toxicitizen

Hahaha, no.

Wait, so each game has its own separate trophy list and then the collection itself also has one? Huh. Stuff like this kinda makes me miss Platinum trophies sometimes. On Steam there's nothing at the end, you just have all the achievements. A lot of games don't even have an equivalent achievement for the Platinum itself, Steam just has one less achievement. Like when I lost my 100% on RE7 after the DLC came out. There was no indication that I had ever completed the game. It just stopped being at 100% overnight without any distinction from having never done it.

Resident Evil Village I finished it a few days ago but I wanted to sit on it a bit before doing this write up because I have some thoughts. The game overall is simply fantastic. It's Resident Evil 7 but bigger and better. The obvious RE4 inspirations are a very welcome addition to the point where it honestly detracted from the horror a bit lol. It reminded me of Evil Within 2 where the core gameplay loop was so engaging that I was just having too much fun to be scared. I don't know what it is about a hub-based game structure but it just ticks all my boxes. Coming back to the Village able to unlock a new section to explore and loot is the kind of stuff that makes me never want to stop playing. I've also noticed that Village does the exact same thing RE7 did with front-loading its best content, although what constitutes best is really down to personal preference. The first main area is Castle Dimitrescu and, much like the main Baker house, it's classic Resident Evil through and through. Puzzles and emblem keys and everything. It's great! I kinda wished the entire game had been like that but, sadly, it's the only section that is. And I'm starting to think that Capcom either doesn't know what it wants these games to be or it wants them to be many things at once. The different areas of RE7 each had their own gameplay style and Village continues that trend. The last main area is a clear RE4-style gauntlet where you're just fighting off hordes and hordes of enemies and it's a blast to just unload all you have on these motherfuckers after everything you've gone through. But the other two main areas in-between feel like little more than glorified boss fights, which was a bit disappointing. This isn't meant to be a length complaint, though. The in-game timer said it lasted me just shy of 12 hours (Steam's more accurate one said 17h), which is pretty damn good for Resident Evil. I got my money's worth and then some. And I'm certainly not faulting Capcom for experimenting with stuff like House Beneviento. Those two sections are really good set pieces but I kinda wished there had been more "mansion bullshit" preceding them. But that's probably just me. So as far as the gameplay goes, Village is definite homerun for Capcom. The story is where basically all of my criticism is aimed. It's fine for like 90% of the game but that last hour or so... lol some choices were made. I'll spoiler tag my thoughts from here on out but the non-spoilery TL;DR of how I feel about the ending is best summarized by this pic: Man, I just can't help myself with these wall-of-text posts lately. ? So yeah, overall Village is probably the best one since RE4 and I loved it despite having mixed feelings about the ending. I wonder if it'll get the same DLC treatment RE7 did. Having just recently gone through all of it, that was honestly an insane amount of extra content. RE2 barely got anything by comparison.

Yeah, the one thing that I feel has aged a bit is the lack of ADS and the feel of the gunplay. It feels weightless and floaty in a way that feels like a huge step down after having played a bunch of Destiny 2 like a year ago. Probably not a fair comparison to make but that was my only point of reference for what a Bungie shooter played like, so my expectations in that regard were probably a bit high. That soundtrack is god tier, though. Holy shit. I honestly can't remember the last time a game soundtrack blew me away like this.

Been meaning to do this ever since losing my 100% when the DLC released, so it's good to finally be done. Some of the DLC was better than I expected, especially End of Zoe. And upon replaying Not a Hero to unlock some stuff for my professional run, it was actually better than I remembered. I thought I was being slick in doing Ethan Must Die before doing my Professional/Joe Must Die runs of Not a Hero/End of Zoe and that it would be a breeze to clean up the last two achievements but they actually turned out to be much harder than I expected. Definitely way harder than the main game on Hardcore. I used video guides for tips and optimal strategies and I don't even feel bad about it. A lot of this bullshit is honestly unfair and specifically designed to fuck you over lol. If I had gone in blindly, I most likely would've ended up stuck in an unwinnable scenario somehow. Especially in Not a Hero. Now on to Village to do the same!

Today, on a whim, I finally got around to starting Halo Master Chief Collection. This is something I'll probably be playing on and off for a long time cause I don't wanna get burned out on it but yeah, I played the first couple missions of Halo CE. Seems pretty fun so far. Oh and on a definitely unrelated note, I got my first COVID shot today!

I really want to get it too but I know I'm not gonna play it anytime soon so that makes it easier to hold off.

@TheMightyEthanThis has to be a super early announcement with the game being pretty far off but there you go.

I just finished Village and, uh, welp...

Going back and forth between Village and RE7 cause I wanna make my first playthrough last and I don't like playing horror games during the day. And holy shit, Ethan Must Die mode fucking sucks. It's just manageable enough that you wanna keep trying but it's so fucking unfair at times. If you don't get certain drops you might as well just restart because certain sections just won't be possible. It genuinely feels like it's deliberately wasting your time and I fucking hate it. Update: Ethan has, in fact, survived. It still sucked, but I did it. And it was on a run I thought was doomed, too. Didn't have anywhere near enough ammo to fight Marguerite so I ran out of my hidey-hole to try and find supplies (which of course I didn't) but I got lucky and she got fucked by turrets while I was running around so my last 4 meager pistol shots were miraculously enough to finish her off.

At the info you posted, not at you personally. I didn't realize CoD had bounced back so much. Like I said, last I heard it was in decline but it's been a few years since I paid any attention to the franchise.

Yeah, I also saw that 12h figure floating around. That's why Jack's playtime surprised me so much. I was hoping 12h was on the lower end of things. I looked at my spreadsheet for that year and I have RE7 logged with 12h of playtime, which has to be the Steam timer and not the in-game one. I'm a pretty slow player so hopefully Village will last me even longer lol.

Not there yet, so good to know! I just got out of uh... the first big area, to keep it vague. You mean beyond the typical RE stuff? I'm assuming there's the usual unlockables for speedruns and stuff, and I know this one has mercenaries mode and an extra difficulty beyond hardcore. So yeah, I'm planning to do multiple runs but still. I was really hoping game length would be one of the things it borrowed from RE4 lol. ----- Oh and while I'm here... Resident Evil 7 I did a replay of it this week and finally got around to playing the DLC. The main game is still so good but man is its quality front-loaded. The starting bit in the main house is still the best part of the game by far. I was actually nervous all over again for the first hour or so until I started remembering everything about it lol. And once you leave the main house it never quite reaches the same level again. As for the DLC, I had only done the Chris one, Not a Hero, and it wasn't exactly amazing. And I tried the Nightmare mini-game and got frustrated with that (not super into that kind of horde mode gameplay) so I bounced off the game at the time. But this time I did all the banned tapes as well as played End of Zoe for the first time. Nightmare was still annoying but the other banned tapes were actually pretty fun. The escape the room one, the demented poker game and the one where you play as Zoe when the Bakers first got infected were all great. The one where you have to bring food to Jack was alright but I was getting short on time (and patience), so I said fuck it and watched video guides to get the S ranks for the achievements. I might've spent more time with it if I was starved for more RE7 but with Village just a day away I didn't really feel like memorizing the levels and figuring out optimal food routes on my own. Finished things with End of Zoe, which was surprisingly good. Playing as a swamp redneck that gets into fist fights with zombies, gators and the fucking Swamp Thing is the kind of silly bullshit I can get into. I'm actually kicking myself for waiting this long to play it. It was way more fun than Not a Hero. I still have 3 achievements left, though. I wanted to get it all done before Village, but I ran out of time. So I'll just get back to it after, I guess. I need to do Ethan Must Die and play both story DLCs on their hardest difficulties.

Jesus. And here I was thinking I made too much progress tonight and stopped because I don't want it to end too quickly hahaha. I kinda hope you rushed though, cause that playtime is short. Pretty sure my first run of RE7 took me longer than that... And it would mean I'm almost at the halfway point which...

Fuck, that looks good. Why have I not played the original yet? Oh right....

Jesus Christ... ?

Scanning through the last couple pages, I guess I forgot to post it at the moment of purchase but I just got my pre-order key for Hopefully I'll be able to preload later today or tomorrow!

Is CoD even making CoD levels of money anymore? I haven't been paying attention for a few years now but last I heard it was in sharp decline. Did it start growing again or at least stabilize somewhat?

Ghostrunner Yeah, that was pretty damn good. When I got to the first boss and saw the kind of bullet hell bullshit I had to deal with, I got real worried that the game was going to become too hard for my slow, old-man reflexes. But it turned out to be kind of a random difficulty spike and after that the game didn't throw anything else at me that felt impossible at first. Even the subsequent boss fights were way easier, including the very last one. And that's kinda what I loved the most about it. It keeps mixing things up with new enemy types and platforming challenges but it doesn't try to one-up itself. It doesn't feel like it gets harder, it just challenges you differently. Either that or the difficulty curve is like... flawless. And for the kind of game that this is, this turned out to be a hell of a lot more manageable than I anticipated: I just pray they don't add any new ones with the DLC because I'm already thanking my lucky star there wasn't anything about hardcore mode in there. For all I know, it might not actually be that bad but I kinda don't wanna fuck with it hahaha.

Resident Evil 3 So, I finished my first run a few days ago but I wanted to do a few more runs before writing down my thoughts to better articulate my issues with the game. It's good, very good even, but coming after RE2 (which already suffered from a few disappointing cut corners) this is still a super disappointing game. My first run on normal took me about 6 hours and this was while playing slowly and carefully. I basically stretched the game to its absolute limit and it was still only 6 hours long, which isn't THAT bad (a single RE2 campaign was only about 8h or so.) But, unlike RE2, it doesn't have dual protagonists/campaigns so that 6 hours is basically all you get. That's not great for any full priced game but since I only paid 20 bucks I can't really complain too hard. At least they added two new difficulties above hardcore this time, nightmare and inferno, and they do try to mix things up a little bit with enemies and items placement but by then I had unlocked the infinite ammo rocket launcher which completely trivialized them lol. The real problem isn't the length, though, it's the pacing and structure of the campaign. RE2 had large areas that weren't exactly non-linear but that you could easily wander for hours if you didn't know what you were doing. The police station alone could easily take up half the game if not more. But in RE3 you're going through a succession of smaller, super linear areas and you'll never spend more than an hour or so in each one, often much less. There's even a section where you revisit the police station from RE2 and instead of milking that shit for all its worth by reusing as much of the map as possible, they just send you on a short linear path through it and it's over before you know it.And that's on a first run. If you just make a beeline for the key items, you'll fly through most sections in like 10-15mins. This hurts replayability and basically takes all the exploration out of the initial playthrough. The only area that feels fully realized is the first city section at the beginning of the game and even then it only has that one loop in the map with an optional ladder you can unlock. Otherwise the game might as well be on rails. Oh and to make this worse, there's only like one puzzle in the entire game. Then there's Nemesis. The first area is actually pretty cool. It's semi-open, and while his appearances are scripted, when he does show up he's chasing you all over the place. And unlike Mr. X you cannot run from this motherfucker, he's way too fast. You have to fight him or use the environment to stun him. At this point I thought the whole game would be like this and got excited. "Maybe it's not as bad as people were saying", I naively thought. Well...after that it's all scripted encounters that are either glorified cutscenes or boss fights. There's no more organic chase throughout a map. The maps simply aren't open enough to allow for it. Oh and speaking of Nemesis, I almost forgot the worst thing: the final boss. It's fine on most difficulties. It's not as interesting as the other fights cause of how scripted it is but it's a cool final showdown. But man, Inferno Nemesis can just go fuck himself so hard. There's this one attack that's now so fucking fast that it becomes an instakill stunlock. It is just absolute fucking bullshit. It's not hard, it's just fucking unfair. I hated it so goddamn much. But hey, at least in the end I did it... So yeah, it was okay but I don't want any more remakes from Capcom. I know they're already working on RE4 and I'm not saying I won't play it but at this point it's pretty obvious they have no interest in delivering definitive editions of these games. RE2 was only slightly disappointing because even though they completely failed to deliver on the whole Scenario A/B thing, the actual game was still fantastic. But RE3 honestly feels completely phoned in. It's pretty fun on a first playthrough but it disappoints in basically every way imaginable. And what's the point of a remake if you're not even going to TRY to improve on the original? At this point, I really hope RE4 ends up being more of a reimagining than a remake. RE4 still plays fine and it's playable on modern hardware so it doesn't need to be updated. Just go crazy with it, Capcom. Make it weird. Do your worst. I'm game. I don't give a fuck anymore and neither do you, I guess. Oh well, at least there's still Village next week!

Once you're done, make sure to do 2nd Run as the other character. ? You need to select 2nd Run from the menu specifically, btw. If you just start a new game as the other character, you're not going to get the alternate scenario. I remember at launch some people got confused and just ended up playing the game twice and didn't understand why it was mostly the same lol.

Oh, is that it? You kinda made it sound worse than that lol. I didn't buy it expecting a AAA game so I'm fine, and budget Persona sounds good to me. The Trails of Cold Steel games are essentially that.

Good interesting or bad interesting? It looked like something I'd enjoy but I was holding off for a deep discount just in case lol.