From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc


Wow that numeric year value seems too high. Nothing to do with music
awards, just feels like way too much history all built up in my
lifetime.

Play:
--=--

House of the Dead Remake (PS4) - Okay, the Move Sharpshooter peripheral
is, surprisingly, not actually all that helpful. Sure it's ergonomically superior, but now instead of straining my wrist to move the crosshairs
around I'm straining my elbow. Having the correctly-angled gun grip
underneath the horizontal Move wand doesn't fundamentally change the
fact that I can't just point and aim. I have to point, and then
carefully drag the reticle to where I meant to aim, and then shoot. This
is made worse by the reload function being the X button, which is the
only one not duplicated by any of the connected buttons on the gun
handle and so I have to press it with my thumb as I awkwardly hold the
barrel of the Sharpshooter thing up. I shoulda saved my money.

Yakuza Kiwami (PS5) - I've levelled up my Majima Everywhere rank to B,
which is stupid because I'm almost certain that the game really wants
you to be worse at the combat at this stage. This is the sort of thing
you only figure out on the fourth or fifth time through the narrative.
I'm honestly, in a weird role-playing sort of way, dreading going to the Serena bar hangout to advance the story because I did just get through
Yakuza 0 Director's Cut and I'm not looking forward to seeing Kiryu
*spoiler* and *spoiler* his sworn brother that he literally grew up
with.

Yakuza Kiwami 3 and Dark Ties Demo (PC) - So this is just the modern
Dragon Engine (from Yakuza 6 and Kiwami 2) transplanted onto the Okinawa
map. The demo of Kiwami 3 opens with the boss fight against Rikiya, and
on principle I don't have a problem with the character model being
tweaked to look like the current voice actor. I do kind of wish they'd
brought back the old actor to do it though because he genuinely looks
more like a rural hometown street punk than this new guy does. The
performance of the demo is pretty terrible on my gaming laptop unless I
cap the framerate, so it looks like this is another game that's best
enjoyed on console rather than through Steam.

Dark Ties is... interesting? They do a crappy job of suggesting why a
player might care at all about Mine's story or his motivations, in that
he's kind of an untethered, privileged doofus. That's sort of true of
every real-world gangster in a way, but Mine's story only heads for
disaster (and anybody who played the original Yakuza 3 already knows how
his ambitions come to a screeching halt as the villain of the piece).
Seeing Kamurocho through Mine's perspective seems to play up contempt
and antipathy more than when any other characters is the POV, and I'm
not sure that's a fun thing to do over 20 hours.

Want:
--=--

The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak (PS5) - Rock, they did
reprint it as I suspected they would. The two Daybreak games are
technically parts two and three of one of the spinoff stories and it's
always bothered me that Daybreak II was widely available but Daybreak I
only lived in shops for like three months for reasons I don't completely understand. The disc is on its way to me from Videogamesplus, which
means I'm getting it for about $20 less than I would if I bought it
local. Thanks the gods for Canada.

Bin:
-==-

Nothing gaming-related.

-KKC, who needs a little more sleep.
--- Synchronet 3.21b-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

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

Wow that numeric year value seems too high. Nothing to do with music
awards, just feels like way too much history all built up in my
lifetime.

I think reading about the whole Moltbook thing has me feeling much the
same about just the last few days. But not to worry, it's probably not
a problem to give large numbers of bleeding-edge AI agents a crude
kind of memory, autonomy, net access, and... their own Reddit clone?

Play:

Grand Theft Auto 5 (PC) - some sandbox action, partly to test a new
controller I bought having finally got tired of the wonky d-pad on my nearly-decade-old PS4 pad. (And the d-pad obviously sees a ton of use
in GTA5, so this made for a very sensible test.) The controller even
takes advantage of the Hall effect, in this case presumably meaning
that the button presses are loud enough to echo noticeably.

Picross e6 (3DS) - more of this. Maybe I'm just out of practice, but
some of the Mega Picross puzzles are starting to seem a little tricky
even at just the 10x10 size.

Want:

To know what the story is behind gog.com apparently now having
available Final Fantasy 3, 4, 8, and 9 - in one form or another - yet
no others. Curious.

The disc is on its way to me from Videogamesplus, which means I'm
getting it for about $20 less than I would if I bought it local.
Thanks the gods for Canada.

I just hope you have a backup plan, in case Canada gets bombed under
the pretext of having suspiciously-highly-enriched maple syrup.

Bin:

Nothing.

-Rus.
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