I count days now for a specific reason. I wrote about me and booze in the past, and needless to say it has reared its ugly head in my life again in a way that became supremely problematic. I finally decided to do something about it and I entered treatment for alcoholism. I completed a month and a half in rehab and am now living in a sober-house situation, all in order to not repeat mistakes of my past. Like I said in my last post, I haven’t gotten the chance to game in the way I used to, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have plans to fix that. There are a couple of games that I started, but have not gotten deep into yet, but time will change that.
I admit it is weird to be sober in this way, this sort of enforced regimen. My head feels clearer than it has in a long, long time, but a large part of me has no clue what to do with the lack of fog. This new try at sobriety comes off the back of some actual legal problems, and as such, I cannot work as a teacher for the time being, not even substitute teaching. This has led to some money issues for me, I am actually kind of at the end of my financial rope, as I am forced to re-assess my situation, and what I can do for money. For the moment, I am applying to some jobs at places that I would have applied to as a teenager. I have an idea of what I want to do long-term, but it will take work, and I am frankly demoralized at the prospect of having to work at something again, especially as the teaching took so much time of my life, to largely amount to nothing.
Yakuza 0: Director’s Cut has a mode in it called “Red Light Raid”. I finally tried it just before, and it kind of sucks, at least solo. It just puts you through a meat grinder of random encounters with no real rhyme or reason to it. You get money for finishing the stages, which you can use to buy additional characters to use in these combat encounters. Kiryu and Majima each have 3 versions of themselves, one for each battle style, and the blacked-out “secret” characters are obviously the Legend fighting-forms of the two protagonists. It has multiplayer, which may enhance the experience, but I didn’t see the fun, especially since it doesn’t seem to fold back into the campaign experience at all.
I think I am winding down with this current play through of Yakuza 0: Director’s Cut. Not that I am close to beating the game per se, but I think I need to dive harder into something I have never played before. It’s a great game for sure, and never stops being great, but the additions to this version of the game over the original is definitely not justifying the time I am putting into it, especially with how limited my free time feels lately. This is one of those games where the sheer amount of extra stuff can end up taking over, and I think that is what happened here. But if you haven’t played this game before, it is definitely worth picking up.
Ray Knows Nothing 