Mister Jack

Okay forget what I said before. I told a friend of mine about the one I had bought and he directed me to this 27 inch monitor that has the same resolution and HDR and all that other stuff for basically the same sale price. Only trade-off is it's 144hz instead of 165, but I think the tradeoff of getting an extra 3 inches on the screen is more than worth it. This was right down the street at my local Best Buy so I canceled the other one and now I've already got this bad boy bought and hooked up.

I honestly wasn't planning to upgrade my monitor until next year but this was on a Christmas sale plus there was a 30 dollar coupon so I'm getting a $260 monitor for $189. That's just too good an offer to pass up.

My old chair was getting uncomfortable but fortunately I had an extended warranty on it. Since there's a Christmas sale going on I got this upgrade, normally $380, basically for free minus the cost of a new warranty.

Fuck it, the Trump tariffs are about to make PC parts stupidly unaffordable again, so I'm just gonna go for broke and be set for the next five years minimum.

I downloaded the game pass version and it was a box to check or uncheck when I did it.

Really appreciate that Indiana Jones makes the 4K textures an optional download. I really wish more games would separate things you don't need like language packs and 4K textures.

Time to join the 32GB master race.

I've been super into VR this year. Next to my PC it's easily my most played platform these days. I bought the Serious Sam VR bundle in the steam autumn sale because it was extremely cheap and boy, lemme tell ya, Serious Sam is a much better game in VR. It's definitely old, and you can tell it was originally made for Vive controllers without joysticks, but it works fine with modern VR controllers like the Oculus Touch so it's not really a problem after a few tweaks. More importantly, playing it this way ends up giving you several improvements, some of which might not have even been intentional. 1) You can dual wield any gun as soon as you pick it up. You can also use a different gun in each hand. It opens up some new strategies. 2) Since you can free aim in any direction crowds are much less tedious to deal with than in the flat version so you're not just hitting S on the keyboard while holding down M1 the whole time. You can also shoot enemy projectiles out of the air much more easily, especially if you're dual wielding a pistol or assault rifle in one hand specifically for that purpose while using your other hand to deal damage. 3) Enemy health is NOT adjusted to take dual wielding into account, so everything dies faster. It really doesn't make the game too easy because you still have dozens and dozens of them coming at you in every wave. It just means battles don't overstay their welcome anymore. 4) Since you can free aim that means you can sweep the flamethrower back and forth in front of you to make a giant fiery wall of death instead of just aiming it in a straight line. 5) The sniper rifle is used by actually looking through the scope, so you can maintain situational awareness around yourself while sniping rather than having a big black circle blinding your peripheral vision. 6) The revolvers and the shotgun can fire as fast as you can pull the trigger, so if you're quick these basic weapons become absolute death dealers. Not bad for 2.99

If you own a Quest headset Meta is giving out three free months of Quest+ right now, which is basically Game Pass for VR headsets. It includes two new free games every month as well as a rotating catalog of games to download. Great way to try some of those titles that looked neat but you didn't want to pay full price for them.

For me this has been the year of VR.

Synapse This game might be a roguelike, but it's still a pure power fantasy. It takes a little while to really build up enough permanent upgrades to reach your full potential, but compared to other roguelikes I beat this one completely in just three days of play. I'm not really complaining though because the telekinetic powers are cool as hell. It's hardly the first game to have them or even the first VR game, but something about just looking at someone and flinging them away like trash thanks to the eye tracking hits different compared to merely putting an aiming reticle over them. It sounds like a minor thing but it changes the whole feel of the game. Plus, there's no meter or cooldown or anything like that on your powers. You can pick people up and fling them around as much as you want. Your only real restriction is you can't pick up heavies and you can only hold one object or person at a time. I've cleared entire levels without firing a single shot from my gun, instead just tossing people off of cliffs or into lava or into their own grenades or into each other. Of course, this does make it one of the easier roguelikes out there. You'll still spend plenty of time dying but like I said, once you've bought enough upgrades you are close to unstoppable. It's a pretty satisfying payoff in the endgame. The story isn't very compelling and there isn't much in the way of enemy types or weapon variety, but the moment to moment combat was just so fun that it made up for those other weaknesses in my book. If you happen to own a PSVR2 then you might as well play it if you haven't already, considering it's one of the platform's few exclusives.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C9CWQJH5?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title

I like the PSVR2 I bought but those shitty little earbuds just had to go. I don't like using earbuds when I'm going to be having to constantly turn my head because they'll either slip out or shift around and become uncomfortable. I don't want to have to awkwardly wear normal headphones over the headset either. These just clip directly onto the headset and then you can flip them down over your ears. Way more comfortable and better sound to boot.

I had no plans to buy the PSVR2 again when I've been pretty happy with my quest 3, but there's a Black Friday discount on this for 350 on Amazon. I also had $200 in rewards thanks to all the medical supplies I buy on there, so I only paid $150 out of pocket. With Horizon, RE4, RE8, Synapse, and the upcoming Hitman (if it's GOOD this time) that's enough exclusives to be worth 150 to me.

Reviving this old thread because I've been playing this mod recently and it kicks ass. I beat Blood once before on the PC, but playing it again in VR practically makes it feel like a new game for me. I never realized just how much VR can enhance those old school boomer shooters like this one. Not only is it cool to be completely immersed and be able to freely aim with your hand, but the modders even changed how some weapons are used. In these old shooters you never really needed to worry about reloading and the same applies here, but back then all you really had to do was hold down the mouse button and the game would play whatever animation it had to. In this mod if you want to throw the TNT you need to flick open your lighter and bring it to the fuse manually. To use the aerosol flamethrower you hold the lighter in front of the spray can yourself. Using the voodoo doll is no longer an automatic process but instead the game will target whatever is in your direct line of sight and then you personally jab the needle in over and over until your enemy dies. Or you can use the secondary death spell by physically waving your hand over the doll. Finally, on a less impressive but no less useful note, you can jab your pitchfork in any direction rather than just directly in front of you, which is great for handling all those rats that run up to bite your ankles. I really hope we continue to see more old school games enhanced and modernized for VR like this. Imagine something like playing Mike Tyson's Punch-Out with actual dodges and punches or playing Descent with an actual cockpit. It's a very exciting time for VR.

It's been a good year for VR. Wasn't planning to get this because the initial trailer didn't impress me but people who have played the game have said it's actually pretty fun in a squad.

It is kind of nice being able to just pick up your units and drop them down where you want them to go.

The VR version specifically.

This is VR specific but usually in a VR shooter that doesn't use a weapon wheel you'll have sidearms at your hips and one gun on your shoulder, maybe two shoulders if you're lucky. Metro Awakening gets around this by having all the two-handed holsters you need on your backpack, and you can access them depending on which shoulder you grab the backpack from. Grabbing your left shoulder gives you access to your filters and lighter and portable generator on the front of the pack. Grabbing your right shoulder turns it around so you can access all your guns hanging from the back side. It's a pretty nice compromise and you still have to reach for the weapon you want in real time so it's not like you can just break your immersion by rapidly hot swapping between them. I hope more VR shooters do something like this. I never really liked the Halo style restriction of only two guns at a time.

Metro Awakening At the risk of sounding weird I'd call this more of a horror game than a first person shooter. A very effective one, too. Oh sure, you use guns and you shoot people and they'll shoot back at you and that's all fine, but the parts of this game that really stood out to me are the segments where you're not fighting against other humans. The mutated animals of the Metro have tunnels all over the place that they use to flank and ambush you, and I'd say at least 50% of the time you'll discover a monster when you hear it skittering in your blind spot and then turn around to find it suddenly jumping at your face. It's extremely tense and it's not a bunch of cheap shots either. The monsters can't just teleport behind you. They have to physically run through their tunnels to set up their ambushes so if you listen closely and have good situational awareness you can make a reasonable guess as to which hole they're going to emerge from. These bastards are quick though, so even if you see them coming you have only a split second to shoot them before they leap at you. Backing yourself into a corner to minimize your blind spots is ironically a good survival tactic when it's available. This is a Metro game so you'll be doing things like using a portable generator to power devices and keep your flashlight lit along with looking for air filters for your gas mask when moving through radioactive zones. There's not a whole lot of VR interactivity outside of your weapons and inventory, but considering this is a world that's been blown to shit by nukes it's not like there's a whole lot to interact with besides rubble and cabinets in your search for ammo. Ammo is scarce too so you best get in the habit of emptying out the guns of everyone you kill. Don't throw away your empty magazines, either. You'll need them to hold whatever spare bullets you find. There's a decent plot here and several segments where you're not shooting anything at all but merely walking through haunted areas and absorbing the story, so if you want constant action this is not the game for you. Traveling through pitch black tunnels while hearing the wails of the dead all around you is pretty damn creepy though. I do have a few small criticisms. If you want a Russian dub, you're not getting it here. I don't know if the Ukraine situation has anything to do with this decision but it is what it is. Several maps also get recycled. They're different on return visits, owing to the supernatural nature of the metro, but the fact remains that you'll be seeing certain locations multiple times. Lastly, there's one too many turret sections for my liking. Still, this is a very solid VR title and if you've been looking for an excuse to bust out your headset again you could do a lot worse. By the way, I don't have arachnophobia but if you do this game is going to be your personal hell. Giant spiders not only creep all around the walls and jump directly onto your face but they'll also crawl all over your body, forcing you to grab around your shoulders to catch them and yank them off. Sometimes you'll even go to grab ammo or your backpack only to discover that a spider the size of a small dog has clamped itself onto your hand. There's no arachnophobia setting either so you best be mentally prepared for that.

Forgive Me Father 2 I am honestly not sure what to make of this sequel. It's not bad but at the same time it changes so much it almost feels like a different game and I can't decide if it's better or worse for it. The graphics are objectively better, no questions there. The leveling system is gone now and it's 100% an action shooter. There's only one character now, the priest, but rather than getting four unique spells you can use together you now have a spellbook and can choose up to three different effects for it to have whenever you press the magic button. In theory this offers more build variety but I found it hard not to always keep the lifesteal ability in one of the slots because these enemies hit hard and the maps can be stingy with healing items. The leveling system is gone. Instead you now find token in the levels that you can exchange for new weapons in the shop between stages. There are 24 weapons now with six categories of four weapons each, which is more than last time, but you have to choose six of them to bring with you into each mission. It does give you a chance to try out more guns since you don't have to commit to a specific path this time, but since I didn't find every token in my playthrough there are some guns I never got to use. New game+ is a thing, but it was still kind of a bummer. The gunplay feels better than the first game, although the first game already felt pretty good so that's not a knock against it. Some of the weapons got rebalanced too. The abyss shotgun no longer bounces projectiles all over the walls and now it's just a rapid fire shotgun. Yeah, it was overpowered before but...damn it, I miss my overpowered shotgun! I'm on the fence about which game I prefer. I know I had a lot of complaints just now but this one still does feel better to play while you're actually moving and shooting things. The last game forced you to choose between holding a gun or holding a lantern to light up dark areas while this one gives you a crank flashlight you have to occasionally rewind, which is easier to manage. You jump slightly higher in this one too, which makes platforming sections much easier to deal with. You can also quicksave now instead of being limited to specific checkpoints. I dunno. I guess I'd say both games are good for different reasons.