toxicitizen

Yeah, I'm not very deep into FFXIV but the more I play of it the more excited I get about FFXVI. Yoshi-P knows what he's doing. This could actually be the best single-player FF in quite a long time.

I'm unironically super hyped for that game. As long as it's a somewhat decent souls-like, I am fully on board with whatever stupid bullshit they can come up with. Honestly a little bummed out that it's EGS exclusive but whatever, at this point I can wait out the exclusivity period for literally any game.

I, too, have ascended! 32in, 1440p, 240hz, g-sync and curved. Even with 150$ off it was still expensive as fuck but idgaf. I felt like spoiling myself. Also feels good to finally have a dual monitor setup. It's definitely going to double my productivity and not just, like, have discord or youtube open on the second monitor. Also, I want to thank @Mister Jack for ensuring that I paid extra attention to whether or not the high refresh rate was actually enabled. It didn't seem any different at first so I poked around and realized that, even though it was set to 240hz in the settings, G-Sync was locking the refresh rate to match the second monitor's 60hz. Had to tweak some things in Nvidia Control Panel to get it right. It's buttery smooth now. ?

Halo 3 I played the first couple missions at the beginning of the month, back when I was still waiting for FFIV, and I wasn't really feeling it at the time. Then around the same time Ethan called it "the best shooter campaign ever" or something along those lines and it got me curious so I went back to it after I wrapped up FFIV. And.... yeah. What the fuck? I liked Halo 1 and 2 but they didn't exactly join the ranks of my all-time favorites. They were good and I understand how groundbreaking Halo was at the time but to me a great FPS campaign needs a little something extra. I realize this isn't a fair comparison but they weren't exactly Titanfall 2 (not that Titanfall 2 is among my all-time favorites either but I digress.) Halo 2 in particular frustrated me a little by the end with some difficulty spikes and tedious mission design. Halo 3 is a whole different story, though. There isn't a single mission in that entire game that I didn't thoroughly enjoy. Never a dull or tedious moment or any point where I wished a level would end already. This is a pretty damn solid FPS campaign. There's one moment in the final level. You're trying to get off the Halo before it fires and running through some corridors and as you come around a corner you see the exit... and a warthog. At that moment I had the biggest grin on my face because I knew exactly what we were doing and I knew exactly which track was going to play. This series' soundtrack is so freaking good, all they have to do is put me in literally any vehicle and play some version of this theme and I'll immediately go "Fuck yeah!" It's basically like a cheat code. So I guess I'm halfway through my Halo journey. ODST and Reach are next, and then Halo 4. I might look into how xCloud works on PC to play Halo 5 eventually but I don't think I'll get Infinite at launch so I'm in no rush.

I'm planning on playing Bloodstained as one of my Spooktober games so I figured I might as well get these two as well. It probably doesn't really matter but IIRC the first Curse of the Moon came out before the main Bloodstained game so I'd like to play it first. I think I'll probably stick to horror-themed games this year since there aren't really any proper horror games on my radar at the moment. For now I'm thinking the Bloodstained games, Blasphemous and the Castlevania Anniversary Collection (and maybe the Advance Collection they just dropped if I have time). Been a while since I played any metroidvanias so this should be fun!

I'm still super skeptical about this adaptation but this does make me happy.

Also got this but the Deluxe Edition because you gotta have that Maniax Pack DLC featuring Dante from the Devil May Cry series!

I can't stop buying Final Fantasy art books! This one is all about Amano's art and it's freaking gorgeous. Even the box is insanely pretty, with a layer of cloth covering the outside. Which makes it especially sucky that one of the corners got a little smushed during shipping... The books inside are fine, though, so I'd feel like a dick returning it over that lol. That being said, would it kill these idiots to package these things properly? Is it a nice, fancy, expensive box set? Then maybe put some padding all around it instead of just sticking it right in the corner of the box! That way the content is protected when the box inevitably gets fucked up during shipping. I pretty much stopped ordering books from Amazon for a similar reason. They just shove them in these super thin bubble mailer and half the time the books are completely fucked up by the time they reach me and I end up returning them.

Final Fantasy IV Pixel Remaster Best one yet! Best story, best soundtrack, best characters, best everything!* *until FFVI I actually played this one at least twice before (once with the original on SNES and once with the 3D DS remake) but this was my first time actually finishing it and it was a loooong time coming because I'm pretty sure the SNES version was one of my first experiences with JRPGs. IIRC I rented Breath of Fire 1 or 2 randomly once as a kid and my mind was blown by this new genre of games I had discovered so I rented FFIV next. I had honestly forgotten just how freaking good this game is! Hell, I had forgotten just how freaking good Final Fantasy is. Or, at least, once was. They sure haven't made one this good in a while... It's one thing to look at FFII and go "Yeah, this is proto-FFIV" but to actually compare the two is kind of insane. Where FFII has character-shaped cardboard cutouts pretending to go through the barest of a plot, FFIV has actual characters with their own internal conflicts and arcs. There's actually character growth in this one and sometimes it even ties into their progression. Rydia only learns the Fire spell after being forced to get over her fear of fire. It's a small thing but it goes such a long way towards making you care about her. My only complaint is that the achievements require you to farm for some really fucking rare drops for some secret summons and the best armor in the game, which was fucking tedious. Even if you know to farm a particular item in a one-time dungeon you can't return to (thank FUCK I did, RPGSite are doing god's work with their missables guides for these games) that allows you to automatically trigger the rarest enemy encounter in any given area, you're still looking at killing the same enemies for a few hours. I don't even want to think about trying to get that pink tail without those items... So yeah, this was great! Bring on FFV!

me: I'm not starting The Expanse until I finish Wheel of time also me: signed 10th Anniversary Special Edition?!? Also, that might or might not be my 3rd copy of Dune ?

Did you think I was lying????!??

At this point I've heard of this game more because of people shitting on its batshit ending than because of its own marketing and it's honestly making me more interested to play it than I was before lol.

Just looked it up on wikipedia. On hiatus since 2015.

It finally got here! I knew it was out of stock when I placed the order but after so long I honestly expected the order to just get cancelled. Also on the right you can see something else I got a few weeks back. Between these and my Junji Ito, my manga collection is off to a pretty strong start! I think I have to start collecting those fancy Berserk volumes now... ?

Kinda how I felt after playing a few games through PSNow a little while back. It does in a pinch when you really wanna play something that isn't on PC but I would never want for it to be my primary way to play games. God of War and Uncharted 4 in particular I'm really eager to replay on PC because the low resolution + heavy compression made it hard to fully get into them. Like, I could tell that they were gorgeous-looking game but I couldn't really see it.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's been a while but I wanted to follow up on this. Turns out it's not really a bug although I'm still not clear if that's really how it's intended to work. But apparently you're supposed to use disk clean-up to free the space back up lmao. Even if this had been communicated clearly (it wasn't), locking down a game's files in a folder the user can't even access sure seems like a good idea if it causes this kind of nonsensical side-effect. ? So yeah, if it ends up happening to you don't panic, I guess.

Oh right, as in Series X/S. I get what you meant now. That's not a confusing name for a console at all!! But no, I meant the Steam release from earlier this year. It's a new port because it's not a UWP and it was enough of a port job that they hired an external studio to work on it. Tbh I wasn't even thinking about it being on the Win10 store prior to that. Which is weird because I actually played a little bit of it on Gamepass. ?

??????????? I'm not sure what you're saying here. I said they ported FH4 to PC. Which... they have? As for the Halo 5 mp thing, that was years ago and their PC strategy was different back then. It's entirely possible they didn't bother simply because they knew it would sell like shit as a Win10 store exclusive. I guess it's still possible they'll just skip it entirely but I think them porting the entire MCC (and even adding Reach to it) makes it significantly more likely that it'll happen. It's literally the only mainline Halo game that's not available on PC.

They only just finished porting the MCC less than a year ago. I'm sure they'll get around to it. I mean, they ported Forza Horizon 4 even though FH5 is coming this year. It doesn't look likely to be before Infinite's launch, though.

Yeah, this is shockingly enough basically the best possible outcome. They both lost lmao. Can't help but laugh at this absolutely garbage take from Kotaku, though. Like, no, this isn't a big win for Epic. Sweeney isn't happy at all with the outcome. His tweet is even in the article. Not that Kotaku was great before but I'm starting to understand why Stephen Totilo bailed like two seconds after Jason Schreier left. They really went off the deep after. It feels like at least once a month I hear about them because of some stupendously moronic article they posted.

Damn, thought they would surely know by now. Maybe they won't be continuing and they're just not sure how to break the news? Personally, to me it depends on how Miura's creative process worked. If he was the kind to have a general idea in his head and mostly just discover the details as he went along then it's probably best if it ends here. But if he was the kind to have a meticulous plan with notebooks full of notes then it would be pretty great if his team were to keep it going. Especially if what I heard is true and that he had been training assistants to better replicate his art style.

Was there any kind of note or indication as to whether it'll be the final chapter altogether?

Eliza I was looking for something on the shorter side of things to play while I waited for FFIV and I tried this one on a whim after bouncing off of a few other games I tried. I'm not sure why I slept on it for so long. I mean, I do. I love Zachtronics but a visual novel isn't really what I wanted from them. But, as it turned out, the style of their games is a really good fit for the genre. The low-key art and ambient soundtrack just really suits itself to relaxing and getting into a story. There are some UI elements that come into play that feel super Zachtronicsy and made me think of the histograms you see after you finish a puzzle in their other games. There's even the now obligatory solitaire mini-game and this one is ridiculously hard. Early on it occurred to me that its difficulty was ironically appropriate given the themes of the story and I got to wondering if maybe that was deliberate. I figured I was just overthinking it but in the last chapter someone actually mentions the game and makes a similar analogy lol. I don't know if this is something I'd necessarily recommend to everyone. It's a small story about people and mental health, not exactly mind-blowing stuff. And if you had told me what it was about ahead of time, I probably wouldn't have been super interested. But it ended up really resonating with me, for some reason. It reminded me a lot of VA-11 Hall-A, another game I ended up really loving. There's a few different endings based on which character you choose to join and normally I'd feel compelled to go back and do them all but for once I'm actually satisfied with the ending I got. There's another one I probably would've been happy with but two of the choices simply did not appeal to me at all and I did not care for their associated characters either. So yeah, if Zachtronics ever makes another VN it'll probably be a day one purchase like their puzzle games from now on.

The House of Da Vinci IIRC I bought this right after beating The Room Three and then forgot about it entirely. I was looking for another similar puzzle game and the Steam algorithm recommended it to me. I figured I should probably go in with low expectations but this game is actually shockingly similar to The Room. You interact with the same kind of Rube Goldberg devices that keep opening up and revealing new puzzle sections. There's even a little eye piece tool that lets you see things that aren't visible to the naked eye. It has a more straightforward mystery vibe and Da Vinci aesthetic though, so it's nowhere near as stylish as The Room. It also turned out to not be quite as good. At first I was pleasantly surprised by how similar it was but after a while I started getting a little frustrated with it. I don't know if the puzzle design is just less intuitive or simply meant to be harder but I kept missing things. I always make it a point to avoid using the hints in The Room but in this I eventually got fed up and used them whenever I got stuck. There was even one time when even with the hints I couldn't figure out what the game wanted from me and ended up brute forcing my way through the puzzle. Overall, I'd call it "good, not great". I'll get the sequel eventually but probably not until I can get it for 5 bucks or so. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯