XBOX Remote Play works a treat

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One of the main problems with having the Xbox plugged into the proper TV downstairs is that of an evening other members of the family tend to want to watch “Call the Midwife” rather than me playing “Yakuza - Like a Dragon”.

The good news is that I can use XBOX remote play to sort this. I’m using it on an iPad with a Bluetooth Xbox controller that I bought a while back. It works a treat. It means that as number one wife is stories of newly born babies coming into the world I can be happily despatching bad guys at the same time.

Yazuka - Like a Dragon

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Watching number one son play Lost Judgement has got me interested in Yakuza games . The Xbox game pass has a bunch of them available including the recently released Yakuza Like a Dragon. It is definitely a grown-up game. I don’t think the language and the themes explored would be very suitable for kids. But having said that, the general principles that underlie the characters are very sound indeed. The main protagonist has has a strong desire to do good and always tries to see the best in people. Of course he’s also not above whacking folks with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire, but always in a good way.

The main story is interesting and well told and the side-quests are completely crazy. The fighting is turn based so you are not frantically bashing buttons (something I’m not that good at). Instead you can spend time weighing up the best attack moves and who to target before you weigh in.

Playing the game is like taking part in a well written action movie. And you end up really caring about the characters. Very strongly recommended but only for grown-ups.

Elven Assassin Upgrade

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We played Elven Assassin on the Quest tonight. It is still great fun. They’ve improved it quite a bit since we last had a go. They now have a feature you can use to skip past the easy first levels and get onto the gritty ones right at the start. They’ve also added a new player vs player environment and seem to have upped the number of simultaneous contestants which has great potential. A game with 12 or so people taking part would be hilarious.

Lost Judgement group play fun

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Number one son and myself had great fun playing Lost Judgement together when he was over for Christmas. I say playing together, actually he played the game while I made sarcastic remarks. But I did enjoy it.

This afternoon we played together again, except that this time we were a couple of hundred miles apart. We used the PlayStation 5 group play option and it just worked. We were able to hold a conversation via the microphones and speakers in our controllers and I watched the game as it was being played. I was surprised how well it works. If you want to experience gameplay together I can strongly recommend it.

Microsoft Flight Sim on the Xbox Series X

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I must have been a good boy last year, because I managed to wangle an Xbox Series X as part of my Christmas present. I got a notification that Shopto had got some in stock so I pounced. The machine arrived on Christmas eve, two days after I’d ordered it, which was most impressive. I’m now going to have to sell the old console and a bunch of other bits and bobs to pay for it. The machine is super. It works a treat and I’ve loaded all my Game Pass games onto it, including Microsoft Flight Sim.

I can’t believe how good Flight Sim looks. And the loading times are pretty speedy so that it is very easy to go for a quick flight during a coffee break. The only slight snag is that I’m having to control the plane with an Xbox controller, but the good news is that the flying skills I’ve picked up from my weekly flying sessions on the PC have transferred across. Although I still managed to plant my aircraft into the runway a couple of times in front of everyone.

Instant Piano Practice

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I’m still doing my piano practice every day. I can just about play “The Entertainer” without falling off the seat. Apparently the trick is not to practice until you can play something right. You have to practice until you can’t play it wrong. In my experience the difference is at least one order of magnitude.

But I digress. Today I hit on a wizard wheeze to keep my piano practice scores tip top. I’m using Simply Piano which has a bunch of sheet music (including Steely Dan) which you can learn from. You play the song and the program tracks what you are doing and marks you. I’ve connected the keyboard to the iPad over MIDI for optimal note tracking. And the piano can record and playback tunes that you tap out. So, all I have to do is record the song once and then I can get get a few minutes of piano playing credit just by pressing the play button.

I’m fully aware that what I’m doing here is cheating myself, in that I don’t think watching a tune being played automatically will improve my skills much. But I’m definitely going to have a go just to see if I can make it work. And I really wish I’d had access to this technology when I was around 11 years and forced to do 20 minutes of practice every darned day when I’d really be rather doing anything else.

Read "The Midnight Library" by Matt Haig

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Every now and then I read a book and think “Other folks might like to read this”. Much more rarely I’ll read a book and think “Everyone should read this”. The Midnight Library is in the second category. Its a beautifully written story about a place where people can experience all the different possibilities thrown up by their lives. But it is also about what constitutes the best kind of life and how a person can look at their options and weigh them up in a constructive and uplifting way. Yep. You really should read this. I think it is a book I’ll be going back to at regular intervals just to enjoy the writings and the feelings that they conjure up. Very strongly recommended.

New Year Schrodinger's Photographs

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Happy New Year to both my readers. We had a great New Year’s Eve. Watched a Bond film, saw in the year with the fireworks and then went to bed.

Today we went out to Hornsea on the coast for a trip out. We do this most years. Pandemic permitting. The weather was very kind we took our instant cameras.

I took a bunch of pictures and dropped them into my pocket to develop as we went around. It occurred to me that they were kind of “Schrodinger’s Pictures”. They might have turned into great pictures in the pocket, or they might be rubbish. I reasoned (probably incorrectly) that the pictures existed in both states until I looked at them. I wondered briefly about embracing the uncertainty and never looking. That way I could claim to have probably taken some amazing pictures.

I’m not going to tell you how many turned out badly…

In the end curiosity got the better of me and I took a look. I’m still learning how to use the camera, but I’m pleased with what I got.

Quantum Thoughts

I’m referring to the “Schrodinger’s Cat” thought experiment in which a cat is placed in a box with a radioactive detector which will poison the cat if it detects a certain number of particles. The idea is that because you can’t predict whether or not the particles will be detected the cat must be both alive and dead right up to the point where you open the box and take a look. I don’t think this is the origin of the phrase “curiosity killed the cat” but it might be…..

This experiment doesn’t map onto my situation particularly well, in that the fate of the pictures is pretty much determined by what I did with them before they went in my pocket, but I’m enjoying pondering about quantum photographs, which is the important thing.

Lost Judgement Game Review

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One of the great pleasures of the holidays is watching number one son play video games. This time he was playing Lost Judgement which is at time of writing on discount in the Sony PlayStation store. In the game you play as a detective/lawyer/ninja type solving a murder that gets murkier with every chapter. You do this by beating people up, solving puzzles, interviewing suspects and beating people up. With a bit of beating people up on the side. The violence is very cartoony (which is just as well considering what the fighters do to each other) but the fighting is quite deep (number one son says).

You have free range of the environments and the amount of freedom you have is very impressive. You can go into pretty much every shop, bar, café or gambling den that you find on the street. There are gaming arcades full of retro Sega games to play. You can dress up as a mascot and go around town doing good. Or you can teach the the local school dance troupe some new moves. The side quests are numerous and some are hilarious. The main story is by contrast pretty gruesome.

We are a few chapters in now and the plot is really thickening. It really is like taking part in a glossy TV detective show, with all the camera moves and captions you’d expect. Very strongly recommended.