From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc


It is a big deal for the major western (read: former colonial) powers to
be recognising Palestine. If all this pain leads to a two-state solution
that everybody can grudgingly live with then that goes a long way
towards healing eight centuries of harm.

Play:
--=--

The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel (PS4) - Back in action after
a gap of what... six years? Holy crap. Interestingly the PS3, Vita and
PS4 games all share a trophy set, so the game seems to remember my
initial 20 hour run through the Vita version. I forgot that the game
opens with a flash-forward to a point in time where the whole team is
together and fighting what appears to be a hopeless struggle against a mysterious force that's taken out better-trained and more-experienced
peers before they arrived. That's kind of a better way of setting the
stakes than a fully /in media res/ situation.

Want:
--=--

More continuous time for gaming - I never interrogated why I wanted all
my game systems plugged in and ready to go at a moment's notice, but I'm starting to understand now that time spent playing is always bookended
by setup before and cleanup afterwards. That's hard to arrange between parenting, elder care, door-to-door salesmen offering me solar panels
and water softeners, and all the other little things that are just continuously interrupting the day. This might be why I've always had
that odd and unexplained preference for handheld systems, which is sort
of pointless now that all the modern ones also need network connections
and online identities and gods know what else that inject all the setup
and cleanup of the front-of-television gaming experience. Is it really
all that extravagant (or selfish) to want 30 minutes to myself to enjoy
this stupid hobby?

Bin:
-==-

Nothing gaming-related.

-KKC, who also played CPU Bach but literally has nothing to write about it.
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From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

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

Play:

Dying Light (PC) - more of this, in which I have somehow managed to be surprised to find that leisurely jaunts around Zombie Town can turn
out to be a bit on the stressful and oppressive side. What I think
might be most curious in the game (aside from the weird overarching
theme of zombie-avoiding parkour, to the point of having a unlockable
skill for doing a sort of running jump off of a zombie to stun them)
is the really strong emphasis on melee. Even once you finally get
guns, which seems to take quite a while (especially if you want to be
able to buy more ammo), the idea of not generally wanting to offend
the delicate sensibilities of the faster-moving zombies by daring to
make loud noises while fighting for your life still encourages you to
use melee weapons where possible. By rights I think zombie earmuffs
should have been distributed to cover this eventuality, as well as
having the bonus of seeming much less absurd.

It also seems unusual that the devs get you invested so heavily into
one sandbox map where it feels like you're clearly going to be there
for the whole game, then have you just... go to another one, without
even really making it clear how to get back. (I did eventually realise
how to do that with the power of magical posters, like the game
randomly turned into a poor man's zombified Mario 64.) And I'd say the
game has a problem with pacing generally. It feels like a possible
ending has been dangled in front of me only to be snatched away again
a good half-dozen times now. At this point I'm basically assuming that
once I chop up some specific number of zombies it'll just cut to a
screen saying "AND THEY ALL LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER. THE END." then
roll the credits.

Want:

Nothing.

More continuous time for gaming - I never interrogated why I wanted all
my game systems plugged in and ready to go at a moment's notice, but I'm starting to understand now that time spent playing is always bookended
by setup before and cleanup afterwards.

I certainly feel like my Dying Light sessions would need a bit of
cleanup in the game world. Or at least that NPC from ye olde Barbarian
that kicks away the severed head. :-)

Bin:

Dying Light perhaps relying excessively on RNG to give average
results, even when it was clearly trying to stop me dying so much (as
at times I was doing a lot of that). Medkits are alcohol + gauze, and
for quite a while early on I had lots of alcohol and zero gauze thus
no crafted medkits.

-KKC, who also played CPU Bach but literally has nothing to write about it.

Well, presumably any CPU Bach would be of a lower level than JS.

-Rus.
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