toxicitizen

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.

Yeah, that's the thing. We'll know soon enough, though.

Not sure if this is new thread-worthy considering this one has only been the two of us but DONTNOD have just revealed another project. http://www.videogamer.com/pc/vampyr/news/dontnod_reveals_horror_rpg_vampyr_2.html I think it's a really interesting idea, there aren't enough horror RPGs these days and rumor is Bioware's Shadow Realm thingie has been axed. If Life is Strange turns out good then this one will definitely be on my radar.

Perhaps if they provided their own thoughts instead of parroting someone who makes a career out of riding the latest internet bandwagon I wouldn't need to make such comments in the first place. It's hard to believe people still react this badly to DLC. You mean post-game content that hasn't been created yet costs money to develop? Who would have thought? Plus in this game you're not even sectioned off from the rest of the community. Everyone gets whatever maps they put out and can play against/with the hunters/monsters that are DLC. You just can't play as them. Seems fair enough. I'm assuming you haven't watched the video then? Because it's not about just the DLC itself but rather about how this game is going about selling it pre-release. I don't personally have that much of an issue with it but I certainly understand why some do. I mean, the game advertised pre-order DLC before it even got a proper reveal. That kinda tells you their priorities are a little bit messed up here.

I think Blizzard's massive success disqualifies them from being the Nintendo of PC gaming. Wouldn't that be more like, I dunno.. Apple? Not that I understand what the fuck that's even supposed to mean... Back on topic, this looks kinda... meh. I'm not sure about expecting it to be F2P garbage but just looking at screenshots you can tell it was designed as a mobile game first. That alone makes me significantly less interested. I mean, Sid Meier's Ace Patrol was alright, I guess, but it really didn't really grab me. It was fun but I only played for a few hours and never touched it again.

Also "gonna be dead in two months like Titanfall". I mean, shit, I feel like most of the hype for it has already died down and it's not even out for another three weeks.

Nah, it's there. That's kinda what I was referring to. I knew it was a DLC episode (day one DLC, I think?) so when I first started it and saw the unicorn I kinda went "wait, maybe I'm not supposed to be playing this yet..." But even after playing it later on, l didn't feel like the vampires (or the fucking unicorn for that matter) were really explained in any way, shape or form. I mean, I wasn't trying to criticize the game when I brought that up. I don't need it to explain every little thing. If a game this weird just throws vampires into the mix without trying to justify their existence, I'm willing to just roll with it. I don't really need to know why there are vampires in this world, just that there are. But now that you mention the unicorn, that's a little harder to just accept. That one felt like it came out of fucking nowhere.

Killer Is Dead. I didn't really have any expectations for this one. I've only ever played two Suda51 games, one of which I never actually finished. I love their weirdness but they seem to be kind of hit-or-miss mechanically. Killer is Dead is very much a hit. I never expected to enjoy the game this much. It's a pretty bare-bones spectacle fighter, once I got a good grip on the mechanics and unlocked the healing ability it didn't really present much of a challenge. The story doesn't make a whole lot of sense, either. It's structured episodically and only a few of them cover the main plot, most of the other episodes are self-contained and just downright fucking bizarre. I mean, at one point you're tasked with killing a fucking train. There's also vampires that are never really explained and I guess some kind of Kaiju as well. It's all over the place but in a good way. It helps that the game just oozes style, the visuals have a very unique aesthetic to them and the soundtrack is pretty great. One thing to note is that, like I mentioned in the purchase thread, the PC port is kinda shit. The graphical options might as well be nonexistant and the framerate is capped at 30. It's possible to change that cap by editing the .ini files but that fucks with the timing of QTEs so you need to go tweak other settings as well if you do so. I ended up playing at 30 because the game crashed a lot at 60. One mission in particular would always hang no matter what. The game is definitely worth playing but if these issues matter to you then wait for a sale. Now I really hope more Suda51 games come to Steam in the future. I never got around to playing Lollipop Chainsaw and I'd love an excuse to give Shadows of the Damned another run.

Yeah, Witcher 2 had settings at launch that people weren't meant to be able to turn on at the time. That's certainly something to take into account when talking about performance and optimization. Meeting the recommended specs doesn't automatically mean "4K + 60fps with everything cranked way up and max AA".

So far the game itself is pretty fun (and so fucking weird) but sadly it's a very shit port. No graphical options to speak of and a 30FPS cap. There's a way to change the cap through editing .ini files but you also have to tweak certain other settings otherwise it fucks with the timing of the QTEs. Also, it seems the game tends to crash when running at 60FPS. I had to revert back to 30 because of one mission that kept locking up on me. As much as it sucks, I think I'll just leave it at 30FPS because it's gonna be a pain in the ass to constantly have to switch back and forth.

It was on sale a few days ago, just forgot to post when I bought it. It's been too long since I played a Suda game. Really wouldn't mind more of them coming to Steam.

What the fuck? Maybe I'm missing something here but that just sounds like a blatant fucking lie to me. If it's to save costs for the consumers, then why was the cost of the AC adapter not subtracted from the total price of the system? The new 3DS is the same price as the old 3DS. I seriously doubt they'd be bumping the price just for the AC adapter, they're the ones saving costs here. Really? That's kinda weird. Has this always been the case or is it a recent thing?