Gaming on a Plane

 

If you've ever been on a plane for a long flight before you'll be familiar with the in flight entertainment system.  Most people use these things to watch movies on but if you actually take a moment to go through the menus you might have seen that a lot of them have a selection of games on there.  This sounds cool but unfortunately gaming on in flight entertainment is one of the most frustrating things in the universe.  

Straight off the bat there's the problem with selection.  Most of the games on offer are crappy little flash games or things like parlor games but this is sort of minor because you'd have to be a bit stupid to expect the latest version of Dissidia or Wonderland Wars.  The real problem is that despite these games being so simple and undemanding the systems can BARELY handle them.  For example I killed a few moments by trying to play Bejeweled at one point and the screen was so unresponsive that I had to push a gem about 5 times before it would select. The passenger next to me tried to play a bowling game that involved a flick on the touch screen and she attempted this gesture for a good five minutes before the game shot her ball off into the gutter at 5fps.  

There was one flight I took that actually had Street Fighter 2 on it that was controlled with the little handset mounted under the screen.  This sounds cool but it ran SO POORLY that even moving your character a step to the left side or right was an exercise in pure misery.  Even the Commadore 64 version of SF2 2 ran better. 

Now most people have the good sense to bring a portable system with them.  I had my Vita for my last trip and tried these games for curiosity's sake but I'm sure there's some people who, on a 10+ hour flight who have desperately wished that they could play a game of Zuma instead of sitting through another AAA Hollywood blockbuster.  

But the real reason I'm making this post isn't JUST to shit on bad quality plane games.  I really wanted an excuse to talk about the Sega Mega Jet! 

This was a handheld device that worked with the seat monitor on JAL flights.  It allowed passengers to bring their own carts onto the plane and play to their hearts content.  Obviously you can't use them anymore but a long haul flight would be a hell of a lot less boring if I could rock some Dynamite Headdy.  My biggest question is why don't we have this today?! I know we have a lot more options for portable gaming nowadays but taking my hardware outside of Japan always makes me horribly paranoid since using a system in public in England and maybe America makes you a target for heavy judgements at least and a mugging at most. Wouldn't it be cool though if let's say Valve released a thing where you could put a couple games on a USB and then play them on the screen in the plane.  Even if it ran like shit some in flight Slay the Spire would help kill the boredom. 

Still no one expects plane games to be good and this is such a non issue I don't really know what the fuck I'm on about

Roman Holiday and In Flight Video Games

I know it was YouTube month so I shouldn't really be doing written posts but things got thrown a little out of whack with my trip to Rome.  My original plan was to post a few Vlogs from my phone when I was connected to the hotel WiFi but when I arrived the WiFi sucked massive cocks and I could barely load single images let alone upload whole videos.

Anyway, because I basically walked the entirety of Rome exploring I'm shit I'm far too tired to make/be bothered to upload a video so I thought I'd make a quick, barely game related post about my trip in Rome just to get things rolling again.

First of all let me start by saying fuck Air China.  Air China can eat my dick.  Bad service, bad food, delayed flights, shit movies on the longer flights and Beijing Airport (which I have to go through from Japan) sucks massive cocks.  If you're gonna take a long flight somewhere, don't EVER fly with Air China, the cheap tickets aren't worth the trouble.  Pay a little extra and get an airline with some good service because Air China is easily the worst airline I've ever flown with. 

Anyway Rome was a really nice city, lots of beautiful buildings and churches and whatnot.  The food was fantastic and the people were generally really friendly.  If you ever get a chance to go, you should.  This is a gaming blog so I'll leave the description of Rome there but if for some reason you want to know more just throw me some questions in the stream, I'll be happy to talk about it.

Really what I want to comment on is aeroplane video games.  I never really tried them before in favor of shit I brought with me or the in flight movies but because the security staff at Beijing airport think that all charging devices are highly dangerous I opted to put my chargers in my suitcases and so I was trying to not use all my PSP battery all at once.  The games on the flight were you standard sort of puzzle game/parlor game stuff with a couple of tower defense titles for good measure. 

Now maybe this is just another shitty aspect of flying with China Airlines but the games were fucking unplayable.  I don't mean because they were bad, because it's hard to make things like chess suck, but because they didn't fucking work.  I tried to play Reversi (or Othello or whatever you call it) where the screen just wouldn't respond to inputs, I played a mahjong game where the AI just decided it didn't want to make moves and with no time limit the game effectively soft locked itself and I tried to play a tower defense game but it kept crashing on startup.  To sum it up, in flight games are a bit like playing Action52 but everything is made in flash or unity or some shit.  I'm glad I had a portable with me because if all I had was that to entertain me I think I would have died to boredom or frustration.

The YouTube uploads will resume tomorrow so check back for new videos soon!  Watch this space





Also fuck Air China