toxicitizen

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...)

Yeah, that's fair. That's about what I paid as well.

I'm not sure that's entirely fair lol. A 30fps lock doesn't mean it's half-assed. We're talking about a game that was made exclusively for a console in 2003. You can't really blame them for not anticipating a rerelease 20 years in the future. Tying game logic to framerate is a terrible practice but it was fairly common back then, especially with a game that was only ever going to come out on one platform. I'm giving them the benefit of doubt and could be way off here but it's entirely possible that fixing the framerate cap meant rewriting a non-trivial amount of game code that simply wasn't feasible for the scope of the project. I mean, just recently Durante's studio released a port of the PSP exclusive Trails spin-off Nayuta no Kiseki and in his blog post about it Durante mentioned that they had someone working on implementing arbitrary framerate support (it's locked at 60fps and the game's logic is framerate dependent) and they had to shelve the idea for now because the amount of work required wasn't justifiable. And we're talking about Durante here! The guy that, when porting Trails of Cold Steel, got the game to run at like 90fps and went "No, this isn't good enough" and ripped out the entire rendering pipeline to write a more optimized one. Sometimes it's just not feasible.

Good old tying game logic to framerate. Wasn't console game programming great back in the day? Atlus gonna Atlus. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I think with these niche JRPGs, companies know they can charge more and hardcore fans will still buy them. And, to be fair, in some cases that's probably the only reason they can keep making them. XSEED doesn't really do deep discounts anymore and NISA must operate on paper thin profit margins given how routinely their Japanese parent company seems to be on the brink of bankruptcy. Atlus probably doesn't need to do it since they're under SEGA now and aren't as niche as they used to be but old habits die hard, I guess... But yeah, if that kinda stuff bothers you then it's always a good idea to check PC Gaming Wiki before buying. Especially with Japanese ports.

Oh I could've easily slashed almost 500 bucks if I'd gone with an i7 (or an older gen CPU) because the motherboard would've also been cheaper. But I figured I'd get all the extra horsepower I can get to make the most out of my 240hz monitor (which, incidentally, I sent back to Samsung for repairs like 3 weeks ago now...) And yeah, it should last me quite a bit longer. My last two builds I went with a mid-range CPU and the CPU is where I ultimately ended up running into issues. On my old one it was Assassin's Creed III that ran like a slideshow despite my CPU meeting the requirements (I haven't trusted Ubisoft since lol) and right now my CPU is bottlenecking my GTX 1660 pretty hard. I can't wait to see how much more I'll be able to get out of it once it's in my new PC. Just to give you an idea, I saw basically no change in performance going from 1080p to 1440p. That shouldn't happen when you almost double the resolution lol. Also, I forgot that consoles have made performance/quality modes standard now. I guess at least people will have the option to keep 60fps.

Lol kinda? I have a recent graphics card but it's a budget model without any RTX cores. I only got it 2 years ago so I can't really justify upgrading already. That's why I went big on the CPU while I wait for the RTX 40 series. And it's not like I HAD to spend 2k dude, come on. For the price of the motherboard and CPU alone I could've built a decent budget gaming PC. As a matter of fact, that's pretty much what my previous build was. Although I'll grant you that GPU prices alone kinda make this harder at the moment. I'm just sick of compromising on visuals and still not hitting 60fps. My goal with this build is to be able to keep a high framerate even past the point when devs inevitably start pushing visuals again and games go back to 30fps on consoles.

Around 2K, not including the case I got last month. Turns out a brand new i9 CPU is pretty expensive! I don't mind, though. After spending half a decade on a budget machine that struggled to hit 60fps in most AAA games, I wanted a killer machine now that I can afford it.

I did the thing! I also ordered some extra mounting screws from Corsair earlier this week to make the CPU Cooler compatible with the CPU socket. I thought I was being smart by ordering in advance but now I'm kinda worried everything else is gonna get here before them. I was tempted to throw in an extra 500GB SSD just so I wouldn't have to nuke my current Windows install when setting it up but decided against it. I'm starting to have second thoughts about that... edit: Fuck it!

My game of the year is... the only 2021 release I played in 2021! Congratulations, Capcom!!!

The final piece of a trio of completely frivolous purchases (the bookends) finally arrived, and so I was able to set up this shrine to my own stupidity. No regrets!!!

The Matrix Resurrections The original Matrix is probably my favorite movie of all-time so I was beyond hyped for this. It's kinda weird. The first half is more or less a soft remake of the original movie, TFA style, but with a new angle to the mystery. That part really worked for me. The new elements introduced in the movie I almost universally loved. If you go into it just wanting a new Matrix story, you'll probably enjoy it. It's definitely better than Revolutions although I personally still love Reloaded more. But I always thought Reloaded was an underappreciated gem that got way more shit than it deserved. If you go into it expect a sequel to the trilogy that single-handedly revolutionized action cinema, though? Yeah, maybe don't. The action in this is..... I wouldn't say bad but woof. Some of the fight choreography is only kind of okay and then there's bits when people will just stand around and shoot and it's like "This is supposed to be the Matrix! Wtf are you doing?!" I don't think it's even a matter of not having good fight choreographers, I think Lana Wachowski just wasn't interested in making that kind of movie. Don't go into this expecting anything like Neo vs Smith in the subway station, the Burly Brawl or the highway chase. It's just not that kind of movie. Oh and

Yup. Been keeping an eye out for the past few weeks and it's all either out of stock or insanely priced. It's pretty obvious there's no way I'll be able to get the Corsair sticks I want anyway, so I'm just gonna go with a DDR4 board when I order my parts soon.

I wouldn't put that kind of bullshit past Sony but I also wouldn't put it past Atlus to just be dumb. Sometimes they really come across like they took a few pages from the Square-Enix playbook. Although, to be fair, they still have like 5 more Persona "projects" to announce for the 25th anniversary celebrations. The last announcement in late 2022 is probably going to be Persona 6 and I'm sure at least two of them will be some completely pointless bullshit like a clothing line or a pencil set. But surely they have at least a couple more games to announce?

Announcing a Steam release of this instead of P5R is the most Atlus move ever but whatever, I'll take it! It's "only" 30 bucks if you already own Persona 4 so it was a no-brainer. I actually bought this one at launch on PS3 so I think that officially makes it the fighting game I've spent the most money on ever lol.

Probably? They already fucked off from Steam when EGS offered them money bags. None of their latest releases are available on Steam. We now know that the overwhelming majority of EGS exclusives failed to recoup the investment for Epic (so the devs end up making no additional income and often stop promoting the EGS version altogether once the Steam release happens lol) but in Ubisoft's case they still had uPlay to fall back on. So I think it's very likely that of all the companies that got in bed with Epic, Ubisoft are the ones that made out like bandits. I expect them to come crawling back to Steam eventually (EA finally did) but they can stay on the EGS for all I care. AC Valhalla is pretty much the only game I'd probably end up buying if they returned to Steam. And honestly, I've wanted a new Splinter Cell for years now but with everything surrounding Ubisoft over the past couple years I honestly couldn't give less of a shit right now. I don't trust the current Ubisoft to make a decent stealth game.

So, as their tour continues more and more videos of the new Gloryhammer singer pop up online and fuck me, he's really fucking good. Thomas Winkler had this manic energy to him that really can't be matched but at this point I think it's obvious that Sozos Michael is simply more skilled as a vocalist. I can't wait for the fourth album so we can hear him singing new material tailored to his strengths.

It's a pretty standard third-person shooter. It's nothing mind-blowing but it's surprisingly competent coming from a studio that mostly makes RTS games and it's a lot of fun if you like 40K.