• Early Bank Holiday Play Want Bin (PWBE 4 May 2026)

    From Kendrick Kerwin Chua@kendrick@nospam.io-nyc to uk.games.video.misc on Sun May 3 23:06:25 2026
    From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc


    It's a bank holiday in His Majesty's Lands and Holdings! Our unwritten
    rules say that I should wait a day before starting the thread. Because
    it's tradition and inertia that keeps me and Rus posting.

    Play:
    --=--

    Yakuza 5 Remastered (PS4) - I love Haruka's portion of this game in a
    way most other Yakuza fans do not. I like that the dance minigame is a thematically consistent substitute for street fighting combat, and the challenge of all the different types of rhythm games nicely breaks up
    what would otherwise be a monotonous slog at exactly the midway point.
    But I'm surprised at my reaction to having to face up to the narrative
    in this section of the game, where Haruka has to confront and then
    overcome the ruthlessness and unkindness of her competitors in the music
    idol scene. I know that she wins them over in the end through the power
    of her sincerity and kindness, but I'm in exactly the wrong mood for witnessing that kind of cruelty in fiction right now.

    Space Adventure Cobra: The Awakening (PS5) - This is... okay. It's
    essentially Mega Man with additional fully-voiced cut scenes and a huge quantity of period-correct sexism. I love Space Adventure Cobra as a
    concept but the actual media of it is always slightly less than I'm
    expecting, in the way that other foundational science fiction is always
    unable to measure up to the collective weight and history of all its imitators. I imagine that people who were born after 2030 who watch Star
    Wars for the first time will similarly wonder what the big deal was.

    Yakuza Kiwami (PC) - The original build, not the newly revised one. The
    first Kiwami offered billiards, darts, and bowling as two-player
    minigames available from the main menu without having to dive into the
    rest of the game to play, and my son is devouring the bowling simulation
    with joy and gusto. No idea what he finds so compelling about bowling,
    unless it is that he just has a capacity for happiness that has escaped
    me now, never to return in my old age.

    Want:
    --=--

    Better access to retro titles - It occurs to me that one of the reasons
    I'm obsessive about physical media and hoarding old hardware is because
    I'm aware that there's functionally no other avenue for enabling my own
    access to older games that don't run on modern platforms unless one of
    the current publishers sees fit to go through all the pfaff of testing
    what's essentially new software. This came up because one of my yank
    gamer mates was running through the list of licensed Fist of the North
    Star games and a few of them only came out in the PS3 era and are
    functionally unavailable to play now in any other format. In a just
    world all this reasoning would make PC gaming my preferred platform but
    for the lack of physical media available now.

    Bin:
    -==-

    Nothing game-related

    -KKC, who also ordered a new mobile.
    --- Synchronet 3.21f-Linux NewsLink 1.2
  • From Russell Marks@zgedneil@spam^H^H^H^Hgmail.com to uk.games.video.misc on Mon May 4 17:51:26 2026
    From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

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

    It's a bank holiday in His Majesty's Lands and Holdings! Our unwritten
    rules say that I should wait a day before starting the thread. Because
    it's tradition and inertia that keeps me and Rus posting.

    Certainly an influence on my posting, at least - I'm like Royal Mail, unreliable second class delivery from another era. Speaking of which:

    Play:

    Lego City Undercover (PC) - cleared more of the free runs, and other
    optional stuff in the sandbox.

    Tetris Attack (SNES) - a bit of time trial.

    Want:

    Nothing.

    Bin:

    LCU having only an awkward semi-fixed camera on some rooftops.

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