IMHO: Yakuza 3

There are many times when I feel utterly ill-equipped to be attempting to talk about video games on the internet, a place full of intelligent and experienced people who have valuable and insightful things to say about the craft. People like Tim Rogers, or Noah Caldwell-Gervais or Hans Stockmann who it sometimes seems have not only played every game in existence, but can somehow summon up something of interest or somehow even something important to say about them.

And then there's me, someone who faced with having given myself the task of reviewing the remaster of Yakuza 3, a widely-respected open-world adventure game from 2009, really doesn't even have a frame of reference with which to judge it. I've been playing games all my life, from a NES and 386 onward without a noticeable break, and yet somehow the whole genre ( I don't even know what to call them, action role playing games, maybe?) completely passed me by. I haven't played an Elder Scrolls game, a Half-Life, a Fallout, a God of War, or a Soulslike. I played one of the Might and Magic games for a bit. I tried Bioshock but didn't really get into it. Any game where you're controlling a character in a 1st or 3rd person perspective, it's very likely that I haven't played it or seen someone play it, I probably haven't even heard of it. Is Yakuza 3 like those games at all? I can't really say. I think that might make me a fake gamer boy.

But judge it I must, because I set myself a target of reviewing all the Humble Bundle games this month and this game has the misfortune to be on it. My first impressions are that it:

1. Is mostly about the plot rather than the rather rudimentary game mechanics
2. Has far too many cutscenes (I think there were seven scene-setting movies before I could do anything meaningful with my character)
3. Leans heavily on the story of the previous games in the series (which I have not played) to make me care about the characters. Except the main dude, who is my dad now (sorry dad).

I was going to go into more detail on those points. On how the gameplay that is not fighting feels like just an excuse to get you either to the fights or to yet another cutscene where we learn that our tough guy hero is just a big softie really. On how the fights feel so rote and uninspired that you just want to get back to the aimless roaming around and cute little side quests. On how the introductory exposition may well be the worse example of un-lampshaded introductory exposition I've even seen. But honestly I think the dot points above pretty much cover everything that I have to say about this game. Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm pretty sure that this game, and games like it, are just not for me.

Except...hold on just one cotton-picking second. Because wait, what's that sign hanging above that unassuming little staircase? "Mahjong Camp"?

If you ever hear people saying nice things about the Yakuza games, it tends to be that they're chock full of weird and wacky moments and odd side quests that you can get lost in, and that they're extremely Japanese, to such an extent that for Yakuza 3, for example, a lot of the content judged more obscure to a western audience, the Japanese trivia, the hostess clubs and the mahjong, for example, were cut out in localization. It turns out that in this remastered version that excised content was added back in, and that I had inadvertently stumbled across this city's one and only mahjong parlour. In an instant, I forget about the boy that has gone missing from my orphanage that I was ostensibly supposed to be searching for, and ascend the stairs.

Inside the mahjong parlour, I am invited to trade my money for mahjong sticks. Having just barely begun the game, I have very little money, but I can afford one game. I sit down at the beginners table with a mix of working folks (who kept emoting that they needed to get back to work or feed the kids) and serious gambler types (whose emotes seemed to mostly consist of sneers) and proceed to get my ass absolutely handed to me. 

Forced back out onto the street to scrounge for cash to feed my new-found gambling habit, I run into a few groups of thugs and swiftly relieve them of their hard-earned cash and belongings. After a short trip to the pawnshop, it was back to the mahjong parlour, where once again I sat down at the table and this time everything was coming up Milhouse. I repeated my victory on the intermediate and advanced tables in short order, although the fact that I kept seeing some of the same faces at each of the tables combined with no discernible change in the gameplay suggests that the table names must be at least a little bit academic. Though who really knows, we're talking about a game of chance here, after all.

The interface for the minigame is a little strange, partially (but probably not completely) caused by insistence on using a mouse and keyboard for a game that emphatically wants to be driven by a controller. This means it's frustratingly easy to accidentally call tiles when you're trying to draw instead, which would be a fatal flaw if this were a serious mahjong platform. The rules are a customisable to a small degree, and seem to be pretty well implemented, though they might be very slightly different to what I'm used to (since I should have had a win from the bottom of the river at some point but it was disallowed). My favourite feature is that the ability to call riichi is hidden, you have to realise that you have a ready hand and press another button to make the option appear, which is a nice little touch of realism that I appreciated.

It's impressive that the designers have gone to such lengths to put this detailed minigame in here, and after checking out the mahjong, I also dove into a few back alleys until I found the gambling house and a bar, both of which also housed a number of other seemingly well-rendered mini-games, each with variants and details of their own. While the main game of Yakuza 3 might not be my cup of tea, I find I'm willing to beat up enough punks to collect enough cash to try out all the minigames, at least, even if I might never find that poor lost boy at the orphanage, so it has that going for it. And that's not nothing.

Some quick numbers

• Time played: 4.9 hours
• Children abandoned to their fate: 9
• Gangsters squeezed: Somewhere around 30 or so
• Mangan hands achieved: 4
• Rating: 5 hapless thugs out of 10

The rankings so far

I find it hard to rank games that are so different to each other, but in the end I decided to give it to the one that I'm more likely to leave installed on my hard drive, so the gangsters lose out to the dwarves.

1. Hammerting
2. Yakuza 3

Next up in this series, due some time in the next few days once I've had a chance to download and properly absorb it, is Deadly Days.

Donga Tour

Welcome to the Centre for National Resilience, also known as Manigurr-ma Camp, I think I've finally gotten over the jetlag enough to give a proper tour of the accommodation that has been our home for the last week and will be for the next week before we're finally free to roam once again, Covid and South Australian Police permitting.

On arrival (in our case from a bus direct from the airport, but some interstate travellers are driving in, I believe), each person is allocated a room, one of a set of four conjoined cabins in a demountable building set somewhere on the site among about 500 of its peers. If you're travelling with others, you'll be placed next to them and can freely travel between each others rooms (provided you put on a mask while not in the rooms). The cabins are known lovingly as 'dongas' (dong-a), a mysterious word that seems to have come into Australian military usage around WWII to mean a temporary or transportable building, not to be confused with the more familiar (to me) donga (dong-gah), which means "somewhere out in the middle of nowhere", although in this case that wouldn't be out of place.

Each donga has a small balcony that represents your only contact with the outdoors, since leaving your cabin for any reason other than the occasional laundry trip on designated days (something I haven't tried yet) is not permitted. You can only use your part of the balcony (as marked by the red tape on the floor) while masked (or while seated and eating), and we're fortunate that ours face away from the sun in the hot parts of the day, so are reasonably livable, though I'm still not over 23 hours wearing a mask the other day, so I've mostly been sitting inside where I also get the benefit of the powerful airconditioning unit. While sitting on your balcony you can watch your fellow residents doing laps of theirs, or skipping, or occasionally trying to organise mass dance parties before you surreptitiously slip inside and pretend that you were never there.

Inside the room is relatively spartan, a single bed, desk, shelf, drawers and cupboard, all decorated with an institutional grey and green colour scheme. The fixed desk and limited space means that it's not really possible for couples to sleep in the same room unless they're willing to share the king single (something that Mrs. Owl in her twenty-six week pregnant state and I in my perpetually restless one are loath to do all that often), although there's more or less room for a second mattress on the floor as long as you don't want to be able to access the bathroom. There's a bar fridge and a kettle, but no other equipment, so you won't be reheating any meals. The meals are probably worth a post of their own, so I'll save that for later in the week. 

We got a care package of soap, shampoo and tasty goodies as well as a litre of UHT milk (surprisingly good) and a takeaway container full of tea and instant coffee on arrival, so we had all the bits and pieces required to make our stay manageable. If you run out of any of the basics, a call to the team will send them running with replacements. I assume that doesn't work with the packet of Strawberry and Cream lollies, which was a blast from the past that I didn't know I needed, but you never know unless you try it on, I suppose.

There's a TV on the wall by the door which gets all the local channels, including most importantly the ones that have been showing the Olympics this last week. I believe there's also some kind of TV on demand service available, but we haven't looked into it, not least because the internet connection has been...intermittent. It works, most of the time, but as you would have noticed if you tuned in for the crossword video yesterday, it's not all that reliable. To further detract from the temptation of television, the beds are on wheels, meaning that you can't easily prop yourself up to watch, and the absence of a comfy chair means that there's not really an ideal TV-viewing spot. The desk chair is fine and all (especially since our most recent comparison has been an airline seat), but I definitely think these rooms all could have benefited from a little armchair to sit and read in.

Each room has an ensuite bathroom that doubles as a sauna, since they're very well sealed and the sun beats in the little window during the day time. The showers have excellent pressure and get very hot very fast, so if your idea of a good time is getting properly steamed up then this is definitely the place for you. There's not all that much to add here, it's a bathroom, it works. It has plugs in it, which after a few years in Britain with their extremely stringent electrical regulations, we find exceedingly strange.

And that's it. There are certainly worse places to spend a fortnight, but I for one am looking forward to a reclining chair and some food that's not out of a plastic container. Oh, and to seeing something living and green, you do have plant life in this country, right?

(Jigsaw) Puzzle - 8th August 2021 NYT Crossword

I've been sorely missing the gang of miscreants that I've been faithfully signing onto discord with every day for the last 500 days or so to do the crossword with. 6pm is proving to be a pretty sad and empty part of the day with no-one to hang out with as I puzzle, so today I thought it might be fun to record the puzzle (like I used to occasionally back in 2019 before this little adventure began) so that we can do it together in spirit even if not in actuality. Curse you, timezones!

Anyway, here's the puzzle, which I thought was a lot of fun. I won't spoil it here, because I fear that would take some of the fun out of the discovered as we go along. I hope you enjoy playing along with me today, wherever you are in the world, whatever time it is where you are, dear friends.

Debris

 I've always been a fiddler. While I'm sitting around, if there's something within reach, I'm messing with it. It's subconscious, and it's deep-seated. Clicking pens, tying knots, endlessly drumming, you namean irritating personal habit, there's a good chance that I have it. I'm sure it's a thing that toddlers, or at least small children, are supposed to grow out of, but as in everything else in life, I have never been able to develop any self-control in this regard.

Most of the time can ignore this habit, but here in quarantine with nothing around but a bare countertop, it's painfully obvious, as I have been repeatedly finding myself surrounded by piles of massacred wooden cutlery from the seemingly neverending supply that accompanies every pre-packaged meal (as we can't be trusted with metal cutlery, apparently). It's got to stop. The cutlery is all going on a high shelf away from my grasping hands. 

I expect my fingernails will suffer as a result.

This post that should have been a tweet was brought to you by Blaugust 2021.

IMHO: Hammerting

Back in March, when I was last a little active on this perpetually fallow little blog, I got six posts into a twelve post series about my thoughts on the February Humble bundle. Though I played a couple more games in that bundle (and have one mostly-written post to join my extensive collection of drafts that will never see the light of day), rather than head back in time I thought I might give the concept another whirl with the most recent bundle instead. But here's a couple of problems that I foresee with this approach:

• Starting again means that I'm further from the finish line, which as a chronic project-starter seems like a pretty poor plan. But I always was a sucker for punishment, and besides, more games means more posts in a month where I'm trying to put out a lot of words, right? 
  
  
• Having not planned to do Blaugust before I got on my flight, I haven't had a chance to pre-download any of the games back when I had lightning fast British internet. Given the general slow speed and regular drop-outs of the internet connection here in quarantine, I don't have high hopes of being able to get my hands on all too many of the games over the next week or so. We'll see how we go on that front.
  
  
• I am just not particularly interested in this month's games. Back in February there were a couple of titles that I knew that I'd enjoy and a couple that I was at least intrigued about. A scan through this month's options doesn't exactly fill me with confidence on that front. This is not an unfamiliar story with the Humble Choice for me, which is a clear indication that I need to reduce my subscription.

However, there was one game on the list that had been sitting on my watchlist for a little while. Hammerting sees you manage a small colony of dwarves, exploring a procedurally generated mountain and generally trying to make your fortune. As someone who has tried and failed to get into Dwarf Fortress on multiple occasions, I'd been morbidly interested it this one as a potential way into a DF vibe without the learning curve of difficulty spikes that have made that game utterly incomprehensible to me. There's just something compelling about dwarves, I guess. Sadly, after playing it for almost 18 hours over the last couple of days (there's really nothing else to do but sleep or watch the Olympics, and don't worry, I've been doing plenty of both of those, too), I can confidently say that Hammerting might be lots of things, but it is definitely not anything like the mind-melter that I've found Dwarf Fortress.

The game was released in Steam Early Access back in October 2020, and here in early August 2021, while there's been eight substantial updates, it is still very, very clearly a game that is in early access. After what I very much hope is a placeholder tutorial of the "here is the menu button, press it to get the menu" variety that does very little to prepare you for what's coming, your three dwarves are sent into a mountain and you're left to your own devices (apart from little queue of quests that generate as you go to give you a few targets along the way) in a side-on view of a mostly dark mountain. This isn't completely a bad thing, the learning curve is gentle and the game is simple enough that you're not going to drown in mechanics before you work out what's going on out there, but it's not a good first impression.

Sadly, it turns out mostly what's going out there is a whole lot of empty space (although admittedly it's a very easy on the eyes variety of empty space), which you must explore in order to gain points that can be traded for improved technology. Some of that empty space has different colours, but though the default sized mountain is very large indeed, so far it seems like there's really only a couple of types of challenges that need to be dealt with: There are big holes, that you'll have to dig around, water, that doesn't seem to do anything to phase dwarves at all, and enemy camps, that can easily be blown up by attacking them. Do these obstacles get harder as you go down the mountain? Maybe a little, but not noticeably so. After digging for a couple of days, it's clear that there's more to discover down there, but also that it's probably not going to be meaningfully different to what's come before. Sure, I could keep digging, but there's been no real indication that there's anything in it for me, and it's certainly not going to be worth wrestling with a user interface and lack of control that is constantly frustrating. 

The other part of the game is trading the goodies that you've found or manufactured with other settlements accessed via the world map for money and for trading points, the other currency required to improve your tech. This section has apparently recently had a revamp, but like the delving, once you've gotten the hang of the basics, there doesn't seem to be anything interesting going on, and this bit doesn't have the possibility of building mighty empire-spanning railcart rollercoasters to redeem it. It feels like it's set up to have different nations battling each other, allowing you to influence the fight somehow, but after 18 hours in my game, this aspect seems completely absent, and even if it did affect you as a player, the overworld seems so divorced from the real world underground that it's hard to imagine how anything happening here it could make any substantial effect on your game.

If this were a regular game, it would immediately have been uninstalled and dragged into my 'Timewasters' Steam category, reserved for games that are a perfectly reasonable way to spend a few hours but that I have no particular need to experience again unless a peculiar itch overcomes me. Since it's in active development, I think it'll go off into the 'Rainy Day' category, to be revisited at some point in the future just to see if it's gotten any more interesting. As with the Wild Eight, another Early Access title we visited in this series last time, there's definite potential here, but the difference between what exists and what seems to be envisioned is a vast gulf that will probably never be bridged. It comes with a Team 17 logo, something I've associated with quality work in the past, so I hope I'm wrong, but if I am then it's certain that the finished product is a long way away.

And because I'm feeling a little pent up frustration, in no particular order, here's a list of things that bugged me that I hope they'll get around to fixing before they call the game complete. Some seem more easily fixable that others:

• There are different grades of materials that you can build the same equipment from. Using better materials increases the resale value, but doesn't seem to make any other substantive difference, and you also don't seem to have any control as to which quality materials different producers use. I don't know how many golden railway tracks I've made, wasting huge piles of coin and a limited resource for no additional benefit.
  
  
• There are skill trees but they don't make any sense at all. The high-level skills all require overlapping trees. It feels like this whole aspect needs to be ripped out and rebuilt from scratch
  
  
• There are neat little character models and character portraits that give each of your dwarves a distinct character, but they don't match each other. This hurts. General interaction with the character menus is a little haphazard and needs a bit of a revamp sometime, too.
  
  
  
  
  
• Some of the more complicated automation tasks like water pumping and drilling aren't very intuitive and desperately need a detailed tutorial or tooltip.
  
  
• You can control which dwarves do which roles, which works relatively well, although the interface is a little inconsistent. You can't stop any dwarves from fighting, though, which means that your entire colony grinds to a halt whenever any dwarf meets and enemies anywhere in the mountain. It would be nice to be able to set a maximum number of dwarves that will perform a certain task (like fighting or trading) at any given time, as well as just having toggles for each dwarf and some archetype templates.
  
  
• There's not really any danger out there, or any variety in that danger. Every nest of enemies can just be beaten up by clicking on it and waiting. If different enemies required different strategies (these ones need to be drowned, or set on fire, or kept under observation, or you need to use weapons with long reach, these ones can be farmed) and there were a greater range of defensive and military options (the only thing in this category at the moment are doors), that would make the game more tactically interesting.
  
  
• Dwarven priorities are a little strange. You can set certain building and construction tasks to high, medium or low priority, but you can't set the priority of digging, and even if a dwarf is set to only care about digging, sometimes tasks are just ignored for hours at a time, even if there doesn't seem to be any competing priorities. They also love jumping off places and getting themselves stuck in caverns or elevator shafts.
  
  
  
  
  
• The 'overland' trading game doesn't have very much variance at all. There are different types of settlements that provide different goods, but they they all buy more or less the same things, and there's no easy way to compare prices for saleable goods across the world or to set up automated trading. Different capitals all have the same special trading task, right from extremely early, which require you to sell them two resources, on which can't be produced until half-way down the tech tree and one that can only be found extremely rarely somewhere in the mountain. 
  
  
• Some of the other quests are really strange, too. One of them, acquired when you build you cookhouse, extremely early on, requires you to make crab soup. I'm yet to find crab meat, either in the mountain or for trade, so this task is just sitting there unfinished with the endgame goals.
  
  
• Final task is just insane. It requires you to collect 10,000 gold. I have maxed out my population and finished the tech tree and I have 3 gold, the most I've had in the whole game is 12, and tradingl which I've talked about above as an utterly uncompelling part of the game, is the only way to each money. I'm certain that I could give up on exploration and just pump out goods constantly for hundreds of hours in order to tick this off, but I'm equally sure that that wouldn't be remotely interesting for anyone involved.

Verdict? It's still Early Access, let's wait and see. I know I'm sounding a little down about the whole thing, but being able to sink this many hours into a game before I gave up in frustration is a promising start, as long as the team follows through.

Some quick numbers

• Time played: 17.8 hours
• Icy caverns explored: 3
• Rats butchered: Somewhere on the far side of 100
• Depths plumbed: Moderate
• Rating: 6 golden railway tracks out of 10

Next up... just as soon as it finishes downloading.. .and play it... and write about it to my satisfaction... Yakuza 3.

XCOM 2 Succession Game: Mission 14 (Parts 1 and 2!)

Screenshots have been eaten by connection problems here in the far North, so I'm afraid this one's going to be just the text. If you'd like an audio-visual experience, watch the video :)

Between bouts of jetlag this morning I found enough time to prop my eyes open to be able to play my next turn in our ongoing succession game of XCOM 2, which very conveniently rolled around to my turn just at the beginning of Blaugust as I was flailing around for that sweet sweet blog content. As has become my wont, this blog takes the form of both a video recording of the game or the traditional AAR.

My turn opened on the Geoscape, showing that our XCOM project has now gained the support of the whole of North America, but that ADVENT has bases in China and North Africa and their nefarious Avatar Project is starting to look very dangerous. After training a couple of new rookies into Grenadiers to help fill the whole in the roster that has opened up since Ramblin' Redshirt bit the dust, and expanding our squad size to allow us to take six soldiers on each mission, I began trying to gather the necessary contacts in Asia to discover and eventually attack the enemy base there. 

I didn't quite get through the first part of that process before I was interrupted by the summons to the mission briefing room to complete a Guerilla Ops mission, so it was back to North America for what was labelled as a 'Difficult' task. Reader, they were not kidding. Operation Knife Song was brutal. Since my last turn in the game back in early June I've played through the whole XCOM 2 campaign, so I have a bit more of an idea what I'm doing than I did back then, but that didn't stop me from unwittingly walking my team into a meatgrinder and getting them spat back out.

I opted for a six-man team of two Specialists, two Grenadiers, and one Sniper and Assault, a flexible team that I hope would allow me to deal with any unexpected threats. I quickly found a Muton and Trooper just inside a nearby building, but had left my fireteam too spread out to take them down effectively. Though we were eventually able to take them out without taking any damage, it required far too much effort to clean them up, and left me needing to make up time over the course of the rest of mission.

Next up, in the building that held the target goodies chest, the team uncovered a big pod of mixed Advent troopers, a nearby pod of sectoids and snakemen, as well as a pair of Autoturrets, all in all a significant mass of firepower in a choke point on the map. A couple of poor tactical moves and wasted abilities, triggering both pods of aliens in moves that could and should have been avoided, showed that I'd someone managed to get a little rusty in the couple of months since I last slipped into the skin of the Commander, and put the team in a pretty sticky spot. To make matters worse, ADVENT chose this turn to send in a dropship of reinforcements, leaving our team bad outnumbered and flanked on all sides.

The firefight that ensued saw the team miss a number of critical shots, and a couple more tactical errors left me ending up being forced to decide which of the team members I could afford to have shot in the back. It didn't end up well for Rakuno, who found themselves caught in a deadly crossfire, Naithin, who got himself constricted by a snakeman, or for Geoff Mason, the Squaddie who I have designated as 'UnwiseOwl Jr', whose back was left exposed to the remaining autoturret in a vain attempt to get close enough to the mission target to finish it in the remaining couple of turns. The team ended relying pretty heavily on their newly acquired heavy armour in order to have any chance of survival.

The team all hit their shots in the next turn, but were left with just too much to get done in the time available. Left with the uneviable choice of killing off one of the remaining ADVENT Captains or completing the mission, Bookahs sprints for the case, leaving Naithin to be unceremoniously cut down in his prime.

Rather than leave us with one of our A-team members dead and most of the rest carrying heavy wounds going into an ADVENT base assault an a potential Avenger defence mission, I instead decided to call my mulligan and turn back time to give it another try now that I was forewarned on what was awaiting us on the mission, being pretty sure that with a more careful approach we'd be able to do the whole thing a lot more cleanly. Unfortunately, my autosave settings had been reset to default in my recent reinstallation of the game, meaning that I didn't have a usable save point before the mission has already gone to hell.

This forced me to reload from the beginning, meaning that the mission was reset and I was once again going in blind. So much for that plan. Thus began what I hoped would be the actual mission 14, sending the same fireteam out on Operation Hell Saga.

We quickly found the first pod, consisting of a MEC and an Officer. Though we accidentally alerted them to our presence before we were ready to deal with them, judicious use of a grenade and elevation bonuses made quick work of the MEC and presented an opportunity that was just too good to pass up for Naithin to attempt to skulljack the Officer, completing an additional objective that had already proved disastrous for the team once. 

Naithin took the shot, collecting a good stash of goodies for his trouble, and the team took aim at the Codex. Dealing with it was relatively straight-forward, since the crossfire was well prepared, allowing Rakuno to lay the initial hit before Junior and Magi stepped in to finish the job, but it did result in a significant proportion of my firepower being behind the action, causing Black Widow to be isolated facing a pod of three Snakemen more or less alone.

From this point a comedy of errors ensued, with a long chain of bad RNG and the reptiles high agility combining to mean that clearing them out took a significant amount of time and involved a number of hits that would send Widow to the infirmary for an extended period. Thankfully her poison resistance (I'm not sure if that's from the armour or a PCS) reduced a lot of damage, and the cleanup was eventually managed without too much drama. 

After taking out the objective, the team faced off against a pod of reinforcements as well as another Snakeman and his Stun Trooper buddies. The reinforcements were taken out pretty easily by a combination of Magi's continuing excellence with the sniper rifle and judicious use of the Bookah's GREMLIN, but another chain of missed opportunities meant that Naithin took a couple of shots before the last pod was finally disposed of, so he'll be joining Widow for an extended stay in the infirmary.

All in all, a successful mission, especially when compared to the nightmare that was the previous attempt, with a lot of goodies picked up and the bonus objective of the disposal of the Codex completed to boot. Magi, surely the MVP as the only member of the unit who consistently remembered how to shoot, got a promotion for their efforts (picking up the incredibly overpowered Kill Zone perk), as did Rakuno (Volatile Mix) and Naithin (Shadowstep). The contribution of Widow, who kept a pod of snakes busy for an extended time, even if she didn't end up seeing too many of them off herself, can't be underestimated either. 

I didn't manage to begin to deal with the looming threat of the Avatar project as I'd hoped, but I'll leave that in the capable hands of Naithin as we begin our third cycle. You'll find the save file here. Good luck, Commander.

It's Coming Home

As the sun dawns on another Blaugust, it finds this correspondent already up and waiting in a queue to check my baggage at the airport. After a seemingly endless series of changing plans and flights and covid precautions, mad rushes and cries for help answered by so many friends, in just another 90 minutes we'll be on a plane home from the UK, for good.

Maybe not forever. We've met too many people that we love too much not to visit again (and hopefully soon) but after six years we're finally giving up pretending to be British, and sitting in an airport terminal in Heathrow surrounded by other Aussie accents, I can almost believe we're home already.

I wasn't planning on Blauging this year, but as old mate Pichy pointed out to me last night, it's not like I have anything else to do during the coming two weeks in mandatory quarantine. We'll start with this unedited description of a day in the life of a traveller in Australia's repatriation flight system, and then we'll play the rest by ear, jetlag and internet connection permitting. Will this be compelling reading? No, likely not, but it will go some way toward filling the long hours, so I hope you'll all bear with me.

4:58
Wake two minutes before our alarms go off in our budget hotel room in Heathrow, feeling like very accomplished traveller types.

5:17
Stumble onto a local bus. Despite signs and the website claiming that buses are free inside the Heathrow zone, apparently that's been cancelled. Thankfully, we haven't cut up our UK debit card just yet. I only fall over in a pile of suitcases once, to the disappointment of the early-morning airport employees commuting to work who seemed to be expecting more of a show.

5:34
On entry into terminal three from the mercifully short travellators (they were longer in my memory), we find a long line of obvious Australians. Thankfully, this government-sponsored flight is the only one in the whole area, as the queue snakes it's way around all on the flight desks on two different zones, around the escalators and off into the distance. It's not moving.

6:42
Make it to the check-in desk after a final temperature check, being assigned stylish apricot N95 masks and a festival wristband. One of our bags is slightly over the weight limit, but the attendant doesn't seem to mind, which is a great relief. Repacking the tightly-squeezed-in detritus of six years in England while everyone else watched might be more than I can take this early in the morning.

7:02
Through security, where as always I was pulled aside for additional checks. I guess even behind a mask I just have one of those faces. The apricot mask is nowhere near as comfortable or as sealed as my faithful cloth one. Guess I'm just not wearing my glasses or seeing anything for the rest of the trip. Breakfast toasties and coffee while we wait for our gate to open, with enough time to message the family anxiously awaiting any snippet of news that we can send them and to sit down and start the blog.

8:08
Through to the gate, in the sight of a plane with flying kangaroo livery. Starting to feel very real. These gates never have enough chairs at the best of times, and with half of them out of commission for social distancing (which seems pretty unneccesary given that we're all about to be sardined onto a plane) , we're fortunate to get seats.

8:19
They've opened additional seating in the next gate. And there was much rejoicing. Boarding time, 8:20, in theory. That's looking unlikely. Time for another airport selfie for the social media.

8:53
The inevitable response of the air traveller. When the boarding for the first ten rows is called, the whole gate gets up and moves as one mass. Humans, eh?

9:13
Successfully boarded and we've somehow won the lottery and scored an exit row. We will be making friends with three toddlers, but at least for now that's feeling like a very good deal indeed.  Some of our fellow travellers are still awaiting the results of their covid tests, so we're going to be delayed for a while to give them a last chance to get on board. They were brought right through to the gate before they were split off from the rest of us, though, which feels less than ideal.

9:46
Safety briefing complete. If oxygen is required, we have to remove our masks to put on our other masks. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, I teared up during the overture of "I Still Call Australia Home" at the end of the briefing. Toddlers one and three start screaming as we begin the taxi.

10:01
Toddler one is really going off. The despair in the eyes of the person in the seat next to her at the prospect of another 16 hours of this is soulful. Toddler three seems fine now. Toddler two has been asleep the whole time.

10:04
The shock of takeoff (an hour after schedule) has proven a welcome distraction for toddler one. A peace settles over everyone in the nearby rows. One gets the sense that the reprieve will be short-lived. My NHS Covid app is pinging angrily at being turned to flight mode.

10:10
The crew close the curtains and little windows between us and the folks in the premium economy seats. The proletariat in the front few rows stage a minor riot at being separated from their bags, none of which were able to be stored anywhere near our seats. Feeling sorry for the flight crew, who are all in full PPE, glasses, visors, gloves and ponchos over their usual kit.

10:24
Despite having been told beforehand that the in-flight entertainment wouldn't be available, it all seems to be working. This is good news for passing the fifteen and a half remaining hours, but bad news for my possibility of finishing the copy of Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed that I bought with me. All three toddlers are currently in thrall to their screens, to the great relief of everyone involved.

10:41
Over Cologne. Resorted to the screen becuase toddler two has woken up and has a piercing wail. After the schmaltzy Qantas ads, I settle down to watch the first episode of His Dark Materials, a series I had a very peripheral job in helping to make, but never got a chance to see.

11:22
Halfway between Prague and Vienna. I have taken off my shoes. I wish this show had subtitles, because the choices seem to be missing half the dialogue to the background plane noise or having my ears blasted out. Spotting familiar bits and pieces of Oxford is a lot of fun.

11:41
Mrs Owl is asleep next to me and I nodded off about during the final scenes of episode one, too. I've never had a decent sleep on a plane, but I'm going to give it a try and see what happens.

12:25
Sleep is elusive so far. Toddler two has set toddler three off and now it seems making noise is becoming a competition. Their parents are doing their best. I could really do with a decent meal.

13:16
It's quiet in the plane, but any hope that might engender is somewhat mitigated by the sad but certain knowledge that there's still twelve and a half hours of flight time to go. Oops. Toddler one makes a break through the premium economy curtain, and she's off.

14:10
Four hours in the air, twelve hours to go. We're somewhere near Baku. Trying no to think about it how far there is to go. The promised hot meal is yet to materialise. I'be been trying to work through my backlog of the last month's USA Today crosswords but my mind has turned into some kind of pudding.

15:38
A meal! A hot beef casserole (and a piece of shortbread) just when it was most needed. Feeling greatly refreshed and encouraged. Our first of many, many meals in takeaway containers over the next couple of weeks, and all packed up neatly in a biohazard bag to be destroyed afterwards. Just ten hours to go!

17:36
We're over Delhi now, slightly past half way. Finding myself napping on and off, I've switched from Pullman to an audio book of Matthew Reilly's 'The Secret Runners of New York'. I haven't read any Reilly for more than a decade, but this seems to be a long way out of his usual action-adventure gunfests, but I'm hoping it will just be white noise to help me nod off and distract from the noises of the toddlers who are at least as exhausted by this whole ideal as the rest of us.

18:39
Quick break from my chair to stretch my shoulders, which are starting to feel very worse for wear, and to take a bathroom mirror selfie (yes, I'm already looking completely pooped). It's a competition between them and my ears having been squished by airplane headpgones for six hours (my headphones are in an overhead locker somewhere) for which part of me is the most uncomfortable. Passengers are asked not to queue for the toilets to reduce infection risk, but on the wander down there I was pleasantly surprised by how generous all the space on this plane really is. I guess that's why we can't afford to fly Qantas if the government isn't picking up most of the tab.

19:30
Began watching His Dark Materials again, since Mrs. Owl has caught up. It feels like it's been dark outside forever. Time is definitely slowing down. Still more than six hours of flight to go.

20:24
I am just not cut out for this sort of thing.

21:30
We're over Ho Chi Minh City now. Just four and a half hours to go. One episode of HDM to go (in season one). Still haven't done any reading. Four hours seems doable from here as long as the toddlers stay quiet and the transfer at the other end isn't too ungodly.

22:36.
Everyone is asleep but us chickens. I wish I knew how they do it. I've never been able to sleep on planes

23:34
The sun coming up through the strange purple tinted windows gives the whole plane a lurid fuchsia colour.

0:34
The lights are on in the plane for the first time since the first couple of hours. Darwin is pretty close to the top of Australia, and Indonesia is pretty close to Australia, so how can we be over Indonesia and still more than an hour away from landing.

0:45
There's breakfast!

1:34
We begin descent into Darwin. There is a mad rush for everyone to fill out their landing cards to give a government department the same information we've given them at least twice already. My shoulders have set into rocks and I'm just generally a little ball of sad, despite the fact that very soon indeed I'll be home in Australia for the first time in far too long.

2:02
Touchdown!

2:10
Taxi complete. We're disembarking in groups of thirty, so this might take a while. Another attempt at the crossword, I think.

2:29
It's likely to be an hour until the first passengers get off the plane. This shouldn't be so bad after being stuck in a chair for fifteen hours, but somehow it feels like a real kick in the guts.

3:41
Once we got off the plane the whole check-in and security process was very fast and efficient. Grab your bags from the big pile and then straight onto the thankfully air-conditioned bus. Australia is kind of hot, you guys.

4:38 (13:08 local time)

Off the bus, through the welcoming cordon of distinctly NT accents and we're off to our rooms. Not much to write about, but they have beds, which I'm very interested in testing out in the immediate future. I'll talk about the quarantine facility a little more in the coming days.

All in all, just shy of exactly twenty-four hours since we forced ourselves out of bed this morning until we were able to collapse in our beds this morning. Extremely pleased that it's all gone well, but very glad indeed that we're not doing that again any time soon