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Gonna play Requiem later this month so I figure I should play this first.

It's actually happening! MGS4 is getting out of PS3 Jail! I wonder if they'll announce more bonus games, though. Because just 2 main games + Ghost Babel is kind of underwhelming after Vol. 1's lineup. I mean, MGS4 being included at all is huge, so I'm not complaining but they could've thrown in MGSV as well to complete the Solid series. The AC!D games would've also been really cool as bonus titles. Kinda makes me wonder if there's going to be a Vol. 3 down the line.

Was there ever any doubt?

Thank fuck it's not too close to Requiem. Should leave me plenty of time to play through it at least a couple times before it's time to put my Fedex uniform back on.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds I'd tried and failed several times to get into A Link to the Past, so I thought I'd give this a shot instead, and it really hooked me. It's a great Zelda game, reminiscent of the old 2D ones while feeling much better to play. I was a little worried about the item rental system, but even that ended up not really bothering me, though I do think overall I prefer the classic dungeon item unlock system. This is definitely a fun game and worth playing though, and I highly recommend it. Grade: A Side note: Playing it on the Thor felt great, like that's where it was meant to be played. It looked great too, running at a solid 1080p 60fps.

Bosses with kill counters in online games. Nioh 3 has a thing where the spirits of dead players coalesce into a tough as nails boss that spawns randomly in the open world and drops really good loot if you manage to kill it. That's already neat but something I got a kick out of was that it displays how many players it kills until someone eventually takes it down. I managed to take one down earlier with a player kill count of over 61,000. Is it completely cosmetic? Yeah. Did it feel cool as hell to be the one who ended his reign of terror? Hell yeah.

Nioh 3 Boy, I really binged this one. 43 hours over six days to beat the main story, which for me is a lot. So yeah, I liked this one. Nioh 2 is one of my favorite action games ever and this one went in a pretty different direction, though a lot of the familiar series staples are there. Yokai transformations from 2 are gone since your character isn't a half-breed, which means the soul cores are used for summons and magic spells rather than transformations. The living weapon mode from Nioh 1 is back to make up for it. The two biggest changes, however, have got to be the ninja style and the open world. Older Nioh games had ninja abilities, but they were a specific subclass you had to devote points into leveling and the ninja items were consumable. It could be pretty powerful if you devoted yourself to it but I never really did much with it outside of a few ninja tools that were useful for my playstyle. This time around, you shift between ninja style and samurai style at the push of a button. Each style gets its own weapons and equipment and, importantly, ninja items recharge while you're in samurai style rather than being used up until you get to a shrine. Ninja style doesn't have the stance system samurai weapons get and you take more damage while in ninja style, but it has a better dodge and you do double damage with any back attacks you land. Swapping styles is also how you parry heavy attacks so you'll be switching between them frequently no matter what. Technically you can also parry with your guardian spirit attacks, but those need to be charged up by doing damage so you can't guarantee you'll always have one available when a heavy attack is coming your way. Putting together both a ninja and a samurai build is mandatory. Losing a few weapons to ninja style stings a bit since you only get one stance as a ninja, but you can now equip four melee weapons at once so that helps make up for it a bit. I might slightly prefer the yokai shift abilities from 2 but I also gotta admit that they were pretty overpowered once you mastered them. The samurai/ninja swapping feels a bit more balanced. Either way I appreciate that it's not just doing the same thing again and both games have their own distinct feel. This game also feels easier to me than 2 but I don't know how much of that is the open world design allowing you to overlevel and how much of it is me having played Nioh 2 for hundreds of hours. The open world was a change I wasn't sure I'd like but it actually worked out fairly well. It's nothing mind blowing, this isn't Elden Ring, but the world is just large enough to feel dense and full of things to find while not being so huge that it feels bloated or padded. The amount of collectibles and side activities here is generous without being overwhelming and the map size reflects that. It feels more like a Metroidvania than a Ghost of Tsushima to me and I'm perfectly fine with that. It's as big as it needed to be and no more. Plus, hey, we get a jump button now! It's fine for platforming but also opens up a whole new set of strategies for combat so that's nice. I gotta ding one aspect though and that's the PC performance. Don't get me wrong, the game works. I could run it at 60 FPS, but I could run Nioh 2 at 120 FPS and this game really doesn't look that different from 2. Yeah, I know it has an open world, but it's not like it's a visually stunning open world. It just felt like this game is a lot more demanding on my CPU than it needed to be. I have a midrange CPU (Ryzen 5 5600X) but I still don't think this should be the game that makes it struggle. I've seen worse ports, it only crashed once, but I've certainly seen better. I'm on the fence about whether I like 2 or 3 more but this one at least feels on par with 2 in its own way. I can easily see myself playing it for hundreds of hours just like its predecessor.

IT'S HAPPENING!!!!!!

One of the more tedious parts of Soulslike games is using consumable resources to top off however much exp you need to level up, especially in the early days when you had to use these items one at a time. Nioh 3 finally streamlined that process. When you're at the level up screen you can hit a single button and it will ask if you want to use however many items you need to reach your next level up. You hit yes and you're DONE. Can every soulslike do this from now on, please?

Majora's Mask is my favourite Zelda game, by far. The time thing doesn't matter. You are basically playing as Phil Connors in Groundhog Day. Skills/abilities you learn (songs, masks, etc.) carry forward (or rewind depending on your pov) with you to the next (or last) run through. IIRC you can eventually unlock a song that skips forward (or back) to the start of the loop. Most of the quests will have a sort of soft checkpoint, where you learn a thing that allows you to pick up midway through. Once you get over the heebie-jeebies of being "on the clock" you realise time doesn't matter.

Divinity: Original Sin - Enhanced Edition It feels good to have finally finished this one. I started a playthrough years ago but never finished it. I thought I was close to the end but turns out I was barely halfway through the game. Anyway, it had been so long I needed to start over because I didn't remember anything about the plot. I think this is the first classic-style CRPG I actually manage to finish. The only other one I remember putting significant time into was Planescape: Torment and I ended up hitting a crazy difficulty spike and dropping it, thinking I had messed up my builds. This game is really good. The plot is mostly fine, it has its ups and downs but it's usually interesting enough to keep you going. But the combat is where the game really shines. The way the environment and elements interact with each other is really cool and the game actually expects you to abuse the hell out of it. Most of the time, if a fight is giving you trouble, the solution is to find a choke point and set up some kind of hazard the enemies will have to get through to get to you. A patch of ice means they'll keep falling on their ass while you're free to beat the hell out of them. If there's water on the ground, a lightning attack will stun everyone standing in it. And my favorite: setting up a poison gas cloud and igniting it with a fire arrow when they cross it to get to you. They take poison damage AND they're on fire. Good times. The first time I trivialized a challenging fight by using these systems to my advantage was one of the most satisfying things I've ever done in a game. The one thing I wasn't crazy about is how directionless the game can be at times. I get that it's meant to be open for you to explore and tackle quests in whatever order you like (within reason) but the maps are also balanced for you to be a specific level in certain areas. Maybe I'm just old and too used to quest-markers and other forms of hand-holding but I ended up using some maps someone made that label each zone with the level you should be to get a general sense of where I should be exploring at any given time. Then in the second main area, the quests seemed to want to send me places the maps said I shouldn't go explore yet, so I ended up not knowing where the hell I should be going. I looked at some guides for recommended quest orders and eventually managed to figure out a logical order to do everything but in hindsight I can see why this was the spot where I dropped the game on my first attempt years ago. Anyway, I don't know when I'll have time to get to the sequel but I'm looking forward to it. From what I understand, it's a massive improvement over this one and should have more connections with the new game.

Road to Empress First game completed in 2026! This is a kind of FMV choose your own adventure/visual novel where you play as Wu Zetian, the first and only Chinese empress regnant, starting as a consort entering the palace and having to intrigue your way first to survival and then to the top. You'll definitely die a lot of times along the way though. It's a lot of fun, completely over the top in a good way. EXCEPT APPARENTLY IT'S ONLY PART 1! I haven't been got this bad by a surprise cliffhanger since Across the Spider-Verse. Still though, great game, a lot of fun. Perfectly achieves what it sets out to do, no notes. Grade: A+

Dual-screen Android emulation handheld. https://www.ayntec.com/products/ayn-thor

The first Nioh is definitely the hardest. I actually think it gets progressively easier as the series goes along. The best tip I can give you is not to try to play it like Dark Souls. Dodging is possible but blocking is your friend.

Painkiller: Black Edition Lots of enemies, cool guns, excellent music, not much more to say lol. Pretty fun, holds up well and ran without issues. This version also includes the Battle out of Hell expansion. Grade: A+ Painkiller: Battle out of Hell Ten new levels (sorta, last one is just a boss fight), some new enemies and a lot more sources of frustration lol. Unlike the original one, which started out in a traditional hellish setting, with graves, creepy cathedrals, and skeleton knights and then ramped up to more modern and weirder settings and enemies, this one does the opposite, ending in some rather boring levels. More importantly though, the platforming is incredibly frustrating, there's a couple of areas where you need to do some jumping, including most of the ninth level, and it's annoying as hell, specially with how wonky physics are, try jumping and if you clip debris or the edge of a platform you'll go into orbit lol. Doesn't help that some checkpoints are placed in hard to get locations, so it's easy to spend a good chunk of time just making your way back up, miss the checkpoint and end up all the way back down, I was actually pretty close to dropping it when I reached this part in level 9 where I kept missing the jump to get the checkpoint lol. Some of the boss gimmicks are also pretty annoying, specially the last boss. Rest of the game is still fun, but the platforming and design of the last couple of levels really drag down the whole thing. Grade: C-

I wouldn't say it doesn't matter, but yeah it's not a big stressor. I do think it detracted from the experience in that when you like beat a boss and changed the state of an area it didn't stick, so it discouraged me from engaging with the changes to the world because I didn't want to have to go back and fight the boss again to re-trigger the change (even though you can skip the dungeon to do so). I still liked the game but I do wish there was some way to make those things stick, or at least make them be activated just by like interacting with a statue or something instead of having to fight the boss again.

Previously I'd only played the Link's Awakening remake, which I did like, and Echoes of Wisdom, which I didn't. I actually ended up giving up on A Link to the Past again after I posted that, and switched to A Link Between Worlds which I'm liking a lot more. I think a big part of it is just that with ALttP you're locked to the grid, which makes combat (especially positioning) awkward and frustrating, whereas in the newer ones you can move around more freely and attack in more than just the four cardinal directions. Also ALttP gives you no guidance whatsoever, it makes Breath of the Wild look like it's on rails, and I just do not have the patience for that level of aimless exploration anymore. I think if I'd played it as a kid it would be one of my favorite games of all time, but trying to play it now without that nostalgia it just doesn't work for me. I'm a good bit of the way into ALBW now though, and unless it takes a nosedive at the end I expect to see it through. I think it does a good job of maintaining the feel of ALttP but more modernized so it's less frustrating. I do wish they'd make a remake of ALttP though like they did with Link's Awakening, I think there's a good chance I'd be able to get into it if they just freed up the movement a little more like that one.

Senran Kagura Estival Versus Also got the Platinum. Had some issues with the camera and lock on stuff, but overall it was a pretty fun game, musou gameplay so you know what you're getting into, although some enemies are pretty annoying to deal with, unless you use counters, or special attacks. Daidoji is hilariously overpowered lol, even at level 1, she can one-shot bosses in Frantic mode. Story is pretty good, the setup of being in a festival were souls of the dead return allows for several characters getting some closure, even the character stories, which are usually more on the funny side do have a couple of emotional moments. I'll be going through Peach Beach Splash soon, try and get the Platinum too, but iirc this was the last game of the main series to have this kind of serious/dark(ish) story alongside the more fanservicey elements. A pretty easy Platinum too. Grade: S

Plan B: Terraform This is a logistics/factory game in the vein of Factorio or Dyson Sphere Program, though it's a little more simplified than those (or at least DSP, I haven't played Factorio). The premise is the Earth is fucked so you're terraforming another planet to live on. Lots of setting up mines to truck minerals to factories to make steel to truck to other factories to make more complicated things, etc etc etc. It's really pretty, and entertaining, and even the little bit of story that's there is pretty fun. The only issue for me was I do wish it was a tad more complex, as is like you can have multiple trains using the same lines to move different materials but they don't block each other, and it makes some of the logistics work a little less engaging than it could otherwise have been. But overall it's still a lot of fun, and I really recommend it if you like those kinds of games. Grade: A-

I freaking love Dynamite Headdy. Used to play that all the time.

Would've loved a simultaneous release on PS5, but oh well, at least it's coming out this year lol

Dragon Quest II HD-2D Remake Now this is a video game. I assumed it would be another middling game which is the reason it got grouped together with DQ1. Now I don't know how the original was but this is easily the best of the trilogy, and I did really like DQ3. The party, the story, the game play? All top notch. At times it really reminded me of Dragon Quest XI with the way it was structured ...and some other reasons It's well worth it to do the post-game stuff and get the true ending, really good stuff. I'm part way through DQ8 3DS, maybe I can get through that before VII.

Cultic: Chapter 2 I feel bad about this. I can tell that Jason Smith worked his ass off on this game and he lovingly crafted these huge, sprawling maps with tons of attention to detail. This game is his baby and I respect the hell out of what he accomplished mostly by himself. However, I gotta say that chapter 2 feels like a step down from chapter 1. There's a massive difficulty spike with the new enemies and level design. Whether that's an issue for you is up to personal preference, I suppose, but even if I'm okay with the game being harder it has one other major issue that really started to affect my enjoyment: these levels are too big. I almost feel guilty complaining about it. Like I said, this game was made by one guy and I can't imagine the amount of time it took for him to make these gigantic areas to explore. One level in this game can be nearly as big as the entire mansion in Resident Evil. You could fit three or four Doom levels in one Cultic Chapter 2 level. It's extremely impressive on a technical level and they're laid out in a way that make them feel like real places instead of mere video game levels. Unfortunately, when actually playing it's also extremely easy to get very lost looking for your next objective. There is an auto-map that fills out while you explore but it only helps so much. There are times when the path forward is practically a secret area. I spent over an hour on a single level at one point and didn't run into a single enemy for half of that time because I was so confused about where to go. I know people like to be snobs about objective markers and compasses but this game really needed it. I had to consult Youtube more than once just to know where the hell I was supposed to go. Maybe that's partly my fault for wanting to do a whole level in one sitting but come on. It's a boomer shooter. That's how they're meant to be played. There's also several atmospheric setpiece moments where you'll be trapped in the dark somewhere, just waiting for something to come at you out of nowhere while you're stumbling around with your lighter. This can be effective in theory, but since I got lost several times this also meant long stretches where I didn't run into any enemies at all because I didn't know where I was supposed to go to trigger the next encounter. I'm willing to accept partial responsibility for it since this is hardly the first time I've gotten lost while playing a game and struggled to figure out what I was supposed to do, but it happened to me enough times while playing this that I started to feel like I couldn't possibly be this inept. Most boomer shooters will have you looking for, at most, 3 keys or key items per level. This one can have you hunting for up to 8 or more depending on the level. It's rough. Maybe I'll have a change of heart on a replay since I know what to do in the levels now but I'm not ready for that yet. I need a break from this one. Shame really because the gunplay feels great as always.