Yakuza Ishin and packed lunches

Okay, GTA like run around with swords murdering the hell out of folk sandboxy kinda game.

But here's the thing - I hear it has this 'another life' mode.

Where you pack lunches, plant vegetables and adopt stray dogs.

And I wonder if the extremeness of the violent side has suddenly made them go 'Is this the only way we can imagine living???'. And in a bit of horror at what they've made, they make an alternate mode with a really different lifestyle?

I wonder if it'll get released in the western world?

The negative reviews that actual challenge in games earns

Ran into this twice, recently. The first is here. It's a review of the latest adventure time mechanic and it mentions that you can only get back to town after every five levels.

To make matters worse, you can only return to the surface after every five floors, so if you happen to lose all of your health before you reach the next checkpoint, tough luck--you’ll be dumped back above ground without any of the loot you’d accumulated. Worse still, there’s no way to quick-save in the middle of a floor, forcing you to continue playing until you reach the next checkpoint (or die trying).

Tre sigh!

And the next is of a review of might and magic in PC powerplay, where they say that whenever you rest, you use up supplies and can only carry six at a time. This is then described negatively as having to cut short the adventure instead of continue exploring.

It's so incredibly wearying to hear things that provide difficulty as being things which actually reduce the score a game is given. Perhaps unless they dark souls-like cram the 'this is tough!' meme down their throat, it's all exploro land to them?

Okay, caveat - Lord of the Rings, war in the north had checkpoints where if you died you'd lose your previously found gear. Which annoyed me greatly.

The thing is, it didn't announce when the next checkpoint was, unlike the adventure time game, where you can see how many levels you are away from the checkpoint.

Without stating where the checkpoint is, it's not a challenge that you're facing, I'd say. It's just struggling to 'not lose'.

You lose = Monster escape?

Let's face it, you're gunna reload. You don't die in the game. There's all these causal paths where something blew you up - but...not really, that got pruned at the press of a quick load key.

So what if the losing condition was that the monsters manage to escape? You can't die - get your health knocked down to a certain level and the monsters freak out and leave through various unfollowable escape hatches.

"But that's frustrating - I hate letting any monsters get away!"

Exactly. That's why this isn't going to sell on you, but to have some kind of literary merit in a game, it has to screw with what you prefer to some degree.

Some target numbers for mmorpgs would be nifty

I was playing runes of magic the other day and I realised that in play, I'd simply be made quite alot happier if there was some sort of rating system for beating monsters - like killing them in X number of seconds. And your character would get to a new zone, and be lower level and lower kit, but you'd see your number improve and get closer to the number then finally beat it!

A bot from global agenda, simply because it looks cool!

Yeah, sure, it's still basically accumulating numbers to beat it. But it'd be more interesting than accumulating numbers and just going 'more is gud!'. Atleast it's hitting a goal here.

Also I hate bloggers labels box - I wish it showed the more commonly used ones, like wordpress does! I can't find the important ones at all easily!

Borderlands - the funny thing about guns

Ever wonder something like that - who makes all these guns? It kind of doesn't matter, yet I think I'd dig it if I saw some production going on somewhere, atleast. Or the players making some.

Great game, BTW. Really enjoying split screen on my friends PS3.

Your Runes of Magic character motivations!

Are you on Siochain OR Macantacht server? If so, what's your Runes of Magic character motivation? Even if it's light hearted and a single sentence, that's fine! Even if your guys just a fighting guy, that counts!

Your characters motivation is important! So I'm paying 3k gold each!!! That's for 50 motivations total (I've only got so much gold!).

Leave your character name in your post (AND which server they are from), so I can mail you the gold. Or you can send me in game mail and point out which post was yours (send to 'Dreambroken', with a capital 'D'). You can post anonymously for this, that's fine. Only one entry per character per day.

I look forward to hearing your character motives!

Oh, and if motivations get a bit overly serious I might delete them here (but I'll send the gold anyway if it seemed a serious entry). There's one below that's a bit overly serious.