PicoBlog

Lies of P – the dark and edgy Pinocchio action game – has been a surprise hit. It’s not the response you would necessarily have expected from a video game adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio – which might be because it’s actually not. Yes, the game nominally adapts Pinocchio, with influence from both the original and Disney versions. But where it counts, it is thematically and emotionally an adaptation of an entirely different work of fiction.

The video games website IGN.com just dropped a big new investigative piece by Rebekah Valentine headlined “How Hidden Nazi Symbols Were the Tip of a Toxic Iceberg at Life Is Strange Developer Deck Nine.” Life is Strange is a video game franchise beloved, in part, for its progressive themes and storytelling. I actually have the original game on Steam — I think I got it for free when I wrote a video game column for The Boston Globe.

The chess tables in Washington Square Park’s southwest corner have been occupied by a revolving cast of hustlers for more than 80 years. When a CAFÉ ANNE reader suggested I interview these fellows for a feature, I asked what she wanted to know. Boy, did she have questions! “How often do people win? Do they compete against each other? What were they doing before this? Or is this like a side hustle!

Sorry, friends. This newsletter has been AWOL for a while, due to a combination of writing deadlines and other obligations, all of which seemed to pile up in the latter quarter of last year and continued through the first quarter of this one. It might be hubris to think that anyone noticed my absence, but if you did, I apologize—and I’m grateful for your patience. Looking ahead, I’m going to play around with the format a little bit.

Hi friends & happy Sunday, Author Mel Robbins has written about how life is like a melting ice cube, an analogy I love. As each moment ticks by, the ice melts a bit more. At some point, the entire cube melts, the time in our life runs out, and we’re no longer here. It’s not sad but empowering — life is precious and fragile, and we don’t know how much time we’ll have together.

Five girls, aged about thirteen, sit cross-legged around a supine friend, whose arms are flat across her body, like a displayed corpse. The sitting girls take it in turns to stack their hands – palms down – over the lying girl. “She’s looking ill,” they chant, “She’s looking worse, she’s looking worse, she’s looking worse; she’s dying, she’s dying, she’s dying; she’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead. Light as a feather, stiff as a board, light as a feather, stiff as a board, Light as a feather, stiff as a board, Light as a feather, stiff as a board…”

I understand that the degradation of US institutions isn’t something any of us should laugh about, but in this particular case it was hilarious. George Santos has been a wild story in U.S. politics ever since he first won his nomination and it begin emerge that he hadn’t been, shall we say, entirely truthful in his campaign. At first, there were a few inconsistencies or things that didn’t quite add up.

I won’t tell you “what happens”, but some details of this game’s story— and thus the series story including Yakuza 6 and Like a Dragon (Y7)— are necessary to give the game a review at all. Sorry, statute of limitations is up on some of this stuff; it’s been years. Since the release of Like a Dragon (formerly the Yakuza series; Like a Dragon is Yakuza 7) a couple of years ago, the series informally split into two sub-divisions: the mainline series, now changed into an RPG, and side games (like this game and the Judgment series) that stick to the series’ action roots.

This newsletter is brought to you by long-time Indian journalist Karan Pradhan who recently branched out from mainline media to start his own newsletter, The Qun which you should definitely subscribe to for interesting opinion-driven games coverage coming soon. To say that the ninth mainline game in the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series carried a massive burden of expectation would be an understatement. Ever since its announcement at the 2022 Tokyo Game Show, the hype around Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth has been steadily snowballing.