toxicitizen

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.

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.