toxicitizen

This just got here! I'm pretty happy to have it because I completely forgot to pre-order it until the last minute and then my bookstore didn't ship it on release day (and removed my shipping estimate). And it was out of stock both there and on Amazon so it really looked like I had missed out on the initial launch stock and would have to wait weeks to get a copy. edit: I guess I should've held off on posting yesterday cause I had other stuff coming in. Lately I've had more disposable income than I've had in a while so it's leading to some slightly... frivolous purchases. Also got this along with it. Art/lore books are quickly becoming a new obsession of mine...

Normally wouldn't pre-order this far ahead of launch but I saw a pretty decent deal so what the hell.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night Finally got around to playing this one. I don't have a ton to say about it, to be honest. It's pretty good; not sure I'd call it great. It's certainly no Super Metroid or Symphony of the Night. Hell, it's no Hollow Knight for that matter. But it's still a pretty fun time although I did find some elements kinda frustrating at times. Enemies that can fly through the scenery and disappear out of reach (and often out of the screen entirely) doesn't exactly make for fun combat. There's also a super weird difficulty spike on one of the early bosses. Maybe I was underleveled or something but since the game was never again that challenging afterwards, that one fight kinda stands out as simply poorly balanced. It's also kinda weird playing this immediately after Curse of the Moon as so many of the characters and bosses are recycled between the two. It's clear RotN is the one where they originated but it kinda takes some of the game's thunder away to reach a boss and go "Oh right, this one." The weird thing is that the games don't complement each other in any way. Curse of the Moon is its own separate timeline and is pretty incompatible with Ritual of the Night story-wise. So it probably would've been better if it had its own cast of characters and enemies. On a more positive note, it's by far the nicest looking 2.5D metroidvania I've played. I usually graphics like that super underwhelming visually but I thought this one looked pretty good. The background doesn't feel bland or empty and the characters/enemies don't feel disconnected from it. It's not graphically impressive or aything but I thought it looked pretty good for what it is. Oh and I expected a Symphony of the NIght-style inverted castle kinda deal but there's actually nothing like that in the game, which was a little disappointing. There's a bad ending if you go fight the final boss as soon as you reach him but it literally ends with a game over screen. So unless you're an idiot who doesn't realize that you still have like 40% of the map unexplored, it's pretty obvious you're meant to keep going. There are a few more areas to explore but that's it. It feels less like an hidden true ending and more like the game has an arbitrary point where it expects you to guess that you need to keep going. I'll play the sequel for sure although I do hope they improve things somewhat. This was a 7/10 at best for me and it could've been an easy 9-10. Oh and it has one of these obnoxious "Obtain/craft literally everything in the game lol" achievement as an extra fuck you. That's every weapon, armor, food, material, etc... Basically wasting an extra 5-10 hours of your time for no good reason if you wanna get all the achievements. Which... I will not be playing Curse of the Moon 2 immediately. I've had enough of this series for the time being lmao.

Finally upgraded my setup enough to warrant posting an update! I'm definitely not regretting that second monitor. Such a massive QoL improvement in so many ways. It's also so large that it wouldn't fit under the shelves that used to be on top of my desk, so I had to remove them. Got a Kallax unit from Ikea to make up for the lost storage space and I'm also very pleased with that purchase! Still need to get some proper bookcases soon, though. The two tiny ones I have are still overflowing even after moving all my mangas and art books over to the Kallax... Also, I think I finally need to upgrade to some proper PC speakers. That bookshelf stereo has served me well over the years but they're getting hard to fit into this new configuration. Also, I think the stereo part of the thing might be fucked lol. I was doing some reorganizing and found some of my old CDs and put one in it for the hell of it. The disc tray was somehow covered in dust even though I haven't opened it in years and even after wiping it clean it would only play the first track. When I tried skipping to the second one, it stopped playing and started making some weird noise. I panicked and got the CD out and there was now an inch wide ring of dust on top of it. Now it just won't play at all lol. At the very least the CD player probably needs a deep cleaning...

I'm still pretty gutted about Gloryhammer firing their singer and then all the controversy surrounding Chris Bowes that came out immediately after. But at least Beast in Black is still awesome! I'll also never tire of this song about Guts and Griffith. Any band that makes an entire album about Berserk is a good band, in my book.

Damn, you're already done with it? Did some of your previous progress transfer over or did you sink another hundred hours into the game already?!?

For a short little side-scroller, it has a surprising amount of replay value. The way you can either recruit 3 bonus characters you can swap between on the fly or kill them to get abilities on the main guy, or just ignore them entirely and be seriously underpowered, makes for drastically different experiences. Especially since the levels are designed with branching paths that require certain abilities to access that you might or might not have depending on the choices you made. There's even a new game plus kinda mode where you replay the game minus the main character, who is now the final boss. The only aspect I didn't like was doing boss rush mode for the last achievement. God, I fucking hate boss rush modes lol. If it's so trivially easy that you can just power through it then it's fine but it's like... what's the point? And if it's an actual challenge then it just frustrates me. The boss fights are actually fun in the game but having to do them all back-to-back with super limited amounts of power ups and healing items (only two for the latter) is just arbitrary and annoying to me.

Birthday present from a friend. So now I need to hurry the fuck up and play Yakuza 3 through 6 already, I guess!

Yeah, base game is the version with Raidou and DLC for the edition with Dante. Makes sense as they probably had to re-license him with Capcom to have him available at all.

A friend of mine has a curved TV and the curve on it is way milder than on my monitor so I assumed that's something they take into account. I figured maybe a less aggressive curve could account for a farther viewing distance and a wider zone where you get the best view or something. So I googled and one of the first results was an article about why curved TV didn't take off and went away. So you might be on to something there lol.

I don't think it has anything to do with specific content and whether it's made for a curved screen or not. From what I understand, it's mostly meant to give a clearer view of the screen because of the way the human field of view works. The effect I noticed in Curse of the Moon didn't detract from the experience or anything. It just made me go "holy shit what" for a second hahaha. Most of the time you don't really notice the curve, there was just something about that particular effect that made it extremely obvious for like a second or so. It's also worth noting that my monitor has a more aggressive curve than in that picture. Mine is meant to match the curve of the human eye, I think.

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon What better way to put my new monitor through its paces than by playing uh... an NES style throwback sidescroller? Yeah, I don't know. It was pretty good, though! For some reason I bounced off of the original Castlevania every single time I fired up the Anniversary Collection but this one clicked with me instantly. It probably helps that it's not bullshit hard like NES games used to be. The last level has one hell of a difficulty spike, though. The entire game is pretty forgiving and suddenly you're being chased by this swarm of... something that destroys everything and some sections require perfect timing with your jumps otherwise you fall to your death. The final boss also felt insanely hard at first but once I started getting a feel for its pattern (and realized there was a hidden room with the most powerful power-up right before it) it was actually pretty easy. I unlocked Nightmare mode and still have some alternate endings to do, though. The game is less than two hours long so I don't mind doing a few more runs before moving on to something else. Oh and since I mentioned my new monitor. Playing a sidescroller on a curved monitor is weird. Maybe it's the angle I was sitting at from it but whenever there was a transition between two rooms and the camera panned, there was this really weird effect. Normally in a sidescroller a camera pan will register as, well, a camera pan. But here the curve made it feel like it was the background that was sliding in from the side, like it was on a physical layer scrolling behind the screen of the monitor. I don't know if that makes any sense but it's kinda hard to describe.

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.