From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc


I hid in my house and shunned all my family and somehow was still too
busy this festive and well-lit time of year. I'm genuinely of a mind to engineer a television station that pretends there is no Christmas and
just plays normal non-event programming. Or, you know, I could just
watch DVDs like I did.

Play:
--=--

Guitar Hero Live (PS4) - Oh, this game doesn't support normal controller input, only the guitar controller. No other controller options, unlike
every other music game that came before. Well that's just awful.

Yakuza 0 Director's Cut (PS5) - Well I put too much time into *this*.
Playing with English voices because the performances are honestly pretty
good. Mercer and Yea are not straying from the performances that Hamill
and Kurylo provided all the way back in the PS2 game, and that's really
for the best because neither of them is a complex character. Fully
formed and with an internal life yes, but honestly Majima puts up a big
wall and Kiryu is a big meathead. Those characters always mean what they
say and so it's useful for the performances to be simple too, if not simplistic. The actors they got to play all of the major opposing
enemies all understand the assignment too, and they each hit the tone
and the themes that their character embody completely perfectly. Imari Williams as old man Dojima is a particular standout.

The older I get the more these side missions hit me where it hurts.
Little girl with a dead father who insists on calling Majima 'Daddy'
because he's the only adult in Sotenbori who's shown her any kindness. Ex-gangster NPC who had to have plastic surgery to hide his identity,
which means he can only watch his son grow up from a distance and not
take part. Teenagers left behind in the economic boom turning to awful self-exploitation to earn spending cash. Even if the game weren't half
as fun as it is I'd still come back to meet all these side characters
again because they're just so immediately interesting the minute you
cross paths with them.

Battlezone (PS4) - I bought a pile of crap PSVR games because I'm going
to come into possession of that original hardware soon. I discovered
that the version of Battlezone that goes with that platform patched in a non-VR mode a few years ago and I decided to give that a go. I feel like
the entirety of what would have been rendered inside the headset is
visible up on my TV screen, in that all the action seems to happen in a
6 cm square just in the middle of it. It's pretty fun, but also a clear example of how inessential VR can be to the experience of a game.

Want:
--=--

My Guitar Hero World Tour replacement pedal (Wii) - Coming late. The
postal service here somehow routed it 200 miles west before discovering
the error. I'll spare you the boring explanation of how a streamlined logistics operation at the USPS has also resulted in a higher error
rate.

Bin:
-==-

Nothing gaming-related.

-KKC, who is back to work today for reasons of carelessness.
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From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

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

I hid in my house and shunned all my family and somehow was still too
busy this festive and well-lit time of year. I'm genuinely of a mind to engineer a television station that pretends there is no Christmas and
just plays normal non-event programming. Or, you know, I could just
watch DVDs like I did.

Being unreasonably strange, my TV-watching was mostly limited to the
BBC News channel as usual - partly a function of how little TV I watch
now, my watching of computer/gaming/cat videos having perhaps rightly
crowded it out. So, I got quite familiar with the morbidly numerous
showings of their famous-people-that-died-this-year rundown. What I
mainly found interesting about it was the implicitly-admitted "you
must be this famous for this ride" bar. It may be poor form to speak
ill of the dead, but apparently passing judgement on the dead's level
of fame in a "dear viewer, let us graphically demonstrate that you are
one year closer to your inevitable death, enjoy" programme is fine and
dandy. You don't see cats doing that. Alas.

Play:

Rise of the Tomb Raider (PC) - to the batcave^W^WCroft Manor. Where I
have mostly been able to demonstrate just how long it can take me to
solve some pretty simple puzzles. Now I seem to be stuck on what I
think it's calling the Final Puzzle - presumably, why I bothered with
this slightly tedious mode in the first place.

Guitar Hero Live (PS4) - Oh, this game doesn't support normal controller input, only the guitar controller. No other controller options, unlike
every other music game that came before. Well that's just awful.

This is where I want to say that the Aerosmith game on e.g. PS3 was
the last GH that had normal controller support - which may or may not
actually be right. Not that anyone has a PS3 now anyway, not since
that guy starting hoarding them. :-)

The older I get the more these side missions hit me where it hurts.

[...]

Ex-gangster NPC who had to have plastic surgery to hide his identity,
which means he can only watch his son grow up from a distance and not
take part.

Presuming that was in the original Yakuza 0 as well, and given the
order that the games released in, I can't help wondering if that was
some sort of devious hint at the story of Yakuza 6.

Want:

Probably to do more of RotTR's various optional tombs, almost all of
which I managed to miss or skip on my playthrough (I think I did maybe
one or two). Which had the odd consequence of this "tombs are back"
sequel actually seeming less tombified from my perspective. So it's
hard not to feel like I should make at least some sort of token effort
at fixing that.

Bin:

Nothing. I neither confirm nor deny this being related to any
visitations by the Ghost of Christmas Future amid disturbing visions
of a tombstone with "Affordable RAM" carved chillingly across it.

-Rus.
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