Yeah, every joke you can make about COP26 feels like punching down, and
the fact that oil companies are there acting like they're peer
organisations to nation-states feels particularly Orwellian. Someone with
more wit and less despair should attempt one instead.

Play:
--=--

Skyrim (Switch) - Yeah.

Lost Judgment (PS4) - Finally had some time to myself so I could get into
the meat of the main story, and it doesn't go whole hog into the mystery
that the opening cinematic teases. Like all Yakuza games, it's a slow burn
but also a satisfying one. We're spending a few hours just catching up
with familiar characters and giving them interaction that's true to the
first Judgment game but don't require knowledge of it so as not to put off
any newcomers. Everybody is charming and imperfect and we just want to
spend more time with these broken men with hearts of gold. It's a good
time so far.

There's something missing from the middling reviews of the game that I
think bears mentioning, and it's that the Judgment games are trying to say
something about society that's quite different to the mainline Yakuza
titles. The seven main Yakuza games (and to a lesser extent Ishin and
Kenzan) are all about current events, and the ways that men can or can't
respond to the world changing around them. So the men who fail to observe
the appropriate scale of the world (and their role in it) invite only
scorn and misery in their lack of humility. In the two Judgment games, the
story is less concerned about what's going on in the world than it is how
people treat each other. The first game had that awkward first-person
minigame where you have to take on the viewpoint of one of the female NPCs
and suffer the ogling and catcalling of the male passers-by on the street,
all in service of attempting to get justice for an abused client. In this
one, Yagami is swept up in an investigation of adolescent bullying that
leads to something much, much worse. Sociology is not as interesting to me
as historiography, but I can't say that I'm being driven away by this
realisation.

Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 (PS4) - I always go six or seven years between
remembering that I really like these competitive event sport games for
some reason. I have all of the old Konami Track and Field titles lying
around somewhere, but not many of the Sega-licensed Olympics games.
They're pretty mindless fun, and what I keep forgetting is that I like
these from a historical perspective as well, in that they serve as a
record of what countries were invited to each even. So you have three
different Chinas, an Ireland that's separate from a Great Britain, an
Israel but no Palestine, and whatever combination of Eastern European
borders happens to be relevant at the time.

Want:
--=--

All my freaking Christmas shopping to be done - That's all the nieces and
nephews taken care of then. Isn't it weird how everything seems to be out
of stock this year?

Bin:
-==-

Injustice (PS4) - I never play it. Off the hard drive it comes to make
room for the next Lost Judgment update. This is getting to be a pattern.

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

Balance forward - $4,119

Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 (PS4) - $20

Total year-to-date - $4,139

-KKC, who hopes to be able to order an Analogue Pocket soon.
--
-- "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:

Watch Dogs: London^WLegion (PS4) - finished the story. Very much the
usual Ubisoft stuff, complete with optional Assassin's Creed crossover
missions to blur the lines even further. It's fairly good within that
context though, and the pseudo-London map is nice if maybe a bit small
by modern standards. One big downer for me is that the game has a
spider drone like I think the first one did (I never played that) -
Watch Dogs 2 admittedly had one terrible spider bit, but here it's
forced on you regularly even you otherwise minimise your use of it. It
doesn't make much sense as a change from the wheeled drone WD2 had, I
mean it's not like it can climb up walls or anything. I suppose it can
jump, that's about it.

Anyway, as you might imagine the story isn't exactly short of
references to 1984 and V for Vendetta, explicit or otherwise. One way
this impacts gameplay is that random members of the public can be
convinced to "wear the mask" as it were, and played like a sort of
premade custom character (yet seemingly with full voice acting). I
almost wish I'd risked playing with the permadeath option offered at
the start (which isn't the default IIRC) - at the time I thought for
some reason it'd literally be the traditional roguelike scheme of just
playing until you die then restarting from scratch, but I think it's
actually more like the old Fire Emblem thing of only having a
character available until they die then continuing on with others. To
be fair, I think that approach might have been annoying, as you can
definitely get used to a character's attributes (e.g. the two I've
used most both have assault rifles, which is relatively rare) and it
can take a mission or two to recruit someone.

> Want:

The Watch Dogs games to finally add flying vehicles properly. In this
game you have the weird half-measure of being able to climb onto a
cargo drone and fly around at basically walking pace... while you
still can't fly a helicopter.

> Bin:

WDL forcing Ubisoft Account/Club/Uplay/Connect (insert
name-of-the-week as appropriate) on players even more than usual. It
sounds like you can play offline without logging in if the console
itself is offline, but the game doesn't seem to give you the option
otherwise.

Quite heavy tearing at times in WDL (I know, base PS4 in 2021), and
some pretty bad voice acting.

-Rus.

On 8 Nov 2021 at 07:45:36 GMT, "Kendrick Kerwin Chua"
<kendrick@nospam.io-nyc> wrote:

>
> Yeah, every joke you can make about COP26 feels like punching down, and
> the fact that oil companies are there acting like they're peer
> organisations to nation-states feels particularly Orwellian. Someone with
> more wit and less despair should attempt one instead.

Not me.

> Play:
> --=--

Animal Crossing: A New Hope (Switch) - v2 has dropped, so I went in. It
*really* feels like a big bundle of stuff they were meant to have
dropped in point releases over the last year or so, there's a whole
bunch of neat QoL things and some kinda-significant new stuff. Having
Kapp'n back is a joy - his songs are as bad as ever. Being sent out on a
quest to find Brewster started off well, but then he was just wandering
around on the island I first looked at and said "sure" when I asked him
to come back and start a new cafe so that was a little disappointing.
Not as disappointing as the amount of extra interactions you can do with
the cafe though. You can
* Elicit a grunt from Brewster
* Buy a coffee
* Use your amiibos to invite any characters for a sit down and five-line
chat
No running coffee errands for islanders, notably. Doesn't even seem to
be any followup on Brewster's new-found fascination with gyroids.

We Were Here - Together (PMG)(PS4/5) - noodling through. Found a puzzle
that was *exactly* the right level of opaquely-split-between-two and
hard-but-doable and nailed it first try, which I was very pleased about.
Then we wandered around our new puzzle areas for about half an hour
without working out how to do it at all, so shall be trying again
tonight. This is a good game.

> Want:
> --=--
>
> All my freaking Christmas shopping to be done - That's all the nieces and
> nephews taken care of then. Isn't it weird how everything seems to be out
> of stock this year?

Mrs has just sent me a "want anything for Christmas from Black Friday?".
Double consumerism!

> Bin:
> -==-

I'm hoping I'll play some more BotW since I'm only half-done on quests,
but you know how it is when you've completed all the major stuff...

Cheers - Jaimie

--
If you mean 'am I serious about what I do', the answer is yes.
If you mean 'am I serious about how I do it', the answer is no.