toxicitizen

September is insanely packed this year. I'm really glad Capcom decided to release Onimusha three weeks earlier because both of these dropping on the same day was fucking brutal. These are both no-brainer day one purchases for me, so I wouldn't have known which one to play first. I'll probably get Silent Hill Townfall as well but that one can wait until closer to launch.

Pokémon FireRed I picked it up when they released the port on the eShop earlier this year and got most of the way through it but then something else came out that distracted me from it and I only just got around to finishing it. Except for a difficulty spike at the very end that forced me to spend a few hours grinding, I enjoyed it for the most part. I did what little bit of story there is in the post-game and I'm at the point where all that's left to do is grind some more and fill out the pokédex. And since I don't have anyone to trade with, I'm not going to bother. It was fun to revisit the series after all this time, though. I had only played the first two gens on gb/gbc back in the day, so this version was good for a retro nostalgia trip while still feeling a bit fresh. I definitely want to play more of the series but I'm not sure where to go next. There's rumors that more ports might be coming soon so maybe I'll just wait for those but it's tempting to jump ahead to the more recent gens to see what modern Pokémon games are like.

A Whole Lotta Kirby So, one of the things that made the Switch 2 so appealing to me was the size of the library available on it, not just the ports and remasters on the Switch itself but also the retro games available on NSO. One of the series I'd been meaning to dig into properly was Kirby. So I spent the month of July playing nothing but Kirby games. Kirby's Dream Land 1 and 2 (GB) They're simple and cute little Game Boy platformers. I kinda figured I'd try them for a few minutes and move on but I ended up playing them all the way through in one sitting. The second one in particular was pretty fun but it got kinda bullshit hard by the end and I don't think I would've bothered finishing it without save states. 7/10 Kirby's Adventure (NES) This one was actually impressive for an NES title. The art style is simple enough that they were able to push the graphics way past what the average NES game looked like. It doesn't quite feel a generation ahead of its time but almost. If you bumped up the graphics a bit, it would basically feel like a SNES game because it brought the gameplay to the level you'd expect out of a Kirby game. Basically, Sakurai was already cooking way back then. That being said, the emulator crashed in the middle of the final boss fight and my only save state was like 2 full worlds back so I watched the ending on youtube because I wasn't replaying all of that. 7.5/10 Kirby Super Star (SNES) This is the only game that I had played a little of back in the day. I think this one is considered the gold standard when it comes to 2D Kirby games and it's easy to see why. It's split up into multiple mini-campaigns and every single one is firing on all cylinders. Not much else to say other than it's a fantastic game. 9/10 Kirby's Dream Land 3 (SNES) I guess this is where they started the "Kirby but with a __ art style" gimmick. It has this watercolor painting art style that looks really beautiful. It might actually be the best looking SNES game I've seen. Unfortunately, it felt kinda sluggish to play. The gameplay was significantly slower than the previous games and the animal mounts didn't feel anywhere near as useful as in Dream Land 2. I had to force myself to finish it and I didn't get the true ending because it requires you to find a hidden collectible in every single level and I only found a handful of them organically. I wasn't going to replay most of the game just for this so I just watched the true ending on youtube. It's basically just an extra phase to the final boss. 5/10 Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards I was bracing myself for the worst with this one since games from that era haven't aged the best but I was pleasantly surprised. It immediately felt really good to play, especially after Dream Land 3. It also looked really good for an N64 game. I don't know if Nintendo's emulator is running games at a higher internal resolution of if the scanlines filter was just doing heavy lifting on the admittedly very simple graphics but the image looked incredibly sharp to me. There isn't that much to say about it beyond that. It's basically a glorified 2D platformer. I wouldn't even call it 2.5D, it's way too simple for that. You can combine two copy abilities to create a stronger ability, which was a pretty fun twist but you only end up relying on a few overpowered ones. I got most of the collectibles by playing the game normally and I was having a good time with it, so I went back and got the ones I was missing for the true ending. It also just added an extra phase to the final boss and then a little extra cutscene. 8/10 At this point I still had a GBA game and a couple of classic style games on Switch that I could play but I only had a week left before the physical release of Xenoblade Chronicles, which I was planning to play immediately, so I decided to skip ahead to: Kirby and the Forgotten Land + Star-Crossed World This was the one I was most looking forward to playing, so I figured I'd use the limited time I had left to play it. It's basically to the old games what 3D World was to 2D Mario. It feels like a 2D platformer that was given a third-dimension without turning it into a full-blown 3D game. It's pretty great! I wouldn't say it was as good as Mario 3D World (or as challenging) but if you're in the mood for a cute and fun platformer, you could do much worse. It's definitely one of my favorite Switch games so far. I got all the collectibles for the base game and the DLC and completed most of the post-game stuff. The only things I have left to do are some of the harder mini-games that seem like they would be more frustrating than fun. I might come back to them to get 100% eventually but for now I think I'm good. 10/10 edit: Oh and I realized I never posted my friend code. Feel free to add me: SW-3747-9638-1387

New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe I was under the impression that the New series wasn't that well-liked, so I wasn't sure what to expect but Nintendo fans are crazy, man. This was great! It was like playing a more modern version of Super Mario World. I cleared every level, got every secret exit, collected every star coin and cleared star road to get 5 stars on my save file. Then I did it all over again in New Super Luigi U. I enjoyed Luigi U even more because of its focus on shorter, faster levels. Although it was kind of a bummer that they re-used the same world map as the main game. Anyway, I thought this was going to be a double entry with Star Fox but holy shit, fuck that game! I genuinely can't remember the last time I hit such an insane difficulty spike in a video game. I was enjoying the campaign just fine. Some levels were a little challenging but I was getting used to it. And then I got to the boss of Area 6 and I wanted to fucking scream. Like, death after death after death with no fucking idea what the hell I was doing wrong. And when I finally managed to beat that level, the final one was even worse! You're fighting another squad and you can barely keep them on screen long enough to try to hit them, they keep moving in ways the camera can't even track and as soon as they disappear off-screen they're already behind you somehow, trying to crawl up your ass. I made it to the final boss once, with only one life left and that motherfucker just immediately swallowed me and blew up my ship. I think I hate this fucking game, oh my god!

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening I was looking for something short to play on my Switch until Star Fox and ended up picking this because the Ocarina of Time Remake announcement put me in a Zelda mood. It's basically a smaller version of Link to the Past, so I don't need to tell you how great it is. I ended up going for all hearts containers (and every other optional things I could find) which I don't think I've done in any Zelda games since the original OoT on N64. I hope they'll remake Link to the Past in this style eventually. I'd be way more excited for that than I am for Ocarina. Although before that, I need Nintendo to stop fucking around and put Wind Waker HD and Twilight Princess HD on Switch already!

007 First Light This turned out to be both less like Hitman and more like James Bond than I expected. Overall, I really enjoyed it. It's definitely the best Bond game so far simply by virtue of not just being a glorified shooter. This adapts the full experience of being Bond including the social stealth aspect and the way you can recover from breaking stealth just by throwing a few punches. Getting spotted in Hitman usually means immediately reloading whereas in this I always just rolled with it since that seemed to be in the spirit of the game. I kinda wish it was more open-ended, though. I don't see a ton of replayability in the main campaign. The levels really aren't as sandboxy as in Hitman. And it remains to be seen how much longevity TacSim will actually add to the game. I guess that's going to largely depend on how much content they plan to add post-launch because right now there doesn't seem to be a ton of content there. Especially considering the amount of cosmetics I've already unlocked from pre-order bonuses, twitch drops and Hitman account linking. So I'm expecting the support to be rather extensive and long-term. I'm a long time Hitman fan, and as much as I'm looking forward to the next Hitman, I wouldn't be mad if IO Interactive alternated between Hitman and this for the next decade. I definitely hope it does well enough for a sequel to happen, at least.

Ditto Shovel Knight was way too good for me not to get this day one. I'll probably play it next once I'm done with First Light.

Dragon Quest XII: The Flames of Fate has restarted development and is now Dragon Quest XII: Beyond Dreams. Coming: not anytime soon lol. At least we actually get some footage of this version, though.

Hitman 2 I decided to replay this to kill some time while I wait for First Light but this turned out to not be a normal playthrough. It started out normal enough, I was going to replay the story and then go for all the achievements so I could transfer my progress into Hitman: World of Assassination and finally play the last set of levels and the end of the story. Well, turns out I waited too long to do this because about halfway through the Hitman 1 levels I found out they killed the Hitman 3 transfer when they added cross-progression to the game. So now I have to once again redo everything in Hitman: WoA. Which isn't a bad problem to have, I'm already looking forward to starting over on a fresh save. But it is a hell of a time sink so idk when I'll get around to do that. Maybe the Steam Frame will be out by then and I'll be able to do it in VR. Anyway, once I found out I couldn't transfer my progress, I changed my approach. Instead of treating it like a story replay, I switched into achievement hunting mode. I started skipping all the story cutscenes so that my next run in WoA would be somewhat fresh and I started being more optimal with my runs. I realized that if I started every level with a Master Difficulty/Suit Only/Silent Assassin/Sniper Assassin run (using a video guide), I would unlock a shit ton of "classics" challenges and would get enough xp to almost max out level mastery immediately (since I was already halfway there on most levels). That made things much more efficient and I started making progress much faster from that point on. It also had the added benefit that I didn't spend hours exploring every nook and cranny of every level. So once again, my next run in WoA should be somewhat fresh when played normally. The only issue was the multiplayer achievements for the Sniper levels but I found someone willing to help on the Steam forum. At this point, the forum is basically nothing but people looking for help with those achievements. I wasn't sure I'd have enough time to finish this before First Light came out but as it turns out now I have another week and a half to kill...

Oh right, yeah, me too.

I don't know if this counts as a trope but I've been replaying Hitman 2 and the game has honest to god functional mirrors. And this was right before ray-tracing became really prevalent, so it doesn't kill the performance and it doesn't look like a blurry mess because of DLSS because the game supports neither of those things. As far as I can tell, they don't use the old trick of rendering the room a second time, either. And by functional I don't just mean clear, visible reflections. If you pull out a gun while standing behind an NPC, they'll spot you in the reflection and react accordingly. It's just one of those things that games stopped bothering with so long ago that I've gotten used to mirrors in games just being some kind of weird-looking blurry surfaces. So when you run into one that actually works it's a nice detail. It's the kind of attention to detail that I've come to only expect from developers like Remedy at this point. I still remember when I found a projector in Control, lifted it with telekinesis and the image it was projecting on the wall reacted accordingly and even spun around with the projector. They're small, superficial details but I always appreciate it when devs actually bother to implement them realistically.

New Zachtronics Coincidence game just shadow-dropped yesterday! At least, I don't think it was announced prior to this. Like Kaizen, it doesn't look like it involves actual coding or have a physical edition, sadly. But that's still an instabuy for me!

I've been anticipating this game because I love Hitman and I trust IO Interactive but my hype has been going into overdrive ever since they released the theme song for the game. I just love a good Bond theme. I thought I'd do a mini Bond marathon in anticipation for the game but less than a week in and I've already rewatched all the Pierce Brosnan movies and 2 of the Daniel Craig ones. At this rate I'll have to go back and watch some of the movies from before my time. Anyway, I was going to wait until closer to launch but the previews coming out today are super positive so far, so I said fuck it.

Isn't it just completing Unknown Signal mode? That's not exactly a big ask. It's basically just a post-game free roam mode with 10 extra challenge rooms to clear. I played a little bit of it yesterday and managed to clear half of them fairly quickly. Some of the chambers require you to fight harder versions of the bosses to unlock (I had already met the requirements to unlock the others), but with my almost fully upgraded gear I found them easier than the original fights...

Pragmata I absolutely loved this game. It feels like a throwback to the PS360 gen in a lot of ways. It reminded me a lot of Vanquish in particular. It made me realize how much I miss the days when most games were a solid 10-12 hours with no fluff, often with a lot of replay value. Nowadays, everything needs to be an open-world with dozens of hours of brainless checklists to complete. And don't get me wrong, I love me a good checklist open-world when that's what I'm in the mood for. Especially when it's a game I love and want to spend as much time as possible with. I just find it exhausting that that's what a lot of AAA games have become. Anyway, yeah, Pragmata is great. The hacking concept is novel enough to make the combat feel pretty unique and with the amount of customization available I'm sure people will come up with insane builds that just tear through Lunatic difficulty. I also loved the art direction, especially in the earlier levels when everything looks like a 3D printer vomited all over the station. This feels like a game I'm going to want to keep revisiting over the years. Kinda like Platinum's games. I'm definitely going to keep playing, at the very least do NG+ and Unknown Signal mode. Maybe Lunatic difficulty if I'm feeling adventurous.

Great decision, it's a fantastic game! It feels right out of the PS360 gen. It plays differently but it's giving me strong Vanquish vibes. I love it. Although I am sad to report that it features AI art.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach It's more Death Stranding. Like, shockingly so. The intro was a huge surprise and the ending was completely bonkers in the best way but the middle 80% of the game basically feels like a rehash of the first game. I don't know what I expected but I figured Kojima would switch things up more than that. And it just overall wasn't as captivating as the first game for me. The first game did such a fantastic job with its world-building that it just doesn't feel weird and mysterious anymore. I can just roll with whatever weirdness the game throws at me. That's not to say I didn't love every second of it, though. Like Mister Jack said, the game is definitely way easier than the first one. The only missions I didn't S-rank with ease were some of the boss fights. I remember struggling with the Mads Mikkelsen sections in the first game but I never had any issues dealing with Solid Snake wannabe in this one. Getting access to vehicles very early on also really trivializes the game. I was playing on brutal difficulty and the only times I was challenged was when I had to deal with those ghost mechs. In hindsight, I probably should've played on that new To The Wilder difficulty but I'm always wary of new "eXtRa DiFfIcUlT fOr PrO pLaYeRs OnLy" modes because more often than not they feel like over-tuned bullshit. It's always a treat to play a new Kojima game but at this point it's starting to feel like he's just remaking the same game since MGSV. Sam controls almost exactly like Venom Snake, he just has a different moveset. They're all set in open-worlds with mission-based story progression and big story moments delivered much more sparingly than in his MGS2-4 era. I kinda hope he'll switch things up a bit more with Physint. I'll be there day one no matter what but I wouldn't mind a different structure in his future games. Anyway, normally I'd keep playing and 5-star all locations and get all the achievements but I started playing Pragmata and it's actually really fucking good. So I'm gonna focus on that for now and probably get back to DS2 later on.

It's been too long since I've played a Metro game. I still haven't gotten around to playing Exodus. I think I'll try to replay the first two games and then do Exodus before 2039 comes out.

I really enjoyed the demo and the reviews and overall buzz surrounding the game are very positive, so I went for it. And it's a new IP for once, so I don't mind showing some support. Besides, if there's a studio that's earned my blind trust at this point it's definitely Capcom. The timing is perfect too since I'm nearing the end of Death Stranding 2.

You bought RAM in this economy? Did you have to mortgage your house?!

I own a few of the Switch games and wasn't quite sure which one to start with. Then Nintendo solved my problem by dropping this on the eshop. Playing this is gonna be a hell of a nostalgia trip. The last Pokémon games I played were Yellow and Silver way back on GBC.

Resident Evil Requiem I tried to take my time with it but I finally got to the end last night. One thing that always bugs me on my first run of a new RE game is that I'm always stressing out about how short it might be and worrying I'm going through it too fast. Especially this time since there were pre-release reports that it was 16+ hours long but as reviews started coming out that started going down to 12, 10 and even 8 hours. That must have been the in-game timer because my completion screen said about 10h30 but on Steam I have 17h, which accounts for the times I died and lost progress. I probably would've finished it faster if I hadn't played on standard classic but daddy needs his ink ribbons. For Grace's sections: no notes, 10/10, classic RE Mansion experience. Exactly what I want out of Resident Evil. The Rhodes Hill Care Center in particular was amazing. There's just something about the way the RE engine is lit that makes these environments such a joy to explore. The main Baker house in RE7 was the same way. You'll round a corner and at the end of a dark hallway there's a light revealing a door with a weird handle or something that you can't open yet but it's setup in a way that makes it so intriguing that you're already looking forward to finding out what's on the other side. If they're actually working on another RE1 Remake, I kinda hope it'll be first-person because it's so perfect for that style of gameplay. The one thing I'm not really a fan of is playing hide-and-seek with a monster you have no means of defending yourself against but thankfully that was only the case for a short section at the beginning. Also, what the hell was that orphanage section? Those kids genuinely creeped the hell out of me lol. Replaying it on subsequent runs is gonna be tedious, though. For Leon's sections: I was getting a little frustrated early on because of how for every hour I played as Grace I'd only get like 15mins as Leon but these sections were paced so well that I can't really hold it against the game. It helps that you get plenty of playtime as Leon later on. Also, if it hadn't been for all the glowing reviews, I would've been really worried early on because Leon's combat gave me strong RE6 vibes. But I think Max Dood said it best: Leon's sections in Requiem kinda feel like an apology tour for RE6. This is what they were trying to do at the time, it just really didn't work. They really nailed it this time, though. All tension goes right out the window the second you switch to Leon, but when I was exploring the ruins of Raccoon City I just didn't care because that TLoU-like gameplay loop was just so much fun. I kinda wish that section had been longer than just the one zone, though. I could easily see a full game set in the ruins of Raccoon City with a proper vendor and everything. Everything that came after was great, don't get me wrong, but once you go through that gate you're on rails until the end of the game. Even the short visit to RPD is pretty linear unless you go out of your way to find the few hidden items. I also loved how they went out of their way to cram as many callbacks as possible in there. When a certain someone showed up, I got so excited even if it was just for a short section. And I think this kinda ties into my main issue with the game. There's a lot of really great ideas but I feel like a lot of them could've been executed better. Not that they were executed poorly, I just feel like there was potential for something even better and meatier in the second half of the game. So yeah, overall I feel like the game was fantastic but I can't shake the feeling that some of it could have been executed better. Also, I need more content. It's kind of a bummer that there isn't a proper NG+ or even a Mercenaries mode in the game. I'm sure the inevitable single-player DLC is still a ways off, so hopefully Mercenaries is coming sooner but the fact that they still haven't said anything about it is a little worrying. For now, I'll have to settle for unlocking stuff in the bonus store and trying out Insanity mode. Also, if the rumors are true, I'm excited to go back to yearly Resident Evil releases for a little bit. Getting RE2R, RE3R and Village within a 2 year span was great and it made the longer waits for RE4R and Requiem more painful.

Resident Evil Village + Winters Expansion With Requiem coming out at the end of the month, I figured now was the perfect time to finally play the Village DLC and get the last few achievements I was still missing. I also used the opportunity to replay the base game so I could mess around with that 3rd-person mode they patched in a while back. I was gonna do a fresh run but once I loaded my clear save and saw all the fully upgraded guns with infinite ammo I had at my disposal, I decided I wanted to play with those instead. So it ended up being more of a victory lap kinda run. I did bump the difficulty up to hardcore to keep things interesting. I almost did Village of Shadows but then I remembered that the Heisenberg fight almost gave me an aneurysm the last time I played... Anyway, you can really tell that the game was made with first-person in mind. The devs expected you to be looking at the environment with the camera way up close. In third-person, some areas feel kinda clautrophobic in an awkward way and the added distance makes it kinda hard to make out all the small details in the environment. I'm glad they added the option for people that care about this kinda stuff but to me this felt like an inferior way to play the game. I'm hoping Requiem won't have this issue because it's being made with both POVs in mind from the very start. Overall, I still feel the same way about the game. It's really good but it feels super disjointed. Castle DImitrescu is still by far my favorite area of the entire game with its classic RE Mansion experience. The factory area with its more actiony RE4 style is a close second but I can't help but feel like they dont belong in the same game. I would have been fine with a full game's length of Castle Dimitrescu gameplay or a full game's length of Factory gameplay but having both together (along with two other areas each with its own different style of horror/gameplay) kinda feels like they were trying to please everyone and that just never works out. The best parts leave you wanting more and the worst parts feel like they're wasting your time. Although, to be fair, House Beneviento is the only area that feels completely out of place in the game and is so fucking tedious on subsequent playthroughs. Oh and the whole fake out about Chris being evil is still such a baffling plot contrivance. It's like they couldn't come up with a plausible justification for the fake out so when everything is revealed Chris just goes "yeah, that was a bad idea lol". I still can't get over how bad this actually is lmao. There isn't much to say about Mercenaries mode. It's fun if you enjoy the combat and the Winters Expansion added some new characters that made getting S rank on all the stages easier, so I'm glad I waited this long to do it. As for Shadows of Rose, it's... fine. It mostly re-uses environments from the main game in basically the exact same way (e.g. Castle Dimitrescu is still the classic RE "Mansion" area). There's a few neat twists in there but overall it's kind of underwhelming as the "conclusion to the Winters Saga". And the way they connect it to the final cutscene of the main game is kind of confusing, too. It really makes me wonder if the original plan was for Rose to be the protag of a future game and then when that idea was scrapped they had to throw something together to wrap things up for her. Also, I kinda wish I had done my first run on hardcore because I had to run through it a second time and that was kinda tedious. But anyway, I'm finally done: Now bring on Requiem!

Thank fuck it's not too close to Requiem. Should leave me plenty of time to play through it at least a couple times before it's time to put my Fedex uniform back on.

It's actually happening! MGS4 is getting out of PS3 Jail! I wonder if they'll announce more bonus games, though. Because just 2 main games + Ghost Babel is kind of underwhelming after Vol. 1's lineup. I mean, MGS4 being included at all is huge, so I'm not complaining but they could've thrown in MGSV as well to complete the Solid series. The AC!D games would've also been really cool as bonus titles. Kinda makes me wonder if there's going to be a Vol. 3 down the line.