toxicitizen

Lol to be fair, King does write fantastic characters. So he's playing to his strengths as a writer and you'll rarely be disappointed in the actual character arc. It's the climax he tends to whiff. Even with his underwhelming endings, I can't think of a single King book I've read that I felt wasted my time. They're still pretty good reads! Whereas J.J. has this moronic "mystery box" philosophy where all he cares about is the initial hook and he just pulls something out of his ass when the time comes to give answers. I feel like this is so much worse lol. Him having to conclude the absolute mess that was the Star Wars sequel trilogy had to be some kind of karmic retribution.

Yeah, he's sort of infamous for his endings. He just doesn't give a fuck lol. I've even watched talks by him where he literally says he "doesn't want to ruin a perfectly good book with plot". To him it's all about the characters and their journey, the destination is an afterthought. So you end up with books like Needful Things where you're on the edge of your seat basically the entire time and then you reach the end and it's like "What the fuck was that???".

Not gonna go through everything I've read the past few months but here's a few things I've read recently. The Stand: holy shit, this is basically the most Stephen King book ever. Masterclass in characterization but the plot is a rambling mess and that ending is like a fart in the wind. Not his worst ending by any means but given the premise of the book you'd expect something a little more climactic. It's basically the MGSV of novels: I can't say the actual plot is good but there isn't a single chapter out of the entire thing that's not fantastic. It is way too fucking long, though. At almost 1200 pages, it took me over a month to read. I had to lower my goodreads reading challenge because this fucking thing set me back so much. Mona Lisa Overdrive: This is the final book in the Sprawl trilogy that starts with Neuromancer. At this point, I'm sold on William Gibson. Definitely gonna keep working my way through his bibliography. I get why Neuromancer is the one people still talk about because it was pretty groundbreaking at the time but MLO is at least as good and has better pacing. Count Zero, the second book, is kinda forgettable and is carried by Gibson's writing style alone. I couldn't even remember what I liked about it until I started MLO and went "Oh, right!". Snow Crash: This is one I've wanted to read for a while and I'm really glad I finally did. For me, it was one of those books that kinda recalibrates your standards, like "Yeah, no. THIS is a five star book!". It actually made me go through my goodreads and lower some ratings. It's not perfect by any means and it could've used an extra chapter or two (I can just picture Neal Stephenson going "What's a denouement?") but, even when it went on a 50 pages long infodump on ancient Sumerian mythology, I could not put it down. This book completely wrecked my sleep schedule because it kept me up all night multiple times. If his other books are anywhere near this good, I may have found my new favorite author.

I never really bothered playing around with a game's photo mode until Death Stranding and I was missing out. It's actually kinda fun! This was about 3 seconds before I lost my footing and ate approximately half a mountain's worth of shit. BB did not survive.

Yeah, they're not as much fun to ride as the batpod but they're less tedious to set up than fixing all those damn roads.

Kojima: In Death Stranding, our team has meticulously crafted a highly-detailed mountain range, full of hazards and challenges, for the player to hike through as Sam. me:

OH MY GOD! Like a week ago, my friends and I were playing Vermintide 2 and talking about how awesome a 40K version would be and, well... It's just a teaser that gives no info whatsoever but I need this in my fucking veins!

So, Dragon Quest XI S is coming to other platforms, including PC. Yay! It's a separate version, not an upgrade, and doesn't give existing owners a discount. Boo! It's actually a port of the Switch version and will look worse than the original release across all platforms. ...what?!? Seriously, just when you think you've reached peak Square-Enix, they go ahead and pull something like this. I swear, this company's ineptitude knows no bounds...

This is the PSP game that the musou is a sequel to, right? If so, that's awesome! Not having access to this one is the main reason I let the musou fall off my radar so if they release this one on PC I'll definitely give them a shot at some point.

Oh man, hopefully this is the first of many. I'd love to see all those non-Persona SMT titles no longer be stuck on PS2. Confirmed for Switch and PS4 only but I'm cautiously optimistic for a PC release. Surely, Atlus West didn't make a big show of creating their Steam publisher page just for Catherine and P4G...

So I put about 10 hours into Death Stranding and yeah, despite the super mixed reception there was never really any doubt in my mind: I'm loving the hell out of this game. The cargo balancing stuff seemed novel and interesting to me so I wasn't really skeptical about that. If there's one thing I'll blindly trust Kojima with, it's gameplay. I'm still too early into it to judge the plot but it's interesting so far and the gameplay has me completely hooked. Hell, I think I'm even more inclined to love it than I would've been just a year ago because the lack of (or lesser focus on) combat is actually more appealing to me right now. Outside of my playthrough of Witcher 3 at the beginning of the year, I've been in the biggest gaming slump I can remember having since, well, ever. And Witcher 3 kinda made it worse because what the hell do you follow that up with? There was just nothing I wanted to play and it took a weird little indie game like Supraland to even get me to finish a game. But Death Stranding is a game I could play all day long and then end up wishing there were more hours in the day so I could play a little more. If the plot actually delivers then I might actually end up loving it even more than Witcher 3, which is saying something.

Geez, slow down. I haven't even bought CSIII yet! Hopefully, we'll get confirmation on Crossbell being officially localized soon because that would make it easier to hold off.

I guess we might have different definitions of what constitutes jank but try not to compare Yakuza to like, something excessively polished like The Last of Us (since I know you just played it lol). It's not exactly triple-A. The combat isn't meant to be this extremely precise Devil May Cry affair, it's really more of a cartoonish Streets of Rage kinda brawler (Majima's breakdancing fighting style would've been a dead giveaway if you had kept playing) with the vast majority of the fights being more along the lines of a JRPG's disposable random encounters. Yakuza 7's combat being straight-up turn-based has only validated my belief that Yakuza was secretly a JRPG all along lol. Basically to enjoy the combat just look around and grab the first bicycle you see and just fucking clobber everyone with it. The fight will be over in seconds and you'll move on your merry way. Yakuza 0 especially has a fantastic story if you give it a chance.

Supraland Finished it last night. This is a first-person puzzle game/metroidvania hybrid and it's one of those things where I didn't realize how badly I wanted this until I actually started playing it. When I was about halfway through the game, they announced the release date for the new DLC for it (it's out by now) and I thought by the time I finished the game I'd need a break but I'm actually seriously considering getting it now. At the very least I intend to keep playing and try going for 100% completion in the base game. It also has this really charming aesthetic where you're playing as this little red toy guy and the entire world is a kid's elaborate sandbox world. SIde note: sometimes this giant kid will be standing there looking down at you and it's honestly kinda creepy lol. It's not the most polished thing ever like Portal or Talos Principle but if you enjoy the genre I can't recommend it enough.

Yeah, I expected them to charge a bit of a premium but this is ridiculous. But honestly, if that's what it takes for the ports to keep coming then fine by me. The games will be coming months and years late anyway, I can wait a little longer until the price drops to my sweet spot. Like you said above, my backlog can keep me busy for years at this point. And it's not just random junk that I might potentially enjoy, there are some great games in there that I've genuinely wanted to play for years and just never got around to. So, whatever. Do your worst, Sony. I can outwait you!* *except for Bloodborne...

Lol looks like the great regional pricing for Horizon was a mistake because it got "fixed". It's only up to 59.99CAD$ for me but it sounds like some regions got hit with a more significant bump. With the ridiculously high base price for a 3+ year old game, I can't say I'm too surprised to find out it was a mistake...

Nah. They cracked down on regional pricing abuse some years back.

Horizon pre-order is live on Steam, coming August 7th. Regional pricing is actually really good but holy fuck at asking 50 bucks for a 3 year old port lmao. 20-30 bucks would've been a no-brainer. But at almost 60CAD$? You're kinda losing me there, Sony...

Yeah, if they bump the price up then I'll just be done buying games day one. Because over here they'll probably end up costing around 100CAD$ and honestly at that point all I can say is: go fuck yourself lmao. The only games I'd even consider buying at that price are the ones that I absolutely must play like Death Stranding or Cyberpunk 2077 and those only come around like once or twice in a generation. I mean, hell, even at "just" 80 bucks I already kinda noped out. When I do pre-order full priced games it's on third-party sites like GMG and Humble where they're discounted enough that they go back to the normal price of a decade ago. 80 bucks is a tough sell, higher than that is just not gonna happen.

And that should be it for the Steam sale. It wasn't discounted but after making ~55$ from selling Steam trading cards I only paid about 25 bucks out of pocket. I was tempted to get some other stuff but I'm still in the middle of Persona 4, DS is less than two weeks away and Horizon looks increasingly likely to drop any day now so it's not like I need anything else to play. Besides, I haven't been playing all that much lately, so I've gotten a lot better at not buying games I don't intend to play immediately.

Yeah, it probably depends on the game tbh. I used Witcher 3 because it's a big game and it's fairly stable. Making sure sleep mode doesn't crash the game is probably on the list of things the certification process for a console will make it a point to test. I'm not sure you can realistically expect every single developer out there to specifically test what happens when you alt-tab out of the game and then put the PC to sleep, though lol.

Neither had I, to be honest, but I just tried it with Witcher 3 and it worked just like you'd expect it to. I'll admit that it probably feels more convenient on a console where gaming is the only thing you'll be doing. It just never fails to amuse me to see consoles getting credit for playing catch-up lol.

PCs can be put to sleep too, dude. And I seriously doubt your console (or the game, for that matter) turns off completely when you put it in sleep mode. Like, I get what you're saying but it's kind of a weird thing to bring up as an advantage inherent to consoles when it's something PCs have been doing for decades lol.

Next time you're playing a game on PC, try pressing the Tab key while holding down Alt.