From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc


Well, half as many as you had before. I happened to order pizza last
night here in the States (from one of Pizza Hut's superior competitors)
and noticed that they raised all their prices as a function of economic strain. I was joking that I could have bought two Playstation 3s for the
price I paid which honestly turns into another three days of leftovers
too.

Play:
--=--

Yakuza (PS2) - Starting over from the beginning. I made it to Chapter 4
in the space of three hours so that I could just wander about in the
proper sandbox and do all of the wacky side missions. Knowing how to
level up properly (and understanding the whole of the combat system)
shows just how little I was paying attention twenty years ago. The
original PS2 game used the cinematic Resident Evil-style camera for most
of the street-level map navigation, and I don't think I fully
appreciated how handcrafted and deliberate all of the NPC placement is.
The later games after Yakuza 3 made a big deal out of randomising all of
the people walking about having their normal day in Kamurocho, and while that's perfectly realistic and immersive on its own there's also
something hyperreal about this first game's deliberate choices. That
fellow isn't just barfing up his last excessive drink, he's doing it in
a dark alley where hopefully nobody can see him. Those five students
gathered in a circle are obviously young people enjoying themselves,
whereas the three fellas in tracksuits leaning against the wall are
obviously up to no good. And your view of Kiryu rushing from crisis to
crisis from high above suggests nothing less than the city-wide
surveillance system that we'll learn is in place later in the game. It's
sort of unbelievable how good a time I'm having with this stupid game.

Want:
--=--

More time (RL) - I was supposed to have all of Saturday to myself to
play Yakuza and many other games, but elder care got in the way. Also I
made the mistake of getting my RSV vaccine Saturday morning, and the
side effects are likely to be kicking my arse all week.

Bin:
-==-

Nothing gaming-related.

-KKC, whose day is only two hours old and has already injured himself.
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From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

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

Well, half as many as you had before. I happened to order pizza last
night here in the States (from one of Pizza Hut's superior competitors)
and noticed that they raised all their prices as a function of economic strain. I was joking that I could have bought two Playstation 3s for the price I paid which honestly turns into another three days of leftovers
too.

For me I feel like more than one day of the traditional cold leftover
pizza breakfast would be pushing it, given my steadily advancing state
of decrepitude.

Play:

Minecraft (Android) - another one of those games I clearly don't have
on enough systems yet. :-) This is actually the first time I've played
the game for a while, especially the Bedrock version. So the
additional crafts you can now make with copper were new to me, though
those I've noticed so far don't generally seem too interesting really,
they're more of a consistency move. The one possible exception I
spotted was that a copper helm gives the same defence as an iron one,
which is pretty handy.

As for the touch-based controls, they're bearable enough given what
the gameplay is usually like in Minecraft, but in some ways they're
worse than in Call of Duty Mobile - the latter has a kind of adaptive
virtual thumbstick position, while here it's fixed. In my case this
seems to mean that whenever I initially use the stick it always moves
left, even when I try to allow for that. CoD's "meet you where you
are" approach seems better suited to my particular brand of
ham-fistedness. Then again, aside from the virtual stick I'd say
Minecraft has (by default) more of a native touch-based feel, as you
e.g. touch/hold the screen to place/mine blocks... whether
intentionally or otherwise.

Want:

Nothing.

Bin:

The painfully slow health regeneration in the Bedrock version of
Minecraft. Still. It's such a massively obvious issue, and quite
bizarre that it keeps being kept as-is while so many other things have
been tweaked in the name of parity with the Java version.

The painfully fast battery draining by this version of Minecraft, even
when using the slightly irksome Moto Gametime's battery-saving
setting. I don't know if it's more demanding relatively than the Vita
version was (to be fair the Vita one was more limited while the
Android one is full modern Minecraft AFAICT), but it seems greedier
than I'd expected at least. Mind you, if the Android version is using essentially the same underlying code as on e.g. the PS4, then maybe I
should instead be surprised that it isn't even more demanding.

How painfully frustrating Android Minecraft makes it to keep an
off-device backup of your map without paying for a Realms
subscription. (And I'm sure it's a total coincidence that said option presumably involves paying Microsoft in perpetuity.) The game defaults
to saving the map as app data, which seems to mean you don't get to
see it from the outside as a mere user of your device which Google so generously chooses to let you use in some ways. Any map created there,
stays there. When I found out about this, I abandoned my first map and
started a new one saved to external storage (which is actually on
emulated external storage or something similarly confusing, unless
it's just intended to mean data external to the app). That data you
can access as files and make backups of - or apparently you could
until a couple of years ago. Now it looks like you may be able to
*read* the files in developer mode from another machine using adb
(even that much I have my doubts about), but possibly can't restore
them on a non-rooted phone. Luckily, smartphones are famous for being
eternally perfect devices and never being stolen or lost, so I'm sure
all of this is actually very sensible and not, say, staggeringly
absurd or anything.

-Rus.
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From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

In article <HbOLQ.141337$X324.110841@usenetxs.com>,
Russell Marks <zgedneil@spam^H^H^H^Hgmail.com> wrote:

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

Play:

Minecraft (Android) - another one of those games I clearly don't have
on enough systems yet. :-)

<snip>

Bin:

How painfully frustrating Android Minecraft makes it to keep an
off-device backup of your map without paying for a Realms
subscription. (And I'm sure it's a total coincidence that said option >presumably involves paying Microsoft in perpetuity.)

Have you looked into Luanti? It doesn't have full feature parity with Minecraft, but if you're not playing online at all then it's mostly good enough and gives you more data access options. It used to be called
'Minetest' before they branched out into other misuses of the engine.

-KKC, who needs more sleep.
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

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

Russell Marks <zgedneil@spam^H^H^H^Hgmail.com> wrote:

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

Play:

Minecraft (Android) - another one of those games I clearly don't have
on enough systems yet. :-)

<snip>

Bin:

How painfully frustrating Android Minecraft makes it to keep an
off-device backup of your map without paying for a Realms
subscription. (And I'm sure it's a total coincidence that said option >>presumably involves paying Microsoft in perpetuity.)

Have you looked into Luanti? It doesn't have full feature parity with Minecraft, but if you're not playing online at all then it's mostly good enough and gives you more data access options. It used to be called 'Minetest' before they branched out into other misuses of the engine.

I played Minetest and Mineclone 2 before I got into Minecraft. When I
played it, Minetest Game was quite different to Minecraft - no
lifeforms other than the player, for starters. Mineclone 2 was closer,
but there were still a lot of differences (like old-style villages and
an incomplete Nether IIRC). So while it's a logical enough suggestion
and I'm sure changes have been made since, I generally preferred
Minecraft to both of those in the form I played them at the time at
least, despite the unspeakable horror of playing a game released by
Microsoft.

That said, the extent and depth of my thought process before buying
Android Minecraft was essentially "oh that's pretty cheap, I guess I
could try that". Map data integrity was not really something I was
considering too much at that point. :-)

-Rus.
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