Mister Jack

Playing the Nioh 1 DLC for the first time and it's absolutely kicking my ass. At first I thought the game was just harder than I remembered compared to 2 but I was dying in one or two hits and that's pretty extreme even for Nioh. It wasn't until I beat the first of three chapters that I realized that unlike the Nioh 2 DLC, this one expects you to have already finished NG+. I'm 50 levels under the recommended. Fuck it though. I'm gonna finish it anyway. I've already gotten this far so I think I can do it.

I'm a really big fan of the classic Looney Tunes shorts and one of my nerdy pursuits is to eventually own every short on physical media, at least the ones that aren't lost to time. I already have the Golden Collection, which is the most robust, but that on its own only has about 60% or so of all the available shorts. This DVD right here is the only way to have all of the Pepe shorts on physical media and unfortunately after he was pulled from the Space Jam sequel and WB announced they have no plans to use him the price of this DVD shot up to absolutely ridiculous prices. Up to $400 on eBay from asshole sellers. Thankfully, I got extremely lucky and only had to pay $13 for this thanks to a recent restock.

The PS4 version of Nioh 1 doesn't upgrade to the remaster like the sequel does. I never got the DLC for it either. Buying the collection used ended up being cheaper than just buying the first game on PSN. So I guess now I don't need my PS4 disc anymore.

Finally got around to finishing the Nioh 2 DLC. I think I've nearly mastered Nioh at this point because there was only one boss who gave me a lot of trouble and when I eventually fought her a second time in a side mission as part of a dual boss I steamrolled her pretty easily. Not that the DLC is easier than the main game or anything. If anything it's harder but I feel like I've got the combat down to a science. I suppose that's what happens when you play a game for 300+ hours. I'm doing a co-op campaign with a friend but after that I guess there's NG++,+++, and ++++ to go through as well as the boss rush dungeon. I doubt I'm putting it down completely any time soon.

Fair point, but Demon's Souls is hardly a blockbuster either so I guess it'll just come down to demand and how willing Sony is to listen to it. I would be more than happy with a performance patch but if it hasn't happened by now I can only assume the only way we're getting it is with a remaster. RE4 definitely doesn't need a remake whatsoever but I admit I would play an upscaled 4K/60 FPS port at least.

Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time Finally wrapped up this one after playing it on and off for a few months. This is, hands down, the hardest Crash game in the entire series, and it was already not an easy game to begin with. I have kind of a love-hate relationship with this one, honestly. I like the cartoony animation and designs. The controls are tight, the levels are cool and the new mechanics and playable characters give you some variety and keep it interesting, which is nice, but if you're a completionist this game is going to ruin your life. If you want to 100% a level in this game you need to do ALL of the following. - Get every crate, many of which are often hidden offscreen and you just have to know they're there. - Get 80% of all wumpa fruits - Find the hidden gem - Don't die. At all. Keep in mind you usually die in one hit and these levels much, much longer than ever before. - Beat the platinum time in the time trial, which also requires not dying even once to accomplish - Now do it all again in the inverted stage variant Have fucking mercy. This is a kid's game! To be fair, they did bring it up to modern standards in some respects. You can turn on a brightly colored ring under your feet when you jump so you'll always know exactly where you're going to land. You can play in modern mode which gives you infinite lives and just counts how many deaths you have. You can play in a limited lives retro mode if you're a purist but I do NOT recommend doing that at all because these levels were clearly designed with the expectation that you will die over a dozen times. Even if you're up for that kind of punishment, one thing I just can't forgive is that whenever you die you have to recollect every box you've broken since your last checkpoint. I know it was like this in the old Crash games but come on. It's a 2020 game. There's no excuse for that anymore. When you are likely to die many, many times in most levels, going back and getting the boxes again every single time you do isn't fun or challenging. It's just tedious. Yes, some of the boxes are used as platforms so you need them to be there every time, but you could at least mark them somehow to indicate that the game counts it as being collected already. I can recommend this game if you're the type who can ignore collectibles and completion percentage and you just want to play a platformer without worrying about any of that stuff. If you can do that, it's a pretty fun, challenging game. If, however, you are compelled to get all the things like I usually am, just know that you are in for one of the most frustrating, infuriating, unfun grinds of your entire gaming life.

I agree, really. In Demon's Souls case I think it really needed that remake because I hated the original game and all of its inconveniences, but by and large I just want 60 FPS gameplay and maybe some updated textures. A 60 FPS patch for Bloodborne, maybe a remaster, would be more than enough for me.

Bloodborne remake doesn't sound so unlikely anymore does it? But still this sucks. I would much rather have Days Gone 2. I'm pretty much done with The Last of Us entirely. I've lost interest.

I like the ones that aren't necessarily challenging but ask you to think outside the box. One of my favorite achievements is from the Ghostbusters game. You have to shoot the ham off of the bartmitzvah buffet table in the hotel level because it isn't kosher.

Picked up Crash 4 again after putting it down for a while but good god this game is unreasonably hard for a E10+ rated platformer game. Just out of curiosity I looked up a trophy guide to see how difficult it would be to 100% this and the official rating is a 9/10. To put that in perspective, the ratings for Sekiro and Bloodborne is 7.

Battlefield 1 Downloaded it alongside Black Ops III and was playing it off and on. The campaign is pretty much a glorified tutorial for the multi but it still confirms to me that I just plain prefer Battlefield's gameplay style over CoD's. There's not really much worth mentioning either way, although there was one mechanic I found pretty interesting. There are a bunch of guns in the game where if you try to reload them before you're empty, you don't just throw away the clip that still has some bullets in it but instead manually load new bullets in one at a time. Obviously this takes a lot longer to do, but I thought it added an interesting strategic element to ammo management. Do you reload early and risk getting caught with your pants down or do you wait until you're empty so you can reload faster but risk not having enough bullets in a bind? It's something I wouldn't mind seeing in more FPS games. Ammo capacity in this game is also much lower than in CoD so I was switching guns way more often.

Judgment What a ride. This is a spin-off of the Yakuza series and while I wouldn't really call it a Yakuza game because it has none of the familiar characters, not even as cameos, it does share a very similar style of gameplay and it does take place in Kamurocho. I suppose I'd call this a Kamurocho side story. However, don't let that trick you into thinking this is a game where the story is an afterthought. The plot had me riveted. You play as Takayuki Yagami, an attorney-cum-detective who gave up law when one of his former clients went on to murder his girlfriend. Yagami has begun investigating a rash of murders being perpetrated by a serial killer called The Mole, who targets yakuza and gouges out their eyes as his calling card. What starts off as a simple murder investigation ends up being full of twists and turns and it becomes so much more. I also gotta say that the killer is one of the coolest villains in the whole franchise. I'd say this one is worth experiencing for the story alone. Yagami himself isn't as memorable as Kiryu or Ichiban but he's not poorly-written or anything. His archetype just doesn't really stand out that much in comparison. We've all seen detectives with a chip on their shoulder who will do anything to get to the truth, but he's still fine for what he is. The gameplay is mostly similar to Yakuza. Yagami has two fighting styles, one for groups and one for strong solo enemies. It's not as complex as 0 or Kiwami but it's not totally mindless either. In addition to the normal fighting you can also solve cases for clients, which is the easiest way to make money. Cases usually involve interviewing people, examining crime scenes for evidence, and...ugh...tailing suspects. I swear, President Biden should sign a bill outlawing tailing missions because they're always the least fun part of any game they're in and this one is no exception. There's also a cool system in place where you can befriend certain NPCs all over Kamurocho by doing missions for them and if you do they'll help you out in their own way. Some might give you special store items or teach you new skills and some might even help you out during street fights. It's pretty neat. Not EVERY new mechanic is a winner though. If you take too long during random encounters the police will show up and you're forced to run away, lest you get caught and penalized with a 10,000 yen fine, which is a lot of money for this game. Worse than that are mortal wounds. When you're damaged with a gun or a sword it inflicts a mortal wound, which decreases the maximum size of your life bar. The only way to get rid of mortal wounds is either to visit a back alley doctor, which costs 20,000 yen, or use a medical kit, which cost 40,000 yen each. You really don't want to get shot in this game because it will seriously hurt your wallet. This is the first game in the series where I got in the habit of using human shields to block bullets. Those are fairly small complaints though. If you like the Yakuza series and you like crime dramas, this one is a winner. The tone of this game is more serious and not as over-the-top as Yakuza so you won't see Yagami singing Baka Mitai or hiring a chicken to manage his business, but you still get plenty of kickass action and compelling characters to enjoy.

You STILL haven't watched it?

PART SIX BAYBEE

This is pretty cool. Nioh 2 had Yasuke as an ally in the story and I thought he was one of the more interesting characters in it.

Godzilla vs. Kong This one manages to cross over the line from average to decent. Past Godzilla movies in the west have disappointed me for two main reasons. One, there's too much focus on human characters who aren't interesting. Two, the monster fights are too dark and obscured and it's hard to see the action. This movie addressed both of those complaints. While there are obviously human characters, they have less prevalence than before and there are fewer of them as well. Most importantly, there's NO MILITARY BULLSHIT. No offense to any soldiers out there but when I watch a kaiju movie the last thing I care about is some army grunt's trials and tribulations. There are jets and ships that exist just to get smashed but we don't have to follow any boring soldier characters. As for the action scenes? They're good! Godzilla and Kong are both given proper respect and while in my opinion there's a clear winner in their matchup it's not completely one-sided. The monster fights are all nice and clear. No fog, no rain, none of that other garbage to block your view. There is a fight at night but it takes place in a brightly lit city so you can easily follow what's going on. What a difference a little visibility makes. Obviously this movie isn't trying to be anything daring or innovative. It wants to be enjoyable popcorn fare and I think this one finally succeeds. There's still a little bit more human focus than I'd prefer but I can't claim that the monsters are neglected. It takes less than 15 minutes for both Kong and Godzilla to get screen time and they're never gone for long after that so good job, Legendary. There's still room for improvement but this is definitely a step in the right direction.

The last sort-of Yakuza game to cross off the list.

I just wish they had included a C-to-C cable instead of an A-to-C cable. They cost about the same so I don't know what their basis for this decision was. I already have a ton of A-to-C cables lying around.

Call of Duty: Black Ops III It was free to PS5 owners with PS+. Yeah, that sure was a Call of Duty game. It's fine but the futuristic cybersoldier mechanics don't really all all that much to the gameplay except for an enhanced HUD and hacking enemy drones. Plot was kind of creative, I suppose. You know, for a Call of Duty game. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Games are definitely getting bigger but I feel like Call of Duty is an exception, not the rule. CoD games are always stupidly huge for reasons I will never understand. Even RDR2 is only half of that size.

I suppose but I think I'd rather just wait for the update, buy a 2 TB drive, and never worry about it again. That's what I did with the PS4, anyway. I'm sure games will be bigger on the PS5 but I think by the time I fill up 2 TB I'll be fine with deleting some of the older ones anyway.

Uh, no...Yours did?

I could do that, I suppose, but wouldn't that mean it wouldn't take advantage of the PS5's speed? It's better than nothing, I suppose, but I paid 500 bucks for this thing. I wanna take advantage of the perks of the hardware.

Well I had to buy a new cable to use that port in the first place, which was an extra 20 bucks, so I didn't really appreciate that. But it was either that or constantly switch out between the controller and the dongle. I have plenty of usb-A to usb-c cables lying around, but I didn't have any usb-c to usb-c because that's not a thing I ever needed until now, and I'm a guy with a fair number of usb-c devices.