Mister Jack

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.

I bought Hades in the last Steam sale but I have yet to get around to it. Next time I'm in a roguelike mood maybe I'll install that.

Returnal Well this was certainly...interesting. This is a bullet hell roguelike, and a pretty good one too. Combat is fast and frantic, and despite Selene's age she can run, jump, and dash quite impressively. You'll be zipping all over the field dodging projectiles, and the optimal strategy here isn't to line up your aim but just to spray and pray while moving around constantly and making sure no attacks ever touch you. It's chaotic, it's quick, and it is hard as balls. Either Ethan is a lot better at bullet hell games than I gave him credit for or he got some seriously lucky drops in his runs because it took me dozens of tries to finally get all the way to the end and I got frustrated quite a few times. The game is usually pretty good about giving you some kind of progress in each run. Unless you die really early on you're likely to, at the very least, pick up some ether, which is a permanent currency that is used to unlock new items. Thanks to that, there were only a few cases where I died and felt like I had wasted all that time with nothing to show for it. The enemy designs were okay, but they didn't really have much personality to them. The boss battles are pretty challenging, but it's only mandatory to beat each of them once. Gameplay-wise, this is a pretty fun action shooter, but I think where Returnal dropped the ball was in its story. Mainly because I have no idea what the hell is going on. I tried, believe me. I listened to every log and optional bit of dialogue I could find. I really wanted to understand the mystery of how and why Selene keeps reincarnating on this planet every time she dies. Unfortunately, by the time I reached the end I really felt no closer to understanding things than I did when I started. It's all just too incomprehensible and poorly explained, and that's really disappointing because I was legitimately invested in the mystery only to be left feeling like the writer got super into making all this buildup but then had no idea how to give it a proper payoff. It's like watching LOST all over again. If you like third-person shooters and roguelikes then I'd recommend this purely for the gameplay. I can't recommend it for the story, though. It's just too obscure.

Space Jam: A New Legacy Oh yeah, this one's a turd. Don't get me wrong, the original Space Jam is also a bad movie, but it's a guilty pleasure of mine that I like to rewatch every couple years or so. Bugs Bunny and Michael Jordan playing basketball against a team of aliens is just too ridiculous a concept for me to not get any enjoyment just out of watching the spectacle. It was a dumb idea and it was definitely made to push the Looney Tunes and Michael Jordan brands, but it's the fun kind of bad. Plus it had a great soundtrack. This one, though? It just feels so soulless. Even if the old movie was brand driven, they kept it focused specifically on the two brands they were trying to promote so it was easier to just let that go and enjoy the ride for what it was. The sequel, however, shoves literally every single Warner Bros brand they could possibly fit into the movie to the point that it's inconceivable that any normal person could see it as anything but a 2 hour long advertisement. It's like Ready Player One in that sense. You might have some fun playing "spot the reference" with the cameos and I will admit that some of the crossovers with the Looney Tunes hanging out inside other Warner films were amusing, but the entire time I was watching it I was extremely aware that I was being advertised to. It's just too much to ignore and it makes it very hard to enjoy it even as dumb entertainment. I half expected to find a focus test group standing behind me when I turned around. I'm going to be fair and admit that there were some jokes in here that worked for me. Wile E Coyote had all the best gags and there were a few scenes here and there that did get a laugh out of me. Still, this movie is two hours long. An occasional laugh amid an endless sea of cross-promotion is just not enough. I'm sure I don't need to even mention that Lebron James is a terrible actor and I also can't help but find it ironic that after all the fuss that was made over changing Lola Bunny into a strong female character because the original was too sexist she turns out to have even less of a personality than before! And that's with MORE screen time! How the hell did they even pull that off? What else? Oh, the story is even dumber than before, the villain basketball team is completely forgettable, and the soundtrack isn't nearly as good this time around. It's also a pet peeve of mine when they turn the Looney Tunes into CGI characters, which they do for pretty much no reason in this movie. I won't lie and said I got no enjoyment out of this movie. There were a few bright spots scattered here and there, but there is no way this is going to become a guilty pleasure tradition for me like the first movie. It's just far too eager to suck corporate dick. I feel like movies like this bring us one step closer to the future Aldous Huxley warned us about.

I'm ready to take down some Spongebob scrubs with Garfield's lasagna pan smash attack.

A Plague Tale: Innocence As some of you may know, this is the July PS+ game for PS5 owners. Took me somewhere between 12-15 hours to beat if I had to guess. As the name implies, this game takes place during the middle ages and is about two kids, Amicia and Hugo, who are forced to flee their home when the Inquisition comes knocking at their door and then have to find a way to survive while surrounded by the black plague. At its heart this is a stealth/puzzle game that usually has you doing one of two things. You're either trying to work your way through areas full of guards or you're trying to use the environment to create a safe path through an area infested with plague rats, which are so numerous and aggressive that they feel more like a supernatural horror than a pest control problem. Amicia is armed with a sling that she can use to hurl various types of crafted ammo, but she's definitely not a fighter. Aside from occasionally braining guards with rocks if they're not wearing helmets, Amicia is terrible in a direct confrontation and she goes down in one hit from any enemy, so her ammo is really meant more for creating distractions or setting up death traps while remaining undetected. To be honest there's probably very little to this that you haven't seen before in other stealth games, but it's still fine, if not revolutionary. Navigating through rat infested areas is a bit more unique. The rats are afraid of light so you'll frequently need to find or create a light source to make a safe path. Sometimes that isn't possible, which means you'll need to either find a way to corral the rats into an area where they can't hurt you or distract them somehow. This is usually pretty straightforward but there were a few occasions where I really had to stop and think about how I was going to get through some of these rat clusters. As a side note, the haptic feedback lets you feel the constant skittering of all the little tiny rat feet all around you and it's pretty gross and creepy in an effective way. The story is decent. It's not super original or anything but it's well presented and it kept me wanting to see what would happen next, at least, but it does take a turn near the end that I'm not sure everyone will like. It's going to be a matter of personal taste as to whether it works or not. The voice acting is quite good. Facial animations can be a bit stiff and wooden during cutscenes, but it is my understanding that the development team for this was on the small side so I'm willing to cut them a little slack for this. However, the characters sometimes have an annoying tendency to talk over each other, and you can't blame that on studio size. If I have one big complaint it's that the game can sometimes be very frustrating. It's not particularly hard but there is VERY little room for error. If you get detected or you accidentally put your foot too close to a swarm of rats then it's going to mean instant death probably 90% of the time. There are items you can craft to give yourself a last second escape if you need one, but they're expensive to make and if you rely on them too much you won't have enough materials to craft your equipment upgrades. The checkpoints are pretty generous so you rarely lose more than a couple minutes of progress, which is good, but even then there are certain sections I found myself having to repeat 10 times or more just because I stepped very slightly out of line for less than two seconds. Slightly slower enemy detection speed and an extra couple of seconds to wade your way out of a swarm of rats would fix this. As is, you have to do everything perfectly or else the game raps your knuckles and tells you to do it again. If you happen to have a PS5, I see no reason not to check out this one. It has a few annoyances but it doesn't overstay its welcome and it's fun while it lasts. 40 bucks on Steam is a little steep, but it'd be at a good price during a sale, I bet. Supposedly there's a sequel coming out next year too.

Got this to help me relax and destress while my mom is in rehab. And got this because it was 45 on eBay. When it comes to $70 games, unless it's something I absolutely positively gotta have on day one─and so far Rift Apart is the only one─I think I'm gonna wait a bit and buy them online for less. Yeah I know the developers get no money this way but 70 dollars is a lot for me and very rarely will I ever feel like a standard edition game is worth that much.

I was playing Gunfire Reborn (basically roguelike Borderlands) earlier and noticed that not only do my teammates go transparent when they walk in front of me so I can see past them, but I can even shoot through their transparent bodies without any repercussions. Is it realistic? Hell no. Does it eliminate one of the biggest headaches when it comes to co-op shooters? Hell yes.

Final Fantasy IX is getting an animated series.

I started it on PS4 but put it down until I got a PS5. Even now after all the patches CDPR still straight up advises against playing on a base PS4. I don't think even they really know what they're doing anymore. The multiplayer they promised is canceled now and I've heard rumors that they're having trouble even getting the DLC off the ground. Shit's a mess.

Cyberpunk 2077 It's finally at a point where it doesn't crash long enough for me to play it, although it did still crash during the credits, naturally. It's still far from bug free, but it's not completely and utterly broken anymore at least. But the bugs are all well-documented at this point and the game will continue to be patched so for the sake of this post I'm going to be really generous and pretend the game is bug-free and just judge it for how it's designed. Even if this game had shipped day one without a single bug, the best I can really say is that it's good. Not great. Good. Cyberpunk has a problem where it's as wide as an ocean and as deep as a puddle. There are lots of cars to buy (and everyone on your phone REALLY wants to sell you their cars) but as far as I can tell there's no meaningful difference in performance between them and I mostly stuck with the default car for the whole game. You can also customize V's clothes with lots of fashion options but the game is always in first-person so what's the point? Each gender only has two romance options, or only one if you're not bisexual. The city, at least to my knowledge, had no real side-activities or minigames like what you'd find in a GTA or even a Yakuza. There were side missions, of course, but if you feel like just chilling out and goofing off I don't think there's really anything like that for you to do in Night City. It's disappointing. I will, however, praise the game on the combat and character building. There are lots of guns to find and many of them feel different and will sometimes even have special functions. Encounters also give you lots of freedom to decide how to approach them, whether you want to go in guns blazing, stealth your way through, or rely on hacking to deal with enemies. How effective each approach is will of course depend on how you're choosing to spend your points when you level up. The story was fine, I guess. Keanu's character is a total dickhead but that's on purpose so it's cool. He's fun to watch. By the time it was done though I still couldn't help feeling a little bit let down by the experience. I'm sure part of that was because it's hard to enjoy something when you're constantly worrying that it's going to break on you, but even if that wasn't an issue it really just doesn't live up to the hype. Night City is sprawling and gorgeous to look at but it all just kinda feels like window dressing. It's probably worth going through once for the story but I don't think this is going to be one of those open world games people come back to over and over even after all the major bugs are fixed.

I liked Control for the most part but I do wish they'd gone in harder on the crazy supernatural aspects. With some exceptions you're mostly fighting possessed soldiers or geometric shapes. More crazy and out there areas would have been nice too. That one you posted is the highlight because almost all the other areas are pretty mundane.

Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart Spread this one out over three days. Took maybe....15 hours or so all together? I'm not totally sure, though. At any rate, this is a strong contender for the best game in the series, up there with Up Your Arsenal and A Crack in Time. The story isn't quite as standalone as Insomniac would have you believe but the game does a good job filling newcomers in on any important details from past entries so you won't feel lost if this is your first R&C game. Rivet is a great character and there are other great side characters I won't spoil. Although you spend a lot of time as Rivet, she also doesn't completely overshadow Ratchet either. They both get a respectable amount of focus in the plot. Right now this is also, in my opinion, the best looking PS5 game there is. The visuals, especially in the cutscenes, are nearly Pixar-tier when you play in 4K, and even then it still runs at a rock solid 60 FPS. I can't recall ever encountering a single noticeable frame drop. More impressively, I did not see a loading screen even once throughout the entire game. It takes maybe two seconds to respawn after you die but that's really just nitpicking. This game really shows off the PS5 SSD in extremely impressive ways. Planets will often shift through dimensions, which means that you have alternate versions of the entire map you're on that you're rapidly switching between back and forth in less than a second. I never picked up on any obvious loading smokescreens like overly long elevator rides or slow walk and talk sections either. This game is just always ready for whatever you want it to do and it's fantastic. Aside from being a technical marvel, the gameplay has gotten a pretty big upgrade too. There's more focus on mobility than ever before, so you can move faster, jump farther, and dodge quicker than any other game in the series. The enemy AI compensates by being quite aggressive, although just how aggressive they are depends on your difficulty. The default difficulty was a little easy for me so if you're used to these games you might want to turn it up slightly if you want a challenge. It never approaches bullet hell territory but you're almost never going to be able to fight while standing still. Jumping and dashing at nearly all times is mandatory to survive. I also enjoyed the Clank puzzles in this one more than I usually do. Hell, even the hacking minigame is fun. I repeat: the hacking minigame is fun. I'm already jumping back into challenge mode for my second playthrough, which has weapons and upgrades that are only available in this mode so there's your replay value right there. At least for now I'm crowning this as my favorite PS5 exclusive, and it's up there with RE8 for my personal GOTY so far. I'm honestly kind of torn between the two.