toxicitizen

Lmao. I really need to play this game.

Did you do the Peralez quest line? Cause that's maybe my favorite out of the entire game. River Ward's quest (which branches off from the Peralez one IIRC) is also really fucking great, although it feels like it probably had some cut content because it's over very quickly compared to others. Oh and Kerry's quest is also really fun although it's more character-driven and focused on Johnny. Really, all the quests around the main companions are great.

Damn, dude, you missed out. I hope you're planning to rectify that because some of the best content in the game is in the side-quests. The meatier one, I mean, though the smaller gigs that you always get calls about while roaming around were like crack to me. I just couldn't get enough of those.

None that I've been but mostly just understand that this isn't like the other From games. If something sucks or is giving you a hard time, walk away. Go explore and do something else. I spent like 10+ hours exploring the first area before I even tried the first big story boss. You'll always find something, whether it's a little crypt with an item, a boss, or a mini-dungeon with both. Hell, sometimes you'll find an elevator going down out in the middle of nowhere and it'll take you places. Oh and the grace lines on the map are there to point you in the general direction of nearby important things and and it's easy to get confused early on but they don't change to reflect your progress or whether you cleared that particular spot already. It's literally just "this is where you should probably go eventually if you haven't yet".

Yeah, I actually got it without even trying in my first playthrough on Vita. I hope I'll get lucky again but I'm going out of my way to use her enemy scanning constantly and making sure to swap party members regularly just to be safe.

That's the last thing I did and yeah, by the end I was basically selling everything I owned, including my clothes, and still came up short. Ended up having to farm some enemy encounters for loot to sell. I'm still missing two achievements because I didn't save enough stats/skill points to max out one and craft legendary items, though. Gonna have to do a replay at some point. Didn't know they were gonna add NG+, though. That'll be handy for that. ---------- Also, yesterday I caved and got back into P4G. I remember bouncing off of it after 40h when it launched on Steam (I think I may have gotten distracted from it by another release) but I'm really enjoying getting back into it. P4AU really gave me an itch to spend time with these characters again. Hopefully I can finish it quickly and then rush through NG+ to finally get all the achievements. Never did bother getting the Platinum on Vita.

Yeah, I know what you mean. I had been playing Dark Souls Remastered before Elden Ring launched and like 50h into my Elden Ring playthrough I randomly fired it up again because I felt like taking another crack at the boss I had been stuck on (Black Dragon Kalameet). And I just could not believe how slow and sluggish it was. When you get knocked down it takes approximately 9 years before you get back up and you actually come to a complete stop when you drink from the estus flask! The first time it happened I screamed at the screen lol. That particular detail had never stood out to me before but now I don't think I can ever fully go back to Dark Souls 1. It's still a really good game but I think it's finally going to start feeling a bit dated for me. There's just too many QoL improvements in Elden Ring. Shield counters alone have completely changed the way I play.

I was feeling pretty burnt out on Elden Ring so I had to take a break. Game's just too big and/or I'm just getting too old for that much Souls I guess lmao. So yeah, I was gonna take a short break and the rerelease of Persona 4 Arena Ultimax came out with perfect timing so I decided to dig into it right away. And now I'm super tempted to both get back to P4G and finish my playthrough before doing P4AU's story mode but also now I have this fighting game itch so I wanna fire up SFV and I just reinstalled Dragon Ball FighterZ... All of this with Elden Ring and Yakuza 3 (that I started way back in October) both unfinished. What is wrong with me lol? It's like no matter what I play my brain goes

I think it's just different endings so you can get away with one if you backup your save.

Definitely don't need to be buying more games rn, especially not games that are still a bit pricey, but it's hit an all-time low (50% off) and I've been low-key looking for a decent deal for a few weeks because I'd like to play it in the near future, so to the top of the backlog it goes. edit: Oh wait I also got this a few days ago cause it dropped to like 12 bucks.

That JoJo fighting game is getting a rerelease and it's coming to PC this time!!! So @Mister Jack, on a scale of 1 to You Are Already Dead, how spoiled will I be if I play this without being fully caught up?

I'm still completely lost in Elden Ring but surely I'll be done by this time next month when this comes out... Surely... Also, I guess I never got around to posting it but it goes without saying that I bought this the second I could: I still need to get around to playing FFV, though...

I dare say this is starting to look like a somewhat respectable collection! For now I'm caught up on both the Junji Ito and Berserk releases so my wallet can rest for a few months. ...or I could just find something else to start collecting. JoJo and Vinland Saga both have some really nice hardcover editions... Really excited to reread Berserk, though. It's been so long, I don't really remember anything beyond the Golden Age. Or how far into it I actually got.

Yeah, it was always more of a "so much room for activities!" kinda game. But you had to actually go out of your way to use the tools the nanosuit provided. It's very easy to just play it like any other shooter and the game in and of itself isn't exactly mind-blowing as a normal shooter. I liked it at the time but I'm not exactly eager to revisit it. Stealth in Crysis is more of a "hide and set up an ambush then start shooting" kinda deal. It's not an immersive sim, stealth is a tool rather than a playstyle. Also Crysis 2 was pretty bad in general, just a huge step down from the original. I don't think I ever got around to trying the third one lol.

Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood There isn't a whole lot to say about this one. It's still way better than A Realm Reborn but it's definitely a step down from Heavensward. The overall plot is pretty good and pays off/wraps up plot threads that have been getting weaved into the narrative since the very beginning. The way it's structured is fine in theory but there are some pacing issues. There's a chunk around the middle that's kinda boring and way too long and by the time things start to pick up again the game is ready to start wrapping things up so it kinda feels like it all goes by in a flash. It's a shame because that boring section takes place in some of the most unique and gorgeous zones of the entire game so far. I definitely loved visiting that place, I just wish I'd had something more interesting to do there. All in all, it's not the best chapter of FFXIV but it's still a pretty decently fun time and now I get to finally play Shadowbringers! Which means Endwalker is only another ~100 hours away! Maybe a little bit more depending on how long the questlines leading into and out of Shadowbringers are. That being said, I think it's time for another break from the game. The end of an expansion is pretty much the ideal stopping point and I'm not going to get anywhere by the time Elden Ring comes out. Besides, it took me like a month to get through the final stretch of Stormblood, even when it became good again. That tells me I'll likely get burned out on the game if I force myself to keep playing. This game is weird because the story is really good but the gameplay is very much an MMORPG that came out in 2013. When you're getting into the story, it can consume your entire existence in a way few games can. But if you're not really feeling it at that particular time or you're in a stretch of the story that drags a bit then the gameplay certainly isn't going to keep you hooked. So it ends up being in this weird binary state of either I want to play nothing else or I have to force myself to keep playing because I want to power through this bit that sucks. Knowing when to recognize it's time for a break is key because the main quest alone is literally hundreds of hours long lol. I can't imagine binging all of it marathon-style and still enjoying yourself when you reach Endwalker...

Yeah, when I pile them up like that it's usually out of desperation because I'm running out of space lol. Good ideas about where to find shelves, it's worth a shot. It shouldn't be a problem for a while, though. I don't have anywhere near as much time to read as I used to. So I had to stop buying so many goddamned books but my book buying habits took a few months to adjust, so as it is I have enough to last me for a while.

You mean like in a pile or on top of each other like a double row? I think a pile would look messy but the more I look at it the more I feel like the shelves have enough head room that I could probably add a couple extra shelves to each bookcase. Ikea actually sells them but they're like 25 bucks a piece so getting 4 would cost as much as getting an entirely new bookcase lol. Of course, I don't actually have room for a third bookcase right now so it seems like their racket is going to work...

After watching their website like a hawk for like 3 months, I was finally able to order some proper bookcases from IKEA! I finally have enough room so that I don't have to double-stack every single shelf. I was really hoping to have more free space left in them, though lol. Also, the wall where my Witcher wolf head was hanged is hidden now so I had to take it down for the time being.

I was holding off on pre-ordering because I was tempted to get the Premium Collector's Edition and it's only available through Bandai Namco and in Canada I had to wait for their new store to be set up. 2 weeks from launch and the store is live but the CE still isn't purchasable, and it's not even available for PC anyway for some fucking reason. So I'd end up with a console copy I would need to resell and I just can't be bothered going through all that hassle for some plastic junk that I'll probably regret paying extra for anyway. So I finally said fuck it and got my pre-order over at Fanatical.

Glad to see they're finally taking this seriously. These games have been plagued with hackers for years now. Unsurprisingly, they're prioritizing Elden Ring so hopefully that means the launch won't be affected by this. But everything else is going to remain offline for now.

My strategy was "Fuck this, I'm coming back in the post-game when I'll be overpowered". The wave with projectile enemies was still a crapshoot but once I made it past that it was just a matter of being careful and abusing axe throws and runic attacks. Which reminds me, I could swear there are no iframes at all during runic attacks and that's another thing that I found baffling. Makes them significantly less useful than they could be in some contexts and getting stunned out of your animation feels really bullshit sometimes.

Lol I guess that last paragraph didn't counter-balance all that criticism as much as I thought. I did love it, I just thought the combat had some significant flaws. Yeah, the Leviathan axe is a real joy to use and it kinda already felt like basically a Thor game to me hahaha. The shot from off-cam thing was really only egregious in that one "take no damage" challenge, I just found it very telling and it really validated my feelings on the combat in general. I haven't played Jedi Fallen Order but the way they handle it with stormtroopers is hilarious. I love it. And I don't think they necessarily need to drop the enemy levels entirely, I'd be fine if they just made it so that you can't be so hopelessly outlevelled that they one shot you. Whenever I'd see an enemy above my level, I'd always try my luck against them and when they didn't one-shot me it usually led to some of the most satisfying and thrilling fights in the game.

God of War Well, I was hoping to get more out of this one by playing it on PC than I did on PlayStation Now and I'm happy to say that I did. I did end up setting the render scale to 75% (so it rendered at 1080p upscaled to 1440p) so that I would be closer to 60fps but it was still an experience insanely more pleasant than the low-res, choppy, blurry, compressed mess that was playing it on PS Now. That being said, I still think this is a deeply flawed game. A pretty good game but deeply flawed all the same. I just think the combat in this is ill-conceived at best. There isn't any specific aspect of it that couldn't work but when you combine the over-the-shoulder camera, the fact that all the camera trickery they use means the camera has to stay way the fuck up on Kratos' back all the time (there is no FOV option in the PC version for this reason) and some of the baffling enemy design choices they've made... I think you end up with something lesser than the sum of its parts. Most of the time it works just fine, especially in the critical path where you're rarely challenged all that much. Except for the dark elves. Fuck those guys. They fucking suck and I hated every single fight with them. But really it's in the optional/post-game content that things reached a breaking point for me. So in Bayonetta the enemies are programmed to not shoot projectiles when they're off-camera. You don't really notice it if you don't know about it but it's a really smart way to avoid needlessly frustrating the player because being hit by shit you can't see coming isn't fun and it wouldn't make the game harder, it would make it unfair and frustrating. God of War doesn't do this. Which is fine in theory, but if you start doing the Muspelheim challenges then at one point you'll reach the one that asks you to not get hit. And someone had the galaxy-brained idea to put projectile-shooting enemies in it. So not only is this annoying as hell, Kratos moves like a tank and the camera is way the fuck up on his back so you can't really see what's going on around you. And enemies still shoot at you when they're off-camera. It is just dogshit game design through and through and it's dogshit in a way that is very telling to me. This is a game that looks competent enough on the surface but, when you really dig into its combat system and its various aspects, it really starts to feel like not enough thought was put into how it all fits together. And I didn't even touch on how baffling it is to have enemies that can outlevel you in a game like this. Having a regular enemy one-shot you out of nowhere is never fun. Which brings me to... The Valkyrie fights. I love the Souls series so I'm not averse to challenging boss fights and it was probably just me sucking here but I kinda hated them. I stubbornly fought like four of them while I was going through the story and they felt so unfair lol. At some point I said fuck it and only came back after the main story when I had upgraded end-game gear and just fucking destroyed them. Except for the Valkyrie Queen. After like an hour of getting absolutely destroyed I decided that it just wasn't going to happen so I dropped the difficulty down to easy and got her after a few more tries. I'm getting too old for bother with unfair shit like this. I can only remember a single other time where I had to do this and it was the final boss of the DLC for Castlevania Lord of Shadows. Not exactly a flattering comparison for GoW but at least now I'm done. Anyway, all of this isn't really an issue if you just do the main story and ignore all the end-game challenges so I don't want to sound overly negative. The game overall is really fun, especially when you start going off the beaten path and exploring the Lake of the Nine, and the main story is pretty great. Ultimately the frustrating parts were only a small fraction of that playtime and the rest of the game never overstayed its welcome so that's no small feat considering how much content there is. I'm definitely looking forward to Ragnarok.

What I love about this is that, by their logic, their own developers must not understand it either because they hate it too. Couldn't possibly be that everyone understands just fine and simply thinks it's fucking shit...

Yeah but the console version is published by Sony. 505 could've handled it differently.