From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc


I have some friends who are travelling west in the US to get into the
path of the total eclipse. Decades ago I'd have been up for it, but if
I've learned anything over 50 years it's that I'm not a joiner and I
don't like crowds. Already there's one American logistics expert who's
saying that the travel snafu will be the equivalent of 20 major sporting events happening all at once, or Beyonce and Taylor both coming to town
at once. If it's all the same to you I'll watch it on TV later.

Play:
--=--

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (PS5) - Like a Dragon games rhyme.
They're not poetry, but they do make an honest attempt. And so it is
that Infinite Wealth ends where it begins, where Kasuga faces off with
an enemy and only treats him with dignity and respect and kindness. That actually happens all the way through the game, where nearly every boss encounter ends up with the character in question being won over to
Kasuga's side simply because he asks nicely. That's even a theme in the
stupid Sujimon game, where fighting street gangsters and pickpockets
means you can add them to your roster of fighting 'monsters' in the
Pokemon ripoff. Kasuga Ichiban's story is building him up to be some
kind of legendary peacemaker, in a way different to that Kazuma Kiryu
was somehow a legendary street fighter.

Speaking of Kiryu, his ending is also perfect. This game has two
protagonists and somehow it gives them both equal weight and time.
Kiryu's story ends in a way that lets him get to a part of the story
that he's earned justly, without a cheat or a lazy plot beat. I don't
think that we're going to see much more of him since he has genuinely
aged out of being at the center of the narrative, but knowing that he's
going to be okay is reassuring in a way that you don't get from most long-running games in quite the same way.

Unusual third paragraph to note that the Daidoji faction, who are the mysterious shadow group pulling strings, announce themselves to be
affiliated with the Yakuza game world's equivalent of the LDP, or the
Liberal Democratic Party that's essentially run politics in Japan for
nearly 50 years. That's an interesting twist, in that a political party
is essentially taking over the role that the crime families previously
played in these games.

Endless Dungeon (PS5) - Limited Edition at an appealing discount. It
looks really nice, somehow better than the Steam version I played
previously. Better tutorial too, in that I can basically understand the instructions I'm being given even though I still don't understand the
point of the game or why there has to be resource management in the
middle of what I perceive to be a twin stick shooter. I would like to
say that I wish people would stop using southern American accents for characters, even if it's just a narrator you never hear again. It's the
sound of ignorance and racism and it's going to be centuries before that
stops being true, and I never want to hear that again in media that I
consume to relax and forget about the world.

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure All-Star Battle R (PS5) - Oh, I didn't realise
that this was a remaster of the PS3 game. It's lovely to look at, and
deeper than I expected because it's a three-button control input but has Z-axis field navigation a la Soul Calibur. I have no attachment to the characters or the narrative so basically I'm just selecting combatants
based on their sex appeal, so it's a good thing all these fighters are
so pouty and runway-ready.

Yakuza 6 (XSX) - Oh no, something's happened to Haruka. Kiryu has to
take a taxi over to Toutou University Hospital. Right after eating bowl
after bowl of kimchi because it has the highest agility EXP value and
will allow me to get my Defence score up to a natural 150 thus allowing
me to log today's Gamepass Rewards points and then quit the game. As of
Sunday night I am 18 points away from a free month of the service, and
it only took me eleven weeks to earn that. Doesn't seem worth it after
the fact, given that all I'm doing is padding Microsoft's statistics
with outliers and exceptions.

Want:
--=--

Better battery charging options - This is the week I plug in all my
handheld gaming devices to get the batteries charged up, on the
optimistic basis that I might want to pick up one of them and play
randomly. As you might tell from my Play report over the last six
months, that hasn't really happened a whole lot. I wonder if there's any correlation between the pandemic reducing travel for work and handhelds
not seeing as much use. I say that with the prejudice that handheld game systems are for trains and buses and other public transport that people outside of New York and Philadelphia simply don't use in my country.

Bin:
-==-

Outdoor lighting (RL) - I binned off my halogen floodlights at the
corner of my garage, mostly because my wife wants to put up year-round
LED lighting and we needed a power connection. I discovered that the
fixture was so old and corroded that it was causing a ground fault in
that part of my electrical setup, so I've accidentally fixed a problem
that was making me moderately anxious for the last year or so. The new equipment is all PVC and waterproofed to an industrial standard that you
don't actually need for homes in the US, but if I'm going to do this
then of course I'm going to overdo it.

Expenditure:
-----=-----

Balance forward - $921

Playstation 3 Slim (a white one!) (PS3) - $120

Total to date - $1,041

-KKC, who really needed that extra PS3. Because I've never had a white one.
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

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

I have some friends who are travelling west in the US to get into the
path of the total eclipse. Decades ago I'd have been up for it, but if
I've learned anything over 50 years it's that I'm not a joiner and I
don't like crowds. Already there's one American logistics expert who's saying that the travel snafu will be the equivalent of 20 major sporting events happening all at once, or Beyonce and Taylor both coming to town
at once. If it's all the same to you I'll watch it on TV later.

I remember back in 1999 thinking something similar. But even having
been quite a few miles away from the path of totality for that one,
and with some awkward cloud cover at times, there's still something
about it getting so dark during the day, the way it gets noticeably
cold, the way wildlife reacts to it, and so on. Also, a good excuse to
mess about with a pinhole camera. :-)

Play:

Outrun 2006 (PSP) - more of this.

Oekaki Puzzle (PS1) - just one, fairly ridiculous guess-heavy puzzle
which ended up taking me 40 minutes. (!) With how many puzzles this
has, I'm starting to think that I might just skip any which require
guesses in future, given that most don't. Like playing a sort of
Minesweeper metagame on top of the puzzle-solving.

Want:

Nothing.

Bin:

OP guess-required puzzles in OP.

-Rus.
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2