Mister Jack

Yeah, I've heard about it. Gosh I just don't know who to root for because I care about both sides so much.

Ghost of Tsushima 4 player co-op mode!

I have my reservations about Harris as a person but purely from a campaigning standpoint I have to admit she was a pretty shrewd pick. Trump, being Trump, is not going to be able to hit back on her without looking like a huge racist or sexist because he has never heard of subtlety. Which, I mean, he is, but apparently there are still people in this country who haven't made up their minds on that yet for some reason.

No wonder it looked so half-assed. They're gonna have to pull a seriously huge rabbit out of their hat to salvage this game.

I wouldn't be surprised if they planned to launch with Halo in November but the disastrous reception forced them to push it back.

Damn I should look there next time I need to renew.

Yeah I think that's a fairly safe bet.

I downloaded Fall Guys on Playstation Plus (it's also on steam for $20) and played it last night with a couple of friends. It's a battle royale—no! Wait! Come back! I swear it's different this time! This is a battle royale in the style of a physical challenge game show like Ninja Warrior or Takeshi's Castle. The game has a pretty low skill ceiling and all you really have to do is run, jump, and occasionally grab things, but the sheer chaos in competing in events with so many other people can make for a pretty hilarious spectacle. One of the games has you all trying to cram yourselves through a narrow doorway and we were all cracking up at the gigantic piles of bodies trying to climb over each other like the World War Z movie. This does mean that sometimes how well you do can come down to luck. With so many bodies pushing and bumping against each other there will inevitably be times when you get shoved right off a platform. However, this is still much easier to win than a game of Fortnite or PUBG. I managed to win an episode last night, even. I could have won three times but two of those times I made a couple of easily avoided literally very-last-second fuckups that cost me the crown. Oh well. Easy come, easy go. I think there are two big reasons that I enjoy this game when I hate every other BR game. 1) Each round in an episode is quick and lasts an average of two minutes each. It's not a shooter so there's no boring period where you are all just scrambling for a weapon and then waiting for something to happen. There's also no chance of you getting instantly eliminated at the start of the game, leaving you frustrated and feeling like you're wasting your time. No matter how bad you are at the game you will always be able to play through the entirety of at least the first round. If you do get eliminated then jumping into a new game takes mere seconds, server status notwithstanding. 2) This is really more of a party game than a skill-based esports title. While there is some on-the-fly strategy involved in how you approach a challenge, I doubt you'll see much metagaming here. We probably won't be getting any Ninjaesque streamers who dominate everyone else on a regular basis. I won't say your platforming skills don't matter but the chaotic nature of the game can help and hinder you in equal measure. Think of it like Mario Party without the board game bits. My only two big criticisms of the game are easily fixable. First, it needs more minigames, which I'm sure they're already working on. Second, there are a couple of team based games where you can end up losing in the last two seconds even when you were completely dominating the rest of the round. It's like timing a capture the flag game and then picking the winner based on whoever happened to be touching the flag when the clock ran out regardless of how long everyone else was holding the flag the rest of the time. I would prefer these games be scored based on time spent in the lead rather than all-or-nothing at the very end. Still a fun game with a ton of laughs, though. If you have PS+ or you just want something fun and silly to play with friends I'd give it a look.

Thank god the mongols only have a handful of these archers.

I'm not really much of a Biden Stan but I sure hope he beats Trump in an absolute landslide in November. Not just so he'll be indisputably labeled as a loser for the rest of time but also so the GOP might finally be forced to do some god damn introspection for once and ask themselves how they need to change if they want to win next time.

Nioh 2: The Tengu's Disciple It's pretty short with just two main missions that last about an hour each if you don't die and a handful of side missions that can range from 10 to 30 minutes each depending on skill level and mission type, but the whole season pass is only 20 dollars so I kind of expected this. There are, however, multiple new bosses and they're pretty good. A few of the them are recycled from the first game but they've been redesigned with new attacks that make them stronger than before. Whether they're harder or not is a matter of opinion. Nioh 2 gives you far more defensive and offensive options than Nioh 1 so at least for me personally I didn't struggle with them nearly as much, but I've gotten pretty good at Nioh after playing it for so long. Full disclosure, I was also overleveled for this DLC. I've heard that the original game's DLC expected you to be at least halfway through NG+ before you tackle it, which a lot of people complained about, so this one is balanced in a way that makes it accessible right after you beat the campaign. However, I was already halfway through NG+ so I pretty much breezed through it. I'm sure when I eventually replay it on NG+ difficulty it will be much tougher. The new splitstaff weapon is pretty cool and introduces a new style of gameplay since it's a weapon based more on draining ki and then going for deathblows than it is on doing large amounts of direct damage. I think this applies to everyone regardless of DLC but there are also new accessories called picture scrolls that you can equip. These are rare, high level drops that provide very powerful bonuses but in order to unlock them you have to first go inside of the scroll and complete a mission. Each scroll has one static perk and two random perks, but if you don't like the random perks you have a limited number of attempts to re-roll them by completing the mission again. Not bad so far. Looking forward to the second episode.

Well Trump's approval rating is around 45% sooo...

Definitely. Aside from the graphics, the OG version was better in almost every way. More content, longer levels, better online, and arguably even better writing.

OG version was actually much better.

If they do bring back the games I want to see more Chaos Theory, less Conviction.

Let's do it! Bring it on, you filthy yokai!

Friend of mine surprised me with this because he wants to play VR shit together. I'm looking forward to seeing what the community has come up with while never submitting anything myself because I'm a braindead consoomer who can't into programming and design.

Ah yes, the J.J. Abrams school of writing. Everybody loves that.

I swear, watching people eat shit in this game never fails to make me laugh.

King always seems to have a problem with writing a good ending for some reason, at least in everything I ever read from him. It's a shame because he's really good at buildup.

I don't think any amount of dynamic lighting can explain away those textures. When they showed those cliffs I thought to myself, no exaggeration, "that looks like upscaled Minecraft." If they wanted to get so ambitious I think they would have been better off just pushing this game to the next gen rather than limiting themselves to the current one. Doing so means it has to work on the original Xbone hardware which, as we all can remember, was pretty weak. I guess you could argue that allowing more people to be able to play it is the preferable option, but I have to wonder if they're being held back by outdated hardware. That demo was being played on the PC though so honestly, what the fuck.

I just wish they didn't go for the open world. I reeeeally don't think that's something that works in Halo's favor.

Ghost of Tsushima I still have a lot of side stuff to do but I finished the main story and all the supporting character stories so that's good enough to post here. I'm surprised just how much I loved this game. A critique I hear over and over is "Assassin's Creed but good" and yeah, that's pretty accurate. This is more or less an Assassin's Creed game without all the tedious Ubisoft baggage (microtransactions, bugs, an overwhelming number of objectives) and with a lot more polish. I would be lying if I said it doesn't check a lot of the open world checkboxes. You clear out enemy camps, you do stealth kills in tall grass, you track footprints, and you do climbing/platforming challenges. All these things are competently implemented but they don't really bring anything new to the table. If this was all there was to the game it would be fairly average but there are two big saving graces to Ghost of Tsushima. First, the combat in this game is great. Sword strikes feel nice and heavy and the constant juggling of stances for managing different enemy types along with using your tools for crowd control is really satisfying. If you time your blocks just right you can also do parries that you can follow up with a powerful deathblow, but this is a lot trickier than it sounds, especially when you're being attacked by a group. Make no mistake, if you rush in and button mash you will quickly get your ass handed to you.You have to fight like a samurai, not a barbarian. It's also worth mentioning that stealth and open combat are usually both viable options for clearing your objective. I personally liked to start with stealth to thin out the herd a little, then jump out in the open and yell for all the remaining enemies to come get some. It's a lot of fun. The other thing this game does so, so right is the presentation. If this isn't the most beautiful open world I've ever played in then it's at least in the top 3. The world here is smaller than most open world games, but Sucker Punch took that smaller space and crafted an absolutely gorgeous environment that is oozing with atmosphere and natural splendor. I took so many screenshots just while riding around the map and I would gladly make any one of them into my desktop wallpaper. It looks that good and it feels super rewarding to explore the island when there's always some breathtaking new sight to see. As if that wasn't enough, the game's navigation blends seamlessly into the world itself. Animals you find will lead you to secrets and the wind blows in the direction of your current objective. Instead of following a map marker, you observe the grass, the trees, and the leaves to find your way. It makes you feel much more connected to the world and it's really cool. I won't say there's no map markers at all, but they only pop up once you're extremely close to your goal and need to narrow down your search area. You can also minimize the HUD if you wish to make it even more immersive. There's a black and white Kurosawa mode if you want to play it in the style of his movies, but while I appreciate the gesture I just can't imagine missing out on these colors. The story is fine. It's a solid if unremarkable samurai movie tale. The characters are also fine. I don't love them but I do like them, if that makes sense. However, even though this plot treads familiar ground there were still a few points where I felt an emotional impact. It's a story we've seen before but it's presented well with great music and strong performances, especially in Japanese. It's hard not to get at least a little invested when it's told with this much style. On one final note, I was really happy to see that this game doesn't lean too hard into realism to the point where it becomes a detriment to your enjoyment. You don't have to watch a slow animation to pick up every item you come across, you don't have to wait for your horse to catch up to you when you whistle for it, and some of the physics are kind of "video gamey." Is it realistic? No. BUT IT'S FUN, DAMN IT!

"This is the largest open world we've ever created!" When I hear this nowadays I actually see it as a negative. When a developer brags about how huge their open world is that tells me one of two things: 1) There's huge patches of boring, cut and pasted emptiness 2) The space between actual mission areas are filled up with an overwhelming amount of busywork and meaningless collectibles rather than meaningful content You know what I prefer? Open worlds that are smaller, but more thoughtfully crafted. I'd rather have a smaller open world with love and care put into every inch than an enormous world where long stretches of boring traversal is a feature. Even Rockstar is guilty of this.