Mister Jack

My new desktop has pretty good wifi, but the fact it's enclosed inside the desk weakens the signal considerably, even compared to my last desktop which is over a decade old. I suspect this has something to do with the physical location of the motherboard. A direct connection to the modem just isn't an option for me. That room is too full of stuff already and I don't want to move the entire desk anyway so I got these powerline adapters instead. After plugging them in my speed jumped from around 7 MB/s to 25 MB/s. I know that doesn't sound like much but I'm stuck with Comcast so that's pretty good for my situation. More than enough for my needs, at least.

Sunset Overdrive Nice to finally play this former Xbox exclusive. It's unapologetically cheesy and videogamey and the characters will frequently break the fourth wall to comment on the fact they're inside a game, but this is a story where a defective energy drink turns people into mutants. You're really not meant to take it seriously at all and are just supposed to have a bunch of goofy fun. As expected from an Insomniac game, the weapons are a lot of fun to use, although I kinda wished that fully leveled weapons transformed into their stronger versions like in Ratchet and Clank rather than you just having to buy the better version separately, thus rendering the original weapon completely obsolete. Other than that I don't have a lot of complaints. The parkour is fun once you get used to it, there's a good variety of enemies and guns, and there's a decent amount of stuff to do in the city. Definitely worth picking up on a steam sale.

Eh, why not.

It's technically a sequel but it only really references the first movie in that Harley is friendly with a few characters she met before. It's easy to not even notice unless you're paying attention. You should be completely fine if you didn't see the last film.

You never needed to attack your own party members to level up your HP in FFII, but at least in the original version you could do that to exploit the system and raise your HP to much higher than it should be because the HP leveling worked based on how much HP you lose in battle. I don't know if they fixed that exploit for the remaster but it was definitely a thing back on the Famicom. There was also an annoying stat atrophy system where one stat would decrease when another one increased so it was definitely possible to level up your party wrongly. I know they got rid of that crap in the GBA remake and it sounds like they did the same for the pixel remaster, which is good because that was a terrible idea. Final Fantasy II is a game you can completely break in half if you know how to cheat the system, which can be fun, but I can also see why some people don't like the game because is has pretty much no balance. If you know what you're doing you can even kill the final boss in one turn.

The Suicide Squad This is by far the best movie in the entire DCEU right now. James Gunn seems to really excel at these films where he's given a cast of freaks and weirdos to write for, especially when he's allowed to go with a hard R rating. Make no mistake, this one is hard R, soaked from head to toe in gore and profanity and I wouldn't have it any other way. Not only are the action scenes a bloody good time, but the jokes frequently made me laugh out loud and the characters were written very well. Even though they're all murderous psychopaths, Gunn got me to actually care about most of them. King Shark in particular steals every scene he's in and I have no doubt he'll become the most popular member of the squad. The movie really lives up to the title, too. The squad starts out with around 20 or so members but this mission has one hell of a body count. I actually felt bad when certain characters died, but by the end I was quite attached to the survivors. I hope to see them all again in a sequel soon.

It was on sale and I didn't want to risk waiting too long only for it to disappear forever once again because of license expiration or some other bullcrap.

Original game didn't have ethers or phoenix downs at all. If someone died you either used a life spell or went all the way back to town to revive them. If you ran out of spells you had to either go back to town or use a tent/cottage/house at the dungeon entrance to restore them. Cutting out that bullshit would definitely make it easier to get through efficiently.

They must have rebalanced it or something because I remember the original NES version being quite a grind. Do they use the original stock system for magic or MP? Do they have more than one kind of healing potion? I remember back in the day having to tediously stock up on 99 healing potions, which only healed 60 HP each, and then use them over and over in the Chaos Shrine between fights.

Damn, you beat it already? Didn't it only come out like two days ago?

Now that my badass new PC is here I'm taking advantage by playing some of the games I couldn't run well before. I installed the Master Chief Collection that a friend gifted me ages ago although it's obvious my former Halo skills have atrophied from disuse. Also got Sunset Overdrive, which is cool, and Vermintide II, which is a lot of fun. I may not be buying any new releases for a while, though. I can't think of anything coming out for the rest of 2021 that I want that's available on PC. That's okay though. I have a huge backlog to catch up on. I looked into VR headsets just out of curiosity but it turns out I don't like any of the PC options. They're either too expensive or too cumbersome so despite having a new PC I might end up waiting on the PSVR 2 anyway.

I think it's mostly the price people are upset about with this one. 75 dollars for the complete set of games when they're this old is a little steep.

Of course I was going to buy this.

Finn Wolfhard, yeah. Also what an awesome name to be born with.

It's not the one for the fragments, is it? Because that's all I'm seeing on Youtube.

I got enough for the game to give me the trophy for finishing Act 3. If that somehow still isn't enough then screw it, I've got other shit to play.

Got the final true ending for Returnal. Story still makes no sense. In fact, it makes even less sense now than before.

The latter

I bought a desktop. https://www.ibuypower.com/Store/Gaming-RDY-SMRVRG201 I wasn't really planning on it but this was such a good deal I had to jump on it. A 3060 these days on its own will cost you around 1000 dollars, let alone a whole system. Part of the discount comes from the fact I have to take the system as is and can't customize it at all, but it honestly has almost everything I would want already. Liquid cooling is new for me and I would get 2 TB of storage if I could, but I can always add an SSD later on. I told myself for a long time I would build my next pc myself, but that was before covid came along and made that impractical. After taxes and discounts it came to 1747, but it also includes a keyboard and mouse

I did look it up and that area wasn't there.

I'm still trying to get that damn stone fragment in the sixth biome and I have no idea where to find it.

After playing around with Guilty Gear Strive a bit I feel like I have a better handle on it and I can see why the general public has taken to this game more than previous entries. The biggest change that is immediately noticeable to veterans like myself is that the gatling combo system has been completely overhauled. It used to be that a fairly reliable bread and butter combo for many characters was some variation of P>K>S>HS in order, sometimes with multiple inputs, for example P>P>d.K>d.S>d.HS just as an example. Well, in Strive you are hardly ever going to use P and K for combos because they don't chain into the other commands. P and K get more use for zoning or anti-air commands. Many combos are going to start simply with S>S and combos in general will have fewer hits. The highest combo count I've seen that didn't include things like supers that stack on a bunch of extra hits is maybe 14 hits, and that's from a top level player. The tradeoff for fewer hits is that each hit does more damage. A combo of only three or four hits is still going to take off a respectable chunk of the opponent's life bar. The other systems have been overhauled as well. The dust button (R1 by default), which used to be used to launch air combos, is now pretty much your overhead attack button to bust out whenever people block low too much. You also use it for sweeps while crouching, but that was always the case. Roman cancels have gotten a complete overhaul. Red roman cancels, which cancel your recovery frames during a hit to let you instantly use another attack, are the same as they've always been, but the other kinds are totally different now. It used to be that if you wanted to use a blue/yellow roman cancel you had to bust it out during specific frames to cancel the animations of things like ranged attacks. This could be pretty difficult even for experienced players and I rarely saw it used during tournaments. In Strive, however, the frames don't really matter when it comes to roman cancels. Yellow roman cancels are now used while blocking, blues are used while neutral, and purples are used after whiffing an attack. Regardless of which color it comes out as, if it connects with your opponent then it will stun them and slow them down for about one second, giving you a brief but valuable opening to attack. One other thing I like is the online system. I remember games like Street Fighter where everyone had to go up one rank at a time, which often meant getting stuck fighting against people way above your skill level because they just hadn't leveled up enough yet. In Strive, there are 10 different floors on the battle tower and if the game detects you're way above people in the beginner stages it'll automatically shoot you up to whatever floor it thinks you should be on. I think this is a way better approach than having to grind through ranks one by one. It also has rollback netcode, which works great for online matches. I like the game, but if your focus is single player then be warned that this isn't like a Netherrealm game. It has arcade mode and a mission mode, but that's pretty much it, at least right now. Story mode is a non-interactive movie like it was in Xrd. Supposedly there's more content coming, but that's gonna be a while. If you want to try getting into fighting games but always found them too intimidating though, this is a good one to ease you into the genre.

I used to be a HUGE Guilty Gear fan. I was pretty good at it too, good enough to do well for myself in the local competitive scene. Despite that, I held off on getting this for a while because I heard it had gotten a major overhaul to make it simpler and easier for the sake of people who are new to fighting games. Everyone online seems to love it though so I decided to take the plunge. I thought I'd have to be relearning how to play Guilty Gear entirely from scratch but after only two online matches the game has already put me on floor 8 out of 10 on the battle tower so I guess I'm in pretty good shape.

Omori Finally wrapped this one up a little while ago. It's an Earthbound inspired RPG, but it's really only like Earthbound in the sense that it's a turn based RPG about four kids adventuring through weird and imaginative locations. I really wish I could talk about the story even a little bit because there's a lot going on here, but this is one of those games where you can hardly say anything without giving away too much. All I can really say is that every time you launch the game it warns you about themes of depression, anxiety, and suicide and it does so for good reason. There's a lot more depth here than the cutesy graphics would lead you to believe, and I think anyone ought to experience it at least once. There are some story segments that drag on for a bit, but the payoff at the end is worth it.