Mister Jack

When it comes to morality systems I hold Witcher 3 as the gold standard that has yet to be surpassed.

Morality system or not, the last thing a game needs these days is a paragon/renegade dichotomy complete with a karma bar. I think we should have outgrown that by now.

It's not just NMS. Every game I try to play malfunctions to some degree. NMS is just the most unplayable. I've been following a thread in the PSVR subreddit about this issue for a while now and this is almost definitely a hardware defect. At this point I'm just going to send it back for a refund. The fact that it's almost been a week now and Sony still hasn't so much as publicly acknowledged the issue, let alone offered a fix or explanation, has left me kind of pissed off. Sure, sometimes hardware launches go like this, but at least admit you fucked up, you cowards.

Got my PSVR2 today. Set it up without any issues, charged up the controllers and all that. Aaaaand the games don't recognize my fucking inputs. I can't even get past the main menu of No Man's Sky. The buttons work fine for navigating the PS5 menus, but once you're actually in the game it just suddenly stops functioning. This seems to be a widespread issue and both me and my friend, who was super excited for this, are affected by it. Shit sucks, man. Sony better come out with a statement about this ASAP.

Does this $70 Zelda thing feel like bullshit to anyone else? I see a lot of folks defending it "because it's Zelda" but I have a veritable laundry list of reasons that falls flat for me. - For starters, I think Breath of the Wild is already overrated, but I accept that is a minority opinion - Same map and a lot of recycled assets. I know the game isn't out but I don't believe for a minute it's going to be comprised of mostly new assets. Otherwise, they would have shown more of that by now. - A $70 Playstation or Xbox game will eventually have a price drop. A $70 Nintendo game will probably take an entire generation to drop in price even a little, and that's if you're lucky. Frankly, a lot of Nintendo games already feel overpriced to me. - The Switch is ancient hardware. They are basically charging 70 for a PS3 game. I hated paying 70 for God of War Ragnarok but you know what? I can at least see where the money went in the production because the game is gorgeous and it ran smooth as butter. A Switch game will often struggle to even hit 30 FPS in 720p, and you want me to pay 70 for that? Fuck outta here. - "But inflation" I hear some people say. Yeah, I have no sympathy. You know why? Because prices kept going up and yet wages still didn't keep pace with it. Even before COVID, the wage increase to inflation ratio was absolutely atrocious. So pardon me if I'm not shedding any tears for Nintendo getting a smaller profit margin. Making up their inflation losses with my already limited and devalued funds is not my responsibility. - You know damn well they're also going to sell an expansion pass for this game. That's another 30 bucks minimum. - Elden Ring is 60 bucks and don't even try to tell me that Zelda is going to be bigger or more ambitious than that game was.

Hogwarts Legacy I wasn't originally planning to play this right away but I got a Scottish friend who insisted and I can see why because I had a great time with this one. It doesn't really do much that you haven't seen some variation of in other games, but it's all wrapped up in a package that's so enjoyable that I really didn't mind at all. My biggest concern going into it was the combat. I worried it would just be spamming pew pew spells the whole time like an over-the-shoulder shooter, but it really isn't. Spells are categorized into different groups, and different kinds of enemies require different kinds of spells to do damage. It starts off pretty simple and basic in the beginning, but once you start unlocking more spells and the enemy types start to increase then you'll be constantly juggling between all your various spells to keep up. As for the flow of combat, I'd call it "Arkham except ranged," which I think is a fair assessment, and I don't mean that in a bad way. The biggest star, however, is the sheer attention to detail. You not only have the entirety of Hogwarts at your disposal, but also Hogsmeade and the surrounding countryside and its various hamlets and labyrinths. Hogwarts itself is definitely the draw here. I loved just walking through the halls and seeing what weird magical stuff was happening. Sometimes students will be having mishaps with their spells, the suits of armor will salute you as you go by, the paintings talk to you, and you'll even see some of the franchise's well-known ghosts roaming the castle and making a nuisance of themselves. No pun intended, but it's all very enchanting and if you have any attachment to the setting then you'll probably find it extremely charming like I did. Of course, if you don't have any attachment to the setting then I'd probably ask why you're even playing it to begin with. I also appreciate that it lets you immerse yourself in ways it really didn't have to. For example, you can ride around on both a broom and a magical beast. There is not really any practical reason to choose one over the other, but they knew there would be people who wanted to ride on beasts so they let you do it. Hogsmeade also lets you visit iconic shops that don't really sell anything that would help you from a gameplay perspective, but you can still look around and interact with stuff. The only way to get more immersed in the setting would be to go to Universal Studios. I don't really have that much to complain about here. The story wasn't mind-blowing, I suppose, but it was presented well enough and I actually got invested in some of the side stories with your classmates. Most of the characters are at least interesting if not always likable. If I have to complain about something I suppose it's the fact that after a while most of the gear you find will be at a lower level than what you're already wearing so it's only good to sell for money. However, this is somewhat alleviated by a feature I love and think absolutely every gear based game should have. As soon as a piece of gear enters your inventory, you can always set its appearance as a cosmetic skin, even after you sell it. Found a cool looking hat but the stats are garbage? You can sell it guilt free and still set your good hat's appearance to match the cool looking one. Why doesn't every game do this? For some reason, there is no Quidditch either. Maybe it's meant for DLC or a sequel or maybe the devs just didn't think they had the time or resources to properly implement it. I dunno, but I hope it shows up in some form in the future. Aside from those two things I feel like any negatives I bring up would be nitpicking. Great game. Can't wait to play through it again as a bastardly dark wizard.

Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin Man, this one hurts to put in this thread because for a good while I was digging this game and I was even willing to put in the patience it demands of the player. This is a game that mixes surprisingly complex rice farming with deceptively intricate 2D combat, and I was really willing to give it a chance. As a harvest goddess, your combat strength depends directly on the quality of your rice crops. In fact, it's the only way to level up. In the beginning you have to monotonously perform all your rice cultivating tasks by hand, which is grueling and takes a long time, but if you power through it then as time goes on you unlock farm tools and level up your farm skills, allowing you to do in seconds what used to take up to ten minutes. I know not everyone would be willing to give the game that kind of time, but it feels satisfying to watch Sakuna grow into a master farmer. I was on board. Unfortunately, once you reach about 75% of the way through the game, your combat stats get nerfed to absolute oblivion due to a story event and you are forced to power Sakuna up all over again by doing fetch quests and beating very difficult bosses with your stats reduced by up to half. It is some of the most atrocious padding in recent memory and it takes literal years of in-game time to get Sakuna back up to speed because chances are your stats will be so low that you're forced to stop fighting entirely and just spend several years farming rice to get what precious few stat increases you can each harvest so you can stand a chance at fighting a boss with stats 20 levels above your own nerfed ass. It fucking ruined the game for me and that sucks because up until that part I was having a really good time with it. Maybe I'll go back and finish it someday but I just can't take any more right now.

I was gonna wait but my friend is raving about it so much he talked me into it.

Half-Life: Alyx - Levitation This is a fanmade expansion for the base game, but for something fanmade it's polished enough to pass for official content. It even has voice acting, not by the official actors of course but by very good impersonators. This campaign will take you anywhere from 3 to 5 hours to play through the first time, which is a pretty good length for something completely free, and there's some decent variety in the gameplay. There's even a boss fight at the end! If I have to criticize something, it's probably the uneven difficulty. Unlike the base game, which carefully distributed health and ammo so that you could always go into each new skirmish with enough of both to get by, Levitation is stingier with the pickups. There were a couple times in the campaign when I was constantly dying and reloading due to being stuck with only 1 HP after an especially grueling fight without a chance to heal myself. It's definitely more difficult than the vanilla game, so I guess if you feel like Half-Life: Alyx was too easy then you might enjoy that aspect of Levitation. Either way it's totally worth downloading.

http://beta.character.ai Pick a fictional character or famous figure and have a conversation with them, or even make your own bot. This is easily the most sophisticated chatbot I've ever seen and you can also rate responses and swipe between multiple possible responses to help each bot learn the proper behavior.

I trivialized it by just staying at the top of the stairs and constantly dodging sideways

If any Persona game needs a remake it's 3.

I've been replaying Sekiro recently and I realized that ogre is much, much more manageable if you just avoid the stairs entirely and fight it strictly on the flat ground at the top. The different elevations on the stairs really screw with the hitboxes.

Okay so I know I said I wouldn't buy this at launch and normally I wouldn't but I'm going through a really rough period in my life right now and I just need something to look forward to to keep me going so I said fuck it, I'll forget about bargain hunting just this once and splurge on something fun.

I think one of the most effective parts about Faith that doesn't get much mention because it's overshadowed by the incredible presentation is the fact that for 95% of the game your only means of defense is a crucifix, which makes for a really nice balance. You're almost never completely helpless and thus prone to frustration from what feels like unavoidable deaths when something pops up unexpectedly, but at the same time you almost never have the means to permanently kill any demons you come across and can only drive them off temporarily, which gives you just enough agency without removing the tension. I wish more horror games were designed this way.

Imagine being one of those poor saps who bought the most expensive Hitman 3 bundle back in the day.

I'm starting to really hate it when games do that really annoying thing where, while you're in the middle of fighting a bunch of enemies, the camera will suddenly pan away from you to focus on the entrance of a mini-boss or new enemy type, sometimes complete with an obnoxious subtitle to introduce them, then put the camera back onto you when you've already lost your momentum and probably become much more vulnerable. Imagine if every time a special infected showed up in Left 4 Dead the game yanked all control away from you for a few seconds. It's irritating, disorienting, and I fucking hate it. The only time I ever remember liking this is in Shadow of War. When a boss orc enters the fray, you get the boss cutscene only when the orc clashes with you, at which point he taunts you for a few seconds while your swords are struggling against each other. Of course, even then that game would sometimes do the version I dislike if the orc boss spotted you from far away. At least they made up for it by having entertaining personalities.

Vampire Survivors is probably my indie game of the year. Cuphead is being funded by Microsoft now so I don't count that, though I loved the DLC.

I installed the seamless co-op mod for Elden Ring to play with a friend and it's been a pretty fun experience. The mod actually attempts to feel like a legit game mode so it's not just adding a bunch of people and steamrolling over everything. The enemies scale depending on how many people are playing together, just like in the normal game, and includes extra scaling for a fourth player. It adds some QoL tweaks to the game to better facilitate the mod too, like showing other players on the map on compass. However, it still has to follow certain rules to function. For example, if one player rests at a grace then the world is reset for all players, even if they're in the middle of a boss battle. It's pretty much necessary for the mod to work at all. Even with that in mind, this is a beta and there's still some jank. It works fairly well for the most part, but there were a couple crashes and sometimes my partner or myself were unable to summon Torrent in the field, which could only be fixed by quitting and rejoining the session. The mod has kinks to work out, but if you've played Elden Ring a ton of times already then this is a good way to revitalize the experience.

Got an Amazon card for Christmas and put it toward this. Can't wait to try it out.

High on Life Yeah, the Justin Roiland game with the talking guns. It seems to be getting a lukewarm reception but I really think your enjoyment of this one will come down to how much you appreciate Roiland's brand of comedy. Mechanically it's sound enough, although it doesn't really do much you haven't seen before. You jump, you shoot, you solve environmental puzzles, your guns have secondary functions both for combat and exploration. It works fine and it isn't bad, but it won't really blow your socks off either. My personal high points for this game don't really come from the gameplay (although I thought one boss fight in particular was pretty cool) but from certain jokes or scenes that I found funny. The comedy didn't always work for me. I still think Trover Saves the Universe is a funnier game, but it worked well enough. Some of the talking guns have endearing personalities, although I am not fond of the SMG. I did find that one annoying. If the thought of your guns talking to you is unappealing you can change a setting to make them only talk during story scenes, but if that's the case then why would you even play this game where that's the entire premise? Anyway, this one was alright. I'd say it might be good to get on sale or after a price drop. It is also available on Game Pass.

S22 Ultra. I'm getting this practically for free because I get to trade in my current phone with a special offer for unlimited plan members. I haven't gotten a deal this good in ages.

Okay I expect this will be the same answer for many people but what the hell, might as well do this anyway and see if there are any surprises. Sorry to disappoint but my GOTY and my runner up are probably quite predictable. It really couldn't have been anything else. The scale, the polish, the sheer sense of adventure I got out of this game was unlike any other open world game I've played. It is huge but not overwhelming with lots of secrets to discover and yet it doesn't bog you down with Ubisoft-style busywork all over the map. This is the kind of game I was hoping Breath of the Wild would be but was ultimately disappointed by, which I know is a minority opinion. I ended up playing this game six times, and if I can convince my friend to get the PC version I'll be going right back in for a seventh playthrough with the co-op mod. This is one I can see myself coming back to every so often even after all the DLC is out and From has moved on to other things. It's just one of the best games I've ever played and I don't think anything will ever bump it off my top 10 list. Runner-Up Damn, we were eating good this year. In any other year, this would have easily been my GOTY over pretty much anything else. It's just unfortunate for Ragnarok that it came out in the same year as Elden Ring. The production value on this is insane, the combat is even more fun than before, and the story brings things to a satisfying conclusion for the Norse saga. There are some minor pacing issues here and there, but not nearly enough to drag this down from being a 10 out of 10 for me. Next year has a pretty tough act to follow because 2022 was one of the most kickass years for gaming in recent memory.

Sonic Frontiers Finally, some good fucking food. Now, while I liked this game, I'm not about to go comparing it to Mario Odyssey or anything like that. This is very much a AA game rather than a AAA game, but I paid 40 bucks for it, which feels about right. The open world is really more like a playground filled with obstacle courses for you to run through to collect the various tokens in the game, but I'm fine with that, really. There are some old-school style Sonic stages, both 2D and 3D, that you can teleport to from certain spots in the world, but the real attraction of this game is just being able to freely run and jump around at high speeds. You can level Sonic's speed up to 99 and when you get there he is absolutely blazing. Using your speed to find shortcuts that weren't intended by the game feels really cool. I also appreciate that you don't have to collect every single little thing to achieve 100%. There are far more collectibles than you actually need, so you can choose how you want to go about unlocking everything. If one token or key is giving you a hard time, there are plenty of others to look for. Maybe some will feel that's cheap, but to me it just means more freedom to do what I want. I only really have two complaints. The first is that there are too many times when the game takes control away from you in the middle of running around to show you a cutscene or tutorial or do a QTE. In fact, when you max out Sonic's rings you get a major speed boost and an electrical aura, which is dope, but every time you do it plays a cutscene, which is annoying. This is the main issue bringing the game down for me, and I hope if they make another open world game they learn to integrate this stuff with the gameplay better. It wasn't a deal breaker for me but it does bring it down by a point on my personal scale. My second issue was that there's a lot of pop-in. Not so much with the environment itself but with the various rails and platforms within it. This isn't an issue when you're actually using them since you can always clearly see your next jump, but if you're trying to figure out how to get to a place on the map far in the distance, you can't count on looking for a connected rail or platform because the game might not have even loaded it if you're too far away. You have to run around and see what pops up, which is a drag. But other than those two things I had a pretty fun time with this game. I'm looking forward to the free DLC which adds Tails, Knuckles, and Amy as playable characters.