Mister Jack

It was on sale at Square Enix's website. I played the free trial until I hit the level cap and then stopped. 30 bucks for the full game and both of the expansions was too good to pass up.

How direct is the plot connection between the three games? I'm still stuck on the original on 3DS because it has a billion sidequests, but I still want to play the newer ones. I still have a Wii U just for Chronicles X.

From the Yakuza team. Is it weird that I kinda want this despite never playing a Yakuza game?

I'm glad to hear Hollow Knight gets better because I played the beginning and it bored me enough to make me quit. Maybe I should go back to it.

Figures I held onto my PS3 for ages so I could finally get around to beating this game and then they go and announce a better version.

So the year is almost over and pretty much all the big or important game releases have come to pass. Out of everything you played, which game deserves to be crowned the king for 2017? Because I suspect a lot of people will have the same answer, I'm also going to include the runner-up for the sake of variety. So to start us off, here are my choices. Game of the Year: Persona 5 This one was obvious from the beginning. While I am aware this game has some well-documented flaws (FUCK YOU MORGANA I DON'T WANT TO GO TO BED), none of its shortcomings were nearly enough for me to stop playing. I got literally over 200 hours out of this game by the time I finally finished it with the platinum. No other game this year even came close to giving me this much entertainment for my 60 dollars. This entry took the already extremely solid gameplay of Persona 4 and fine-tuned it to near perfection. I had a hard time imagining how they could improve on P4G but they did it. It will be years before we ever see Persona 6, but I'm already chomping at the bit for it. Runner up: Cuphead I have to explain this one a little. Cuphead is a great game in its own right, but that's not why I'm naming it as my runner up. There are other games this year I played longer. There are even other games this year I would say I had more fun with. However, I just can't understate the remarkable achievement of what Studio MDHR pulled off here. Golden Age animation is something I take a great interest in, and the way the devs replicated the look so faithfully with actual hand-drawn animation on an artist's desk is just incredible. This was a passion project through and through, and it's produced something that I don't think we've ever really seen before in the gaming medium. I know there are other games that emulated the aesthetic, but to my knowledge no other titles in the history of gaming have ever gotten it this accurate. Even the music sounds like something you'd expect from a 30s cartoon. Cuphead opened up a whole new world of possibilities, and I can't wait to see how people capitalize on it.

This Harry Potter book written by a predictive program must be seen to be believed.

Yaaay Star Wars! I liked it a lot. I might even go so far as to say I loved it. It fixed pretty much every problem I had with TFA, whether it was through retconning something I hated or just plain better writing and characterization. I have very few complaints, honestly. Fans seem pretty divided on how this movie did so much different that they weren't expecting, but that's exactly why I liked it so much. Star Wars has been following the same beats for too long. It's time to shake the franchise up.

I wouldn't be surprised if Disney decides to stick with the new guy after the much better reception this movie got. I feel like it will be remembered more fondly than TFA a few years from now.

Both of the new DLC episodes are out now. One of them is free. I'm not sure about the other one though. I bought the season pass a while back so I'm not sure if that's part of it.

Won't it be fun to watch the GOP try to court young black voters in 2018.

There is really no reason not to want the Dems to retake control of the House and Senate in 2018, even if they are going to be unfairly blamed for Trump's absolutely atrocious tax plan. I used to consider myself a fairly centrist guy, but not anymore. The Republicans are fucking it up. Anyway, here's the Alabama voter results based on sex and race. Pretty eye-opening stuff.

Figures they announce this long after I got rid of my copy of the game, which was pretty mediocre.

Night in the Woods I've been looking for games on my hard drive I could beat quickly and delete to free up some room, and this happened to be sitting on my D: drive. It's a neat little narrative with likable, well written characters and a charming art style. There isn't a whole lot of gameplay outside of a few mini games, so you're mostly just watching the story unfold. It's nice, but unfortunately the plot kind of falls apart at the ending. Lots of unanswered questions and it kind of feels like the devs wanted to just get it over with. There are a few good scenes that make me glad I played it though.

I know even less about this game now than I did when they unveiled the first trailer.

Doki Doki Literature Club Honestly, it's impossible to talk about this one without spoiling it. It's free on steam, just play it. A single playthrough only takes a couple hours and I guarantee it's an experience you won't soon forget.

Technically it was a gift, but I look forward to getting into this.

Middle-Earth: Shadow of War This was a big step up from the first game, which I liked but I also felt like it was a bit too small in scale. This game is bigger and better in just about every way. There's more to do, there's more maps to explore, the bosses are better, and the combat has been fine-tuned. It does get a bit grindy if you're going for the true ending in Act IV, which is the part that tries to bait you into buying loot crates, but I managed just fine without them, minus the crates I occasionally bought with in-game currency. It took me a little over 40 hours to complete everything, so there's really no need to waste your money on microtransactions.

XCOM: The Bureau is free on Humble Bundle right now. I know it's an average game, but hey, free's free.

I'm having a total blast with Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, but I'm at that infamous endgame now where you have to basically fight a prolonged war and the average level of your enemies jumps up dramatically. This was clearly designed to entice people into buying loot crates to help even the odds, which is definitely shitty, but fortunately I found a good way to level up without having to resort to loot boxes, so if you are playing or have played this game and gave up around this part because the grind was so bad, here's my advice: Lose your forts on purpose. Seriously, do it. Defending your forts requires a ton of resources and you'll be going through your spoils of war like water trying to buy all these upgrades to fend off attackers who are ten levels higher than you. However, if you lose the fort first then all you have to do to move on to the next battle is reclaim it. This is much better than trying to defend for two reasons. Firstly, you can still lower the fort's level by doing missions to kill off individual defending captains. It's much easier to attack a fort with a 120 rating than defend from attackers with a 380 rating. On top of that, you get 3x as much XP for capturing a fort as you do for defending it. You're guaranteed at least one level up for every fort you capture, maybe even two. Is it still a grind? Yeah, a bit, but much less of one. I'm halfway through after just a few hours using this method. It's possible the last few stages will jump up again and force me to find another way to grind, but I still went from level 40 to 45 after just a few battles.

Bungie caught concealing XP scaling. If you haven't already heard about this, Bungie had a hidden system in place where if you were grinding an activity repeatedly for XP, your gains would be increasingly reduced over time, but this wasn't actually reflected in the onscreen XP notifications. In otherwords, the game would straight up lie to you about how much XP you were getting. When Bungie got found out they turned off the XP scaling, but then without telling people they also slashed XP gains in half, which means the grind to get another bright engram is now even longer than it was while the scaling was turned on. I really hope this loot box shit comes back to bite them in the ass like it currently is with EA and Battlefront.