Mister Jack

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.

I'm looking forward to Guardians of the Galaxy but I'm a huge Guardians fan so I'm biased. It's not being made by the same team that did that terrible Avengers game and it doesn't seem to be a GAAS so I'm cautiously optimistic.

Game Pass coming to TVs and browsers. It would be nice if this actually works because I want to play Bethesda games without having to get a new desktop or an Xbox, but I'm still skeptical of the technology if only because the US internet infrastructure is complete crap.

What film IS worth 30 dollars, really? Assuming you're not paying for a big family to watch in which case it probably seems more reasonable.

Yeah sure, if you got nothing else going on this weekend then why not. I didn't hate it and it had a few good things going for it. There are very few Disney animated films that I find obnoxiously bad and this wasn't one of them.

Ratchet and Clank was made with no crunch whatsoever. Good for you, Insomniac. I honestly kinda hate that Insomniac needs praise for not working their employees halfway to death but that's just how the industry is now.

Raya: The Last Airbender Sorry, I mean Raya and the Last Dragon. Yeah, it's pretty much impossible to watch this without drawing comparisons because they're very very similar in a lot of ways. Obviously Avatar is the superior story, but let's put that aside and pretend this movie exists in a vacuum for a bit. How does it shape up then? Well, it's still just kind of okay. Honestly, a globetrotting adventure story in a fantasy land like this one works better as a tv show than as a two hour movie. Hell, it's not even really two hours. It's more like 90 minutes with an extremely long credits sequence at the end. That's just not enough time to build this up properly. Aside from the Fang and Heart nations (they're all named after dragon parts) every other part of the world just feels rushed. If this were a tv show they could have been properly explored. If you're willing to accept some uneven pacing, the movie is mostly fine. The animation is obviously gorgeous, I like the dragon a lot, there are some decent action scenes, and while the jokes didn't really make me laugh they didn't make me groan either. I would have considered a lower-tier entry for the good movie thread if not for one thing: the moral of this movie is completely broken. What do I mean by that? Well the message of this story is that people need to be able to trust each other and Raya is framed as being in the wrong for being suspicious of everyone she meets. If you ask me that's a debatable moral to begin with but I would have accepted it if the writing supported that argument. But it doesn't. Time and time again Raya or Sisu or someone else just keep getting stabbed in the back. This fantasy world is full of terrible, selfish people and Raya is absolutely right not to trust them but somehow we're supposed to want her to put her faith in people who keep screwing her over? Really? Also I really hate the Princess Namaari character. She's basically the Zuko of this film and I don't even consider it a spoiler to say that she gets redeemed eventually because of course she does. Did you really expect any different? The problem with that is that this is a 90 minute movie so unlike Zuko, who has to earn his redemption over the course of an entire season, Namaari gets forgiven almost instantly despite committing crimes for which she honestly deserves to be put to death. It's frustrating to watch and just made me resent her. So yeah, that inconsistent tone is why this is in the OK movies thread instead of the good movies thread. It's alright if you already have Disney+ since they're no longer asking for 30 freaking dollars for the privilege of watcing it.

No. I'll probably go back and do NG+ to mop up some trophies I didn't get. Whether or not I get the platinum will depend on how much of a pain it is to fill out the persona compendium. It's definitely going to be more hassle than it was in the original game.

Persona 5 Strikers Took me roughly 35 hours to finish. I usually hate musou games but ended up liking this one quite a bit and that comes down to the battles feeling closer to Persona than they do to Dynasty Warriors. Yes, you fight huge groups of mooks that you swat away by bashing square and sometimes triangle, but you also frequently have to consider elemental weaknesses and deal with buffs and debuffs much like in the original game. You can't get by in this one just by button mashing. Plus, you need to manage an entire party, not just one character, and each party member feels different to play. This went a LONG way toward keeping the game from getting as tedious as Dynasty Warriors always gets whenever I try to play it. This game is shorter than Persona 5 but it still has a fully fleshed out story that is far from an afterthought, so I appreciated that. There's no calendar system or confidants or social stats with this one, but you still spend plenty of time hanging out with the Phantom Thieves and enjoying their camaraderie. It doesn't just rush you from one dungeon to the next. Speaking of dungeons, the dungeons in this game aren't quite as interesting as the palaces were, but they're mostly fine and look distinct enough from one another to avoid a copy-pasted feeling, even if you do the same thing in a lot of them. I only have two big criticisms that bring the game down for me. Firstly, you can't manually fuse Personas anymore. You can only choose preselected fusions from a list. Because of this I was stuck with useless Personas for longer than I liked because I couldn't do anything with them. Why is it set up like this? It makes no sense to me, plus this system means it's harder to get the abilities you want. My other criticism is that boss fights take waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long. I'm talking up to 20+ minutes of just whacking on them over and over. Even when you exploit weaknesses and set up All Out Attacks it does practically no damage. You just gotta keep chipping away with single digit damage numbers. God help you if you get party wiped right before the end too because that means you're doing it all over again. It's extremely draining and I honestly wouldn't blame anyone who sets the boss fights to easy just to get them over with faster. I doubt I'll be playing any more musou games going forward, but this one at least was mostly pretty decent.

Digimon Cyber Sleuth: Hacker's Memory Took me a while to finish this one because Resident Evil 8 came out but I finally got around to finishing up this collection. Hacker's Memory isn't a sequel as much as it is a side-story that takes place during the previous game. Mechanically it isn't super different from the other game either. There are some minor quality of life improvements. There's a hack that increases your running speed on the field, taking missions now transports you to the mission location instead of forcing you to walk there yourself (a huge time saver), and there are a few balance tweaks. Other than that and some new Digimon in the roster it plays more or less the same, which is fine. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. The story to this game is slightly shorter than the other game, but I actually found it more interesting and the characters were more likable. This does assume that you've played Cyber Sleuth though so if you don't play that one before playing this one you're going to have a hard time understanding what's going on. Both are fine games, though. I've got my eye on the upcoming Digimon Survive now, which looks like a cross between Danganronpa and Fire Emblem. I hope it turns out to be good. If it does, I'm on board.

I had thought of that but is it common practice to maintain such things when the author is not that old and is in, as far as anyone knows, pretty good health? I doubt Miura thought he was in a position where he'd need such an insurance policy.

Knowing that this 20+ year epic saga will never be completed is an extremely hard pill to swallow.

Fuck, this is terrible for so many reasons. What a tragedy.

My current laptop technically still works, but only technically. The keyboard is fucked and I've been using a bluetooth keyboard for ages, the battery doesn't charge up unless it's turned off, but the thing that finally pushed me to replace it is that the charger will now randomly cut out sometimes and I have to jiggle the cord to make it start charging again, and even then sometimes the charging pin will get much hotter than what I think is normal. Now it's possible that the charger or the port is faulty, but replacing that costs 120 dollars and I've replaced it twice already so fuck it. Just FUCK IT. It was time to move on. I've sunk enough money into a six year old machine. You can't see it in the photo here but this is an HP Envy x360, which can convert into a tablet mode by pushing the screen all the way back. I got it with the following specs: 15.6" touch screen 16 GB RAM 1 TB NVMe SSD Integrated Radeon GPU AMD Ryzen 5 Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 It cost me a little over $900 before tax, which seems fair. In terms of gaming performance this is technically a step down from my current laptop (which now gets too hot for intense gaming), but I've made the decision that any future PC gaming I do, at least for current gen titles, is going to be done on a desktop whenever the GPU prices calm down a little. Nvidia is already taking steps to discourage crypto miners so maybe that will be sooner rather than later. While this machine can allegedly run last gen games at medium settings just fine, for the most part I've decided that laptops should be primarily for web browsing, media, or productivity and maybe some light gaming with less demanding titles. Few things are more irritating during a gaming session than a laptop fan that sounds like the engine of a Boeing 747. Plus, gaming laptops are heavy and the battery life on them is crap. If you have no other options they'll do in a pinch, but I think I'd rather save for a new desktop in the future and do my heavy gaming on that and use this nice, sleek, portable device for everything else.

I don't normally go for musou games but everyone says this is the best one ever and I like Persona. I still didn't want to pay full price for it, though. Luckily, I got this one at a very good sale price of 30 bucks.

@toxicitizen

Mortal Kombat Finally got around to watching this on HBO Max and it's 100% a fanservice movie. If you're not already familiar with MK lore then this movie is not interested in filling you in on anything more than the basics, but if you are a fan of the franchise then they really went out of their way to give you what you would want to see in a Mortal Kombat movie. The signature moves are there, the fatalities are there, even the iconic announcer lines make their way in. Most importantly, the blood and gore is present in copious amounts. It is complete pandering but it's the kind of pandering I can't help but get into. The fight choreography is also quite good. However, I do have issues. I can forgive the plot being just a thinly veiled excuse to have a bunch of fight scenes, but even then it still does a few things where I was not a fan. The main character is an OC Donut Steel who was made up for the movie, which I'm not against on principle but he's just not very interesting and his powers are stupid. I have nothing against the actor who played him, I'm sure he did the best he could with the material he was given, but that material wasn't good. It just made me wish they'd used Johnny Cage instead, who isn't even in this movie at all. Some of the exposition scenes also get dull, but Kano steals the show whenever he's in the scene. He honestly salvages the talky portions of the film. I don't see myself watching this one over and over but I bet I'll be looking up the fight scenes on Youtube every now and then. I wouldn't mind seeing a sequel.