From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc


It seemed stupid to need a spare PS5 disc drive when I bought a second
one six or seven months ago. Seems less stupid today.

Play:
--=--

Hood Story: Kaito Yamazaki (PS5) - Hah. What if Yakuza, but with a
five-digit dollar budget instead of a ten-digit dollar budget. You can't switch the vertical camera control, the music loop is bland and short,
the combat is very much what-if-Streets-Of-Rage-but-slower and the
writing is about as trite and weightless as a marshmallow. The character models are same-y, the spoken dialogue is wildly inconsistent, the environments are somehow too big but also too cramped at the same time,
and the whole thing looks like a game that started off in Roblox made
out of free assets. But I can tell that there's a lot of love (if not
much care) in this world that wants to ape Yakuza games but also do GTA
things like the constantly progressing clock.

I'm not sure that motivated enough to want to play the game past the
first hard encounter, which initially ended with me losing the fight but
then waking up in the hospital (again, a GTA flourish rather than a
Yakuza mechanism). But the first few character interactions suggest a
big lived-in world with multiple gangs to encounter and complex
character motivations, not unlike what you might have seen in an early
Yakuza installment. The big roster art you see on the PS5 splash screen
for the game suggests the existence of a large number of distinctive (if unoriginal) personalities living in this world. If only it were easier
to make money to buy healing items. I think at one point I won 14 yen at
the end of a long fight, which is enough to buy a toy balloon.

Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise (PS4) - So obviously, if you're a
bit tired of Yakuza games but want a Yakuza game that's different, the
thing to do is to play a game by the Ryu Ga Gotoku team build on the
Yakuza engine that has none of the characters or the setting of the
Yakuza series but is clearly exactly like the game in every other way.
The first time through (in 2018, which is what the save data tells me) I bounced off the game really hard because I was expecting the grappling
and vaguely realistic martial arts action of the Yakuza series and kept fighting muscle memory. The game also doesn't explain the mechanisms of
its fantasy combat well for anybody not steeped in the manga and anime
source for the Hokuto series. Once I had it explained to me that the
game presents all of the major canon story events reshuffled into a
urban hub (as opposed to spread out over continents worth of nuclear wasteland) the game made much more sense to me. I've even figured out
the weird timing and rhythm-game inputs that go into the special
attacks, which I've just realised are meant to simulate the stupid
martial arts discipline that the manga tries to pass off as barely
plausible.

Over my bank holiday weekend I've spent something like 22 hours
collectively playing this game almost exclusively. I'm six chapters in,
and I recognise now that I'm a bit underlevelled for what the game wants
me to be able to do, so I've spent most of Sunday becoming a better
bartender and auto mechanic. I've also helped a little girl become the
most successful merchant in the bazaar, rescued at least four other
children from fates worse than death, and won over all of the other
local shopkeepers and business owners. Everybody is on Kenshiro's side
in his quest to find his lost fiancee, and I like how that's a clear
parallel to Kiryu's character arcs in the various Yakuza games. It's not
a wonder that they thought this would work when they pitched it.

Pac Man World 2 Repac (PS5) - Bought for... a tenner? Something cheap.
Anyway, my son noticed the disc and immediately asked if there was a two player mode. And there is! It's very much baby's first platformer, where
the player controlling Pac Man has to negotiate the jumping and
exploration bits and the player controlling the little drone can shoot
at enemies to stun them and hit distant floating crate things for the power-ups inside. The game is a really clever updating of the original
title's 2.5D side-scrolling levels, but there's really nothing here for
an experienced player who had the original game on the PS2.

Lunacy (SAT) - You know it as Torico there in the other hemisphere. An
FMV maze with point-and-click puzzles and NPCs running around giving you condescending hints to which key-shaped things go into which lock-shaped things. It's charming and I've never given it enough time, but I
remember now that 30 years ago I was put off by how hostile all the
characters are to the protagonist, who's running around with amnesia and
a tattoo he doesn't remember getting. While this is a perfectly fine
story hook, it's not fun to be around those characters when I'm
confronted with people like that in real life all the time. I'll come
back to this later.

Want:
--=--

A hall-effect PS5 pad (PS5) - Both of my first-party PS5 controllers are starting to exhibit symptoms of stick drift, and no amount of cleaning
is going to fix it without opening them up and replacing parts. I've
taken to playing PS4 games with my third-party PS4 controllers, which
all required some amount of tuning and calibrating. I've gone and bought
a third Dual Sense pad (for cheap from Canada) but I only have low expectations for anything Sony sells these days. Hoping that either
RetroBit or Retro Fighters makes a good one after observing that nobody
cares about the haptic feedback options.

Bin:
-==-

Nothing game-related.

-KKC, who has Monday off to play more games with!
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From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

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

Play:

Grow Up (PC) - more of the wobbly robot with the growth mindset. This
extends things to planetary scale and beyond with multiple Starplants,
which probably explains why it runs pretty badly on my N100 - far
worse than Grow Home did. It's still been playable enough to get the
basic finish and do some of the challenges, but I'm not sure if I'll
be doing all of those this time around (given that things can almost
devolve into a slideshow at times).

Pac Man World 2 Repac (PS5) - Bought for... a tenner? Something cheap.

It's strange how I keep managing not to play Pac-Man World 2/3. I
can't help wondering if I have some sort of lingering PTSD from the
pain of doing tricky 3D jumps in the first game. :-)

Want:

Nothing.

Bin:

Grow Up apparently not allowing lower resolution modes (than 720p)
which could have been preferable in my case.

Not previously noticing that Grow Up's title screen features a column
of letter blocks apparently spelling out Little AC, presumably
referring to Assassin's Creed. Which it kind of is in a way, being a
sandbox where you need to climb up high, which has optional goals and fast-travel points scattered around. There's just less "requiescat in
pace", and more lunar exploration and being flung around by flowers.

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

In article <ADNnS.82547$kqHe.6788@usenetxs.com>,
Russell Marks <zgedneil@spam^H^H^H^Hgmail.com> wrote:

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

Pac Man World 2 Repac (PS5) - Bought for... a tenner? Something cheap.

It's strange how I keep managing not to play Pac-Man World 2/3. I
can't help wondering if I have some sort of lingering PTSD from the
pain of doing tricky 3D jumps in the first game. :-)

The Repac games have something called Fairy Mode Difficulty, which isn't
as condescending as it sounds. :) You have a little Navi sidekick who
keeps you from being hurt, gives you infinite lives, and adds extra
blocks everywhere so that the precision platforming challenges aren't so frustrating. I presume that mode is there for people who just want to
enjoy the narrative. My kid didn't really find Fairy Mode helpful whilst
also fighting stick drift.

-KKC, who has a replacement Dual Sense on the way.
--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

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

The Repac games have something called Fairy Mode Difficulty, which isn't
as condescending as it sounds. :) You have a little Navi sidekick who
keeps you from being hurt, gives you infinite lives, and adds extra
blocks everywhere

Tempting, but I might hold out for Ah Diddums difficulty. Ideally with controller-mounted stabilisers.

fighting stick drift

One of the lesser-known martial arts and/or arcade racers.

Also, very OT but... AI apparently just resolved a Millennium Problem
(even if there is some associated drama). Blimey. I know I'm probably
wrong, but I still feel like this could be a hint that things are
actually Going Places in a hurry.

Maybe we'll (briefly?) get to find out whether an AGI-without-UBI
economy "becomes a theater where humans pay each other for the
privilege of watching other humans do things badly on purpose", as
Qwen 3.8 Flash Next put it. :-)

-Rus.
--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2