From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc


Man, it's not safe to drive a boat anywhere right now, is it?

Play:
--=--

Yakuza 0 Director's Cut (PS5) - Completed it, mate. Stayed up late a few nights because I've been recovering from an unexpected back injury, so I
had a lot of time to plow into this. Majima's final boss fight is sort
of clunky and brute force, but Kiryu's closing battle is really
theatrical and full of satisfying combat beats. I managed both this time around without missing any QTEs and, weirdly, without having to use any healing items in spite of having an inventory full of that Habu drink
that the pervert in Sotenbori makes you aware of. Kiryu's real estate
business is maxed out because it's fun to rope in all of the side
characters as employees, but the lack of that same hook is one of the
reasons that Majima's cabaret club business game is less interesting to
me.

Much has been made in the gaming press about the 25 additional minutes
of cutscenes that make up the extra content of the Director's Cut, and
I'm here to say that they're just fine. They add a lot and don't really
take anything away, because the characters who now have survived the
story don't get in the way of any continuity or thematic strokes. All
the villains who needed to die still die, and the characters we're able
to catch up with are made more interesting for having shown their face
on camera after what was, arguably, an ambiguous or unreliably-reported
death in the original game anyway. They're bit players, not major
figures in the story, and I'm glad we have the option to see more of
them later if we can.

Stellar Blade (PS5) - That's interesting, I somehow bought a later
reprint of the disk that has the latest version of the software loaded
on it. Probably because they didn't want the initial version of the game
with the age-rating violating arse cheek-exposing costumes released into
the wild again. Anyway, it's a Soulslike but with incomprehensible science fiction nonsense the likes of which I haven't seen since Final Fantasy
13. Why do the creatures have a name I can't spell or pronounce? How can
you tell when the writhing mass of tentacles is alive or dead? Who are
all these people? Why do I care? Normal Souls games at least do a decent
job of explaining a small part of the stakes to you so that you can get invested in a small part of the story right away, but Stellar Blade
seems to want me to empathise with the hot Korean robot lady based on
nothing more than her looks and her voice, and that's just not what
drives me in this entertainment medium.

Want:
--=--

Yakuza Online (PC) - So the stupid card-based mobile Ryu Ga Gotoku
Online game actually has a pile of narrative in it, and quite a bit of
it covers a couple of redemption arcs for some of the surviving
antagonists from Yakuza 0. That makes me really insanely sad because now that's two entries in this series (Online and Black Panther) that have
never been released in English and that I don't technically have access
to the story for. And Yakuza is nothing if not a fully narrative
experience for me. Just like I hope they Kiwami-up Black Panther into a
more traditional release, I hope they boil down the bits of Online that
matter into an experience we can access without having to make
micropayments.

Bin:
-==-

Nothing gaming-related.

-KKC, who is past his little medical scare from the previous week.
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From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

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

Man, it's not safe to drive a boat anywhere right now, is it?

I'm too busy hurriedly drawing a new flag on this post to comment.

Play:

Picross e6 (3DS) - which I started in 2016, and last played in 2021.
I'm not saying I'll ever finish all the Picross e games (as I imagine
there is an upper limit to how much nonogram-solving it is possible to
fit into a single lifetime, reasonably or otherwise), but it would be
nice to at least finish this one somewhen. So... I did some more of
this. Which has been appropriately Picrossian.

Stellar Blade (PS5) - [...] incomprehensible science fiction nonsense

I was wondering if that would just count as realism at this point. But
when I asked my PC it disagreed.

Want:

Not to leave it another five years before playing more of Picross e6.

Bin:

The temptation to include some contrived reference to Oekaki Puzzle.

-Rus.
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