From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc


Can we go back to news about celebrities and show business deals for a
while please? All this international warfare and significant cultural
event anniversary stuff is really making it hard to do funny Usenet post subject headers.

Play:
--=--

Yakuza Kiwami 3/Dark ties (PS5) - Just cleaning up some of the side
mission stuff. I calculated that I need about 30 of the little biker
gang badge things in order to level up all the members to 50, and I
probably can't be bothered. There's a way to min/max the special attacks
and healing abilities so that you can win every fight quickly and
decisively but it's not really that much different to just going in and pounding heads manually with Kiryu's normal combat abilities. There are
also two straggling orphanage missions remaining, once of which involves trying to shield the children from a men's magazine that's been
abandoned on the shoreline in front of the house.

Yakuza 3 Remastered (PS4) - Completed it. Specifically, I picked up my
last save from March six years ago and powered through the remaining
four chapters with the whole story fresh in my head. No spoilers, the
proper end of the original game is much more hopeful (and talky) than
the Kiwami version. Giving voice and complexity to Mine (the main
antagonist) has the effect of negating how shallow and stupid his
motivation is, and giving him a larger role to play in future games just doesn't ring true against everything we know from the rest of the
series. It's clear to me that they could very easily reverse all this
with just a minute of dialogue if they bother to redo Yakuza 4 in the
same way. Speaking of which.

Yakuza 4 Remastered (PS4) - Completed this as well. The last save was
from only five years ago, and the only thing I left undone was the giant
boss rush at the end where each of the four heroes gets a big moment
against their main rival. It felt nice to be able to get through the
whole fight using almost no healing items, even the giant lopsided
twenty-man battle that Tanimura has to suffer through. I also did a
bunch of the side missions that I never got around to in the PS3 days
and I was struck at how interesting it was to catch up with characters
who only merited a few lines of dialogue or some other brief forgettable encounter in a previous game. That never felt cheap or unearned, because
every time a familiar face would show up they'd be older and wiser and
looking ahead. I wonder why they forgot about that appealing aspect of
the series when they did Kiwami 3.

Want:
--=--

Tokyo Xtreme Racer (PS5) - Coming in the mail today. Only Japan gets a
disc, so I've ordered the Japanese-region disc. If you don't have it on removable and persistent media then you don't own it, it's just a full
price rental. Waiting patiently for the rest of the world to catch back
up to this entirely reasonable and sensible conclusion.

Bin:
-==-

Nothing gaming-related.

-KKC, who does have a lot more respect for Kier Starmer suddenly.
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From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

Kendrick Kerwin Chua <kendrick@nospam.io-nyc> wrote:

All this international warfare and significant cultural event
anniversary stuff is really making it hard to do funny Usenet post
subject headers.

It's the 80s all over again, but with more compute and less Garfield.
A situation which clearly calls for cartoon cats in 3D.

Play:

Little Kitty, Big City (PC) - quite a fun indie that does a nice job
of portraying cat-based antics in a smallish^WBig City sandbox, as
well as giving off quite strong Dreamcast and/or Katamari vibes.
Finishing the story doesn't take long at all, which arguably does
spoil things slightly, but I stuck around for more collect-em-up and
other randomness at least.

Picross e6 (3DS) - it might have been nice to have a coincidental cat
puzzle, but alas, a hamster is as close as this was getting.

Want:

To see somewhen if I can get a game from after 2024 (when LKBC was
apparently released) running on my reasonably potato-adjacent PC.
Presumably it's possible, even if it might need to be a 2D game or
something. :-)

Bin:

Trying to figure out which alley LKBC's chameleon is hiding in, which
is probably intended to be much easier than I'm finding it. Not that I
actually am finding it.

-Rus.
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