From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc


How many times can I publicly rag on Russia's government before somebody complains? A big snowy country that can barely bake bread and produces
nothing other than oil and resentment thinks it's a peer to any western
nation that exports cars, technology, labour and intellectual
properties. It's a lot like Drake thinking that winning a fight on the Internet means that he has authentic talent driving that victory.

Play:
--=--

Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii (PS5) - Incessantly, but not for
as long as I thought I would have played. Ten hours in, I've finally
done all of the sailing ship and cannon battle and crew maintenance
stuff in what turns out to be an extended tutorial before the game stops
and becomes a Yakuza game for a little while. Running around on the
Infinite Wealth map doing the regular brawler gaming style is really entertaining, but also occasionally oddly triggering for me. By this I
mean that the English dialogue and the familiar American setting remind
me unpleasantly of how violent my own childhood was. Not all the time,
but the idea that young men settled their differences with fistfights on
the regular is something that I never accepted as a thing that was real
even though I have scars and missing teeth that tell me otherwise.

There's something weird going on in that the collectible stuff respawns
at a much faster rate than it did in Infinite Wealth, to the point where
I can walk around a block, have two combat encounters, pick up a
valuable crafting item in a shockproof briefcase, walk around the block
once more and do it all over again. It's gotten to the point now where
I've accidentally achieved a monetary goal a few hours before I'm meant
to, which I'm sure the game accounts for in the story beats but feels
like I'm just exploiting loopholes. There must be something right about
the game that I'm finding all this repetition fun in spite of the lack
of progress and the need to confront real trauma.

Want:
--=--

Evercade Indie Heroes Vol 4. (EVC) - This is the cart with the Jane
Austen platformer on it. The fact that it exists and that it's good
enough that I want a copy is stupid in so many delightful ways. The cart
is technically not available in North America until the 10th, and since
I bunged it in with a bunch of other games it'll delay my copy of
Suikoden Remaster by a week or more. I'm sure I'll be merrily being a
pirate in a way that won't really make the delay painful.

Bin:
-==-

Nothing game-related.

-KKC, who shouldn't treat Usenet like group therapy.
--- Synchronet 3.21d-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

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

Play:

The Lego Movie 2 Videogame (PC) - this is one I'd not played before
due to some unusually scathing reviews, it gets 57 on Metacritic to
give you some idea (while the best few Lego games get 80 or so). It's
like a sort of experimental mix of the typical gameplay with a bit of
what I think might be Lego-Worlds-ish build-placing stuff thrown in,
and with missions available from various NPCs in the levels. In some
sense this gives you more freedom in how you play the game and makes
it more sandboxy (even if there isn't a single large sandbox as such),
but I'd say it comes at the cost of the story which tends to feel like
it's barely even being hinted at sometimes.

There's one thing that I thought was pretty telling. At one point
early on you get shown that extra levels exist separate from the story
ones, and to paraphrase what a character said, "you could stay here
and mess about in this level, or, uh, I guess we could go back and
help our friends if you want?" That's good in a way, maybe, but for a
movie game in particular the connection to the story just feels so
tenuous, and the whole idea of ever following the plot so optional.

Still, the game's better than I'd expected so far, even if it is
rather odd. And that's despite it somehow featuring loot boxes. (!)
They don't seem immediately game-ruining, but I expect they'd make
getting 100% completion very grindy and frustrating.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance (PC) - got through a story battle, even if I
had to redo much of it due to a crash, and yet again after a rubbish
autosave (as I'd reached the boss fight with only about 10% health).
Because a battle like this is intrinsically far easier than the way
it'll ordinarily have some random baddies outnumbering you 5-to-1
(where you might generally just get to enjoy being beaten to death),
in this case you get rather artificially forced to essentially do
three battles in a row then a boss. I still have no idea where the
third wave of baddies was meant to have appeared from, and the
one-on-one boss fight also seemed pretty implausible.

Soon after that I had some awkwardness and semi-failed stuff due to
not being able to read (no doubt to encourage you to bother with it),
so did the relevant quest - I liked the sneaky way they looked like
they were requiring you to actually read Latin, but weren't really. I
think I'll kind of miss the way it would sawp the ltteres anourd in
the midlde of wdros wehn you terid to raed a book wohtuit any rednaig
slikl tohguh. (I think it might have been for the whole word not just
the middle, but close enough.)

Want:

To try the two familiar Lego games I also just bought, even if I might
not necessarily replay them in full - The Lego Movie Videogame (PC),
as bundled with the other movie game, and Lego City Undercover (PC).

Evercade Indie Heroes Vol 4. (EVC) - This is the cart with the Jane
Austen platformer on it. The fact that it exists and that it's good
enough that I want a copy is stupid in so many delightful ways.

And yet, it is a truth universally acknowledged.

Bin:

Speckcellher tublore.

KC:D crapitude:

- The game's (relative) realism extending to featuring many toilets,
letting you sit on them, and even having an optional quest where you
get to choose who should be employed to empty the local ones - yet
you can't... use them. It's not like I'm desperate to go, so to
speak, it just seems a bit odd to take things that far then stop. I
did like that the game designates them as places granting faster
reading speed, though. :-)

- Having "fast travel" which can take significant time and interrupt
you with an ambush which means you don't actually reach your
destination, quite possibly getting killed in the process. Which is
a bit ridiculous given that the whole point of fast travel is to be,
you know, fast, and to travel to places in a non-posthumous fashion.

- During a fight, not letting you cure bleeding or regain health or
change your equipment. (It seems all can be done during a (full)
battle specifically if you time things right, which arguably makes
the whole idea rather dubious.) The bleeding is really the worst
part of this, because it essentially means that for every hit you
take, you risk an unavoidable death. So if you're not absolutely
perfect, you can always just randomly die. At times I've found
myself abusing inadequacies in NPC pathfinding so I can camp in a
safe spot and take my time making them into arrow-clad pincushions,
rather than risk the inevitable melee outnumbering. Which does feel
cheap, but actually isn't unless you pinched the arrows.

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