toxicitizen

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.

Pricing details have been announced for Death Stranding Director's Cut on PC. 40$ and a 10$ upgrade for owners of the original. Color me surprised, I was honestly expecting something terrible like full price and barely any discount. Definitely gonna grab it day one then. Kinda funny to see them handling this so well right on the heels of IOI completely fucking up the Steam launch of Hitman 3, which should've been an easy slam dunk for them lol.

Yes, I know what remote code execution is lol. Apparently the knowledge of how to actually exploit the vulnerability isn't fully out in the wild yet and those who do know are only using it to spread awareness for now, though. So there's at least that. Also the game is still a month away and online functionalities aren't exactly something that would fall under last minute polish or a day one patch so their network programmers might actually be in a position get this fixed in time for launch so this doesn't necessarily mean a delay is inevitable. God I fucking hope they don't have to delay the PC version lmao...

They've already taken the servers offline for Dark Souls 1-3 so they seem to be taking it pretty seriously. Which is a first because Dark Souls on PC has always had a problem with hackers being able to fuck up your game with hacked items and shit like this. I can only assume that Elden Ring's imminent launch is the main reason for this.

Did anyone really expect them to pull existing games? It never occurred to me that they might because it seems like such a counter-productive thing to do. Physical copies are already in the wild and even pulling digital copies would just piss people off. Feels like the cat's already out of the bag there. Unreleased games are absolutely going to be exclusive, though. Except maybe Call of Duty, I guess. Although yeah, this could simply mean Warzone here.

Ugh, why am I doing this to myself? This is only going to end in pain... But yeah, I read most of my Junji Ito back in October and I don't wanna touch the few books I have left yet because the next one isn't coming out until the summer. So I just got started on Ghost in the Shell and after that is Akira, both of which are pretty short, so I'm gonna need something for after. Think I'll also get The Drifting Classroom by Kazuo Umezz soon.

I mean, the deal isn't even finalized. They probably can't do anything right now and announcing that they intend to fire him in the future would be pretty stupid lol.

And we're back! The new monitor got here a day early. The smaller screen size is definitely noticeable (especially when it's next to my old monitor; the Samsung one seemed so massive comparatively lol), but on the bright side the 1440p image is much crisper on it. On the Samsung one you could kinda tell it was being blown up a little bigger than it should be at that resolution. Not gonna lie, though, now I kinda want to get a second one... Next purchase is gonna have to be a wider desk, though. Having all my fancy RGBs hidden behind the monitor simply won't do. Not crazy about my headset stand being behind the monitor, either.

It will! And it'll be payback for you outbidding me on Forza last year!!!

According to reviews, it's actually 144hz out of the box and you have to go into its settings to make it 170 because it's technically overclocked at that point. There's also a warning about potential flickering. I'll try it out but I'm buying it expecting a 144hz monitor. Also, I'm sure 27" will be fine but man I loved that 32" screen on the Samsung one. I could just put on a video or movie and go lie down in bed and it was just big enough to be perfectly fine at that distance. It's how I binged most of Tim Rogers' 5+ hours long YouTube reviews back in October lol.

Couldn't help myself, didn't want to wait until whenever the fuck I'll get that refund check from Samsung. This way I'll be back to a dual monitor setup faster for school AND I'll get to play God of War on a better display with G-Sync on friday! I'm a little bummed out to go down from 32" but the 32" model with the same features as this one was like 300$ more and I ended up regretting spending so much on the last one so this will do. (For now...)

Elden Ring: It's gonna be the best. Game of the year! Hollow Knight: Silksong: It's gonna be the best! Indie Game of the year! The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Zero: Fucking finally! Honestly not sure if there's anything else that comes remotely close for me. I'm excited for Sony's PC ports I guess, but the only two that are confirmed right now are God of War and Uncharted 4, both of which I've already played through PSNow (not Lost Legacy, though). Since these two are coming early in the year, hopefully there'll be more. Spider-Man and Ghost of Tsushima would definitely be up there for me. There's also been some hints that Horizon: Forbidden West will come to PC fairly quickly. Hopefully that'll prove true and will apply to God of War: Ragnarok as well. I don't expect them until at least 6+ months from the console launch though, so they'd be late 2022 at best.

New PC is up and running! And a slight change in my setup, although it's a semi-temporary one. I definitely intend to go back to a dual monitor setup in the near future. I miss it so bad lol You can't see it in the pic but all those RGBs are doing a rainbow spiral thingy in sync that I'm 99% sure improves my framerate somehow. Except for the keyboard because it's a Logitech piece of crap that isn't compatible with iCue! My old PC is still in its old spot behind the rainbow box but it's fairly empty right now. Eventually I'll move it and put the new one in its place and once I feel confident I won't need it as an emergency backup machine I'll probably put my old GTX 960 back in it and turn it into a Linux box.

The Doom franchise bundle brings it down to like 26$ and I made 16$ selling cards so what the hell, I'll rip and tear for 10 dollars. I was tempted to grab Days Gone as well but it goes on sale all the time, so it can wait. I still need to play Horizon, anyway, and I have God of War pre-ordered.

Didn't really buy anything for myself during the Steam sale (that might still change, I sold some trading cards...) but a friend of mine was feeling the Christmas spirit and gifted me these two Loop Hero is pretty damn cool, haven't tried Hades yet. We also both got this to play coop with our other friend. I never really got into the original Risk of Rain so it wasn't my idea lol. So yeah, this has been a roguelike kind of christmas...

I didn't press for details but I asked someone that was playing it at different points through the game and at first they were like "yeah, it's fine" but by the time they reached the ending their tune changed to "yeah, uh, no." I'm assuming the huge spoilers for previous games is what they meant lol. But tbh I'm always skeptical of "yeah you can just jump right into this one" because if it's coming from players then their idea of "fine for new players" is probably wildly different from mine and if it's from the dev/pub then I just assume they're lying through their teeth because "you need to have played 7 games before you can play this one" isn't exactly great marketing. See NISA with Trails of Cold Steel 3.

Even if that were the case (I was told in no uncertain terms that it isn't), I hate skipping installments in series. To the point where if the first installment in a series is on a platform I don't have access to I'll usually just ignore the rest of the serie unless it's a special case like Titanfall 2 where everyone is raving about it and the first one was mp-only. Besides, I love Yakuza and actually want to play them all. Might as well do it in order lol.

After skipping the last couple years, I actually gave enough of a shit to do my spreadsheet again this year! I think I even managed not to forget to log any games! Not that I played all that many compared to the ~50 or so I used to do in a year but it's certainly the highest it's been in a few years. Depression sucks lol. You can actually kinda see where I started getting better, now that I think about it hahaha. Only two games in the first 3 months of the year then around spring I got some good news and you can see the completion dates being closer and more frequent. 3-5 games a month is much closer to the pace at which I used to complete them. Cyberpunk 2077 PC Jan 31 Call of Cthulhu PC Mar 19 Titanfall 2 PC Apr 5 Mirror's Edge Catalyst PC Apr 16 Resident Evil 3 PC Apr 25 Ghostrunner PC May 2 Resident Evil 7 Biohazard PC May 6 Resident Evil Village PC May 13 Halo: Combat Evolved – Anniversary PC May 25 Halo 2 – Anniversary PC May 30 Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn PC July 4 Ys IX: Monstrum Nox PC July 25 Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster PC July 31 Final Fantasy II Pixel Remaster PC Aug 8 Final Fantasy III Pixel Remaster PC Aug 15 Chrono Trigger PC Aug 23 The Room 4: Old Sins PC Aug 29 The House of Da Vinci PC Sept 1 Eliza PC Sept 8 Final Fantasy IV Pixel Remaster PC Sept 20 Halo 3 PC Sept 26 Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon PC Oct 3 Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night PC Oct 23 Blasphemous PC Nov 8 Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward PC Dec 10 I was hoping to finish Stormblood in time, but even though that's what my plans are for tonight I chose to spend last night finishing to read Misery so I don't think I have enough time left to wrap it up by midnight. Looking at the list, I think some obvious goals for 2022 would be: continue working my way through Halo MCC so I can play Infinite keep trucking along in FFXIV so I can play Endwalker and I really need to go through the Yakuza series as well, since a friend bought me Yakuza: Like a Dragon for my birthday around October and I haven't touched Yakuza 3 in like two months... Oh and I need to play FFV if I'm to continue on to FFVI and, as was my initial plan, keep going through the series once I'm done with the Pixel Remasters... ....I want to play too many games. Maybe I should just go back to being depressed.

I also can't imagine that anyone would go on stage at an award show about video games and shout "Fuck the Oscars!" and yet...

Oh right, that was this year. I decided to wait until Crossbell is out to continue with the series so it's on hiatus for at least another year or so. But then I'll finally be able to get up to date without skipping any of the games!

Cool thread! I probably missed some stuff and I went through a list filtered for PC releases only so it's possible some of these weren't actually 2021 releases but late ports that I forgot about. I split these in two categories. First, the games that I really wanted to play at launch but couldn't justify buying (whether due to lack of time, money or because I knew I wouldn't play them anytime soon): Mass Effect Legendary Edition Tales of Arise Guardians of the Galaxy Psychonauts 2 The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles What makes these different is that once I got over the initial launch FOMO, I kinda forgot about them. I still want to play them all but at this point I'll just wait for deep discounts. Also, in the case of Great Ace Attorney, I really want to finish the original trilogy first. Then there's the games I genuinely wish I could've played: Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker - I got back into FFXIV last summer and intended to keep playing so I could be caught up on the MSQ in time for Endwalker's launch but that didn't happen. I stopped midway through Heavensward, the first expansion, and didn't return to the game until this month. I put over 100 hours into it this month alone and I'm still only on the second expansion, Stormblood. After that there's the post-Stormblood content, then there's Shadowbringers and finally the post-Shadowbringers content. So I'm looking at easily another 150+ hours before I can even begin Endwalker. Maybe by this time next year I'll be caught up lol. Deathloop - I love Arkane's games but for some reason I never buy them at launch and always feel bad about it. It doesn't help that for the longest time it wasn't really clear what Deathloop even was. The initial reveal trailer made it look like some kind of multiplayer deal and none of the marketing leading up to launch really cleared things up for me. I have it on Steam now, though, so it'll be one of the first games I play once my new PC is up and running. Hitman 3 - Contrary to what you might believe, this one didn't actually come out on PC in 2021. Or at least, it might as well not have as far as I'm concerned because I'm not buying anything on the EGS. In my case, it sort of has the opposite effect where I'll forget most of these games even came out and by the time they hit Steam I've moved on. So I don't end up buying them until much later, when they're dirt cheap. Great job, Tim! Oh and I guess Kingdom Hearts and FFVIIR are also in the same situation here but Square-Enix has insane pricing (and is getting worse!) so I likely would not have bought them right away even if they had launched on Steam. Nioh 2 - This one was simply down to knowing how much of a time commitment it would be. I loved the first one but completing it took me almost 200 hours. I really wish I had had the time to play it this year but I had other shit I wanted to do. I'll buy it when I'm ready to play it immediately or when the price drops into impulse purchase range. Nier Replicant - I made a conscious decision to drop original PS3 version and this was back when I hated doing that and forced myself to finish basically every game I started, so that should tell you something. Nier Automata is legitimately one of my favorite games that I've played in the decade since, though, so I really want to give it another shot. But it's still too pricy for a game I can't be sure I'll even like. Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne HD Remaster - This one (along with the PC port of P4G, which I stopped midway through) was just down to time. Gonna have to find time for it before SMTV drops on PC, which could happen as soon as 6 months from now. bonus entry: Monster Hunter World: Iceborne - Not a 2021 release but I really wanted to play it before Rise's PC launch and that's not going to happen. I'm glad I held off, though, because now I'll get to play it on my new PC at a decent framerate with G-Sync enabled (assuming Samsung ever repairs and sends my monitor back...)