toxicitizen

Trials Evolution: Gold Edition. Man, going back to Trials was fucking brutal after having played a lot of Joe Danger recently. You can't rely on checkpoints when going for gold medals because every retry counts as a fault and at first I kept wanting to press A to boost up steep hills. This game is so much damn fun, though. It's hard to get frustrated at it even when faced with repeated failure. So, I beat the Evolution campaign and earned the Trials trophy, which triggered the end credits. I got all the gold medals on the earlier sets of levels but holy shit the last few get crazy difficult. Once you beat it, you unlock the ability to earn platinum medals on all the tracks but man, getting gold was challenging enough. I can't imagine pulling too many of those off. I'm actually kinda shocked that the game awarded me two of them right away. The game also includes all the levels from Trials HD. I completed them up to the extreme ones. Those are just fucking impossible at my current skill level. But yeah, I really loved the game. I'll probably keep playing it on and off until Trials Fusion comes out. Which is probably not going to be anytime soon.

Alright, thanks. That's too bad, it looked like it had a lot of potential. Anyway. Dishonored: The Brigmore Witches. It's really hard to complain about more Dishonored. The story is great and the gameplay is as awesome as ever. But I felt like it was seriously on the short side, more so than Knife of Dunwall. I didn't really mind them re-using a map from the base game for one of the missions, but holy fuck, did it really need to be this short? If I wasn't so anal about doing things perfectly (I play games like this or Deus Ex at a snail pace, carefully exploring every inch and reloading whenever I do something I deem to be a mistake), I probably could've finished that first mission in 15 mins on a first run. The second mission was a lot bigger and more open like the missions from the main campaign but the third one was again kinda short and small. I'm really gonna have to replay the whole thing back-to-back at some point, though. Having something like two months between the two episodes made it kinda hard to really get into the story. Also, I wonder how the ending actually works.

That would be the soundtrack. The game is currently 75% off on Steam and it applied to it as well. edit: Gotta push that new graphics card to its limit somehow!

For someone like me who's not a huge TMNT fan, would you recommend waiting for a sale?

Ah ok. I've never really experienced it with lower frametates, to be honest. If it happened, it probably wasn't as noticeable. For it to bug me, it has to be pretty bad. Like HL2 at 120fps bad, or Mirror's Edge in the elevators bad.

Isn't tearing an issue only when the framerate is ridiculously high? Like, I'll turn it on when playing something like Half-Life 2 because even maxed out I get 100+ fps and that causes a lot of tearing. But usually I find the performance hit to not be worth it unless I'm getting significantly higher than 60fps.

Don't know about that but I just double checked and, unless I missed something, everything is set as high as it'll go. I'm averaging around 40fps. I'll probably tweak it a bit to get something closer to 60. V-sync is off, FOV is 95 and resolution is 1920x1080.

Radeon HD 6970. 100$ used from my cousin. My GTX 295 is now officially retired. It's not exactly recent and I'm usually more of an Nvidia man but I just couldn't pass up such a cheap upgrade. I lose some horsepower going from dual GPUs to single but it's otherwise technically superior in every way. More than double the VRAM and also does DX11. My first thought: "I can finally play Assassin's Creed III!" Once in-game: "Wow, it actually somehow runs fucking worse." I give up. I am never going to be able to play that fucking game. Maybe my CPU is the problem. I still think Ubisoft's engine is an unoptimized piece of crap, though. At least everything else seems to run significantly better. I can actually max out Chivalry now without my framerate tanking. So it no longer looks bland and terrible. Also, lighting effects! I only briefly tried Arkham City but the tesselation looks pretty cool.

As much as I'm interested in it, I really can't justify getting it now either. Especially considering they've said the price will go down once it actually comes out.

Yeah, that bugged the shit out of me. I'm okay with games that want to tell you a story that isn't affected by player agency, but if that's what you're doing then don't fucking give the player choices to be making. If I'm blowing off Katherine in gameplay I want Vincent to do the same in the cutscenes. Otherwise just don't give me the option. Pretty much, yeah. Before playing the game, I was under the impression that

Finally beat Catherine late last night. Man, it's good to have this one scratched off the backlog. I hated having it there. Loved the game but ended up losing interest because of a damn difficulty spike when I first bought it over a year ago. The story is about as good as you would expect from the Persona team. Only issue there is your choices don't always mesh with how Vincent acts in cutscenes. As far as I'm aware, only the ending is affected by those. As for the gameplay, as someone who loves both difficult games and puzzle games, this game fits in a weird niche that's kinda perfect for me. The only problem is that the difficulty curve is kind of all over the place. It starts out easy enough and slowly ramps up as the game introduces new concepts. But suddenly around halfway through it just spikes out of nowhere and one boss level in particular feels like they programmed a variable called "bullshit" and just cranked it WAY up. There is so much shit coming at you from every single direction that you almost need luck to not walk into something that kills you by complete accident. This is around the part where I'd initially stopped. Here's where it gets weird, though. After that boss, it kinda gets easier. I mean, I guess it's possible I just got significantly better at the game without realizing it. But I really doubt it. I feel like the game is at its best when it throws difficult puzzles at you but doesn't rush you through them (i.e. doesn't actively try to fucking murder you so you actually have time to think). And the last few levels are a lot like that, even the bosses aren't trying as hard to climb right up your ass. Not the final boss, though. Holy shit, fuck that asshole. It's like they didn't know what to do so they just went back to that bullshit variable from earlier and fucking broke it on purpose. Here, there were times I literally died because I stepped on the wrong block at the wrong time, without any real way to know what was coming. It was infuriating. I don't think there even exists words of profanity hateful enough to do justice to my hatred for that motherfucker. But yeah, other than those two difficulty walls, I absolutely loved the game. I kinda want to keep playing it. I mean, there's trophies I could hunt or go for some of the other endings. But really, it's just more of the gameplay that I want. That hasn't happened in a while. I think XCOM was the last time.

Really? Like I said, I never got very far into it. But in the early stages I played, sometimes I would have to scan for a bit before any UFO showed up.

Turtles are creepy.

Well, in-game days obviously and you can speed them up. When you're in the geoscape, you can have many days go by without anything happening so it's not like you'd necessarily be sitting around unable to do anything because your planes are refueling.

Ha, that's a recent tweet, too. I could've seen them saying it back when it first came out on 360 but now... I wonder if it's just a case of different parts of MS not being on quite the same page (as often seems to be the case). But still, Titanfall is third-party and, more importantly, an EA game. They're not usually in the business of console exclusivity (see Mass Effect). They've made it pretty clear that Dead Rising 3 is a true Xbox One exclusive so I guess I don't see why they would leave room for doubt when it comes to Titanfall. But EA and MS seem to be kinda overly friendly these days so who knows.

Sonic Generations. I'm of two minds on this one. I don't want to be too harsh on it because it's the first Sonic game I've played since I was a kid (before all that 3D nonsense), so it was really nice to revisit the series after such a long time. For the most part, I enjoyed the gameplay. It's really fun when you go fast, that part works. But holy shit the platforming is horrendous when it forces you to slow down or stop. Even as a kid, I always thought the way Sonic controls made any slow platforming kinda shitty and that hasn't changed here. Other than that, the story was kind of cringe-worthy. I guess the cutscenes were written with kids in mind? I didn't realize Sonic was aimed at young kids specifically nowadays. Or maybe Sega just has shit writers. Oh and that final boss fight was terrible. I mean, I get what they were going for but it played the worst of the entire game. It was the only one that just wasn't fun. Seemed kinda weird. Also, looking at the thread I guess I forgot to post about it but I also played through Analogue: A Hate Story a few days ago. It was alright. I mean, it's a visual novel. I don't expect they get much better than this considering the story was interesting enough for me to finish it. I kinda liked the prequel Digital: A Love Story better, though. I really liked how it was set in the late 80s and had you using an old OS in the early days of the internet and message boards. A new sequel called Hate Plus just came out on Steam, I'll probably grab it at some point.

Can't wait to play it. Gonna get started on it as soon as I finish Sonic Generations and Catherine, which I expect will be tomorrow.

Interview on RPS. Sounds like there's still a bunch of stuff they're adding to the strategic aspect (base management) that they're not talking about just yet. Also, it's not the first time they've been asked about base defense since they announced EW and they basically dodge the question instead of flat out saying no. It's possible they simple don't want to create negative buzz by saying they haven't added it but... one can hope.

Not sure what you mean with Minecraft but fair enough. Like I said, it's just assumption based on what the devs both have and have not said.

The difference is I used to buy my EA games on Steam. I have no reason to want to move to another platform now. Origin isn't really doing anything that Steam wasn't already doing. There's no advantage for me to be using it. Whereas the Blizzard games were their own thing to begin with. And now they all use the same launcher so I can at least just run the one thing and they all get patched. It's an improvement. Another useful thing is you use your battle.net credentials to log in (which you can set the app to remember) and it carries the session over into the game. So you don't need to type it in every single time anymore. True. But like I said, it's all about perception. I'm significantly less worried about Valve doing it than EA doing it given the history of both company. Besides, Steam is clearly Valve's main source of income nowadays, so they have every reason to keep it alive. But, judging from the recent Bundle, I doubt Origin is doing anywhere near as well. That might change now, though. We'll see. Nah, nothing official. But they've been increasingly dodging the question so people have started assuming. If it was a true exclusive, I would expect MS to leave no room for doubt and to be shouting it from the rooftops a bit more, to be honest.

Having never played the original myself, from what I heard you had to be strategic in how you positioned the facilities in your base. Like, if you didn't have choke points you were basically fucked when a base defense mission happened. Not sure how the actual mission played out, though. I kind of assumed it was similar to the regular turn-based combat but NeoStarr comparing it to tower defense makes me think that might not be the case. I tried the original a few times but could never get into it because of how dated its UI is. I'm seriously looking forward to Xenonauts for this reason. It's a more faithful recreation of the original than EU but with a much cleaner and modern interface.

Eh, to be fair, I'm never exactly keen to pay 60$ for any game. But in the case of Origin vs Steam, it's a matter of perception, I guess. Steam doesn't really register as DRM for me. It's just where I buy my PC games. It's something I want installed on my PC anyway. It launches right alongside Windows. It's something I use day-to-day. I'd also argue that Steam offers a lot more features to the user, and that counts for a lot. For example, Blizzard's battle.net desktop app just went into open beta and I gladly installed it. I hate that Origin is forcing me to use an additional app because it doesn't provide me with any benefits for using it. Blizzard's app, though, consolidates the launchers for all my Blizzard games into a single program. It might not sound all that significant but there are advantages to using it, however small they might be. Origin, on the other hand, feels like it's being forced on me and doesn't really add anything that I want or need. And that alone is enough to make me dislike it immensely. Same reason some people dislike Steam, I guess. Ubisoft have their shitty uPlay stuff and Ubistore, but at least they still offer the option to buy their games through Steam should I want to. And then there's how I do not trust EA one bit. And that's not to say Valve is necessarily trustworthy, either. A company's a company. But EA have a history of shutting down servers and killing off games and such so I'm really hesitant to invest any significant amount of money in a library on their platform. For all I know, they could easily just decide to pull the plug on the whole thing in a few short years.

Yeah, this is looking absolutely fantastic. Sucks that the chances of it being on Steam are slim to none, though. Because I'm still not too keen on paying a full 60$ for an Origin game. This is one I might actually consider getting on PS4 instead, once the timed exclusivity ends.

A few things, actually. In my last stretch before going back to school, I've been mostly sticking to shorter games. Stuff I can beat in a day or two and move on. But now I felt like playing something a bit more substantial. Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes. I fucking love this game. JRPG-inspired story and with the addictive Puzzle Quest kind of gameplay but with a much more interesting and strategic mechanic than simple Bejeweled-style connect 3. Played this on PSN a year or so ago but never finished it because of the difficulty spike in the last chapter. Grabbed it again on Steam at some point because, well... Steam sale, most likely. Started it again out of boredom a couple days ago because I couldn't decide what to play next. It just sucked me right back in. Almost done with the second campaign now. Sonic Generations. This and Rayman Origins were two platformers I normally wouldn't have bothered with but bought during Steam sales because of all the praise I kept hearing about them. With Rayman out of the way, I figured I'd give this one a shot. After playing the first few stages, my initial impression was "I am going to fucking hate this game". As someone who hasn't played a Sonic game since owning a Genesis and Sonic 2 (so, like... 15 years ago?), I am absolutely godawful at it. Then I made it to the first boss. "Oh shit! That's the robot from the end of Sonic 2!!" Nostalgia is a funny thing. The game pretty much won me over from that point on. I don't see myself playing this for long sessions or anything. I just beat the second set of stages and boss and stopped. Probably won't touch it again until tomorrow. Catherine. For some reason, I felt like playing some Persona last night. Of course, with only a week of vacation left, that just wasn't an option. So I went back to this one instead. When I first bought it over a year ago, I ended up getting stuck (on the fifth night, I think) and never went back to it. Didn't remember much of the story, so I started over from the beginning and I'm almost back to where I was. I definitely intend on finishing it this time.

Oh, I don't remember that then. Been a while since I played it.