toxicitizen

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. ?

You can choose a theme at the very bottom of the page, in the middle.

Lmao oh God, why. Cold Steel I has like the least interesting plot of the entire series. As for the real reason I'm here. Kuro no Kiseki details and first gameplay footage! I keep forgetting the first Calvard game has already been announced... There's a third clip but it's in a weird aspect ratio and super low quality, so not really worth posting. I don't really understand the decision to have their gameplay reveal in silent, unlisted youtube clips but uh... sure. Also, that combat sure is different. It's taking a page out of Final Fantasy's book and turning into a semi-action game. edit: !!!

Yeah, what Bloodborne really needs is a remaster or, at least, an update to boost the resolution and framerate and fix the fucked up framepacing. Not sure what a full-blown remake just a single gen later could possibly add of significance, tbh. Ray-tracing, I guess? But that's just lighting and could easily fall under the purview of a remaster. The game isn't that old, the 3D assets are still fine lol. There's very little to gain in rebuilding the entire game from scratch.

Don't buy Valheim, guys. It's not a game, it's a fucking curse. I just stopped a 4h session with my friend and it's already calling back to me. I have to restrict myself to just playing on our common world because if I start playing solo I'll do nothing else with my life lmao.

Yeah, once I figured out which rooms I came through more often and just started dropping my shit on the floor there. Then at some point further on I'd find a new room that was more convenient and would do a few voyages moving everything there, the entire time asking myself "what the fuck were they thinking with this shit? how is this supposed to be an improvement?!"

Fuck me, that actually looks like it could be good. It certainly seems to nail the tone. Consider me intrigued.

Right, but isn't that for Hitman 3? Hitman 2 wasn't (and still isn't lol) on the Epic Store. The Epic store didn't even exist yet when Hitman 2 launched.

Really glad they're doing something new with the style instead of just making Octopath 2. It sounds like Octopath wasn't anything special but this aesthetic is really appealing to me.

Are you sure? I know for a fact that it wasn't possible at launch and, after some googling just now, all I can find is either still no or "you can move the profile folder and it will be detected but only work in offline mode". Do you mean importing the levels? Or maybe it was a console-only feature? It doesn't sound like there's an official way to do it on PC, at least.

Yeah, I get you. Hitman 2 repeated all the achievements for the first game and I didn't do them at launch because I had just finished completing the first game but I do intend to redo everything. Which is kinda why I didn't care about the EGS deal because it gives me an extra year to get around to it lol. And I vaguely recall reading that Hitman 3 is going to import your data, including achievements, but even if it doesn't I wouldn't be opposed to redoing it all a third time, tbh. These games are just so fucking good. I've been a Hitman fan since the PS2 days but this is the best the series has ever been.

Viking survival game with an emphasis on boss fights that just launched in early access and has been kind of blowing up. I was about to suggest it to my friends for our co-op gaming nights and it turned out one of them had already bought it so it was an easy pitch lol.

Yeah, that was WAY too blatant of a tease. If they're not actually working on Alan Wake 2 then, honestly, they're just being fucking dicks. If they are making it though, it absolutely WILL be that game Epic is funding and likely a lifetime EGS exclusive. So... that's going to suck either way.