Mister Jack

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.

Well I have officially finished my Village of Shadows difficulty playthrough with 3 hours on the clock and did my speedrun with the clock at 2 hours. Mind you, the game does not count deaths and the timer will reset to whatever it was at your last save, so take that as you will. I died a few times on Village of Shadows but didn't die at all on the speedrun.

There is a lot of replay value after you beat it, if that makes you feel any better.

Resident Evil VIII Eight and a half hours. I totally binged this game. It's like it took all the best parts from 4 and 7 and put them together. More weapons, more enemy types, more places to explore, more replay value, more everything. About the only area where I think VII is still better is that the Bakers were more memorable antagonists than the villains in this game, and that says more about how good the Bakers were than it does about these new ones being bad. I'm already going to jump back into NG+ as soon as I finish posting this. So far this is my GOTY for 2021.

I played the original just in time, it looks like.

God I hope that's true. Activision put all their eggs into that basket and I want it to crash and burn. I know that seems impossible but nothing lasts forever. There WILL come a day when it runs out of steam.

Toys 4 Bob is now a Call of Duty studio. While I guess it's a good thing they weren't all laid off, this fucking sucks. I had a great time with the Crash remakes and I absolutely loved the Spyro Reignited Trilogy. I even liked Crash 4 when it wasn't pissing me off. I was hoping really hard for a new Spyro next but I guess it won't be happening now because Activision is ALL CALL OF DUTY ALL THE TIME. Literally, I don't think the Activision side of the company is making anything except Call of Duty anymore. At least I can't think of anything else.

Ha! Got you, you bastard! This is the DVD that was part of the collection I've been acquiring recently that was going for 400+ dollars on eBay, the one I told myself I would probably have to accept that I would never get. However, I was able to place an order from this directly from the Turner Network, which is a subsidiary of Warner Bros. It will be a while before they can actually ship it, but it's still mine now. To make matters even better I did some looking into the shorts I currently own and it turns out that some of the special features on the collection I recently got include shorts that are on some of the other DVDs I was originally planning to get for completion's sake so now I don't have to get those. This brings me up to owning roughly 93% of all the shorts that have been transferred to physical media.

I actually consider R&C 2016 to be one of the weakest entries in the series and I didn't even dislike it.

Digimon Cyber Sleuth This game is a hidden gem with a few rough edges around it. I bought it purely because I was sick of the Pokemon franchise never innovating since Gen 1 and I wanted to give the competition a try. Naturally, this meant I was comparing the two franchises the whole time and now that I've finished I've come to the following conclusions: Things Pokemon does better 1) Creature design is, as a whole, better in Pokemon. There are some pretty good Digimon designs in the roster to be sure, but there are also some that are just faceless blobs or something else dull like that. To be fair, the more boring Digimon are usually on the lowest rungs of the evolutionary ladder and they evolve out of them quickly. Even then I'd still say Pokemon designs are usually better, but there are some still pretty cool looking Digimon. 2) Environments and exploration. Digimon takes place partly in cyberspace, which is basically just a bunch of holograms, and Tokyo, which has the usual Shinjuku/Shibuya/Akihabara/etc districts you're used to. You also move between regions through a menu so there's minimal exploration in this particular Digimon game. Don't play it expecting to explore a wide open world. 3) Better side activities. Most of the side content in Digimon Cyber Sleuth involves you taking on cases for clients. Almost all of these cases are just fetch quests or "go here, fight X" missions. It also has an annoying habit of making you go somewhere just to talk to someone before sending you somewhere else. It's pointless busywork and it really wasn't needed. On the other hand, Digimon has better post-game content with some seriously tough optional missions to really put your high level party to use. 4) Catching a Pokemon in a ball is more exciting than scanning Digimon out in the field and then reconstructing them in a menu. That said, every Digimon you encounter gets scanned, even multiples, so there are no wasted encounters. 5) If you lose a battle you can continue. If you lose in Digimon you have to reload, so you'd better save often. 6) Music is more memorable for the most part, although the Digimon OST has some legit bangers on it. Things Digimon does better 1) The battle system is way more engaging. The menus are quicker, battles flow much, MUCH faster, you have easily accessible information to all your abilities, what they do, and even whether they'll be effective or not against the enemy type you're targeting. You also get a battle party of 3 instead of just 1. You can also carry up to 8 extra Digimon in reserve depending on how much RAM you have and you can switch out your entire party for any of your reserves at any time during battle at the cost of just one turn. It honestly plays more like Final Fantasy X than Pokemon, which I consider a good thing. There's also a handy auto-battle option for dealing with trash mobs and the AI for it is pretty good. 2) Way, way, WAY more evolution options. Every stage of every Digimon has a minimum of 3 different evolutionary paths to choose from. Some of the evolutions look nothing like the last form (there's a fox that can evolve into a tree), but each mon will still have at least one evolutionary path where the design stays pretty consistent. You can even devolve back to a lower stage if you want to try a different path. Evolving or devolving puts you back at level 1, but with increased base stats inherited from whatever level you were at before the change. You'll be digivolving way more often than you ever evolved your Pokemon and you have full control over when and how it happens as long as you meet the requirements. It's quite addicting. 3) Better presentation. The graphics are better, the framerate is better, there's voice acting (in Japanese), there are some anime cutscenes here and there, but most importantly every single Digimon has unique animations for attacking and performing signature moves. None of that pathetic "Scorbunny used double kick" jiggling in here. While there are shared moves that have generic casting animations, every mon has at least two attack animations that are exclusive to that species. The story is also more interesting than any Pokemon story I've personally played. It's not a masterpiece or anything but for a mon game it's got a lot more going for it than you'd expect. Oh yeah, and all three Digimon from your battle team follow you while you walk around. 4) Each Digimon has a normal attack and can learn up to six moves rather than four. New moves after that are stored in a bank and you can swap them out between battles as many times as you want. No need to forget moves like in Pokemon. 5) Type matchups are not the end-all-be-all of battles. Digimon come in four types (vaccine/data/virus/neutral) and then on top of that they also have elements like fire/water/lightning/etc. In order to do maximum damage you have to use both the right type and the right element, and unless your team is VERY carefully balanced it'll probably be rare that you have everything matched up perfectly. Depending on your type matchups you can give or receive anywhere from half damage to 3x damage, but it usually hovers around 1.5x to 2x damage. Obviously you want to have an advantage whenever possible, but even at a disadvantage it's usually possible to tough it out if your mons are well trained or have support from their teammates. 6) Challenge. Everyone knows Pokemon is piss easy with maybe one or two bosses per game that turn out to be harder than expected. Digimon is pretty easy too for the most part but there are quite a few boss battles, especially in the second half, that can really give you a run for your money. That's not even getting into the bonus post-game bosses. Fortunately, leveling up is pretty quick in this game. With a full team of 11 you're guaranteed to get at least one level up every two or three fights against similarly leveled oppenents and you'll usually get more than that. There are also ways to boost your exp gains and if you're willing to put in the work then by the end of the game you can make it so you get 40+ levels per fight. When certain evolutions require you to evolve and devolve multiple times to build up the ability stat, this is a godsend. Things that suck in both games 1) Unskippable cutscenes. Ugh. 2) Pacing is kind of uneven. 3) Annoying side characters. Digimon only had one character that really annoyed me but she annoyed me enough to count for three bad Pokemon characters. 4) Silent protagonists. I am really tired of seeing that. All in all I liked Digimon quite a bit and I would recommend it, or at least this particular game. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Never gonna make it

You just reminded me of how much I used to love the hell out of Simant. Man, I wish someone would make a new version of that.

Humble Bundle is kneecapping charitable donations. Maybe they should change their name to something else like Insincere Bundle or Token Gesture Bundle.

I really wasn't planning to buy these anytime soon but in a crazy coincidence right after I bought the Pepe DVD a reliable insider leaked info that Warner Bros plans to stop all DVD production for these shorts in 2022 and transition to streaming only. I figured I'd better get them now before they shoot up to ridiculous prices. This brings me up to owning roughly 85% of all available shorts. There's another Sylvester DVD in this collection but it's going for $400 so I might just have to let that one go.

This was on sale in the eshop. The last few Pokemon games were such underwhelming disappointments that I've been meaning to give the Digimon games a chance to see if they're any better but I didn't want to pay 40+ bucks on a gamble. Just 19.99 for a two game collection is a steal and if I don't like them then at least I didn't pay much.

Beat the Nioh 1 DLC. Going back to the original right after spending so much time with the sequel made me realize just how different they are. On the surface it seems like 2 is just 1 with some extra features and a couple of new mechanics but those new mechanics completely change the way you approach combat. With Nioh 2 you are given multiple ways to heal during battle that require you to play aggressively, kind of like Bloodborne. With Nioh 1, however, you're mostly limited to your finite elixirs and maybe healing talismans if you've invested enough points into magic. You also don't have the burst counter move from 2 so you can't interrupt the enemies' strongest attacks, which means you pretty much have to play more defensively. If Nioh 2 is Bloodborne, Nioh 1 is closer to Dark Souls. Speaking of differences, this DLC has an absurd spike in difficulty compared to where you are probably at after beating the game for the first time. I was dying in one or two hits for a while because I was 50 levels below even basic enemies. They gave pretty good exp so I was leveling up pretty quickly, but each mission jumps the level up even higher so by the time I finished all three episodes I was more like 90 levels under the recommended. I got by because I invested in a living weapon build, which is a mode that makes you temporarily superpowered and invincible for around 10-20 seconds. Usually it takes a while to charge that up but I figured out a specific setup that let me refill the meter every two or three minutes. Even then it was pretty brutal. On the plus side I got the PS5 platinum trophy in the process.

You hear the same theme for over an hour on the same boss fight and it has a way of getting stuck in your head. It's a good thing the music in this series is god tier.