Mister Jack

I feel like there must be some kind of exclusivity deal between Sony and Atlus we don't know about. Something like "only Sony consoles can have the most recent mainline game" or something. Or if not an official deal at least some sort of gentleman's agreement to maintain good relations between the two companies. Sony does push Persona pretty hard in their advertising.

I refuse to play anything that's shoving in NFTs. I don't even know why they're doing it when Valve has already said NFT games will not be welcome on Steam. Do they really expect uPlay to pick up the slack on this?

I've only been playing the multiplayer but I think this might be the best the gunplay has ever been. The classic weapons just feel more satisfying to shoot somehow.

Metroid Dread Finished with just under 6 hours on the clock. Yeah, it's kind of a short game, but what's there is pretty damn solid. The levels are well designed, the power-ups are fun, the boss fights are the most intense in the series, the counter mechanic is cool, and for once the story is actually pretty good when usually I don't really care at all about Metroid lore. Other than that, if you've played Super Metroid I don't have a whole lot of good things to say here that you don't already know. My least favorite part of the game, as is the case with many Nintendo games, was the unique gimmick, which in this case is the EMMI robots that chase you through the levels. Pursuit enemies add some fun tension in 3D games, but in a 2D game like this one they became more of an annoyance than anything. If you so much as touch one it's a one-hit kill and since it's a 2D plane it becomes that much more of a hassle to evade them. They're faster than you even when you haven't been detected and while you do technically have a last chance to escape from their grab the timing on that is so deliberately precise that I only pulled it off successfully maybe five or six times in the what I'm sure is over a hundred times they killed me. Thankfully, the only penalty for being killed by one is that you respawn outside the room where you were killed. If it sent you all the way back to the save point I probably wouldn't have even finished the game. I think the gimmick would have worked better if getting caught simply did a huge chunk of damage rather than killing you in one hit regardless of how much life you have.

Glad it's not just me who noticed. I literally said out loud "this looks like Sunset Overdrive."

The exact opposite.

Call of Juarez: Gunslinger is free to claim on steam right now.

I read all the documents I could find but obviously you can never be sure without consulting a list if you've found everything, which I did not want to do.

Deathloop It's alright. Figuring out everyone's daily routine over multiple time loops so you can learn how to arrange the deaths of your targets is a pretty neat idea and the guns and powers are fun to play with, but there were a few things about this game that I had a hard time overlooking. For starters, the story leaves a lot unexplained. I don't know if they're planning DLC to fill in the gaps or something but I was left with several unanswered questions. But if we ignore the story and focus purely on the gameplay, the fact is that in order to win this game you have to kill all your targets in one loop and there's only one right way to do that. Most of the game is spent researching how to get everyone where you need them to be so they can all be killed in one day, but don't expect the freedom of a Metal Gear or a Hitman game. While you can kill targets individually to take their gear and powers during any loop and there are multiple ways to accomplish that, when you're ready to get them all in one fell swoop it's extremely scripted. It's still fun, but a little bit disappointing. My other complaint ties to the sometimes unforgiving nature of the time loop. You get two respawns before the day resets most of the time, which is perfectly fair, but sometimes there are objectives in the game where if you fuck up even once the entire loop is shot and you have no choice but to start over from the beginning of the day. It's not like you can just pause the game and restart the loop from the menu either. You have to either kill yourself until you run out of lives or go all the way back to your home base and move time forward until it loops back to where you were. There are two targets in particular who I found more frustrating than fun to hunt because there was so little room for error. In fact, one of them will ruin your progress for the whole loop if you're so much as detected while in their area, an area that's already crawling with guards. I legit hated this part of the game and felt immense relief when it was over. I'd still say it's worth playing but maybe get it on sale. I wouldn't quite put it up there with the Dishonored games, but I will say that Colt was a much more likable character compared to Corvo.

Even though 2020 was the year dominated by Covid, 2021 was the year where Covid really screwed over game development with a ton of releases I was looking forward to getting pushed back. I honestly didn't see a whole lot to get excited about this year, but that doesn't mean there were no good games. You know the drill, one winner and one runner-up. For me it was not a hard decision. Putting aside all the titty vampire mommy memes, this was a great game. You can debate as much as you want about whether Resident Evil is going in the right direction with its gameplay and story and characters and monsters, but to me this was a bigger, better version of VII, a game I already loved. I ran through this game probably five or six times just to unlock everything I possibly could. My only regret is that there's no VR option, but if they ever add one after the PSVR 2 comes out you better believe I'm gonna dive right back in. Runner-Up I was really torn between this and Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart. Both are great games and, objectively speaking, Rift Apart is the more technically impressive and "next gen" title. The reason I ultimately picked Psychonauts 2, however, is that I just felt like it had more heart. Not to say that Rift Apart doesn't, Insomniac clearly worked their asses off on that game, but Psychonauts 2 is the result of a 15 year old promise that actually lived up to the hype and I can't tell you how great that feels. You can tell while playing that this wasn't just some slapdash sequel Double Fine put out because they were obligated to. They tried their very best to fulfill all the hopes and dreams of their eager fans, and even if you don't like how it turned out you could never accuse them of being lazy or half-assed. The animation is whimsical and charming. The new characters are lovable and memorable. The writing is better than before with both hilarious jokes and poignant parables about the importance of confronting your past mistakes. The level design is the best I've seen in years. The story started in the previous game is wrapped up nicely. I don't know if there will ever be a Psychonauts 3, but if this is the last time we see Raz and company then this is a great way to send them off.

I believe it's the latter.

So uh, Jojo part 6 just dropped a dozen episodes out of nowhere.

I use an AIO, yeah. I see no real reason to bother with a custom loop when it's no longer necessary to get the benefits of liquid cooling.

I was surprised how big my case was too. Still need to add another hard drive to it at some point. If you haven't tried liquid cooling before I highly recommend it if you can swing it financially. My desktop is nice and quiet no matter what I play on it so far.

Perhaps this?

Black Friday deal. 1 TB for 200. Still kind of steep, but I don't see myself ever keeping more than 2 TB of games on my PS5 at one time, even with the increased size of games in the current gen. Kudos to the Sony engineers because this was super easy to install and set up. Took maybe 5 minutes.

Youtube is disabling the ability to see dislikes. This brings it back.

https://www.returnyoutubedislike.com/

Far Cry 6 It's fine. I mean, what can I really say? Everyone knows by now if they like Far Cry or not. You drive, you fly, you shoot, you clear outposts, it's more of what you are familiar with, just bigger and with more content. It can also be a lot of fun if you have a buddy to play co-op with because sometimes due to the random nature of the open world shit will suddenly go bananas without any warning. I once tried to bribe a soldier only for a wolf to suddenly charge in from the side and maul her to death right before a pair of out of control trucks barreled over the both of them and fucking exploded. It's jank as hell but it's fun jank. If I have to find something to talk about with this game in particular I suppose it's the villain and the presentation. I love Giancarlo Esposito. He's a fantastic actor, but the fact is that Anton Castillo is not as memorable as Vaas or Pagan Min and I think this is for two reasons. Firstly, as the dictator of an entire country he has very little direct interaction with the protagonist. They come face to face in maybe three scenes total that I can recall. As a military dictator, Anton also has a hardass no-nonsense personality which is pretty typical for dictator characters and doesn't really have the same kind of evil charisma that you see in Vaas or Pagan. That's not to say Anton is without merit. He has some pretty good monologues here and there, but he's more of a mouthpiece meant to push the story's themes about imperialism and colonialism than he is a fleshed-out character in his own right. The other sticking point for me, and your mileage may vary on this, is that the cutscenes have gone from a first-person camera to prerendered scenes in third-person where you see Dani interact with other characters from an outside perspective. I assume they did this because they wanted Dani to have more of a personality than previous Far Cry player characters, which he certainly does, but I don't know if it's enough of a personality to make losing the first person perspective worth it. I think if the confrontations with Castillo had been delivered in first person they might have left more of an impact. That's what I think worked with previous games. You, the player, are forced to face down psychotic despots. When you watch these kinds of scenes as a passive observer rather than an active participant I feel like they lose something. I can only speak for myself, though. I'm sure there are people out there who prefer the third-person cutscenes.

Oh shit, World of Horror update after a year of silence from the developer! I honestly thought this game had been abandoned but now it's finally time to go back to Shiokawa, baby. Even though it's in early access I can easily recommend it to anyone who likes roguelikes, RPGs, or horror. Now that the update is going to be adding two new cases and Old Gods at the bare minimum it's even easier to recommend, especially at 15 dollars.

Why in the FUCK do games with crafting mechanics still insist on making me push a button to pick up crafting supplies. When am I ever going to not want to pick up crafting supplies? You should just automatically collect it when you touch it. To me, making you push the square or triangle button or whatever just to pick up some doodad is the game trying to trick you into believing that it's more engaging than it actually is by giving you pointless busywork to do. Unless you are playing a VR game where collecting things with your hands is part of the appeal or a huge Bethesda or Minecraft tier game where you can pick up everything that isn't nailed down, there is no excuse to make you do that. Just collect it by touching it for God's sake. It's not rocket science.

Dude was legit one of the best things about it.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings Watched this on Disney+. To tell the truth, I would almost put this in the okay movies thread. It's fine. Shang-Chi is fine as a character. Not great but not terrible. The Mandarin is fine. The side characters are fine. They don't leave a strong impression but they're not really obnoxious either. The thing that pushed this movie over into this thread for me was the fight choreography. It's really good. In fact, in my opinion these are some of the best fight scenes in the entire MCU and there's plenty of them. As a Marvel movie, meaning a movie that's meant to push the MCU forward and get fans hyped for the future of the franchise, it's kind of meh. However, as a standalone kung fu movie it's great. If you watch it just for the stunts and action scenes it's pretty enjoyable but it loses some steam in the climax when it turns into a CGI fest like Black Panther did, although the effects here aren't as bad as they were in that movie.