toxicitizen

The weird stuff ties into the "true" ending, which I'm assuming you didn't get. It's incredibly annoying to even unlock it. Basically, you need to make the correct hidden choices at various points through the story (i.e. give money to the kid, save such and such NPCs, etc..). It's been a while but it's something along the lines of

Earlier this summer, I noticed that no sound was coming out of the left side of my current in-ear buds. I was tempted to just get the same ones since they're pretty cheap now but I felt like upgrading and getting proper headphones. Those seemed good enough and weren't too expensive.

At this point I don't think anyone does anymore. The massive success of the NDS and Wii confused the shit out of them and now they don't seem to know what the fuck they should be doing. They're like that old uncle whose mind you suspect is starting to go but you can't be sure just yet. In a few years, we just might get a call from the grocery store because Nintendo has been wandering the aisles confused for hours with their pants around their ankles.

Yeah, I just found out that Velocity X2 is going to be 20$ for non-Plus subscribers. That's not a bad value at all. I've said it before but cross-buy has made the past few months amazing for Vita owners. But still, it's kinda sad that the only two games I'm legitimately excited for this month are a port of an older game I've already played and a cross-buy Vita version of a game that's technically not even on the line-up (Don't Starve).

Oh, I'm not annoyed. I'm all for an actual hardware upgrade. It just sucks having to wait because I really don't want to cancel my Persona Q pre-order. And I was really looking forward to playing Fire Emblem Awakening and Shin Megami Tensei IV. But really, I'm just glad I haven't bought my 3DS yet. If they'd announced this new version after I'd just bought it, I would've been livid.

Yeah, they clearly haven't learned anything from the Wii U brand confusion. This feels like half new system, half new model. Like they couldn't fully commit to bringing a completely new handheld, so it's this instead. Oh well, so much for me getting a 3DS this month. Makes no sense to get the old model now. Goddammnit...

So, the official release of Incognita Invisible, Inc. on Steam Early Access made me want to fire it up to see how it's coming along. Turns out the answer is "very fucking nicely"! I was sold on the idea of "Stealth XCOM" from the very start but the initial alpha build I played a year ago basically loaded you directly into a single procedurally generated map with no context whatsoever. Once you cleared it, all you could do was go back and try again. It was little more than a polished prototype and there was very little content in it. Now it feel much more like a real game. It also plays a lot better. In the initial build, you couldn't even rotate the camera. Really glad that's implemented now. I don't know if it's feature complete yet but there is a story mode now. Basically, it's a bit of a roguelike-ish structure where the game isn't very long but you're going to fail a lot before you manage to make it anywhere near the end. You start out with two units and two hacking abilities (you can unlock new ones and choose which ones you start with) and you select your missions from a world map. The missions' objectives are things you want to retrieve, such as cash, intel, gear and even new agents. The twist is that you only have 72 hours to prepare for the final mission and each location has a travel time associated to it. Oh and ammo doesn't refill after a mission, if you run out then you need to find/buy a new clip during the next one. So it's essentially a whole lot of time and resource management. And it's glorious. On my first attempt, I failed on the very first mission. I got progressively better with each new attempt and eventually managed to get a third squad member and some decent gear. I'm at a point where I have a good grasp on the mechanics so I started taking more risks and as a result I haven't had a decent run all day. Things can go wrong so very fast if you get careless. As it is right now, it feels maybe a tad too difficult. I think it could definitely benefit from being balanced towards the player if only a little bit but otherwise it's a pretty solid game. Really glad I jumped in early.

Disgaea 4: A Promise Revisited. Beat the main story last night and man, this game is fucking great! I mean, it's the same insanely deep Disgaea gameplay but the story is a huge step up from Disgaea 3. I never really understood why D3's story got as much hate as it did but now I kinda do. D4's actually makes it look bad by comparison. Disgaea has always been super corny but D3 layed it on way too thick. Maybe it didn't bother me as much because I never played D2, so I only had the original to compare it to. Here. you start out as a bunch of demons (led by a vampire) fighting their way out of Hades but by the end you're fighting robots and aliens on the fucking moon. There's also a giant robot that fits into this somehow. This series has never really taken itself too seriously but this is a whole new level of ridiculous, even the original wasn't quite as silly when it introduced similar elements. Probably the funniest game I've played all year. But Disgaea is all about that deep gameplay and here it's largely the same but with a lot of key improvements. There is still a metric fuckton of shit to do and systems you can use (and abuse). Or you can ignore it and just enjoy the story. At first I was really disappointed to see the skills team attacks from D3 were gone but after a few hours I forgot all about them. Overall, I really can't complain. It really feels like the "next-gen" leap that D3 wasn't. And I don't just mean how they finally fucking got HD sprites (I still don't know wtf they were thinking with D3 there...). There's tons of small details and refinements that makes it a better experience. The character sprites look great, especially on the Vita's screen, and they actually turn their heads to look at each other during cutscenes. Also, finally being able to retry or quit out of a mission without having to reset the game is so fucking useful. I lost the habit of saving after every single mission less than 10 hours in. Losing this feature is gonna be hard if I ever go back to one of the previous games. I don't think I'll touch any of the post-game stuff for now. That's a hell of a time sink and I'm technically not done with D3 in that area. But yeah, if you own a Vita and love Disgaea, you really can't go wrong with this one.

September's line-up is, uh... not the greatest. Velocity 2X (PS4, Vita) Sportsfriends (PS4, PS3) Playstation All-Star Battle Royale (PS3, Vita) Hoard (PS3) Joe Danger (Vita) TxK (Vita) Velocity 2X is a new release so I guess that's nice? I got the original through Plus, I think, but never bothered to try it. No idea what the fuck Sportsfriends even is. PABR feels like it should've been on there months ago but eh, at least I didn't grab it one of the fifteen times it was on sale for less than 5 bucks. And Hoard?? Really? That game is like 5 years old. I tried the demo way back when it first came out and it looked fucking terrible, too. Joe Danger Vita is nice, I was already thinking of double dipping. Sounds like it's only the first game, though. That'd be a shame because the second one is so much better. Both games merged into one would be fucking amazing.

Both on Vita. I still don't know why I didn't grab OlliOlli when it was like 6-7 bucks a couple months back. I had been holding off until they patched the crashing issues and that was it, it was on sale and everything. And I just didn't get it. Oh well, 10 bucks is still better than full price... I was on the fence about CounterSpy but the discussion about it here sold me on it just now. It's been on my radar for months yet somehow I missed that it was a roguelike/procedural kinda deal. Should be fun!

Wait, what? Procedural? Roguelike?! I had the completely wrong idea about this game, then. I thought it more of an action/metroidvania, the kind with designed levels. That's simultaneously disappointing while making it equally interesting, just for different reasons. I might grab it soon.

Yeah, Matador is the one I was talking about. I had heard all about him so I was prepared for the fight but he still wiped the floor with me on my first attempt. He's not really all that difficult if you know what to watch out for but otherwise it's downright brutal. And the alternate title for Europe kinda confuses me because that's a bit of a spoiler, kinda? It's not like it's a major plot point but when you meet that character it's not immediately clear who he actually is. I get dropping the III from the title because it was the first core SMT game released in english but changing the subtitle to that is like wut.

Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne. I should've finished this one last week but I got stuck (and frustrated) in the final dungeon, so when my copy of Disgaea 4 got here I just started playing that right away instead of waiting. I only went back to Nocturne a couple days ago. Overall, it was pretty damn good. The story was disappointingly basic but the gameplay was solid enough to carry the game. For the first 10 hours or so, I sometimes wished I was playing Persona instead, especially when I was fusing demons (being able to manually select which abilities are inherited during fusion in P4G has spoiled me). But after a while I really started to appreciate how different this game is. Particularly how it's structured like a real JRPG, with an overworld to explore and actual, designed dungeons. There were times when the high encounter rate made some of those dungeons kinda frustrating, though. Nothing makes me hate random encounters more than getting one every 3 fucking steps when you know where you need to go and just want to get there already. Likewise, it can be pretty difficult and annoying to keep track of a convoluted teleporting puzzle in a dungeon when you're constantly interrupted by combat. Only 2-3 dungeons really suffered from that, though. For most of the game, it wasn't an issue. One thing I really liked is that this game doesn't fuck around with boss fights. There's a boss like 5 hours in that's basically the game telling you "get your shit together or get out now!". If you've been neglecting buff/debuff abilities, he will fucking wreck your shit. And he won't be the only one. I wasn't going for any specific ending, I just kinda played and picked whatever dialogue option I felt like, and ended up getting the neutral ending. I watched the others on youtube and man, do they all suck lol. At least mine was a little bit more satisfying but yeah, the story really isn't the point of this game. I have a back-up save made so that I can go finish the optional dungeon to get the true demon ending, though. I haven't watched that one. Now to get a 3DS and play Shin Megami Tensei IV.

Yeah, I enjoyed it but it wasn't anywhere near as memorable as Smith's first episode. Not quite sure how I feel about Capaldi yet either. He's good but so far I've felt like every new Doctor blew the previous one out of the water and there was just something about Smith's run that resonated with me a lot more. It went from being just a show I enjoyed to being one of my favorite things. I guess we'll see if it manages to stay on that level. One thing I was a bit worried about (and ended up being pleasantly surprised by) was

Paragon levels. Once you hit the level cap, your exp will go towards those. They give you points you can allocate however you wish to each of your main character stats. And yeah, from this point on it's either higher difficulty or adventure mode. I'm not sure if the console version is different but on PC you have a lot more difficulty options since the expansion dropped. The hardest is Torment and it can be set from 1 to like 7. You need a pretty insanely geared character to tackle the more advanced Torment levels. Adventure mode is pretty great if you just want more of the gameplay. It kept me busy for a few weeks after I cleared the expansion's campaign. Basically, the entire world map and waypoints are unlocked and each area/act has a set of five quests. Clear an entire act and you get a blood shards and Nephalem caches. The shards can be traded to a vendor for a random item (think of it as gambling) and the Nephalem caches are basically loot packs. It's kinda fun to accumulate a bunch and then mass open them.

Yeah.

Ooooh man, this is all kinds of fucked up. Polytron website and twitter accounts were hacked and Phil Fish/Polytron got doxxed. All kinds of personal and financial info was apparently leaked. The Polytron site had a message claiming it was done by /v/ but who the fuck can say for sure...

Yeah, think of normal as the tutorial. You're meant to move on to the next difficulty for a bigger challenge and better drops.

I could get Beyond Earth for like 15 bucks thanks to all that Playfire Rewards GMG credit I accumulated and it's really tempting to just go for it. But I'm not willing to risk it until they reveal the system requirements. I'm probably fine since it doesn't look much more demanding than Civ V but I've been burned before. Fool me once and all that.

Yes! Burn the witch! BURRRNNN HERRRRR!!

I've been following this drama since it started and I think the timing of this shitstorm (Depression Quest just came out on Steam) and the fact that, AFAIK, no one has managed to prove any of those allegations says a lot here. The guy that wrote the blog post that started everything seemed more interested in character assassination than in exposing any alleged unethical behavior. All I'm really getting from this is that maybe, possibly Zoe Quinn is a shitty person? Okay. Why should I even care? It's none of my damn business, I don't know her. There's a reason no press outlet has picked up this "story" and that's because it isn't one. The only thing all this has really accomplished is once again showing how fucking vile and disgusting gaming communities can be. It takes a truly fucked up mind to think any of this justifies harassing someone like what's been going on the past few days.

A bit of both, I think. But the thing with Rogue Legacy is that all you really need to do is try not to die until you have enough gold to level up. The persistent character progression means it's almost impossible to truly get stuck.

I'm the same way with Incognita/Invisible Inc. I bought alpha access as soon as it came out because I fucking love Klei but almost a year later and I barely touched it beyond the first couple weeks. I had kinda forgotten about it, to be honest. It finally came out on Steam Early Access today. I should probably fire it up and see how it's coming along. It seemed to have a lot of potential a year ago but there was very little content in the original build. But a fear I have with buying early access is that I don't wanna get too into it and risk getting sick of the game before the full version comes out...