toxicitizen

Life is Strange - Episode 1. I'm really glad I picked it up. It was a bit more uneventful than I expected but the characters were interesting and I'm really curious to see where the story is going, especially considering that what I thought was the premise of the entire game turned out to just be the opening scene. I fucking love going into games blind, I don't get to do it often enough. The only negative thing I can say about it is that there are a few really cringe-worthy lines in there. Most of the dialogue was fine but every now and then someone said something that just took me out of it. It's really not a big deal, though, just a little off-putting. I'm also glad to see Telltale finally getting some competition in this genre. They really need to stop licensing every damn IP under the sun and take some time to develop a new engine. Their current one is kinda shit and getting a bit old at this point.

I've wanted it since it came out because of the positive reception but knowing I could've pre-ordered it for 13 bucks on GMG made it a little hard to pay 20 bucks for it. I checked Nuuvem just in case and it's 18% off right now. Came down to about 14 bucks after the currency conversion.

And now we have a new shitty trailer for the only upcoming Persona game that actually matters. I'm not gonna lie, I am totally buying this day one. Hearing those tracks is actually making me want to start a new P4G playthrough.

I suppose that depends what it was you disliked about P3P's dungeons. They're better in P4G but still kind of similar. It's not one uberdungeon like Tartarus but rather a series of smaller, themed dungeons. But it's still the same kind of procedurally-generated maze-like floors. There is a little more variety to them, though. I think P4G has an easy mode, so you could always use that to power through the dungeons and just enjoy the school life/story parts. Although, I didn't find the game particularly difficult on normal so meh.

New Persona 5 trailer! Holy shit, that gameplay! That music! Visual fidelity and presentation look very similar to Catherine, which is great. Really digging the masked vigilantes angle for the party, too. Oh man, this is gonna be so gooooooood!

It'll be your first Platinum game, right? If so, make sure not to neglect any abilities. From what I understand, in W101 some of them are pretty much mandatory but easily missable if you don't carefully check the store or wherever it is they're unlocked. Platinum's games are great but they almost always have a point where they basically go "Have you mastered all your core mechanics yet? Because fuck you if you haven't." Which can be frustrating if you're a newcomer who's been mindlessly button-mashing his way through the game up to that point.

An early access game and a pre-order. I normally try to avoid both of those things but Darkest Dungeon looks so fucking good that I couldn't resist. I also recently sold a shitload of Steam cards, so I had a little over 30 bucks sitting in my wallet. That means I essentially got Darkest Dungeon for free and Oddworld at a 60% discount. That made it kind of easier to pull the trigger.

Grim Fandango Remastered. Well, I'm really glad I've finally had the chance to play this classic. Definitely deserving of the praise. The characters, story, world and even voice acting are all incredible. Really glad I picked it up. I mentioned adventure game logic a couple days ago but fortunately only the second "chapter" of the game suffered from it. I probably just suck at adventure games but I ended up having to look up maybe half a dozen solutions for that part alone, more than I did for all the other sections of the game put together. Once I was past that part, though, I was able to finish the game without any issues. I ended up powering through the second half of the game last night, not stopping until I finished it at almost 5 AM. If Schafer's other old adventure games are all as good as this, I hope they remaster more of them. I know Day of the Tentacle is confirmed but, personally, I'm really more interested in Full Throttle. I'm also really excited to play Broken Age now, but I'm still waiting for Act 2 to drop on that one.

Go into your Steam profile settings and you can set up a custom url, so it'll be something like steamcommunity.com/id/[your username or whatever]/

If you mean from the original PS3 version, then I have no idea. I've only played the Vita version.

So far I'm really enjoying it. The writing, characters and world are all really good. It actually feels like a Double Fine game in a lot of ways, so I'm assuming it was largely the same core team. The only issue I have is there's a tiny bit of "adventure game logic" to deal with. I can solve almost everything on my own but there's been a few times so far where I had to look up a solution. And it usually resulted in me going "how the fuck was I supposed to figure THAT out?!" and once even "I tried that and it didn't work!" Admittedly, I didn't really play many of these adventure games growing up, so I'm probably just awful at them. I also get bored very quickly if I spend more than 20 mins walking around aimlessly with no idea what to do.

I'm not sure if it was in chapter 2 but I only encountered one difficulty spike when I played it on Vita. I was told that the game's main dungeons expect (i.e. are balanced for) you to have done the optional dungeons. Once I started doing those every chance I got, I didn't really run into any difficulty spikes again.

Seems to be reviewing very well so far. The scores listed in the NeoGAF review thread are almost all 8+. The only reservation I have left at this point is their targets for the release of the rest of the episodes. Have they talked about this at all? I'm not sure I want to jump in right away if the next episode is potentially still 6 months out or whatever, but even something as vague as "one episode every other month" would be good enough for me. I mean, I don't really want another Kentucky Route Zero sitting in my library. I really want to play it but when there's been literally an entire year between episodes, I'm not sure it's worth getting invested in the story just yet.

I needed to replace my current case because it's kinda banged up and most of its fans don't even spin anymore. I didn't want to spend too much and wasn't planning on getting anything fancy, but once I started shopping around I came across this sexy thing and it was love at first sight. I had to have it. It's technically a mid-tower but in reality it's almost a full one. There's a hell of a lot more space in it than in my current one, so that'll be nice. There's dedicated cable management holes in the back panel and the PSU goes at the bottom. It also doesn't light up like a fucking christmas tree. In other words, it's a massive improvement over the monstrosity currently housing my system. It cannot get here soon enough.

I finished my Chris run in REHD and didn't really feel like doing one of those bullshit knife-only, real-survival or invisible enemies run. At least not right now. So, it was either going back to FFXIII or buying this. I've never actually played it so I'm really curious to see whether it'll live up to all the praise it gets on the internet. The last time I played an old Tim Schafer game was Psychonauts and I was not disappointed, so I'm kind of optimistic going into this one.

Oh, right. The PC version's been up for pre-order for something like two weeks already so I read that as meaning "coming out today".

I don't think so? Every place I checked (including Steam) says it's coming out on the 30th, which is friday. It even specifies friday in this week's The Drop on the PS Blog.

Glad to hear there will be a demo. Sounds like they're confident in their game, which is usually a good sign. I'm tempted to skip the demo and just wait for reviews, though. I never got around to watching most of the trailers and diaries so I've been on a bit of an unintentional media blackout. I love going into games blind and I rarely get the chance to do it, so I think I'll do just that.

Oh, ok. Maybe you're meant to just stick to one line-up for the entire game then. I guess that might be an element from the Etrian Odyssey side of the crossover?

Yeah, I get that. But, for what it's worth, 30 +mins of exploration and puzzle solving can usually be replayed in like 10 mins if not less. It can definitely get a little tedious if you're careless but lost progress doesn't really translate to a constant quantity here, if that makes any sense. I mean, there's a reason the game has multiple speed run trophies, including one that requires you to beat the game in under 3 hours. No promises. Never had a PlayStation and I doubt I could have been gifted the game. Never finished the original on my PSP because of, well, the ink ribbon issue and my inherent loathing of losing progress. Thing is, I enjoy the Jill sandwich and I want to eat the whole thing. That sounds dirty. The remaster is definitely the way to go if you want to give the game another shot. Tank controls have a slight learning curve at first but once you get over that they just work. The new controls just completely break the game's balance and turn it into a joke. I understand why Capcom felt the need to include them, people love being babies about tank controls. But the new control scheme is horrendous and no one should experience the game this way. As for the the loss of progress, see above.

Aren't all Persona games like that, though? I mean, it's annoying but if you want to switch someone out you can always grind a bit to bring the new character up to your party's level. It's what I always did in P3 and P4.

Yeah, I can see why but I was playing on normal (the highest difficulty that's unlocked from the start) and I never had less than 3-4 ribbons at any given time. Honestly, I was probably being a little more stingy with my ribbons than I really needed to. The game gives you plenty of them, you just need to not waste them too much. So I don't think it's that bad in this case. But yeah, I really wouldn't say that the ribbons are a particularly crucial mechanic here. I didn't miss them in the least when RE4 ditched them. From what I understand, Alien: Isolation does saves similarly but without a saving "currency" and that sounds perfectly fine to me. And I could be wrong here but IIRC the saving happens in real-time so you're exposed while doing it and it's actually possible for the alien to find you, which is kind of awesome.

Resident Evil HD Remaster. Just finished my first run. This was my first time playing the remake and goddamn is it great. The remaster job is a little hit and miss, some areas look really good while others show their age a little bit. There's even a handful of rooms that look so bad they felt kind of out of place. But overall it felt really good to go back to RE's true roots. My completion time was 8 hours according to my clear save but in reality it was over twice that long since it doesn't account for deaths and the occasional lost progress. I was playing as Jill, which is arguably the easier character since she has two more inventory slots and starts with the handgun. But even then, my first evening with the game was pretty brutal. I was trying to be clever and just run past enemies to conserve ammo but I'd always end up getting hit. I burned through all my healing items way too quickly and was kinda fucked, so I started over the next night. My second run went a lot better, I never ran out of ammo and by the end I had a pretty ridiculous stock of herbs and healing sprays. I was also pleasantly surprised by how the game didn't feel dated at all. The ink ribbons did annoy me a little at first and made me miss checkpoints a lot, but it didn't take long for me to learn what kind of progress was and was not worth spending a ribbon on. Also, tank controls are as functional now as they've always been. If you play this and use that abomination of a "modern" control scheme, you are a bad person. I'm talking war criminal bad, here. Just don't do it, it's not okay. Anyway, I have other games to go back to but I enjoyed this one so much that I'm really tempted to just do another run as Chris right away.

Then at E3 "We heard your concerns about the accents in Unity, so in Assassin's Creed Victory everyone will speak with a french accent!"

Oh but now I wanna know what the sick burn was! Anyway, Destructoid has a piece relevant to the current discussion. I absolutely get why people react the way they do towards pre-release DLC but in this case I'm starting to feel like the outrage is a little misplaced. The monsters are overpriced for sure but he claims that all DLC maps will be free. Combined with the fact that they're not splitting the community (if you don't buy the monster DLC you can't use it, but you can play against it), it all seems very reasonable to me. It looks like ignoring the DLC isn't really going to negatively impact your experience in any significant way.