toxicitizen

I've been eyeing these for years now and finally resigned myself to the fact that the better deals I've been waiting for aren't coming. And they go on sale so infrequently that I might as well get them now while I can. I had honestly kinda forgotten about them at this point but they just announced a sequel for Blue Reflection and browsing the Koei Tecmo sale on Steam reminded me about the Berserk game.

Who could've possibly seen this coming? This is completely out of nowhere and oh wait...

Woah, those Great Ace Attorney games that looked like they were never going to get localized actually have been and are coming to Switch, PS4 and Steam. Out of nowhere but that's great news. I had assumed the first trilogy collection hadn't done too well since there's still no word of another one for Ace Attorney 4-6 but hopefully this is indicative that it'll happen eventually.

Hooooly fuck. I cancelled my RE3 pre-order when I found out that Nemesis wasn't a roaming stalker like Mr. X and was only relegated to scripted encounters (and also due to how short the game was). But now that I'm finally playing the game I'm actually okay with that. Holy shit is he more of a threat than Mr X ever was! He's fast, he shoots tentacles that grab you and he fucks you up real good, real fast. Maybe I'm doing something wrong but I'm struggling to run away from him at all hahaha. Mr X on the other hand you could just kite around forever.

Ha I didn't platinum it at launch, I actually went back to it years later to do it. Idk either but I will totally do it all over again once I get the Steam version because I'm a very sick man. It's been years since I played any David Cage game, and while I used to enjoy them unironically, I'm really hoping they'll still be good for some laughs.

Never got to play this one so 10 bucks for the PC version is a no-brainer. I'll probably double dip Heavy Rain at some point because I'm trash.

Yeah, the DLC has a hell of a difficulty spike. I remember being pretty frustrated with the first one but it sort of evened out as I progressed through them. I think they expected you to have gone through NG+ at least once by the time it came out.

I thought the dashes would be the longest and hardest part by far so I kept them for last but it only took me a few extra hours to 3-star them all. I quickly realized that the arrows often send you on a needlessly roundabout path and you're better off ignoring them and finding a shorter way on your own. A few of them even require it for 3 stars because the time limit is straight up impossible if you don't find a more direct route with mag rope anchors to swing from. So instead of being pure execution challenge on a time limit, it's all about finding the "trick" for this particular trial. That was pretty disappointing but I can't complain because it made them much easier than I expected. ?

Mirror's Edge Catalyst I'm of two minds about this one. It's more Mirror's Edge and, at least on the surface, it seems to be an improvement over the original in every conceivable way. Bigger, longer, open-world. What's not to love? Well, the story is pretty damn terrible, for a start. When it's not utterly predictable, it's just pulling things out of its ass for convenience. And early on they start teasing you with this blueprint of Faith's tattoo in a way that made me wonder if it maybe was a special sci-fi tattoo of some kind that would provide some kind of upgrade. Turns out it's not and she literally only gets in in the ending cutscene but even way before that the story was so bad that I just assumed I would get it and it would be nothing. There's a decent skeleton of a story that could've been fleshed out into something decent. But for some reason they just didn't. Open-world Mirror's Edge sounds fantastic on paper and, to be fair, what is here is definitely an improvement over the original. But the game doesn't exist in a vacuum and by the standards of typical open-world games it just falls flat on its face. It simply doesn't feel like an open-world. It's more like a bunch of semi-open levels that just happened to be linked together into some kind of hub. Ideally, in a game like this you'd never want to use fast-travel and would run everywhere. But the way the world is set up, some sections are just tedious to travel to and from. It's also fairly weak content-wise. The main missions and side-missions are pretty fun but the only open-world content that I actually found worthwhile was the one where you enter a server tower to hack it and once inside runner vision is turned off and you have a solve a climbing puzzle. Everything else is some variation of "here's thing, get it there". Which, yeah, Faith is a runner. And the fragile deliveries where you can't eat shit otherwise your package will break are fine. Diversions are also fine but I found them a little tedious due to how finicky they were about adding bonus time. Sometimes I'd think I reached the next goal just in time but I wouldn't get the bonus time and would just fail the mission instead. Time trials are fine but idk, that doesn't feel like "content" so much as an extra challenge for those that want it. But what the fuck is up with the covert deliveries? I could never figure out what the hell the game wants you to do. Cameras spot you but only sometimes cause the mission to fail. You can't be expected to avoid guards because they spawn randomly (sometimes burst through a door right in your path) and just running past them usually doesn't (but sometimes does) fail the mission. So yeah, not sure what's up with those. The entire time I couldn't help but think back to older Assassin's Creed games from before they turned into the bloated corpse of a monster. Like the Ezio trilogy. The worlds weren't tediously large yet and there was decent mission variety and very little of it felt like, and I hate using this term here, "lazy" content. I saw something online about how people think the covert deliveries might be unfinished and I can kinda see it. The open-world just screams of unrealized potential in general. Maybe it was a budget thing? And I know the whole pristine white city is the series' aesthetic but man, some visual variety would've gone a long way here because for most of the game I never had any idea where the hell I was. Everything looks the same to the point where I can't imagine ever turning off runner vision in the open-world. It's just too important to navigate the environment because otherwise all you have is a far-off marker and no real way of quickly parsing which paths are viable routes to it without looking at your map constantly. And it's kinda hard to buy into the runner fantasy if you're doing that... The gameplay is as fantastic as ever, though. It carries the entire game on its shoulders. At first, it was kinda weird coming right from Titanfall 2 because movement in Mirror's Edge is way more grounded. So at first it felt slow and heavy because I couldn't wallrun, double jump into another wallrun and survive a 50 feet drop without a scratch. But that's not the game's fault and once I got over it the skill-based parkour in Mirror's Edge was so insanely more satisfying. Despite its flaws, I could still just run around the map for hours because it's so much fun. And I will, since I still have a bunch of collectibles and achievements to get. So yeah, that probably sounded super negative but I actually enjoyed the game a lot. I want more and I hope the series isn't dead again (although it sounds like Catalyst didn't do super well so I'm not holding my breath this time.) I just found it to be simultaneously an improvement over the original but still a very flawed experience. And it's not like I went in with any kind of expectations, either. I met the game on its own terms, liked what it had to offer but also found it lacking. Now I'm kinda curious to replay the original to see if it holds up to how good I remember it being. I was engaging with games more passively back then and didn't look at them as critically, so I wonder how I'd feel about it these days. If my Alan Wake replay from last summer is any indication, maybe I'm better of leaving it as a short game I remember really liking lol. Oof, this ended up being more of a wall of text than I intended... They stop being survival-horror about halfway through RE4. You could argue RE5 is trying at times but RE6 is pretty much just a bonkers action movie that just happens to have monsters in it. And speaking of, I think RE3 is next for me. I really want to get it done before Village comes out.

Wasn't planning on getting anything else for a while, but Ethan reminded me of this and I saw it was on sale on Humble. I heard it's only about 6 hours long so I wasn't going to pay 40 bucks for it but with the sale + Choice subscriber discount it came down to 16 bucks, which seemed about right.

I didn't mean to suggest the remake killed DG2, sorry. The two are unrelated. Days Gone 2 was simply never greenlit. Although, it sounds like Bend has basically turned into a Naughty Dog support studio, Activision/COD-style. So uh... yeah, about them being free to work on their own thing... maybe not.

I didn't say it wouldn't happen, I said it shouldn't happen. Honestly, maybe I'm just getting old but I find the entire concept of video game remakes to be so fucking pointless. Unless we're talking something like FFVII where the original is two decades old and looks like hot garbage even for the time, then sure. But anything remotely modern I just throw my hands up and wonder what the point even is. Like, I don't need a remake of Resident Evil 4 because I find Resident Evil 4 perfectly playable to this day. Demon's Souls was kinda borderline because the original was a fucking mess visually, even for a PS3 game. But something like Last of Us or Bloodborne is honestly just baffling to me. Like just do the most basic remaster imaginable to get the resolution and framerate up and like... what more could you possibly need? What a waste of time and money lol.

So there's more tweets and more to the article but basically Days Gone 2 isn't happening despite the first game being profitable and, uh, Naughty Dog has taken over a remake of Last of Us 1. Apparently that remake was started by a small team in 2018, a whopping 5 years after the game first launched... If this is true then someone at Sony is smoking crack because holy lol. I can't imagine a more pointless waste of money than remaking such a recent game that was remastered just a few years ago. Like, is anyone seriously asking for this?

Immediately acquiring the IP seems weird to me, though. Especially since, as far as I can tell, the game didn't set the world on fire or anything. I wonder if it's just a matter of them coming in too late to take ownership as part of the initial publishing agreement or if they plan to keep it going without the devs for some reason. Maybe they already had their next project lined up and weren't available to work on a sequel or something?

Yeah, for sure. Although at least something like this can easily be boosted if you're enough of an achievement hunter to actually give a shit at that point. I remember back in the day Killzone 2 had one that was honestly kinda fucked up. You had to be in the top 1% of weekly rankings (just looked it up to make sure I was remembering it right and the trophy guide said 'unobtainable due to server closure', so that's another fun thing about mp achievements lol). Like, I'm all for challenging achievements. Make me earn that shit. But also make it so it's realistically achievable for the average player? I'm not that good at video games, man. If I go online, I get destroyed. Period. Even back then, that one was functionally unobtainable as far as I was concerned.

While I appreciated the excuse to replay the campaign, Master difficulty had some truly bullshit moments in it. Nothing unmanageable with a little practice but there were some frustrating moments. That being said, I'm willing to forgive the game for it if only because it only has three multiplayer achievements, two of which you can get from the menu before you ever join a game. The other one is just to win a single game so you can just join any team-based game and hope you're lucky with the matchmaking. That's pretty awesome coming from a game where multiplayer is arguably meant to be the entire point. More games should follow this example.

Bought some shitty bundle that had a few games I actually wanted and Fanatical gave me a 10% coupon. Both of these were already on sale and calling to me, so I took it as a sign that it was time. I wanted to play RE3 before RE8 comes out, so the timing is perfect.

Oh wow, just found out there's an anime adaptation of Junji Ito's Uzumaki coming out this year. And it's all going to be done in black and white. The Junji Ito Collection series from a couple years ago wasn't very good but I did enjoy it a lot in a "so bad it's good" way (I actually just bought a bunch of his collections that VIZ has been publishing in english so I'll finally get to enjoy the stories in their proper form). Hopefully this one won't skimp on the budget and will actually manage to do Ito's art justice this time. The black and white thing makes me want to be cautiously optimistic that it'll be the case.

Yeah, I really wanna play that. Just waiting for the price to drop a bit.

Titanfall 2 I had heard that the campaign in this was good but damn. I can't remember the last time I enjoyed an FPS campaign this much. It's just so much goddamned fun! Some levels are straight up genius, too. One second you're parkouring your way through an automated assembly line building houses and the next you're shifting between the past and present, having to keep track of two combat encounters at the same time and being strategic about where you position yourself when shifting back and forth. For a game all about piloting big robots that punch other big robots, you'd think that every second spent outside the big robot would make you go "When am I getting back inside the big robot?!" But running around as a pilot is just so much fun that it honestly stole the show for me. My favorite parts were when the game made me wallrun my way through hazardous areas and up giant radar dishes. And just when you think you've seen it all you get the smart pistol, and suddenly you feel like even more of a ninja god as you wallrun all over the place effortlessly headshotting every motherfucker along the way. And since this was very short and I still want to wallrun some more, I think Mirror's Edge Catalyst is going to be next.

Yeah, I don't know what my problem is. I'm behind on every single one of the few animes I watch. I still haven't watched Attack on Titan season 2 and I think I might actually be two seasons behind on MHA...

I really need to get around to watching Golden Wind... The wait for its announcement felt like it lasted a hundred years and yet here we are with the one for Part 6 and I still haven't watched it. ?

Call of Cthulhu That would be the 2018 one. It's... fine. It's alright. It was good enough for me to finish it (although it did take me like two months of playing on and off despite its fairly short length). This is one of those games that sounds fantastic on paper but completely fails to deliver on its promise. It looks weird and low budget, it plays weird and low budget, and whatever interesting mechanics it has are half-baked or ultimately pointless. At first, it seems like it's a borderline immersive-sim with semi-open levels, RPG mechanics, and multiple ways to tackle objectives! But it becomes obvious very quickly that it's all pretty shallow and way too limited to qualify as any of those things. You can basically see the seams where ambition clashed with reality. This could've been a pretty damn good horror game had it had a real budget (and perhaps been in the hands of a more skilled developer.) Also, for a game called "Call of Cthulhu: The Official Video Game", it sure has sweet fuck all to do with the Call of Cthulhu short story, or even Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos in general. As it is, it's really more of a heavily-inspired-by kinda deal and it feels like they only slapped the name on it for brand recognition and because it was in the public domain and, presumably, free. If you're in the mood for a Lovecraftian detective game and can look past severely lacking production values, it's honestly not that bad. Like I said, it was good enough for me to finish it and I'm glad I gave it a shot. And if you got it from a bundle like me, then there's really no reason not to give it a shot. But I'm not sure I could recommend buying it on its own unless it was dirt cheap, like less than 10 dollars. Probably closer to 5...

Ever since they started doing this, I low-key assumed that they would eventually backtrack on it at some point, maybe after Phil Spencer is gone. But a few days ago I saw something about how Forza Horizon 4's Steam release performed in Asian countries and now I think Steam might actually provide them with a significant enough source of revenue/market reach that it would make no sense for them to pull out. Especially if rumors of Gamepass coming to Steam are true. At the very least, I'm sure it's obvious to them by now that their games perform significantly better on Steam than they do when released exclusively on their shitty store. I don't think they would've gone back to port Forza if that wasn't the case. And it looks like that did pretty well despite being sold at full price over 2 years after its initial launch (last I checked, it had reached a higher peak concurrent user count than the previously biggest racing game on Steam). So yeah, they're doing a lot of the right things right now but I'm not naive enough to expect MS not to start being shitty again at some point in the future. I don't think it's going to be anytime soon, though.

My warning not to buy Valheim stands. This game is fucking evil. There is always something else to do real quick before turning it off. Next thing you know, it'S 5AM. ?