Missed a few, thanks to either migraines or a relationship that needed a bit of a quality time. Let’s get back to it, shall we?

Cineast

Movies? What are movies? Somehow the only thing I keep watching recently is still LOST, and since it’s my 7th’ish rewatch of that series – go figure. Purely “comfy food” for the soul, being halfway in the second season I still have to admit that this is pretty much my favourite show and probably will still be top tier for a long time being.

Aside that, at least one interesting thing should pop up next week then: Napoleon is out on Apple TV+, so expect maybe a word or two about that then.

Games

Going full retro with some emulators at the moment. With a mix of RetroArch and Aethersx2, my MacBook has been turned into a decent gaming machine. Still not going the full pirate mode, because why would I – there’s plenty of games on my shelfs here which I never really played. That’s a collectors thing: Buy game, throw it in, watch intro, decide “it works” – then put it on the shelf and never touch it again. So, the last few weeks I’m mostly going back to some real classics, where a few stood out especially.

After years of owning it, it was time to start some Persona 4 and holy, I think I really missed out on that one. So far I’m about 4 hours in, and I did get to actually play like… 15 minutes? Whoever tells me next time that Kojima is “just doing movies”, oh boi, you gotta sit down and play *this* one. Kojima is tame compared to that, trust me. Still, the characters are fun, the dialogues are well written, the story is engaging and that bit of a combat system I got to see is also super decent, which makes me actually enjoy this a lot. I got to admit though, I see why they turned this game into an animated series. It simply makes sense – it’s really a *lot* of story and little gameplay, at least at the beginning. We’ll see where this will go.

Besides hanging with anime school kids I also spend a decent chunk of my time with Virtua Tennis for the Dreamcast again. The simple, yet addictive gameplay is what keeps me coming back to this one, and the World Tour mode with it’s various challenges is exactly that kind of Arcade gaming which I really miss a lot these days, where most games seem to end up being less game, but more “as a service” instead. I’d rather stick it to the “insert coin to continue” formula honestly, so there goes modern gaming for me, I guess.

Last one noteworthy is GTA San Andreas, which clearly shows its age to be honest, running the original PS2 version. Still, with the color filters (these sun rises!) it’s still my favourite version of this game. Some of the gameplay mechanics seem rather basic today (switching between a thousand weapons with the shoulder buttons?), but it’s still quite impressive considering the original hardware to see such an massive open world come to life. Sure, a lot of areas are what you’d consider “empty” nowadays, but for that time? I’m really impressed they pulled that off at all, and it packs a ton of content on top of all. So, while mostly just roaming around and doing more sightseeing instead of actual missions, I’m having quite a good time here.