So the least hurtful witty subject header I could come up with this week
started with 'Pamplona' and I just decided not to bother.

Play:
--=--

Tokyo Xanadu EX+ (PS4) - Woo, New Game Plus. Either I'm really jaded or
this game knows exactly how to give up the right level of challenge
without being too repetitive. It's doing a very disciplined thing where
it actually leads you subtly towards content you've missed, and one of
the ways it does that is by removing play restrictions from the first
time around. Before you were constrained as to how to spend your free
time, but the second run through gives you all the options irrespective
of what's optimal or preferred. So you're not starting from zero but
you're also not obligated to remember exactly what you did before. It's
really rare for a game to respect your time like that.

Want:
--=--

Lenovo Legion Pro Gen 8 (PC) - There's a second sale on, with slightly
better prices than what was available back in August. Not sure I *need*
a new gaming laptop, but this option is much better than what I
originally specced out three years ago during the pandemic shortages. I
can afford it, but there's a practical side of me that says my current
laptop is just fine. Also that I don't actually play games on it all
that often as compared to what time I spend on consoles, so there's the
issue of low-four-digits of hardware just sitting around taking up
space. Because that's never a problem in my house usually.

Bin:
-==-

Nothing game-related.

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

Balance forward - $3,887

-KKC, who also narrowly avoided buying another Playstation 3.

On Monday, 25 September 2023 at 00:02:51 UTC+1, Kendrick Kerwin Chua wrote:
> So the least hurtful witty subject header I could come up with this week
> started with 'Pamplona' and I just decided not to bother.

That's getting to be the norm these days.

> Play:
> --=--

Starfield (PC) (Rog Ally)

I'm trying to stay positive on this one. The individual missions are fun but the whole
absence of any kind of meaningful space travel thing is getting annoying. I mean,
you can finish a mission on planet A and need to hand something in at a specific
point of planet B, so you go into your mission screen, highlight the mission and
press 'Land'. Boom - you're on a new planet without so much as walking to your ship.

Baldurs Gate 3 (PC) (Rog Ally)

Perfect. In every way.

> Want:
> --=--

The perennial favourite - time to play things.

> Bin:
> -==-

I'm pretty content with my lot these days.

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

Still not doing this :)

J

On 25 Sep 2023 at 00:02:40 BST, "Kendrick Kerwin Chua"
<kendrick@nospam.io-nyc> wrote:

> Tokyo Xanadu EX+ (PS4) - Woo, New Game Plus. Either I'm really jaded or
> this game knows exactly how to give up the right level of challenge
> without being too repetitive. It's doing a very disciplined thing where
> it actually leads you subtly towards content you've missed, and one of
> the ways it does that is by removing play restrictions from the first
> time around. Before you were constrained as to how to spend your free
> time, but the second run through gives you all the options irrespective
> of what's optimal or preferred. So you're not starting from zero but
> you're also not obligated to remember exactly what you did before. It's
> really rare for a game to respect your time like that.

That's *excellent*. Finishing Nier Automata offers something similar but
in turbo mode: you can jump to any part of the game's main story and
finish off any quests you missed due to story progress, and/or you can
do a full play from the start again. Depending on exactly how you
finished the game, anyway.

Play:

Very little, just the Monkey Island ep2 in Sea of Thieves (xbox)(pmg) -
doing the three trials to make us mighty pirates. We were doing jolly
well until the Sky mass semi-outage occured and Angus semi-fell off the
Internet, at which point we parked it for the week.

Want:

Really gotta get back to Pikmin 4.

Bin:
Usual (lack of) health stuff.

Cheers - Jaimie

--
"We don't stop playing because we grow old; we
grow old because we stop playing"
-- George Bernard Shaw

On 25 Sep 2023 at 10:17:18 BST, "Jaimie Vandenbergh"
<jaimie@usually.sessile.org> wrote:

> On 25 Sep 2023 at 00:02:40 BST, "Kendrick Kerwin Chua"
> <kendrick@nospam.io-nyc> wrote:
>
>> Tokyo Xanadu EX+ (PS4) - Woo, New Game Plus. Either I'm really jaded or
>> this game knows exactly how to give up the right level of challenge
>> without being too repetitive. It's doing a very disciplined thing where
>> it actually leads you subtly towards content you've missed, and one of
>> the ways it does that is by removing play restrictions from the first
>> time around. Before you were constrained as to how to spend your free
>> time, but the second run through gives you all the options irrespective
>> of what's optimal or preferred. So you're not starting from zero but
>> you're also not obligated to remember exactly what you did before. It's
>> really rare for a game to respect your time like that.
>
> That's *excellent*. Finishing Nier Automata offers something similar but
> in turbo mode: you can jump to any part of the game's main story and
> finish off any quests you missed due to story progress, and/or you can
> do a full play from the start again. Depending on exactly how you
> finished the game, anyway.
>
> Play:
>
> Very little, just the Monkey Island ep2 in Sea of Thieves (xbox)(pmg) -
> doing the three trials to make us mighty pirates. We were doing jolly
> well until the Sky mass semi-outage occured and Angus semi-fell off the
> Internet, at which point we parked it for the week.

Whoops - forgot until Choobs mentioned.

First two hours of Skyrim Iiiiin Spaaaaaaace (Game Pass). Was deeply
unimpressed at the onboarding. If they'd dared to repeat the "Oh good -
you're finally awake" line at the first moment, that would have sold it
to me.
The actual intro is awfully clunky, kinda mirroring Half Life but
without the cool worldbuilding sequence or the exciting payoff after
touching the thing; the explanation for perks etc in the character
builder are rubbish; the 'how to shoot and loot' tutorial is awful, the
menus are rubbish and working out how to manually swap back to your
lasercutter when the picked up gun runs out of ammo after you hold A to
switch to the gun while getting shot at was hilarious (put it in the
Dpad quickmenu would have been ideal); the 'how to spaceflight and
fight' tute is awful - it only got partway into explaining the systems
when the pirate turned up then carried on talking while I killed it with
my leet Elite skills so I missed most of the chat; the 'how to land on a
planet' tutorial is bad and then puts you not within walking distance of
the actual site so I spent an hour noodling about on a boring random gen
planet surface with an empty cave and then it doesn't explain about the
existence of on-planet fast travel...
Then it crashed after I actually got into the base. So, yeah, not
impressed.

> Bin:
> Usual (lack of) health stuff.

And probably Starfield. I have not loaded it up a second time.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.
-- blue_beetle

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

> Play:

Minecraft (PS4) - there was a Trail Ruins near the village I did the
raid at (and even nearer to another village weirdly right next to that
one, so much so that villagers would actually sleep in the bed I put
nearby), so not having previously tackled one of those I did some
crafty mining.

I think the ruins are intended as an ancient settlement of some sort
for you to gradually unearth, but in gameplay terms the key thing you
get is some mostly-buried clusters of various blocks, including
"suspicious gravel" that you can use a brush on Because Archaeology,
to get a hidden item to pop out. So I slowly got some new stuff
sprinkled in with old stuff, realised that it would probably take
years to actually get all of the new stuff which was seeming fairly
pointless anyway, and stopped there (though I'd probably cleared much
of this particular instance by then). Standard Minecraft gameplay
after a new update really.

> Want:

Nothing.

> Bin:

In Minecraft, a creeper seemingly managing to detonate right behind me
without my noticing at all until the explosion. This sort of thing can
happen all too easily if you're playing the game without sound like I
tend to (a habit carried over from how I usually play Minetest and
Vita Minecraft). It's probably just as well that I'd kept my decent
armour on.

-Rus.