From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc


Oh hey, progress. NIS America and other game companies have reported
that Sony is quietly surveying them about what the consequences of
ending disc media might be for them as individual development
organisations. What's distressing about that is that Sony obviously
didn't actually talk to any of them first before making their decision,
so now they're having to come around and ask for opinions and guidance
after the fact. That would be like a TV reality show host who somehow
gets elected president of the United States but doesn't actually
understand how public service works, who then has to decide whether to
do the job for real or just surround himself with sycophants to cover
his own incompetence.

Play:
--=--

Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise (PS4) - Completed it. I spent a
lot of time in the last chapter dithering and collecting things.
Finishing off side quests and gathering as many car parts as I could. I
had a sense that I was a little bit overpowered for the last boss fight,
and that was true multiple times over, no spoilers. I like how
restrained the ending is in a classical Yakuza way, in that it doesn't
choke off the story or freeze it in amber. Kenshiro's story is wrapped
up nice and tight, but the rest of the world spins on independent of him
in a way that makes you want to spend more time with all the characters.
The ones who survive, at any rate.

I've read a bit about the source material, and the ending of the game is
both happier and sadder than the original manga. A few of the villains
who meet violent ends in the comic are set up for redemption arcs or
even face turns that we may never get to see, and a few prominent
characters have their fates rewritten in ways that will make them stick
around longer too. I'm really glad I got to play, and one of the things
I wish is that the story was just a little bit more clever in a way that
would give you an excuse to persist in the urban sandbox the way that
the mainline Yakuza games let you do.

Team Buddies (PSX) - I, erm, borrowed a copy. I sort of had a sense that
this really wasn't worth the three-digit asking price, so I'm glad I
tried it out before buying a scarce US-region disc sight unseen. It
looks to be a nice enough tower defence game and the multiplayer
functions look fabulous. But it's also absolutely not my sort of game in
any way. I just can't abide anything that approaches RTS because I just
don't have the aptitude to be watching parts of the map that I'm not conditioned to be paying attention to. I don't have to be led by the
nose, but if there's no clear indicator that something is important then
I don't have any ability to perceive that it is. I wonder how extensive
the upcoming Steam remaster will turn out to be.

Yakuza Kiwami (PS4) - Got the trophy for walking a kilometre holding
Haruka's hand. Just randomly wandering around and doing things has
earned me about ten completion points in the post-boss open world, and I
need 15 more to get a stupid equipment type that does... something. Not
even sure what. Most of those points can be earned through combat in the coliseum, but a few of them require you to be good at karaoke or
billiards or gambling. The most likely outcome here is that I chase a
few trophies I didn't have before and then go finish Lost Judgment like
I actually meant to do this past weekend.

Want:
--=--

Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter (PS5) - Still on the short list. I talked
myself out of some stupid toy purchases recently, so obviously
something's going right in my decision making process. It's not unlikely
that there'll be a sale soon, although that means that the game will
drop under a certain free shipping threshold which means I'll end up
spending more. So that's something to look forward to.

Bin:
-==-

Nothing game-related.

-KKC, gearing up for a difficult work week.
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From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

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

Oh hey, progress. NIS America and other game companies have reported
that Sony is quietly surveying them about what the consequences of
ending disc media might be for them as individual development
organisations.

I suppose it'd be unreasonable to interpret this as Sony saying,
"nice place you got here - shame if anything were to happen to it".

Play:

Grow Up (PC) - reached 100% Grow Up completion, which presumably now
means I get to do wobbly robot adulting. It was a bit of a drag
towards the end though, there was a fair bit of just flying around
trying to guess where the last few crystals could be.

The Pinball Arcade (PSV) - I figured I'd play Terminator 2 on this
again, while it's still just about fictional. :-) TBH though, it's not
the greatest table ever. And my performance was also not the greatest.
I was missing the pre-multiball shot a whole heck of a lot, and while
I did keep on returning to it there's only so many times you can say,
as Arnold so famously did, "Get down." Wait, no, that other one. "In a
panic, they try to pull the plug"? Close enough.

Want:

To watch more of how GPT-6 Astra beat Nethack - so far I just
basically checked the gameplay on the last level. The game seems to
have been played as (amusingly) CodexDelver on hardfought.org using a
harness it wrote, and there is indeed a matching ascension on there
complete with ttyrecs which show the (quite slow) gameplay. Here's the
blog post about it from, you know, some random human who appears to
have been loosely involved:

https://kenforthewin.github.io/blog/posts/llm-nethack-ascension/

(More seriously, if you dig in the Github link's "evidence" you can
find a human-messages.json which lists the prompts.)

The LLM ascended a Valkyrie with a final AC of -9 (!) despite a fairly leisurely 37k turn count and having no less than *four* bones files
appear during the game - so it's fair to say that there's room for
improvement. Still, a language model ascension definitely has me
sitting up and taking notice. :-)

Bin:

Grow Up's much greater range on the crystal proximity detector (than
in Grow Home) often managing to be either too much or not enough.

-Rus.
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