From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc


So best practice is not to have alcohol after you get a COVID booster
because to do so screws up the delicate immune response. That's a shame because I have some Yakuza-inspired JPN-region whisky sitting here in a
lovely heavy bottle that I'm going to have to wait another six days to
enjoy properly.

Play:
--=--

Yakuza Kiwami 3/Dark ties (PS5) - And now one week later I've finished
not just the main narrative of Kiwami 3, but both the biker gang and the
rogue ex-gangster bounty hunting stories too. The Haisai Girls turned
out to be more interesting than I expected because the story is all
about found family and standing up to bullies and fits right in with the
rest of the thematic structure of the revised game. The Reapers (which
is the name that they give to ex-Tojo Clan members who are attempting to profit off of their former affiliation) is sort of a mirror image to
that, depicting people wallowing in their resentment and failures and
who are otherwise unable to move on, and it ends with a big character
surprise that I didn't see coming.

There are notable gaps in the original story that are filled in a
satisfying way, in my opinion. One of the things that they added was a
farming game that also forms the basis of all the optional orphanage encounters. So basically you can skip all of the child rearing stuff
from the original game if you want, but if you skip it you miss out on
the big plot points that illustrate Kiryu becoming a member of the
community in this little Okinawan town. Farming and merchant loops
brought in From Like a Dragon: Ishin do wonders to explain how the
orphanage can sustain itself and earn an income, and we also are shown
(rather than being told) that the neighbourhood comes together to help
Kiryu rebuild after the bad guys knock over his house. I think that on
balance I do like this version of the game being authoritative, even in
the face of all the other narrative they had to leave out.

Yakuza 3 Remastered (PS4) - I spent a few minutes trying to pick up my
save from six years ago and I was struck by how annoying and
time-consuming the mid-boss battle is in Chapter 8. After you defeat the Flower Snake Triad officer you have to pursue him on foot in the
footrace minigame they left out of the Kiwami version, and if you mess
it up you have to start all over from the beginning. That's frustrating
and not at all entertaining and I don't know how I ever made it through
on the PS3 version. Anyway, I've made it through to Chapter 9 now after
some difficulty where I can now interact with Mack Shinozuka (the
footrace trainer) and level up my footrace abilities, which would have
been nice to have a chapter ago.

Want:
--=--

For them to not screw up the next Like a Dragon game (PS5) - Mild
spoilers, the end of Yakuza Kiwami 3 implies that they're going to break continuity and head off in a new narrative direction. But they could
just as easily reverse themselves and make all of the events of the new
game an addendum rather than a retcon. The danger of what they're doing
is that it negates or even erases whole character arcs that we've come
to know and build affection for, which is discontinuous with all of the
cameos and callbacks that they still want to do.

Bin:
-==-

Nothing gaming-related.

-KKC, who has an impossible work assignment to do today.
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From Newsgroup: uk.games.video.misc

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

Play:

Hitman: Blood Money (PC) - it turns out that using a different
controller means I need to tweak every qjoypad config I have to allow
for the differing axis/button mappings. Fun. This was one of the more horrifyingly^Wenjoyably involved setups, so I thought I'd see if I
could bang things into shape enough to clear another level. The good
news is I did the first part. The bad news is that I'm at best very
much out of practice on this, and also that after some mediocre
save-heavy progress on the opera level the game seized up. Worse, the
save scheme is such that any mid-level saves are gone if you happen to
exit, and apparently an "exit" by having needed to kill off the game
process counts despite the actual save files seemingly still being
present. I'm a bit torn on whether to try running the game with DXVK
(which wasn't already the case for some reason) in the hope of
resolving random issues as it's seemed to with other 32-bit games in
Wine, or go for a different version instead. It's just as well there
isn't an Android version I could be tempted by, or anything.

Picross e6 (3DS) - for which I report neither save issues nor testing
of controls. I just did more puzzles. Madness.

Want:

Nothing.

For them to not screw up the next Like a Dragon game (PS5) - Mild
spoilers, the end of Yakuza Kiwami 3 implies that they're going to break continuity and head off in a new narrative direction.

As long as we get the Scooby-Doo ending.

Bin:

Amusing button mapping on the "GameSir Tegenaria Lite" controller I'm
using, at least as exposed in Linux via qjoypad. It has two unused
button slots with each coming after two of the face buttons that form
the diamond, suggesting that on some level the thing is being treated
like a pad with six main face buttons where the rightmost two just
happen to be broken. :-)

Writing a shell script to remap qjoypad DS4 configs to... GTL? For the
sake of maybe three configs I ever actually use, one of which I'd
already converted manually.

-Rus.
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