No more masks! No more limits on gatherings! Obviously we fixed all the
problems with the disease! Go around licking everything now! Sword
swallowing and trumpet playing and spitting contests for everybody!

Play:
--=--

Yakuza 0 (PC) - It's a good thing I'm enjoying so many new games on PC
now. :/ I love running around Sotenbori as Majima, swinging a baseball bat
around without consequences, being monetarily rewarded for collecting
pornography, single-handledly shaping Japanese tax policy, that sort of
thing. I don't think I fully appreciated how much care they took to make
the place look different in each time period, since in the 1980s there's
just a tiny grassy catwalk, and the later games show the 21st century
upgrade with the full boradwalk and all the extra places to go. It's also
really interesting to me how both Majima and Kiryu take it as read that
it's always necessary to be kind to children, because that's not a thing
that I've observed as being consistently true in American culture. That's
a really depressing though here in the land of no gun control.

Phantasy Star Online (PC) - Not really reporting on my own play, but I do
want to brag that my son finally beat the Forest boss on his own without
me having to be handed the controller. It helps that his FOmarl is level
35 and has two Evade amplifying armour units, but I was able to sit
(mostly) on the other side of the room and just tell him what to do and he
went and did it. This from a three-year-old who can't talk yet.

Want:
--=--

A Playstation Vita Slim (Vita) - All the recent news about the stupid
Steam Deck thing had me looking over my handheld hardware, and the revised
Vita system is a notable gap in my collection. There's an American
retailer that may have it in stock, but it's just as likely that they
never updated their online store and are just giving me false hopes. It's
also one of the JPN-exclusive colour variants, so there's an import markup
as well as a rarity markup. If they do have it, I'll still probably buy it
though. For reasons.

Bin:
-==-

Nothing game-related.

Expenditure:
-----=-----

Balance forward - $3,043

-KKC, who wonders what it'll take to turn everybody around again.
--
-- "People with happy families don't become spies. A bad | kendrick
childhood is the perfect background for covert ops. You | @
don't trust anyone. You're used to getting smacked around, | io-nyc
and you never get homesick." - Michael Westen, /Burn Notice/ | .com

On 19 Jul 2021 at 01:28:33 BST, "Kendrick Kerwin Chua"
<kendrick@nospam.io-nyc> wrote:

> No more masks! No more limits on gatherings! Obviously we fixed all the
> problems with the disease! Go around licking everything now! Sword
> swallowing and trumpet playing and spitting contests for everybody!

I'm staying indoors, and not just because of the heat. The sort of
people who stop masking at any excuse stopped masking over the weekend.

> Play:
> --=--

It Takes Two (PS4/5) - finished! Somewhat abrupt ending, but I'd
recommend this game to anyone who wants a two-player co-op. It's
absolutely superb, apart from the cringeworthy framing story.

Carto (Mac/Steam) - a gorgeous little story/puzzle game where the
conceit is that you can rearrange the map tiles in the overworld view,
then walk around the result. This creates new tiles sometimes ("Oh, the
hut is west of the forest and north of the river" so you place a forest
tile and a river appropriately, and the hut tile pops in) or allows you
to work around barriers by moving things, or follow trails in a Lost
Woods style by moving and rotating two tiles to allow you to carry on
according to the hints. And lots of other stuff, it gets very creative
and quite tricky. I'm about 8 hours into this and nearing the end I
think.

Monster Hunter Stories (iThings) - Kiddy MH! It's very cute. Put about
four hours into this, will continue.

Breath of the Wild (WiiU emulated on PC) - Very easy to set up in CEMU
and enable the graphics tweaks, works very nicely indeed at 4k60 with a
PS4 pad as motion-enabled controller (i7/2080ti). The game's still
great! I did have a bit of luck: I've been putting off sorting out the
third party shim software for using the PS4 controller motion stuff, and
now the CEMU team brought it into the main emulator, just in time for my
first motion shrine.
I'm trying to resist getting into modding rather than tweaking, or I'll
just do that and not play it... HOWEVER the Linkle player character mod
is super tempting, but v2 is old and a bit buggy now and v3 is expected
in autumn so probably Christmas. Assets for it are both new and/or
stolen from Hyrule Warriors, it looks great. No, they're not redoing the
cutscene videos with her in.

> Phantasy Star Online (PC) - Not really reporting on my own play, but I do
> want to brag that my son finally beat the Forest boss on his own

Player Two Level Up!

> Want:
> --=--

Linkle mod V3 :(

> Bin:
> -==-

Having my Switch down as non-primary when away on hols with zero wifi or
cellular signal. Nothing eShop will start.

People's excitement about the Valve Steam Deck. It's going to be
not-as-good as a £300 PC build plus a £70 controller, why are folks
going mental about it? Have they never seen a Switch or Vita or any of
the other handhelds back to the GB?

> -KKC, who wonders what it'll take to turn everybody around again.

The hospitals will run out of beds and staff soon. Hmm. Do you have that
round your way, or do the Floridian covidiots just die at home because
freedom?

Cheers - Jaimie
--
Reality is what doesn't go away when you stop believing in it
-- Philip K Dick

In article <ill7tbFhb98U1@mid.individual.net>,
Jaimie Vandenbergh <jaimie@usually.sessile.org> wrote:
>On 19 Jul 2021 at 01:28:33 BST, "Kendrick Kerwin Chua"
><kendrick@nospam.io-nyc> wrote:
>
>> -KKC, who wonders what it'll take to turn everybody around again.
>
>The hospitals will run out of beds and staff soon. Hmm. Do you have that
>round your way, or do the Floridian covidiots just die at home because
>freedom?
>

There was a run on hosptal beds last week, as a few of my family members
laerned. No COVID among them, but they did have a long wait behind many
people who turned out to need oxygen and ventilators. Florida accouunts
for about a fifth of the new cases and a fifth of the daily deaths in the
States now, despite only having just under ten percent of the population
of the country. So hooray.

-KKC
--
-- "People with happy families don't become spies. A bad | kendrick
childhood is the perfect background for covert ops. You | @
don't trust anyone. You're used to getting smacked around, | io-nyc
and you never get homesick." - Michael Westen, /Burn Notice/ | .com

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

> Play:

V-Rally 3 (GBA) - apparently winning the championship at the 2WD level
by winning every rally means that Subaru offers you a 4WD seat... and
nobody else does. Nice.

Oekaki Puzzle (PS1) - a not-at-all-obscure Picross/nonogram game. It
has 500 puzzles, which is... a lot. And at least four sequels. And an
animated character who looks rather odd.

Robotron: 2084 (PS1) - on the Williams collection. It's a shame about
the weird scaling on this version, but it plays well enough. While I'm
pretty bad at this nowadays, I can at least get to the brains level
consistently again.

Mr. Driller (PS1) - still barely getting past halfway.

Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2 (PS4) - a bit more of this.

> Want:

Nothing.

> Bin:

Silly heat.

Oekaki Puzzle dealing with memory card load/save in a way I wouldn't
exactly call intuitive, even for a PS1 game. You can only load/save
(via post-puzzle prompts or a popup menu) on the puzzle-selection
screen, and if you quit back to the main menu it seems to dump all
your progress - well, the copy in RAM at least.

-Rus.