toxicitizen

I was hoping I'd be able to last on my CPU's stock cooler a little longer but Wolfenstein: The Old Blood was pushing it to temps that made me very uncomfortable. I was tempted to go for one of those fancy All-in-One liquid coolers Corsair makes but I'm kinda nervous about them leaking so I stuck with air. Installing an aftermarket cooler like this is still the step that makes me the most nervous out of the entire PC building process. I just fucking hate it. But at least I knew what I was doing since I helped a friend install the same model in his build like a week ago. Mine was much less trouble to install than his was. And I actually did mine without taking the motherboard out of the case. Speaking of which, man, I fucking love my case! I don't think I could ever go back to a case that doesn't have cable management holes now. It just makes such a huge difference in how annoying it is to go mess around in there. And it's not like I even tried that hard to make everything nice and tidy, I just shoved everything through the holes. The extra space compared to my old one is pretty nice, too. Anyway, it's making a pretty big difference, so that's nice. Idle temps aren't quite as low as I'd hoped but Old Blood is down to much more reasonable temps now (mid 50s versus borderline 80s before).

and I guess technically also The game + all the DLC for 30 bucks over on Bundle Stars. The deal's been there for like a month but I decided to go for it at the last minute (it ends in a few hours). It ended up not being as great of a deal as it first seemed because of the exchange rate, but rumor is the GOTY Edition is gonna show up tomorrow. So, I figured this is the best deal I'm likely to get for the whole thing for the foreseeable future. And I kinda wanted a new game (as in not from my backlog) to keep me busy until Witcher 3. edit: Completely forgot this was coming out this week. I enjoyed The New Order way too much not to get this day one but the 25% off voucher on GMG was a nice additional incentive.

Broken Age. I know it's all the rage to shit on Double Fine these days, and Act 2 got a rather negative reception for some reason, but I actually enjoyed it a lot. Act 2 was a bit more obtuse with the puzzles but overall I thought it was on par with other DF games like Costume Quest, Stacking and the likes. Not mind-blowingly great or anything but still very fun and enjoyable with some funny writing. It's not as good as Grim Fandango, though. Not even close.

That's why I love GMG. They generally have pretty decent deals, especially on pre-orders. Arkham Knight is 43$ right now in their VIP section. And I have about 10$ in store credit. I'm holding off on buying since I can still potentially build up a little bit more credit through their Playfire Rewards program but I'll end up paying like 30 bucks for Arkham Knight. At that price, even if the game disappoints I won't regret pre-ordering. I wouldn't be surprised if they had the season pass for less than 20 bucks before the end of the summer. Yeah, I don't know what it is about them but they're just so much goddamn fun. I'm working my way through the Arkham City ones right now to clear the achievements before Arkham Knight comes out and I'm having a blast. Those campaigns are so much work, though. I've been at it for almost a week now and I still have a whole bunch of them to do.

So, after that idiotically vague reveal for the 40$ Season Pass, they've finally given a bit more details about its content. Surprisingly enough, that actually seems like a very reasonable amount of content for the price point. The most significant reveal being that we get a Batgirl story DLC. Of course, like any season pass, it's still not worth getting until at least some (if not most) of the content is out. There's no good reason to ever pre-order DLC.

After my last post I realized it was also 50% off on Steam. Figured better safe than sorry. Especially with the way the show was unceremoniously taken off the air, I don't think Activision will be too eager to renew that license. Of course, now I have to get up to date with the show before I can play it. It takes place between which seasons again? 2 and 3?

Having played and actually enjoyed it, yeah, wait for it to be sub 15$. It's good but not great. And it's actually coming to Steam in the near future, so it'll inevitably be like 5 bucks eventually. I kinda feel like I need to get Korra ASAP, though. It being an Activision licensed game, I'm nervous it could disappear any day.

If you're dying instantly, then you're simply not learning from your mistakes. Which is when these games are at their most punishing because yeah, you're essentially banging your head against a wall. That's not the way to play them. Also, Kenshi is right. Most enemies can easily be run past (and won't follow you very far). Running back to a boss can usually be done in a minute or two at most if you've already explored the area properly. On the flipside, just because you can't appreciate how well designed these games are doesn't mean that people that do are exaggerating or wrong.

Dark Souls doesn't have a health penalty, though. There's nothing stopping you from just staying in hollow form all the time, it even allows you to "opt out" of getting invaded. That's something they actually felt the need to rectify in DS2. They also brought back the health penalty for death and nerfed the Estus Flask. Ultimately, it ends up making very little difference all things considered but it was a big source of frustration for me early in my first run. Keep in mind most of what I say is meant to be about Dark Souls, not Demons. It's been way too long since I played Demons for me to really comment on it.

Oh, the same issue Ethan has then. I wouldn't really call it backtracking and I personally don't see what the big deal is but okay. I mean, I kinda get it. It's just something you really need to get over if you're ever going to enjoy the game. Having played both, I gotta disagree here. I don't think Dark Souls is particularly harder than Rogue Legacy. Obviously the skill set required going from a 3D action RPG to a 2D side-scroller is completely different. But they're actually both very similar in terms of difficulty curve. Like I said before, Dark Souls really isn't that hard. Especially not after this long with all the wikis out there. Pro tip: early on, upgrading your gear is more important than leveling up your stats. And if you want to turn on "easy mode", go for a dex build and upgrade a weapon that scales well with dex. Oh right, you haven't played Dark. Yeah, I'll grant you that one. Dark Souls actually fixes that with the Estus Flask. It's an healing item you get early on that starts with five charges and gets refilled every time you rest at a bonfire. You can upgrade both how much health it restores and how many charges it holds (up to 20).

I haven't played Bloodborne so make of that what you will. But literally every single thing I've seen or heard about it makes it look pretty much identical to the Souls games.So, it made little to no sense to me when people that disliked Dark Souls were excited for and now claim to enjoy Bloodborne. Kinda makes it sound like they went into Dark Souls looking for reasons to hate it or just weren't willing to give it a proper shot. Or maybe that's just the power a console exclusive has over fanboys. I dunno, I seriously don't get it.

Well, Rogue Legacy is a much simpler game. So there's that. I'd also argue that there isn't much backtracking in Souls nor do you need to actually farm to get through the game. But YMMV, I suppose. Dark Souls is a lot more complex than Rogue Legacy but the basic structure is very similar. Dark is more open than Demons, so after the tutorial you get dropped into the "open" world and you can go whichever way you like. In Rogue Legacy this is limited to up, down and right (iirc the Maya, the Darkness and the Forest, respectively?) and each area has its own boss and difficulty level. In Dark Souls, it's less straightforward but the overall idea is the same. It's obviously much bigger but there's a recommended logical order to tackle the areas in that creates a reasonable difficulty curve. As long as you don't make the mistake of picking the master key as your starting gift, the game vaguely guides you through the early areas. A good way to put it would be that Rogue Legacy feels a bit like a demake of Dark Souls. It strips the concept down to its core ideas. Also, unlike Demons, there are a lot of shortcuts to unlock and the level design is kinda brilliant in how everything is interconnected, so you never really need to backtrack all that much once you get familiar with the layout. And like in Rogue Legacy, the more you level up the easier everything gets. By the end of my first run, I'm usually powerful enough to blast through half the game on NG+ in just a few hours. The one major difference is that you lose your souls upon death whereas in Rogue Legacy your get to keep your gold. But you do lose anything you don't (or can't) spend when you reenter the castle, so it's not like that's drastically different either. I've had a lot of "wasted" runs in RL because I died and didn't have enough gold to buy any upgrades. I don't really see how that's different to losing your souls. It actually seems a bit less forgiving, even. Overall, I find Dark to be significantly better than Demons but that's not something everyone agrees on. So, I hesitate to say you should give Dark a try considering how much you hated Demons but it's definitely possible you'd enjoy it more.

It's pretty blatant, to be honest. You probably don't have a full grasp on what the Souls games are really like, then. Which, to be fair, they are kind of obtuse about a lot of things. And maybe the similarities are stronger with Dark than with Demons. It's been quite a while since I last played Demons so I'm comparing it to Dark Souls more than anything. They share a lot of the same design philosophies but Dark Souls is a bit different in a few ways. But yeah, I mentioned Rogue Legacy specifically because I thought I remembered you liking it. It's pretty much 2D Souls, no joke.

Why would that even bother you? Anyone that actually says that to you is a fucking idiot. Likewise bragging about how "hardcore" they are for beating the game. It's not actually that hard. Yeah, I didn't stick around too long in the Dark Souls subreddit. "Oh you put soul levels in dex? Fuck you, your opinion is invalid!". I blame the marketing more than the game itself, though. For From, it was never about the crushing difficulty. The difficulty is only really there to emphasize the oppressive atmosphere of the game's world. Demons wasn't marketed like that at all. Namco are the ones who kept pushing that "Ur goan die!" nonsense. Personally, I don't give a fuck. I level up dex, use a katana and summon help for boss fights because I'm playing the game to have fun. That makes me literally Hitler to some of those people, though. I kinda feel like the Souls games are a little like that, though. You're not explicitly unlocking stuff but it's kinda like Rogue Legacy where the more you level up the easier it gets. I remember reading an interview with one of the devs where he actually admitted they set out to make a 2D Dark Souls kinda game. And I think their pulled it off pretty well.

Two Jimquisitions in a single week? For a second there, I got worried I had already lost track of time two days into my summer vacation... Anyway, this should be good. edit: You know, the more I find out about this whole thing the more I'm actually happy for Kojima that he's finally getting the hell out of that shitty company. It's a major bummer about Silent Hills and the uncertain future of the MGS series makes me really sad but I'm looking forward to whatever Kojima will do next. Hopefully he'll start a new studio and create a new IP that will blow MGS out of the water.

XCOM: Enemy Within. Man, this one was long overdue. I bought the expansion when it first came out because I fucking loved Enemy Unknown. But I was pretty busy with school at the time so I gave it a quick try, got my ass handed to me at the base defense and figured I'd give it another shot when I had more free time. Then I kinda forgot about it... After a couple of botched starts I decided I just wanted to get through the new content at least once, so I swallowed my pride and turned off Ironman mode. I tried not to save scum too much but it's pretty hard not to hit that reload button when your best sniper gets killed because you're an idiot. I hadn't played in quite a while so it was still fun but it's nowhere near as satisfying as Ironman mode. And the game still suffers from that weird difficulty curve where it gets piss easy near the end, so at that point the missions were kinda boring. I could just throw all strategy out the window and still wipe the floor with the aliens. Next time I play, I'll definitely have to go back to Ironman Classic. Anyway, overall it's still the same old XCOM, only now with super soldiers and MECs. The EXALT stuff adds a nice little extra distraction but after a while the missions get kinda repetitive and the final assault on the EXALT base was kind of anticlimactic. You can kinda tell it wasn't given the same kind of attention as the main story missions. It was pretty fun to give the game a replay but we really need a sequel announcement soon. Since Civ: Beyond Earth is out, hopefully that means it's Firaxis' next project.

I guess I probably don't get the same vibe because I mostly agree with him. I wouldn't say I'm indifferent towards consoles, I still very much want a PS4. But as a primarily PC gamer, any multiplat game is a game I'll prefer playing on my PC. So, Bloodborne is pretty much the first worthwhile exclusive to come out on the system for me. The only one that would actually make me want to go out and buy a PS4 tomorrow if I suddenly found myself with an extra 500 bucks to spend. It's kinda hard to get too hyped in that situation. Yeah, it wasn't a full review. I'm not sure he'll bother making one at this point. But he's been talking about the game a lot outside his videos. But one thing from his console gaming video that would probably carry over to a review is that he doesn't really do hype. Literally the only times I remember him gushing over a game completely were his Critical Close-Up of MGS3 and his Shovel Knight review. Normally, he'll mention any significant flaws he finds in a game. Which might come across as harsh, and would probably be an unpopular thing to do when it comes to a game like Bloodborne. But he does it with every game he reviews and I've yet to see him fail to make a compelling argument to support his opinion. That alone pretty much makes him my go-to game reviewer these days. Check out his Critical Close-Up of MGS2. The Dark Souls one is also good. If you don't like those then it's probably safe to say his channel simply isn't for you.

I.. uh, what? I'm not sure where any of this could possibly be coming from. You seem annoyed by his lack of enthusiasm for the current console generation but I can't think of anything in his videos on the topic that would warrant this kind of response. It kinda sounds like you're projecting your own issues into it, to be completely honest... Lol. What are these assumptions even based on? He was loving Bloodborne before it went full Lovecraft. He bought a PS4 specifically for the game and he made a 30 mins video essay analyzing Dark Souls a little while back. He's clearly a fan of the series. The video was specifically about analyzing the Lovecraft inspirations, that's why it's the only thing he emphasized and explored in depth. I mean, I'm not saying you have to love the channel or anything. I guess his content probably isn't for everyone, because it's clearly not for you. And that's fine. But a lot of your criticism seems based on mistaken assumptions and your own issues being projected into it. For example, I never got any of that smug PC superiority you've been describing from any of his videos or anything else. I can't possibly imagine how someone could have that kind of response to his opinion unless they were particularly sensitive to the topic of PC being a superior platform to consoles. I mean, it's not like he was being abrasive about it or anything. edit: Something else to consider. Admittedly, you wouldn't know it from his videos alone but he also bought a Wii U last fall and he still won't shut up about how much he loves it on the podcast. He's really not the PC elitist you seem to have him pegged as.

Mind elaborating on this? Which other videos have you watched? I've been watching his content for a while and I now regularly listen to a podcast he hosts and I'm really not getting that vibe, certainly not condescension. Maybe being familiar with his overall tone and personality helps but I love his writing style and delivery. The guy actually went to journalism school and I think it really shows when you compare his content's quality to that of other youtubers. I guess I can kinda see how it might come across as indifference, though. But I really don't think that's the case. I mean, in this particular case, the dude is a massive Metal Gear fan. I don't think he'd have bothered making this video otherwise, especially considering he usually releases his new videos on thursdays. His Critical Close-Up series is probably the best stuff he'd made so far. You should check it out if you haven't.

Hey look, actual investigative game journalism! God, I fucking love Super Bunnyhop. That channel has criminally low views/subscribers numbers considering the generally high quality of the content. Anyway, most of it is stuff that was already rumoured but there's a few nuggets in there that I hadn't heard before.

Side-quest. Basically,

I manually keep a selected list in the spreadsheet I use to keep track of the games I beat. I have two lists: a longer, more general one for long-term stuff and a shorter priority list for stuff I'd like to get done in the near future. I used to have a category called "Backlog" in my Steam library but I recently got rid of it. I barely ever looked in it so all it accomplished was making me forget about some games entirely.

Yeah, that sounds a lot better than co-op. And I assume they'll bother hiring a voice actor for Nightwing this time around. It was so weird how silent he was in Arkham City, even if it was only challenge rooms. Like, have at least some battle grunts or something. Speaking of which, I should probably get back to finishing those challenge rooms. I still have a fuckton of them left to do and they're the only thing standing between me and 100% achievement completion. Would be nice to get that done before Arkham Knight comes out.

Didn't they say a while back that there wouldn't be any kind of multiplayer? Those might just be team-up attacks with an AI partner. At least, I hope so... Also, I still think Arkham Knight is Jason Todd. The way they tried to make it sound like him having his own story DLC somehow debunked that theory seemed so half-assed that at this point I'd be more surprised if it wasn't him. Another interesting theory I've heard, and I guess I'll spoiler this because it's from a side-quest in Arkham City, is that

Really tempted to also get it while it's on sale. But I'm rather broke at the moment, so it's hard to justify the purchase when I already have so much other stuff to play. Then again, it does look pretty damn good...