toxicitizen

Holy hell, there is so much shit going on in that trailer. This game is going to be insane. The single-player mode looks so fucking 2004. Like when Tony Hawk tried having a single-player campaign or something. I love it!

RIP my wallet but after waiting so long for them to come to Steam, I just had to... Think I'll have to try to finish Soul Hackers 2 ASAP (pretty sure I'm in the final dungeon anyway) and try to squeeze the first game in before Trails from Zero in two weeks. I can do this...

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R You don't really beat fighting games but I've gone through all the single-player content so I'm calling it done. This is a super fun game if you love JoJo. It's a pretty solid fighting game and it goes really hard with the fan service. I haven't tried all the characters but most of those I did try were pretty fun to play. Usually I'll try characters until I find one that works for me and stick with them but I can't really see myself maining anyone in this game. The roster is just too much fun to stick to any one character. I only have one minor nitpick and one major complaint. So, I guess the original release of this game was from before the anime really took off. So it's pretty cool that they went to the trouble of hiring the voice actors from the anime to (re-?)record the voiceovers. What sucks is that they didn't go the extra mile and license the music as well. That anime's music is so good and iconic at this point that hearing the actual character's voices without it made it feel like something was missing. It's a small thing and doesn't really impact the game's overall quality but I thought it really stood out. That was the minor nitpick. As for the major complaint, it's something that does impact the quality in a big way: the netcode. The game is basically unplayable online. If you set it to be the host and limit it to same region only you'll get plenty of matches that are perfectly fine but do quick match and holy fucking hell. At some point I had gotten so used to various degrees of slowdown that once I finally got a normal match it felt like the game was running in fast-forward. It's that bad. Concurrent player count on Steam alone has already dropped by like 50% in the two weeks since launch. Lack of crossplay means it's only going to get harder and harder to find nearby players to play online and lack of rollback netcode means whatever matches you can find will play like absolute shit. I wouldn't be surprised at all if this game dies completely before it even has a chance to be considered for EVO next year. Which really sucks because it's so much fucking fun! So yeah, this game is definitely worth a look if you're a JoJo fan but it's hard to recommend unless you're mostly interested in it for offline play. I'm treating this one as a single-player game, personally. I might hop back online for the occasional match but now that I'm done with the achievements I'm moving on. I was always going into it as more of a "fuck around" game, I never intended to try and get good at it like I did with SFV and am currently doing with GG Strive, but even if I wanted to it just wouldn't be feasible with that garbage netcode.

Finally out! it's Early Access though, so it's sadly not the whole game. I probably won't dig into it immediately but I played the demo a while back and I seriously love what they're going for with this one, so I wanna show some support.

I've been in kind of a Marvel mood lately so I've been catching up on MCU movies. Here's some quick thoughts: Shang-Chi: Starts really strong but the second act gets kinda bogged down in exposition and the climax felt a little rushed but overall I really liked it. It doesn't register as a Marvel or superhero movie at all, and that was the best thing it had going for it. It starts out as a standard martial arts movie and just gradually turns into martial arts fantasy. 7.5/10 Eternals: I went into this one expecting the worst and maybe it's because my expectations were abysmally low but I actually really enjoyed it. It has pretty major flaws. The pacing is all over the place and even at 2h30 long it feels rushed. This one probably should've been a prestige tv show. I think there was enough material in the movie to fill a good 6 episodes or so. That would've given the large cast of characters more room to breathe and allowed the plot to carry a bit more weight. 7/10 Spider-Man: No Way Home: I watched this one the night before the game came out on PC, so I was definitely in a Spider-Man mood. I thought it had less substance than the first two Spider-Man movies but overall it's still pretty enjoyable. It mostly relies on the gimmick of bringing back previous characters but it uses it really well so it ends up being a pretty fun watch. The interactions between the 3 Spideys were the highlight for me. And Garfield's version somehow manages to steal the show even though his iteration was the worst one by far. So it was cool to finally see him get to play the character in a movie that's not complete garbage. Oh and speaking of stealing the show, I did not realize how badly I had missed Willem Dafoe as Green Goblin. He's so perfect in the role. 8.5/10 Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness: And, holy fuck, Sam Raimi is another one I missed. This movie isn't perfect by any means but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I loved the way it gradually amps up the Sam Raimi-ness until by the end it's just a full-blown Sam Raimi movie. Also, I can't believe I didn't get spoiled on I hope Sam Raimi keeps making these movies from now on because, as much as I enjoyed the first Doctor Strange, this one was way more my shit. For me this was the Doctor Strange equivalent of Thor: Ragnarok. 9/10

Yeah, that's kinda why I'm so hesitant. I want one because it seems like it would be fun but if I'm gonna invest into a fight stick I'd like to get a decent entry-level one, at the very least. And I can't really justify dropping 150-200$ on something I may not end up using all that much. Especially considering how much I like the fighting pad I'm currently using. It wouldn't just have to be fun to be worthwhile, it would have to feel better for me than the fighting pad.

Fight not flight lol. As in fighting games. I imagine a flight stick would absolutely enhance the experience no matter what, yeah. But with a fight stick I'd be basically throwing all my muscle memory out the window. So I'd essentially be starting over from almost zero. Knowing myself, that alone would frustrate me more than anything lol.

Yeah, I'm only sort of casually into racing games but I bet a setup like that makes them even more fun. Can't justify investing that much for a genre I barely play, though. If I'm gonna shell out for an expensive peripheral, it's gonna be a fight stick. And even then I'm really hesitant to drop that kind of money because what if I don't like it.

God, the original anime had such a perfect soundtrack. I haven't watched the show or listened to the soundtrack in like two decades but I've been reading through the Golden Age arc since last week and this theme just came back to me and got stuck in my head.

Lol a bit? I love his games but the dude went too far up his own ass years ago and got lost in there. Also yeah, I'm very curious to hear what he had to say about The Looker lol.

The next few weeks hit my wallet pretty hard... JoJo is going to lack rollback netcode, of course, because Bandai Namco gonna Bandai Namco. I still can't believe they actually just announced Dragon Ball Fighterz is getting it. Fighterz 2 must still be pretty far off (or not planned at all) because otherwise I can't imagine they would bother after all this time. Either that or ASW figured out a way to add it easily/cheaply enough through their work on GG Strive that BN was willing to sign off on it. That might explain why they're not doing it for Tekken 7 too but I imagine they're focusing on the next one right now. It would be funny as fuck if it turned out to still not have rollback, though. I'm still not sure if I wanna try getting through the first Soul Hackers before the sequel comes out. I own a physical copy for 3DS and I actually went through some boxes to find my 3DS and charge it but I might be too busy to get it done in time. I really hate skipping instalments in series, though, and it sounds like it's reasonably short by Atlus standards, so I think maybe I'll just start it and if I'm not done in time then I'll just hold off on starting Soul Hackers 2.

How the fuck are you going through these so quickly?! I know TIS-100 isn't that long, the only reason I never finished it is that every time I pick it up again I start over... and then I eventually stop again lol. But Shenzhen I/O is pretty long IIRC. It took me longer than Exapunks to beat, at least. Wait, let me guess. You don't waste hours on the solitaire minigames, do you? As I was typing that and looking at my playtimes and achievements, I realized that could totally account for it.

Yeah, by that point I already felt like I was seeing a completely different Quill than in the movies but that moment really cemented it. I honestly cannot imagine Chris Pratt's version saying that line and it coming across as sincere or in-character.

Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy Okay, this one actually surprised the hell out of me. I had heard good things around the time it came out but, unlike Jedi: Fallen Order, there wasn't really anything about it that especially appealed to me. I heard the writing was good and GotG is probably my favorite subseries within the MCU but that's about it. The initial reveal was pretty meh to me and, while I didn't have any issues with the character designs (they sure as hell seemed better to me than Avengers), making it a third-person shooter where you only control Star-Lord seemed like a disappointing choice. I wanted to give it a shot anyway, though, but I was waiting for a deep discount and even 30 bucks is more than I was planning to pay for it. This was a total impulse purchase because "hey this would be a perfect game to play while I wait for the Spider-Man port!" Early on it was more or less what I expected. Kinda fun and the writing and characters seemed good but the combat wasn't really that interesting. I kept playing but it seemed like one of those games that's fine but that I end up being distracted from and never coming back to. Then I kept playing, got deeper into the story, unlocked more abilities for the Guardians and... holy fuck, how did this game get so fucking good?! The third-person shooter combat looks deceptively boring because in reality controlling all the Guardians as a team is key. I knew you could give them orders but what I didn't realize was that you're really controlling the entire team as if it were a party. In a way, it reminded me of Brutal Legend: Star-Lord is more like a cursor that just happens to have guns and his own move set. Once you unlock more abilities for the team, things get way more interesting and finding ways to combine the Guardian's various moves to take down strong enemies super quickly is just a ton of fun. The writing is also shockingly good. I'd honestly put it up there with the Gunn films. Hell, in some aspects I think it even surpasses them. The plot itself is really solid and surprisingly long for this kind of game. There's so many twists and turns and basically all of it is set up perfectly. What seems like a throwaway line early in the game can turn into a major plot point later on. I don't remember the last time I played a linear, story-driven, single-player game with this meaty of a campaign. My one complaint about the story would be that it feels like there's a missing cutscene at the end. Without spoiling anything, it seemed like just a short bit showing things going back to normal would've gone a long way towards making the ending feel more "complete". As it is, it comes off a little artificial and sudden how you beat that one boss and then it's like "Yay, you won!" without really acknowledging everything going on outside the boss room. Like, think in Guardians 2 where you see these quick cutaways that show what Ego is doing on various planets throughout the galaxy. It seems like something like that was missing. It didn't even need to be completely new locations, just show things going back to normal in a few places you've already visited over the course of the game. I imagine it was probably a budget thing, though. So it's a minor complaint, it just really stood out to me. Then there's the characters, which is the main area where I find the game surpassed its MCU counterpart. I found both Drax and Gamora way more likeable in this. I feel like the game showed me a side of them that the movies didn't. Drax in particular felt like more of a full character instead of being relegated to more of a comic relief sidekick role. Rocket came across as an even bigger asshole to the point where I actively disliked him at times, which allowed moments later in the game have a bigger impact. Groot is, well, Groot. But the biggest difference for me was Star-Lord. Keep in mind I've never read the comics, so I didn't really know anything about the characters other than what's in the MCU movies. So I don't know which version is more "true to the character" and, frankly, I don't really give a shit. All I know is that I found Game-Quill to be massively more likeable than Movie-Quill. And it's not like I hate Chris Pratt's Star-Lord or anything. The game just makes him seem like a self-centered, juvenile asshole in comparison. Like, he is a juvenile asshole, even in the game. That's part of his character. But if you go out of your way to go through all the optional conversations with the Guardians, Game-Quill is also a dude that seems to genuinely care about the Guardians and has the ability to be thoughtful towards them and even help them on a more personal level. The movies tell you the Guardians are a family but the game shows you that they are. That's not a knock against the Gunn movies, though. Obviously the game had way more room to develop the characters and a big part of me liking the game versions more likely has to do with the fact that I got to spend like 20+ hours with them as opposed to just a couple of 2 hour long movies. One point where the Gunn films are better is the music choices. There's some really fun licensed tracks in the game but overall I still think Gunn handled that aspect better. That being said, props to Eidos Montreal for going above and beyond and outdoing even Remedy here. Alan Wake and Control had a few Old Gods of Asgards songs but Guardians of the Galaxy has an actual full album for Star-Lord and it honestly fucking slaps. I'm starting to think that putting a fictional heavy metal band in your game is a surefire way to ensure I'll fall in love with both the game and the band. About halfway through the game I found myself humming some of the songs because they were stuck in my head and I started listening to them outside the game. Zero to Hero in particular is my fucking jam! Also, another one with no hassle: I had heard this game was janky in how chapter select works and how collectibles are tracked, so I was using a guide early on but I found that to be a miserable way to play the game so I stopped after a few chapters. Fortunately, it gave me enough of a sense of how the collectibles were hidden that I found enough of them on my own to get the 65% you need for the achievement. Late in the game I also paid attention to combat achievements and got most of them before I was done. So at the end I only needed to use chapter select for two combat achievements and a handful of outfits I had missed. Thank fuck the outfits save as soon as you collect them, though, because having to replay the whole game would've been painful. It's great but it's also very story-driven so even just doing partial replays of a few chapters was annoying as hell in how many unskippable cutscenes or slow sections there were. Having to do a second full playthrough immediately after would've probably soured me on the game a bit. I'd definitely love to replay it eventually, though, if only to see some of the alternate scenarios your choices can lead to. So yeah, this one was a massively pleasant surprise. I was disappointed that Eidos Montreal made this over another Deus Ex but now I'm honestly a little sad this one probably won't get a sequel. At the very least, now I'll be willing to give the benefit of doubt to anything they make. I still need a new Deus Ex, though...

Oh, I see. I never got the impression that Trevorrow departing had anything to do with the TLJ backlash but I never followed the situation that closely to begin with. Or I could just be misremembering.

Was Rian Johnson ever planned to direct Ep IX, though? Trevorrow was initially attached to direct but I don't remember Johnson ever being. I thought it just went directly to Abrams after Trevorrow left. Like, at this point it's likely not happening anymore but at the time Johnson was set to make his own trilogy. It would be weird to fire him from Ep IX over fan backlash but then give him his own trilogy.

Is that what happened? I thought they gave it to him after Colin Trevorrow was fired and/or left the project. It sounds like there was a ton of studio interference, though. Like, I'm not the biggest J.J. Abrams fan or anything but it is by far the worst thing he's ever done. I can't imagine even on a bad day he'd make something that fucking unwatchable unless he was forced to do dumb shit. Like, say... bring Palpatine back with no prior setup whatsoever.

Episode IX is such a huge fucking pile of shit. I'm not even exaggerating when I say it's bordering on incoherent.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order As someone that's kind of over Star Wars and can't bring himself to care about any future movies or TV shows anymore, this one was surprisingly fun. I mean, I had heard it was good and it seemed like the kind of game I would enjoy, otherwise I wouldn't have given it a shot. But for the first few days of playing this, I was honestly kinda wishing I was still playing Ghostwire. It was just that kind of a game where I was vibing with it so much that just being in that world was fun for me. I think that combined with my current apathy for all things Star Wars would've made me bounce off of this game pretty hard if it hadn't been so freaking good. It was nice to play a game with Soulslike element but that's not actually a Soulslike. It's basically your typical third-person story-driven action game with set pieces and everything. Combat is just more lethal than usual and you can reset enemies at bonfires. That's not to say the game is especially difficult, though. I played on Jedi Master, which I'm assuming is supposed to be hard, and I was never really challenged except early on while I was still learning the mechanics. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. I didn't really go into this looking for difficulty. I probably would've gone for Jedi Grandmaster if I'd known, though. A little more challenge than this would've been fine. Also, gotta love a game that doesn't waste your time with needlessly time-consuming achievements: You have to get every colletibles, secrets and enemy scans but most of it isn't obnoxiously easy to miss. I went out of my way to collect everything as I was going through the game and basically only had to spend an additional 30mins doing a post-game cleanup for the last few things I had missed. So yeah, I think I enjoyed this one enough that I might actually get the sequel day one. It was a pleasant surprise.

Doesn't seem like it. Google does bring up a lot of rumors about it, though, going as far back as 2020.

That pricing kinda sucks and no one seems to be running any kind of open discounts, for some reason. Guess everyone expects it to sell like hot cakes regardless. Anyway, as usual, thank god for GMG because I got an 18% off voucher through their XP program, which brought it down to a price more in line with previous Sony ports. Anyway, this was one of my most-wanted ports from Sony so I'm really excited to finally play it! edit: Browsed a bit more and figured why the hell not grab a few more Marvel games. Probably nothing to worry about but the Eidos sale has me kinda worried they might be getting delisted in the near future. Probably wouldn't have bothered with Avengers if it hadn't been 15 bucks, though lol.

As far as I can tell, the ending doesn't change if you transferred 100% of the spirits. You just unlock some new prayer beads. Which is cool, I guess, but kinda useless since I'm not going to be doing another playthrough lol. At least not anytime soon. Only took me a few extra hours to get everything I was missing, though, so I don't mind. It's been a while since I 100%'d an open-world game.

Ghostwire: Tokyo I didn't mean to finish all my ongoing games at the same time but here we are. To my surprise, I absolutely loved this one! I went in with pretty low expectations because it seemed to have come out and disappeared without leaving any kind of a mark. Also, it's not The Evil Within 3... It does feel like a direct successor to The Evil Within 2, though. TEW was a proper linear, survivor-horror game whereas TEW2, while still being a horror game, focused less on scares and took a more open-area approach to level design, with large zones full of collectibles and side-quests. And now we have Ghostwire: Tokyo, a full-on open-world game that discards horror entirely but keeps the otherworldly aesthetics and themes. In other words: I absolutely loved everything about the setting: the Japanese-style ghost stories, the yokais, the tanukis, the realistic rendition of Shibuya. Early on, just exploring the map, taking in the sights and wondering what weird shit I'd find around the next corner was a real treat. The only reason why it eventually felt less special was because the content started feeling a bit repetitive. But by that point I was mostly just indulging my inner completionist and trying to clear as much open-world stuff before going to do that main story mission that warned me it was the point of no return. So I guess the balance is just about right for someone that doesn't care about that. As someone that finds I just don't have the time or mental energy for open-world games these days (I still feel mentally scarred by Assassin's Creed Origin's map and its endless fucking quest markers), this game was perfect for me. It's open-world but with a map the fraction of the size of what's common these days. So everything ends up being close enough that I'd constantly get stuck in a loop where I'd spot a collectible on a roof and climb up to get it and would immediately spot 3 more nearby that I'd have basically no choice but to go for. So even though this game is like 8 hours long, my playtime when I finished it was 35 hours. It's not without issues, though. After a while, the side-quests get kinda samey. It also could've used the basic QoL feature of autosaving as soon as you grab/do something. I think it saves like every 5 mins or something so if you end up inadvertently jumping into a lethal combat encounter right after grabbing half a dozen spirits, you need to go get them again. Early on I thought the enemies were too spongey because they took forever to kill and I'd be constantly running backwards while shooting at them but I think that was just because I was playing on hard. It stopped being a problem after I levelled up a bit and spent some skill points. Plus, it forced me to learn to use all the tools at my disposal early on, which made the game way more fun even near the end. And by the end of the game I'd still need to be careful because being sloppy could easily lead to my death. So yeah, if you play this one I definitely recommend doing so on hard. It felt just right. At this point I think I want a sequel to this as much as I want The Evil Within 3. Tango is quickly becoming one of my favorite developers. Although apparently the next game by the director of TEW2 is "the complete opposite of horror", whatever the hell that means. So it may be a departure from what makes me love their games. In the meantime, I have to go finish collecting all those spirits because apparently I need to redo the ending after doing so. I'm assuming there's some kind of alternate or true ending? Also, I'm most of the way there already so I'll just go for all the achievements.

Elden Ring I'm on a roll with finishing long overdue games! I rushed the last few bosses with some summoned help just so I could at least wrap up my first playthrough. At least now I can remove the game from the backlog category at the top of my Steam library and move it to my achievement hunting category, where it won't be taunting me every time I open Steam. Not gonna jump into NG+ as I don't really feel like sinking dozens of hours into it right now. Besides, there's still a chunk of map that I haven't uncovered to the north and a few optional bosses I haven't done so I still have some stuff to do before NG+ anyway. Maybe I'll pick it back up once they announce some DLC or if/when that ray-tracing update manifests itself. Beyond that, it's honestly been too long for me to write any kind of extended thoughts about the game. It was great but at some point I just kinda bounced off of it. Not even sure why, tbh. First time it happens since the original Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. And at the time I had yet to beat any of these games so it wasn't exactly the same thing. Weird, can't say I've had that problem. Maybe a brightness issue on your end? the only times when things were too dark to see, there were flashlight blocks I could move to see what I was doing, so I assumed it was deliberate in those instances.

Smaller doesn't sound bad to me. At this point I almost feel like I have too much Yakuza to get through. That's a very good problem to have, don't get me wrong. But at my usual speed, I can spend close to 100 hours on each of these games and from what I've heard 5 starts to suffer from bloat so as far as I'm concerned it's a good thing that they knew to scale things back a bit. That being said, I really hope they're working on some kind of rerelease for those Samurai-era games. I wanna play them so bad... edit: Oh yeah, I finished Lego Builder's Journey as well. It's alright. As a tech showcase for ray-tracing it's incredible. @TheMightyEthanwasn't kidding when he said it was the best looking game he'd ever seen. But as a puzzle game I found it kinda lacking. All the levels are either obvious as shit or "I have literally no idea what you want from me" with basically nothing in-between. It's cute and short, though, so I don't regret the 10$ I spent on it.