bad start.
 

 
The game constantly plays various Iron Maiden tracks. The Number of the Beast plays over the menu.  Apparently you can choose from any of the 20 tracks on the album for any of the stages, though it defaults to Phantom of the Opera for the first stage.  The musical quality is surprisingly good; I was expecting it to be bit crushed to hell (especially since I have run multimedia programs on Windows 3.1 that did that) but it sounds fine. Not quite CD quality, but fine.  Sometimes there was skipping during transitions, but this is probably due to me dropping my virtual CPU speed to the minimum requirements for the game to make sure that Windows 98 ran correctly.
 
The game itself is a rail shooter.  We're theoretically playing as Eddie, or "Ed Hunter: Private Eye"
 

 
We've been given a note to help someone out, and then its off to the streets to kill waves of punks:
 

 
(Incidentally I thought that "5th nut" was some sort of bizarre game mechanic, but just means that the 5th score on the high score list is to someone who put in the initials NUT.)
 
And that's pretty much it. Mow down waves of enemies like any other rail shooter, then the scene transitions, and repeat.
 
The connection to Iron Maiden, beyond playing as Eddie, comes from the music blaring in the background, Iron Maiden posters being present in many locations and some of the locations/enemies being inspired by album art.  For example I'm sure that we go to an asylum and meet this guy because of the Piece of Mind cover:
 

 
Was kind of hoping that there'd be some adventure game elements or a variety of game styles, not just rail shooter gameplay, but it does seem to just be a rail shooter.  That being said, it's pretty competent for what it is.  It's hard to explain without a video, but the view often quickly pans from place to place and moves the enemies appropriately, even though they are all just sprites and none of this is actually 3D.  They did also include some variety with multiple route choices and so on.
 
Final thoughts:
 
I wasn't expecting much, but I probably will go back to play this from time to time. If I had purchased this in 1999 when it came out, I would be pretty psyched.  (Well, assuming that I could get it to install at all, which is doubtful considering I had to use a workaround that wouldn't have been possible in Windows 95/98.)  From what I understand this collection was largely marketed and priced as a music compilation first and foremost.  You do get 20 solid Iron Maiden tracks even without the game. So the game is more of a bonus than anything.  There was lots of that kind of stuff in the 90's and a lot of it was of questionable quality (for example, see LGR's videos on the "Hot Wheels Computer Cars" programs that came with certain hot wheels toys.)  So the fact that this is a competent game AT ALL is pretty cool. Speaking of LGR, I feel like I have a good understanding of the pain the likes of him, Ross and Mandalore go through.  I'm pretty sure I've went through the exact sort of troubleshooting hell that Ross has bitched about in specific videos.  I would say that I am on the edge of becoming one of those channels, but realistically half of what makes that stuff hard is the video editing and I have NO desire to go through video editing hell on top of game compatibility hell.

People comment on screenshots because private profiles don't automatically make your screenshots private, and you can just go steamcommunity.com/id/#idhere#/screenshots and view em all. Some default to that route cuz it'll work for both private and nonprivate accounts.

I think Firefox containers are probably what you're looking for.

I am a developer for Microsoft Teams because I sold my soul for a paycheck a long time ago.

I'm using teams every day now. It's how we send files back and forth, host virtual meetings, and organize our calendars.
I'm afraid I have no real complains, because I mute any chats I don't want to ping me and it's the only program we have to use.
 
I did have an amusing moment where I.T. kept checking my windows version because we're forced to use Windows 11 now (ick) and I immediately installed classic shell.

Necromancy powers activate! Looks like I need to eat a hat now.
 
Anyways, the MCC is awesome now. The Steam Workshop update is probably the single greatest thing 343i has ever done for the franchise. Of course, that bar was never particularly high, but still, when you get something like THIS on the workshop....
 
....then MCC will become the next Garry's mod, because this is epic. Especially for Steam Deck users who are forced to use the anti-cheat disabled version. All I really want now is a version of the Custom Games Browser that can play modded servers with AC disabled. I might even need the AC to work on Proton anymore if that's the case.
 
Seriously, whoever is leading the MCC team is single-handedly keeping the franchise alive, cuz Infinite sure shit ain't.
 

Vermintide 2 is free to keep on Steam.

GOG is giving away Jazz Jackrabbit 2.

I think the AI art stuff is really neat. It's fun when you can submit any nonsense and get something back.
Seeing how the AI responds to the input is half the fun, there were similar shenanigans with AI Dungeon.
 
Trying to turn AI art into real money though becomes a really complicated issue really quickly and I'm not educated enough to speak on it.
I'm sure there are legitimate professional applications for AI art, I've heard backgrounds or concept sketches being cited as legitimate uses, but there are also people stealing art for training sets or trying to pass something off as their own.
 
Basically I think the technology is cool and people are the issue.
 
I don't see AI anything going away though. I'm now working at a tech company and a lot of the newsletters talk about new applications for machine learning.
They also talked about the future of the metaverse though, so maybe it's not a good metric haha.

Hurricane: survived
Power never even went out. No flooding, no trees on the roof, just the usual shit ton of debris everywhere.

Still funny how quickly the previous tiams filled and how long this one's persisted
 
And I actually do mean funny, I think at this point I don't really feel that sad about it. Honestly just glad we've got posters still kickin' at all

The Space Quest games were not only Sierra style games where you could easily die, but they were pretty merciless even for Sierra games.  For example, there's a part in Space Quest I where you need to make enough money to buy a new ship.  While you can get some starting cash from a few places, the only way to extend that to enough is to play a slot machine.  Now you can screw yourself in the usual way, i.e. by losing all of your money and not having any way to make more.  However some times you get a bad enough result that the slot machine straight up kills you.  It's completely random; there's no way you can prepare for it or avoid it.  (Though the game is nice enough to let you know it's a possibility by killing the guy playing the slots before you.)
 
The funny thing is that being this level of dick actually makes those games feel more fair, in a way.  It's almost impossible to play a Space Quest game for long and not realize that you are expected to save constantly, under different file names.  In contrast Kings Quest II is quite content to let you get through about two thirds of the game without letting you know that you fucked yourself over the first five minutes by walking over that bridge twice.  Space Quest is kind of like kaizo platformers; in no way is is it fair, but you knew what you were getting into.
 
Anyway, I had no idea that the guys from Andromeda were making another game.  I'll keep an eye on it.  That being said it seems like adventure kickstarters always go wrong, so I'm not exactly having high expectations.  But maybe just taking a decade is enough going wrong that the game will be fine.

Bit of a blog post here, but "Two Guys SpaceVenture" is finally releasing out of Kickstarter today!
 
The project was originally kickstarted back in June of 2012 as a successor to the Space Quest games.
Admittedly I never played the Space Quest games, but I have a fondness for point and click games.
Although the Space Quest games were Sierra, whose catalog were infamous for killing you over every little mistake!
 
I originally received the news through the SPUF forums because none other than John Patrick Lowrie, voice of the Sniper, is featured as one of the voice actors for the game.
At the time, I backed SpaceVenture to the tune of thirty dollars and waited.
This was also around the time that projects such as Wasteland 2, Pillars of Eternity, Doublefine Adventure, and the Shadowrun games were all getting funded.
All of those came out and most of them got sequels in the time since SpaceVenture was funded.
 
So here we are more than ten years later and it's finally ready to launch later today.
They've been releasing backer updates during all this time, but SpaceVenture still qualifies for the hall of "Games I waited a decade for."
 
SPUF might be gone now, but I originally only found SpaceVenture through SPUF, so it's kind of a strange feeling.

Humble has a pretty good Starlight bundle out for the next 13 days.
Includes a good chunk of the classic Lucas Arts PC games for ten bucks.
 
$1 gets you KOTOR, Jedi Academy, and Full Throttle
BTA gets you KOTOR2, Grim Fandango, Day of the Tentacle, Lego:TFA, and Jedi Outcast
$10 gets you Force Unleashed, Lego:TCS, Lego:CloneWars, AvP, and some Pinball.
 
I grabbed it because I didn't own any of the Lego games.
So I have Extras of,
-KOTOR
-KOTOR 2
-Jedi Outcast
-Jedi Academy
-Grim Fandango
-Day of the Tentacle

So over the course of about a year, I set about Playing all the No More Heroes games for the first time.
I just finished the third entry so I thought I'd give my thoughts on all of them.
Played them all on the switch with motion controls enabled, but they're optional in all the games now.
 
 
So I guess I would rate them like this
No More Heroes 1 - Most consistent game, best boss fights.
No More Heroes 2 - Most fun for mindless hack 'n  slash action, coolest boss designs.
Travis Strikes Again - It's okay I guess but I did enjoy the DOS visual novel sections. Most fun with a friend.
No More Heroes 3 - Most self aware parody, solid combat loop, retro 70s aesthetic but I'm not sure if it all ties together ultimately.
 
It was a roller coaster of a series and I don't know if I'd really recommend any of them, but I had a good time of it.

After careful consideration if I could extinguish one species of animal from the face of the Earth, it would be the deer tick.

There are still a shocking number of people who buy the fanciest TVs and turn around and buy DVDs or stream in 480.
Like, they're not even getting 1080p on their 4K tv, and companies think they can convince these people to buy 8k movies.

There are still a shocking number of people who buy the fanciest TVs and turn around and buy DVDs or stream in 480.
Like, they're not even getting 1080p on their 4K tv, and companies think they can convince these people to buy 8k movies.

So I finally played through and beat Trials of Mana that I bought on a sale like a year ago.  Here comes a way too long review/meditation.
 
For those not in the know, Trials of Mana is a remake of Seiken Densetsu 3.  In Japan the series was known just as Seiken Densetsu (legend of the holy sword) but in the west this was the "mana" series, with each entry getting the title _____ of mana.  (ex. Secret of Mana, Dawn of Mana.) The title of "Trials of Mana" was retroactively added to the game, though it is used in Japan now too.  Since I will be comparing this game a lot to the original for Super Nintendo, I will just use "Seiken Densetsu 3" or "SD3" for the original and "Trials of Mana" or "ToM" for the remake.
 
As I commented on the best console thread, the Super Nintendo is the console that I emulated the most.  On that system, Seiken Densetsu 3 is the game that I emulated the most.  It's a pretty neat little action RPG that plays much like Secret of Mana, though with some key differences.  One of the biggest is that rather than having a set party of three characters, you choose a party at the beginning from a group of six possible characters.  These choices will affect the story.  Most significantly each character has a different short prologue before their storylines join, and then there are three possible long final dungeons depending on your main character (basically the six characters are in pairs of two, with one part of the pair being from a kingdom being invaded by an evil army, and the other part being a defector from that evil army; about halfway through the plot the three armies fight and whichever one is related to your main character comes out on top.)  Beyond that there is a huge amount of customization from your choices.  Each of the six characters plays differently, especially on class changes.  Twice through the game you get to select a "light" or "dark" version of your class, for a total of 4 final classes per character or 24 final classes in all.  This means that there are 80 possible party class compositions at the end of the game.  This immediately adds a huge enticement for replaying when compared to something like Chrono Trigger (not that Chrono Trigger is anything short of excellent.)
 
Anyway, let's talk about the remake.  To begin with, this is maybe more accurately a "reinterpretation" or "reinvention" along the lines of Pegasus Prime.  There are a huge number of differences in how the game looks, plays and many of the underlying mechanics.  I can still see myself getting the itch for playing the original SD3 instead of ToM.  That being said, this was something that was obviously made with a love for the original.  The idea seems to be "let's make the original, but how we would make it if we weren't stuck with the limitations of the SNES."
 
On some levels the game is shockingly faithful to the original.  I can recognize that many of the maps are basically identical to SD3, though tweked just a bit to acccommodate the ability to jump.  For all I know every map is 90% similar to the original, but I can only say this for certain for the first half of the game since the maps in the later part of SD3 don't stick in my mind as well (plus it is hard to easily compare complex maps in the SNES screen by screen format versus the 3D levels of ToM.)  I can't verify since I played with a fan translation, but it wouldn't surprise me if all the dialogue from SD3 appears word for word identical in the Japanese version of ToM.  (The new translation changes a bunch of names for some reason, ex. Bijuu -> Belladonna, Makai -> Mavonia, Jinn -> Sylphid, but they are the same in the Japanese dialogue.)  The music is basically identical, just with higher bit instrumentation (and actual instrumental performances in some cases.)  Since SD3 might have my favorite soundtrack of any SNES game this was a pretty smart decision, though the game even allows you to just use the SNES music if you're that much of a purist.  All the items from the original game are present and work basically identically.
 
In other ways the game takes a complete departure from the original.  Most obviously it's in 3D with a third person over the shoulder, which actually causes some change of play issues immediately.  It is much trickier to babysit the two party members you aren't controlling, though you can switch to them at any time and they are smarter in ToS making it less necessary to babysit them.  (In contrast it's pretty straightforward to do this on SD3 since you can see the whole battlefield at all times.)  The fighting system has been changed.  In SD3 basically there are two types of attacks: normal attacks, and "moves" (i.e. skills and special abilities.)  Normal attacks can be used with a cooldown, but can also miss if their animations don't connect with the enemy.  Moves require a charge time where your character can't do anything, but when they go off they are a guaranteed hit (which applies to you and the enemies.)  In ToM enemy moves go off much more quickly, but you will be given an indicator of where they will hit and you can dodge out of the way.  The same applies to your moves though, so you now have to aim spells, especially to make sure you get the most out of area attacks.  Additionally, ToM adds jumping to deal with aerial enemies, charged attacks, and light/hard attack combos.  This is mostly welcome, since a big problem with SD3 is that only two characters (Angela and Charlotte) get moves before their first class change.  So your other characters (which could easily by your whole party) can only bash enemies until they build up a limit break class strike, which doesn't lead to a huge amount of strategy.  You'll mainly be deciding when to use items and making sure that no one is in the middle of nowhere or getting swarmed.
 
Both SD3 and ToM have a stat system, where you choose which core stat (ex. Strength, Luck, Intellect, etc.) to improve on each level.  But this is much more involved in ToM.  In SD3 you basically just increase each stat, which has an indirect effect on your damage, HP, critical hit chance, etc. and with each class having different caps for stats.  In ToM the main purpose of assigning points is not to increase the stats themselves (since leveling will increase those stats by much more due to innate class bonuses) but rather to unlock perks in a skill tree.  Sometimes these are just more significant boosts to the ability (ex. getting an extra 5 or 10 points of strength instead of just 1) while other times they are special abilities that can be equipped to do things like giving your heavy attacks a chance to poision, decreasing the time debuffs affect you, increasing damage dealt from elemental weaknesses, etc.  This adds more replay potential, though some of the abilities can get pretty ridiculous.  In particular there are a huge number of abilities that restore MP, especially in the very late game.  When combined with the removal of the MP and HP caps (which were 99 and 999 respectively in SD3) this means that mana is much easier to manage late game.  For example Angela's best spell in SD3 costs 12 mana.  Thus you can only cast it 8 times in one battle even with max MP, before you need to refill your mana (and options for doing that are pretty limited, unless you do that one build with Duran that allows his allies to drain MP.)  In ToM they raised the cost of this spell to 28, but between Angela now being able to get more than 100 MP and having many abilities which can restore mana here and there, it still doesn't feel as restrictive (in the build I ended up with she gained the ability to automatically regain 40% of her MP every time that her HP drops below 10% of the max, which happens frequently in boss battles.)  The balance ends up being similar to SD3 in the beginning but by the endgame it's something else entirely (though not completely broken.)  This gets back into why I said this game isn't a complete replacement for SD3.
 
A lot of the game involves little tweaks that end up feeling pretty similar to the original, despite a different implementation.  For example, in the original you could avoid most combats by simply moving to the next screen.  In ToM there are no real "screens" outside of loading zones from leaving cities and the like.  But they artificially do the same thing by making a "combat zone" once you are discovered.  You can run away by rubbing up against the edge of it for a certain length of time.  In the end in both systems it's actually pretty damn easy to run away (which is great for low level runs) though you can take a few hits while trying to do so (or in the worst case get juggled by enemies and prevented from leaving.)
 
One major downside of ToM is the lack of multiplayer.  In SD3 you have multiplayer just like Secret of Mana: once you have two or three party members someone on controller 2 can press start and take control of one of them.  With the multitap you probably could have all three controlled (I know it's possible on the ROM but I'm not 100% certain that that wasn't hacked in.)  I think in ToM this was omitted due to the increased hardware demands: you would have to use a split-screen mode which could tax the graphics engine unless you made the environments and enemies less impressive.  (The developers say that they didn't include multiplayer so that the single player mode would be more polished, and I assume that this is what they meant.)  It's a shame because there are a few boss battles which become somewhat of a clusterfuck in the third person mode or due to your allies walking into attacks (most don't have this issue, but the ones that do will piss you off.)  These problems would have gone away in multiplayer, on top of the inherent fun of playing a game like this with your buddy.  It's not like the plot is all that deep, so you don't have to worry about having the experience dragged down by having you both read pages of dialogue or lore.
 
A couple of other things I don't like: The cutscenes skip dialogue in a weird way.  If you skip a line of dialogue it will advance to the beginning of the next line, which might skip over important events without dialogue.  For example you might have a character say a line and skip it once you've read the text, only to have another character say something like "I can't believe he's dead!" because the first character got killed by an assassin in between those lines.  Even in the best scenario you'll have the camera suddenly skip when it is making those dramatic pans.
 
Speaking of skips in cutscenes, for some reason that happens a lot in the pre-rendered cutscenes and ONLY the pre-rendered cutscenes.  At first I thought it was my computer, since it's about 3 or 4 years old at this point, but the in-game stuff works fine.  I first realized what was going on when I realized that this was only happening in cutscenes with no party members present, and which thus weren't affected by my choices.  I don't know how you mess this up, but they did.  In game the only problem was ye-olde Unreal Engine pop-in.
 
I could go on about this game for probably six or seven more pages easily, but I doubt that more than one or two people read this much.  Basically Trials of Mana does what it is supposed to: it updates a SNES game for a new audience while maintaining much of the same basic feel of the original and adding a few extras for returning fans.  Not a replacement, but definitely something made out of love and something worth playing.

EDIT: Found a big blind spot
 

Wow, its been only 7 years since I put something here?
Well, anyway, I got back to sketching and recently I had this dream about this insect humanoid character I apparently created. So in some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, here it is.
 
I call her Beatrix.
 
 
Notes: drawing sure got harder. I used to draw more detailed stuff as a kid but now I cant even get proportions and perspective right without help.

I beat Pegasus Prime, so as promised my meditations continue.  If Ross already spoiled something I won't put it in spoilers.
 
-The confrontation with the crane arm in NORAD is pretty bullshit as Ross suggests.  Something he doesn't go into in the video is how you need to press the controls before they are needed.  What I mean is that when you move the clamp to the robot you have to select the grab option before it gets to the robot.  If you wait for it to actually get there the robot will go into its "kill you" animation before you get a chance to react.  Same thing with moving the arm after grabbing; this needs to be done before the animation for grabbing ends.  This is highly counter intuitive, especially as you can't select anything as the robot is walking over the window making it easy to assume that you won't be able to select anything until after the animations for the crane arm finish.
 
-On top of that, I don't really understand how your actions kill the robot.  All you do is move it to the right, but it doesn't hit anything.  Shouldn't it be struggling against the arm?  And since you need to go over to it to grab its biochips, it could just strangle you then even if it couldn't get out of the arm.  It just kind of mysteriously dies as it is moved.  Now in the original it makes sense: the crane arm busts it through the window which is definitely reinforced glass together with a lot of metal bars.  That could definitely mess up the robot, especially since it's going head first.
 
-This brings me to another point: I never really understood why you get more points for the crane option in the original game, as opposed to the other way of dealing with the robot which Ross doesn't show (which is to cause it to implode by increasing the pressure of the room it is in.)  While the bonus options are called the "Gandhi" options for being "peaceful" they still all involve violence and as Ross discusses the name Gandhi doesn't really make sense here.  What they really seemed to be were options that were trickier/required more observation.  The "Gandhi" way of dealing with the Mars robot is to disable its ship, which requires several precise shots and then the use of a tractor beam (and in Pegasus Prime also requires dealing with debris.)  The "violent" way is to simply use an overpowered gun to blow it up in a couple shots, which doesn't require aiming.  The Sydney robot can be beating "violently" by simply ripping a power cable from the wall, which requires no preparation.  The "Gandhi" way requires the use of an item from another time period (though which item varies by game) and only makes sense if you watched Dr. Sinclair's laboratory notes.  In the original game the crane option only required pressing the programmed option (Ross is wrong when he says that you need to click where the robot is; you don't even need to do that.)  The pressurization option requires paying attention to an earlier warning message, and so is arguably more clever.  I thought that maybe the bonus points were for causing less damage to the time line, but pressurizing the room causes no permanent damage while busting the robot through a wall is obviously going to cause problems.  The Pegasus Prime version felt like they were trying to fix this issue by not having the robot go through the wall and making the sequence trickier, but that they overdid it.
 
-With that out of the way (I really didn't think I was going to talk about that one puzzle for so long) let's talk about the game as a whole.  Pegasus Prime certainly aged a lot better than Journeyman Project Turbo did on a visual level.  The graphics in the original are pretty pixelated, even if you don't zoom into the HUD like Ross did.  But what's really nice about Pegasus Prime is that they animate the whole environment.  So for example when you see the robot on Mars come out of the reactor room, it's just a sprite on a background.  in Pegasus Prime they animated the whole room, so you can see the light from the reactor casting shadows on the walls in a dynamic way as the robot walks through.  Makes it much more immersive, even if the pre-rendered models would only look so-so in a game where they were modeled in game.
 
-Pegasus Prime adds an AI companion which states the obvious.  (For example telling you that you were shot by a dart immediately after you saw yourself get shot by a dart.)  This isn't really a new addition in a sense, since most of the messages are just verbal forms of text messages shown in the original game (these aren't really visible in Ross's video since they show up on a part of the HUD that he cut off.)  However when they are verbal messages they feel much more intrusive.  Kind of makes me think about how different we react to things in text form versus audio form, even if the content is identical.
 
-A lot of puzzles in Pegasus prime seem to be swapped up just for the sake of giving some new content to returning fans.  For example the gas mask in Mars is not filled up at the station you get it from, but from a universal gas filling station in another time period (which is also used two more times to get other gases.)  It's not clear why an oxygen station wouldn't actually fill a mask with oxygen, or why the station in the other time period would distribute anything but oxygen (since its primary purpose is to pump oxygen into the installation) so this feels like a puzzle added just to make things trickier and to force you to jump back and forth between time periods.  I don't know how I feel about this.  On the one hand it definitely made it more interesting when I played Pegasus Prime back to back with Journeyman Project Turbo, but on the other hand I think this brings some puzzles to a counterintuitive level that would make the game too frustrating for newcomers.  (My solutions were often of the form "this is what I would do in the original game, but that's no longer possible because of issue X, and therefore I will do Y to make a slight modification to that approach; but the approach Y would seem to come out of left field if I didn't know it was modifying something more obvious.)
 
-Because I know Graph Theory, I was able to do that bomb puzzle on my first try with about 60% of the time left.  But I don't blame Ross: they put in some pretty complicated patterns that did a good job obfuscating the important bits.  The last two were tricky for me to start on even knowing the optimal solution algorithm.  It is also a type of puzzle like the Tower of Hanoi puzzle where the first move is the most important, but the wrong first move does not lead to an obvious problem for a while, making it hard to figure out where you went wrong if you haven't analyzed this type of problem before.
 
-Speaking of the bomb, it was probably intended to be in the first game.  Pegasus Prime uses the same optical memory videos as the original game, and in both games Sinclair mentions a bomb set to go off if he is unable to get the shot off.  In the original you stun him and the game ends successfully with no one mentioning the bomb, despite the game beginning with a premonition dream where you see Caldoria exploding.  I'm guessing the bomb was cut for time or budget issues, so naturally they put it in this time around.
 
-One thing that bugged me in the original game is that if you try to go anywhere but your apartment building after leaving TSA you get the "uncreated" ending that you get if you don't report into work.  Since you fixed the timeline, this shouldn't happen.  Pegasus Prime changes this to a non-standard game over where you don't die, but Sinclair is able to successfully kill the alien delegate, which is nice.
 
-Though given that you have a time machine, is it really a final ending if the delegate gets killed?  Couldn't you just time travel to before he gets killed and try again?  Though since the series suggests that there are hard locks on how the time machine can be used to prevent shenanigans, and Pegasus Prime leans into that harder, probably the time machine isn't able to be activated except in response to temporal rips.
 
-One thing that I don't like about the new time travel animation (beyond the removal of the smooth rock) is that the original animation plays variation voice clips that you have heard to simulate being lost in time.  The final one is "I will assassinate the Cyrollan delegate myself" which is stated by Sinclair in the last optical memory file you get from him, though it is distorted to try to hide the identity.  It makes a nice bit of foreshadowing and is kind of creepy.
 
-But there is a new problem in Pegasus Prime.  Your boss specifically tells you that you have to stop Sinclair.  However, he later talks about a raid done by other TSA agents which provides a bunch of information that you already know and don't need (since this message comes in after you beat the game.)  The issue is this: why is the TSA post going unmanned?  Agent 3 gets mad at you being late because it meant that she had to stay late, since TSA protocol is that someone always needs to be watching in case there is a time rip.  Just because you stopped Sinclair, that doesn't meant that there won't be time rips again, so someone should be there.  In the first game you never interacted with other agents so it seemed like you were either responsible for everything or that there were other unseen agents who could take care of things in your absence.  Here it has not only been stressed that someone needs to be there at all time, but the game also explicitly makes note of other agents handling things.  So why do you need to take care of things?  (There is somewhat of an implication that you simply didn't follow protocol and decided to handle everything yourself; certainly the game has established that you don't do a good job of following procedures.)
 
-Lastly, I hope that Ross really is going through JP2 and 3 and making a video on them.  Pegasus Prime was made after JP2 and a lot of the changes were made to better streamline things with how they were presented in that game.  For example, without getting into too big of spoilers, Agent 3 who is pissed at you for being late also plays a significant role in each of those games and has the same actress.  Definitely would be interesting how much of that he picks up in retrospect, compared to someone like me who played the whole trilogy first and then went back to Pegasus Prime.

I'm continuing on my sort of pilgrimage to Ross's Journeyman Project video with my own playthrough of Journeyman Project Turbo and Pegasus Prime.  Some observations:
 
First, I didn't encounter the errors that Ross did when I went through Journeyman Project turbo.  Specifically I didn't have his problems with sound mixing; the radio program at the beginning had no interference and the sound were properly mixed in the biosuit creation section.  Similarly I did not get the enlarged video problem he had when viewing the optical memory biochip.  I'm pretty sure that this is due to me running it on Windows 3.1 while he was running it on Windows 95.
 
A few things Ross missed in Journeyman Project Turbo:
 
-He complains about this version of the game not giving you any hint on where to go in the final sequence, whereas Pegasus Prime shows you where the villain went (you just don't know he's the villain yet.)  What he's missing is that the final robot's optical memory contains a reference to the assassination location being the place in Caldoria with the best view of the government center, which is how your apartment building is described in its ads.  I haven't got to the end of Pegasus Prime yet, but I've heard that they cut this part of the video out in that version so that may be why he missed it.
 
-There is a very bizarre death scenario where you don't get a real death screen; only a windows dialogue box which forces you out of the game immediately.  It's not even written in a serious manner, and I'm guessing it was a placeholder message from before they implemented death screens and which they forget to implement.  I actually missed this on my playthrough because there are two bottles you can click to die in the room where this occurs, and one actually does have a proper death screen.  But coming back I verified it does happen, and also found this playthrough that demonstrates it:
 
 
 
(By the way this guy says that he doesn't understand how clicking the first bottle gets you caught by security: the reason for it is that it is the bottle containing the sleeping gas that knocked out security and which is currently attached to the ventilation system. So presumably by removing it they wake up and catch you.  But the game doesn't really explain this properly.)
 
Some things I've noticed so far in Pegasus Prime:
 
-It really feels weird controlling this game.  Journeyman Project Turbo can be entirely controlled by the mouse, though you can use arrow keys to move instead of using the on screen buttons.  Pegasus Prime goes pretty far in the other direction.  Not only do you have to use the arrow keys to move, but you also need to use other keys to go through your inventory.  Presumably this is due to the game being designed for Playstation (and thus a controller.)  What's really weird is that you have to use the arrow keys to open doors, rather than clicking on them.  But it's really to open them, not to go through them, so you have to hit forward twice: once to open and the next time to walk through.
 
-Ross talks about how it's inconsistent for Gage to be uncreated if you don't do anything, meaning that you don't exist in the altered universe, but for his boss to recognize him when he comes back to the altered universe.  I figured that this was just an oversight by keeping the "uncreated" death without considering how it should be updated for the new content in the game.  But what's weirder is that the game is actually inconsistent with its new content too.  In Pegasus Prime there are virtual busts of six important historical figures.  These are unchanged in the new timeline.  But two really should change: The first is Enrique Castillo, the poor sap whose assassination you have to present.  Now we know that he does exist in the new timeline, or else he couldn't be assassinated, and his personality is basically the same as it was originally.  But the problem is that his exhibit lists him as the ambassador to the alien alliance.  The big alteration in the new timeline is that Earth never joins this alliance; that's sort of the villain's whole goal.  You could argue that perhaps we still have an ambassador, but a hostile one.  However Castillo was assassinated shortly after the first confirmed contact with the aliens and so even if there was an ambassador in the new timeline, it wouldn't be him (and it seems strange that an anti-alien timeline would want to honor him.)
 
-The second problem is the presence of the first president of a unified Earth.  The NORAD section of the game is about a change to the timeline which prevents the unified Earth from forming, which would then mean no president for it.  Now you could argue that the game only says that the actions made it unlikely that a unified Earth would be formed any time soon, and that happened two centuries before the present, so perhaps one formed later.  Sure; that's not entirely inconsistent with how the altered timeline state is discussed in Pegasus Prime's new additions.  But even if it was unified much later, the original president would probably be too old to be president, so someone else would have had that role.
 
-Another thing which I'm surprised Ross didn't touch on: In the new timeline your boss recognizes you (even though he shouldn't) but is weirded out not only by your uniform but also by the fact that you didn't return on schedule.  It goes by quick, but the dialogue states that Gage is supposed to be doing research work in the past.  In the original timeline the time machine was invented for historical research, but was only used for one such trip before it was declared too dangerous and it became used only for time cops.  (Incidentally in the sequel they start using it for research again, just with more precautions.)  In the new timeline they apparently never panicked about using it for research and are still using it for that purpose.  Now they're also using it for time cop stuff due to the chief's discussion of security protocols.  But since they are using it for research purposes and since Gage wasn't expected back so soon, this means that some of their agents are in the past doing research.  Pegasus Prime doesn't say what time periods they are at, but time periods for research are listed in the sequel and the majority of them are before any of the events that you change.  For example, one of Gage's research projects in the sequel is studying Da Vinci's laboratory, way before the World Unification day in our future.  Now in this game if you travel to before when a change is made, you aren't affected by it.  That's a big part of why you have to go back to the prehistoric age as your first jump.  So shouldn't there be a bunch of time travelers in the past doing research, even after you fix the original problems to the timeline?  And since your biochip was able to bring you back to the new timeline's version of the Pegasus time machine, shouldn't the alternate timeline versions of the TSA agents eventually go back to the present in the "fixed" timeline?
 
EDIT: Another note: Moonwalking isn't required to get around the robot at NORAD.  You are meant to use the shield biochip.  However, since the game destroys robots when you get their optical memory biochip regardless of whether you've gotten the other ones there is a high chance that Ross missed this biochip, just like he did the retinal one.  He also doesn't discuss the trace biochip which is only used in Sydney to track where the robot went, and thus avoid the "discovered by conference goers" scenes.  Though I doubt Ross was trying to avoid those anyway.
 
However, getting back to NORAD, even if you do use the shield biochip you still lose energy and the animation plays out the same way; you just don't lose nearly as much energy.  So it isn't obvious that the shield biochip did anything.  And you still end up with more energy by moonwalking anyway.
 
Oh, and the trackball part in NORAD is pretty bullshit.  I meant to talk about that earlier when discussing what went better in Windows 3.1 vs. 95.  Not being able to smoothly control the trackball and needing to make tons of readjustments before it registers may seem like a glitch, but no, the game is just designed like that.