• Re: CRAP Poll # temporary_placeholder: How you vroom?

    From Justisaur@justisaur@yahoo.com to comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action on Mon Jan 26 16:12:10 2026
    From Newsgroup: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action

    On 1/23/2026 10:52 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
    On Thu, 22 Jan 2026 10:34:24 -0800, Justisaur <justisaur@yahoo.com>
    wrote:


    Ah you're bringing back nostalgic memories. I loved the motorcycle in
    VC. VC was I think the first game I ever 100%, and there's few others I
    have, mostly souls.


    I don't remember if I 100%'d Vice City (or if it even measured that?)

    It most definitely did, I remember the last achievement I did was get $1,000,000 in property damage by using the gunship and just destroying
    all the army sent after me for quite some time.

    I tried to 100% GTAIII as well, I did a whole new game because of a
    glitch that prevented me, but the glitch repeated as well in my repeat
    play. so 99%.

    I stole the Apache or whatever it was called in VC, and strafed them
    down if I remember correctly. Most fun with a helicopter in any game
    I've ever played!

    It was called the "Hunter"

    "The Hunter is nature's little way of telling someone that they're about
    to have a hundred rounds of heat-seeking freedom launched into their way
    of life. With space for more mass destruction than anything in its
    class, this thing has been responsible for delivering more kilotons of democracy than any other attack helicopter on the planet. "
    --
    -Justisaur

    ø-ø
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  • From Justisaur@justisaur@yahoo.com to comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action on Mon Jan 26 19:03:19 2026
    From Newsgroup: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action

    On 1/24/2026 11:03 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

    This is not a continuation of the original poll. Or it sort of is. But
    I don't really want to talk about the poll itself. It's more of an observation, and a chance to hang my head in shame. See, I want to
    talk about this bit in the subject line, and how I managed to outsmart myself:



    Re: CRAP Poll # temporary_placeholder: How you vroom?
    ............... ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^..............


    So, I don't know if you noticed, but we've been doing these CRAP polls
    for a while now. I mean, asking other readers here for their thoughts
    on a variety of gaming topics has been part and parcel of the
    newsgroup since it's start. The general idea's been around for
    decades. I've done some, but so have many, many others. But the
    earliest reference these being "CRAP polls" is, I think, in 2019.
    That's when I put my own personal spin on it. Maybe you like these
    posts, maybe you don't (I hope more of you fall into the former camp
    than the latter) but it's not really a new idea and not one I can
    claim any credit for creating.

    The thing is, when I started my own polls, I knew I'd have to
    differentiate each poll from the last. Otherwise you'd end up with a
    dozen different threads each with a subject line called "CRAP Poll"
    that would all merge into one another. How boring! The easiest way to
    fix this, of course, would be to assign a number to each subject line.
    "CRAP Poll #1", "CRAP Poll #2", etc. Boring but effective.

    Of course, then I'd have to keep track of the numbers...

    So instead, I said to myself, "Why bother? Just assign a number at
    random. Non-contiguous numbering; that's the way to do things. Start
    with CRAP Poll #65625, the next one maybe will be CRAP Poll #291, and
    then just roll along with that." It's the sort of madness that appeals
    to me.

    So I did that for a while. But nothing's really random (especially
    people), so I worried about doubling up on a number I'd already used,
    and besides... numbers were boring. So I decided to solve both
    problems by using 'funny' descriptors to differentiate each post. So
    we ended up with "CRAP Poll #Banana72" and "CRAP Poll DEADBEEF" and
    just recently "CRAP Poll #temporary_placeholder". People would be
    expecting another random number, and instead they'd get some
    nonsensical non-number instead! Ohohoho, aren't I hilarious?

    [You don't need to answer that.]

    Again, all well and good... but after a while I was ready for another change-up. Back to the numbers, I told myself; that's what I'll do!
    Still, that just gets back to the problem of figuring out what numbers
    I already used.

    So I did a search, just so I could rule out which digits were already
    taken and I could work around them with future CRAP polls. We've done
    40+ such polls since we started; surely there must be quite a few
    numbered ones.

    Turns out... not so much. You know how many CRAP Polls I used numbers
    on before jumping to the nonsense? Go on. Make a guess. No? I'll just
    tell you then.

    _One._

    One single post where I labeled a poll --not even a CRAP poll, this
    was before I started calling them that!-- with a random number. ONE!

    All this effort over the years to ensure I never re-used the same
    number, all the times I went with the 'silly' differentiators like '(Infinity-6)'... and I've only made a single CRAP Poll post that used
    simple number.

    I outsmarted myself. My silly joke that was itself riffing off my joke
    about non-contiguous numbering all of a sudden fizzled away. I'd
    outsmarted myself without even trying. And probably because of that,
    no one ever noticed I was even /trying/ to make a joke.

    <sigh>

    To quote the kids, 'Sometimes, I can't even.'

    I don't think that means what you think it means.

    And no, I didn't even notice the "numbers" :P
    --
    -Justisaur

    ø-ø
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  • From Anssi Saari@anssi.saari@usenet.mail.kapsi.fi to comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action on Sun Feb 1 13:46:21 2026
    From Newsgroup: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action

    Justisaur <justisaur@yahoo.com> writes:

    On 1/23/2026 10:52 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

    I don't remember if I 100%'d Vice City (or if it even measured
    that?)

    It most definitely did, I remember the last achievement I did was get $1,000,000 in property damage by using the gunship and just destroying
    all the army sent after me for quite some time.

    Sure, there were even some silly stats that didn't count towards 100%
    like "keepie uppie beach ball" or something like that which meant
    bouncing a beach ball off any body part a few times, without letting the
    ball hit the ground. Harder than one would imagine, considering the
    physics in the game.

    I tried to 100% GTAIII as well, I did a whole new game because of a
    glitch that prevented me, but the glitch repeated as well in my repeat
    play. so 99%.

    I remember that too, on the PS2 if you had finished the game, you
    couldn't reach 100% on the same memory card even if you started over
    because members of some specific gang would no longer spawn. Due to the
    glitch the completion was saved in some kind of global area so it
    affected all GTA3 saves on the same card. I don't know if the PC port
    was bug compatible.

    To be sure, I remember trying to get even close to the 100% was
    extremely frustrating in GTA3 anyways, there was at least one (or more?)
    of those timed rampages of the kind "kill x members of gang y in z
    seconds" but then usually not enough gang members would spawn in the
    time allotted. Really tedious grind.

    But really, frustrating missings are a staple of the GTA games. San
    Andreas had some pretty awful plot missions too and others, like the
    tanker truck missions. And Zero's missions, first fly a model plane to
    destroy some vans, main problem being running out of fuel! Other than
    the extremely wobbly controls. At least the fuel issue was fixed on
    PC. And right after that, the next mission for Zero was shooting down a
    zillion model planes. Not much fun with gamepad controls but a breeze on
    the PC with mouse aiming.
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  • From phoenix@j63840576@gmail.com to comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action on Sun Feb 1 06:25:47 2026
    From Newsgroup: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action

    Anssi Saari wrote:
    026 10:52 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
    I don't remember if I 100%'d Vice City (or if it even measured
    that?)
    It most definitely did, I remember the last achievement I did was get
    $1,000,000 in property damage by using the gunship and just destroying
    all the army sent after me for quite some time.
    Sure, there were even some silly stats that didn't count towards 100%
    like "keepie up

    with the moteo boat. This one is different because you can't outrun him
    either - he will go back the opposite direction & run away. Hypocrisy is
    at hand.
    --
    6iuq7JrV8XY
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