Slowly carrying on with Fire Emblem Engage. It's picking up a bit and it's pretty fun now. I'm playing on the easiest settings (no permadeath and unlimited use of the time crystal to rewind when you make mistakes). I'm slightly conflicted about that now, because I did enjoy the old challenge of getting through without anyone ever dying. In Engage I'm mainly using the time crystal when I make a button press when I don't mean it or immediately seeing a better placement for a unit, but every chapter or two I have a character die and I rewind to save them (where in the past I would have restarted the chapter). On one chapter, I didn't bother rewinding and just let someone die because I knew they'd come back. It is a huge (real) time saver, but it's a very different feel from older FE games. I know I could play with harder settings, but now the option is there, I'm not sure I have the patience and time to go back to the old way. Not sure what the point of this ramble was - still a fun game, and I'm definitely going to play through to the end.

They stipulate the card cannot be used for fares below £12 between 04:00 and 10:00, Monday to Friday.

The rule does not apply in July and August, when Mr Williamson used his railcard on several similar journeys without falling foul of the rules.

This is pretty confusing to be fair - I wouldn't expect a rule about train tickets that applies during some months and not others. We're used to conditions about time of day and day of week, but month is a new one for me.

So if it gets that far, I wonder if she gets retrialed with a proper statistician to provide comment and different experts, or she is just acquitted?

I felt like Scarlet/Violet were maybe the worst mainline pokemon games I've played. The performance issues and glitches can be annoying, but it's not a dealbreaker. It's more the overall feel of it. The gyms didn't have the same sense as older games, and the battling aspect didn't seem to have as much importance in the game.

Yeah, a few of the puzzles are really hard if you just don't see it. I think I was trying for half an hour on both those tricky ones before getting it or giving up.

I'm still really early on in Engage, so I can't really comment on it, but between battles I'm just watching the cutscenes and going through the dialogue, not doing any of the optional support conversations or even going back to the base to check the shops etc. so it's quite a fast pace. The story so far feels a bit meh, though - not very epic.

I thought I might try Three Houses after this and just skip/auto as much of the monastery stuff as I could, but if I actually have to do that stuff to recruit people, it's going to get annoying.

I have come across my favorite boss from Oracle of Ages

It's not the only returning boss - I'm not sure if there's a plot reason for it or they just felt like recycling

I gave up on FFVII because it stopped being fun. The Midgar parts were fun, but at a certain stage it just started feeling like a bunch of random events strung together with only a loose connection to the plot. I got up to doing the mandatory chocobo race.

I've been watching my son play some Echoes of Wisdom and got called upon to solve some dungeon puzzles he couldn't get past. The hardest ones were figuring out that you could place echoes far away by holding down the button (presumably that was in a tutorial, but I missed it). Then there was trying to get past a water flow that was pushing in the wrong direction. ::: spoiler spoiler It didn't feel like the correct solution, but I did it my placing a shark and following it so that it took me to the other side. ::: Last, in the ice temple, there was a room with a fan and ice and fire vents on either side where I couldn't reach the doorway. To my shame, I had to look up how to do it

::: spoiler spoiler I knew I wanted to turn the water to ice, but didn't realise you could do it with the orb in the adjoining room. :::

For myself, I started playing Fire Emblem Engage. I could have chosen Three Houses, and its story looks more interesting, but I'm not that into social sim stuff and they say the Engage battles are better.

There's just enough time to rerelease the old f-zero games in between Mario Party releases; not quite enough to make a successor to GX.

This is a statement from North Korea, so I'm not sure they'd agree

I've helped him out with just a couple of things, like a cloud boss battle, but he's mainly tackling it by himself, which I'm happy with.

FFIX seems to be regarded as a beter game in some ways, but I think FFVII is more iconic. I think I only ever tried out VI before (not for long, I couldn't get into it). I'm not sure whether I'll try out any others after this - I know there's IX and X at least also on the eshop

I'm stepping away from Super Smash Bros because now I'm literally just grinding gold extremely slowly to buy the last ~60 odd spirits I'm missing, which are all just DLC spirits. It's not fun that way.

Bought Echoes of Wisdom, but my son's been playing it and I probably won't tackle it myself any time soon.

Instead I bought FFVII since it was on discount and I'd never played it before. I'm slightly disappointed after hearing it being hyped for 20 years - but it's still enjoyable enough to carry on with.

The fast pass has been a thing for years, but are you saying the last three chapters are permanently locked? That's terrible.

Current interest rates with six times my salary - not sure I could even afford the repayments.

Same here. I don't know that she's innocent, but there didn't seem to be any hard evidence. It's terrible for the parents to have this certainty over the deaths taken away, but I expect it will get overturned eventually.

I bought nintendo online so that I could try out the online mode mode in super smash bros, and it's really discouraging. I thought I was alright at it because I've basically completed the game and done the hardest challenges, but on online I'm riduclously outclassed. I think I played like 30 games last night and won only 2. I know it has a ranking system to match you up with similar players - I don't know if it starts you out pretty high at first or something, because I feel like I'm a level 1 CPU right now.

The Home Office official said that because Alina is over 18 she is not being granted permission to come to the UK as a dependant of her parents.

They're not counting her as a dependent child because she's an adult, but it seems to ignore the fact that her parents care for her in some way

In Smash Ultimate, do you mean the playable characters or the spirits? I've been grinding away at the spirits still, and I've got about 175 still to go. The spirit board is almost clear I think, so I'm guessing there's loads (like most of the DLC ones) that I still have to buy using gold.

The 3D on the 3DS was a harmless gimmick because it could be turned off, and that's what I always did, but I would have liked a cheaper version without it. I think they eventually did that with the 2DS XL.

iPlayer needs a login, I can't remember if you need to prove that you've paid for your TV licence

I have passed 1000, so a few hundred left. A lot of those are summons and enhanceable ones, so I'll have to grind SP. And there's a few 4-star legends that I can't get past, it's Super Sonic and Evil Ryu at the moment that I've been beaten by multiple times.