toxicitizen

Hey, good on Lab Zero for actually listening when people told them their regional pricing was fucked. At least this is roughly equivalent to the price in USD. Was it updated for your region @MetalCaveman ?

Dragon Ball FighterZ Picked it back up earlier this week and finished the story mode as well as cleared all the arcade courses, so I guess that counts. Story mode is alright, I guess. It's basically just an excuse to do a bunch of fights and explain why Yamcha is able to fight the Saiyans without getting immediately vaporized. They throw in some light RPG mechanics but they don't really affect things all that much. It's super repetitive and needlessly long, though, so you really have to enjoy the fighting game part to get anything out of it. It's not like the recent Mortal Kombat games where it's almost like a movie with interactive fight scenes. The real game begins now, though: getting gud. Aka getting endlessly destroyed online. If I can find a match, that is. I don't know if the game is supposed to have good netcode or what but I tried playing earlier and whenever I tried to get online the game would just go idle while trying to find a lobby (the opening demo video would literally start playing after a while). After that I'd get a network error and would have to try again. Hopefully this was an isolated incident...

Why does this work so well?!?

Isn't it just the combat that's inspired by Valkyrie Profile? Not that I know what VP is actually like but I remember trying out the Indivisible demo ages ago and it seemed kinda metroidvania-ish.

It's not us, it's the devs! The regional pricing for this game is all over the place. That USD price converted to CAD is a slightly more reasonable 50 bucks. But really, in a world where Hollow Knight is 15 bucks, any similar game is a hard sell past the 30$ point. Trying to charge a full 60 bucks is honestly just laughable.

Yeah, it's really baffling how even game journos seem to buy into it. And to be fair, there's definitely some ridiculous persecuted gamer shit going on that's laughable. Like, anyone that thinks EA is evil because DLC or microtransactions or whatever is a fucking moron. Ditto that pointless "worst company in America" thing because holy FUCK if you think a glorified toy company even qualifies for this you REALLY need to go out into the real world and get a reality check. But some devs genuinely come across like they think they're entitled to my money or that they should be above even the most basic consumer protection laws, which is just... u wot m8.

Yeah, as much as I dislike EGS exclusivity deals, the harassment the Ooblets devs got for it is obviously way out of line. At the end of the day, it's a valid business decision on their part and I can wait out the exclusivity period (although in this case I'm not really interested in the game, I just mean in general). That being said, you would have to be a complete fucking moron not to see that the harassment could've been EASILY predicted AND avoided. That blog post is some next-level condescending shit. Like, how fucking stupid do you have to be to go "People don't like these deals so I'm gonna get ahead of this and just antagonize the shit out of them right out of the gate!" Best part is that now because of this, Epic have managed to reframe the narrative and paint themselves as the good guys. I'm already seeing critics of the EGS being compared to gamergaters, which is just lovely. I wouldn't be surprised if articles making this false equivalency started popping up in the near future. Because yeah, I'm such a fucking asshole for not wanting to use a garbage launcher. I should just suck it up because it's good that devs are getting money!! My experience as a customer doesn't matter because VIDEO GAMES!!!

Considering the amount of typos still present in Ys VIII even after the redone loc, I wouldn't be surprised if every single one of those was still there in the final version... edit: Eh, I've seen someone claim that a NISA rep on some discord server has said the screenshots are from an older build and the typos have already been fixed. Doesn't mean there won't be more or that they got all of them but it's something, I suppose.

Let me know how it is! I've heard great things but I feel like more often than not these unlocalized games get an exaggerated amount of praise and turn out to be aggressively underwhelming. See: Final Fantasy Type-0. I got it for like 20 bucks and I still regretted my purchase. God, what a fucking turd. Anyway, EVO fever got to me and I grabbed some things. Maybe this will be the time I finally stick with one of these games long enough to actually get good at it. Probably not, but FighterZ is still pretty damn fun so whatever!

It's pretty obvious at this point that this was never about securing exclusives and always about keeping games off of Steam. I mean, Ubisoft games are still sold on uPlay. Like, on the one hand I get it. Steam has a huge market share and throwing Fortnite bucks around for exclusivity deals is the easiest way to cut into that. On the other, they keep claiming that it's about fighting Steam's 30% cut because it's toodamnhigh.jpg but also their benevolent 12% cut is apparently making it very difficult to add even the most basic fucking features to their store and "forces" them to pass payment processing fees onto the customers. Honestly, I don't think you can read anything into this particular case. They've bought exclusivity on KS games that promised Steam keys before, most famously Shenmue 3 but more recently MechWarrior 5 and at least another one that I can't remember right now. And you can't interpret this as them not wanting to do it again to avoid flak either because they've said before that they wouldn't repeat a situation like Metro (buying a game that was already pre-purchasable on Steam) only to turn around and do it again like literally a few weeks later. Honestly, at this point I'm more inclined to assume this was them not being interested in the game and giving the dev a bullshit excuse. For all their talk of helping smaller indie devs, it's blatantly obvious that they're only interested in indies that are already wildly successful like Team Meat or Supergiant. TL;DR: Epic Games are full of fucking shit and their word means nothing.

Pretty much. Gabe Newell was spot on years ago when he said piracy is a service problem. I'm not subbing to multiple streaming services, especially not those that only exist for a single company's content. Right now I have Spotify for music, Crunchyroll for anime and Netflix for everything else. If whatever I want to watch isn't on one of those then I'll usually find a torrent or watch something else entirely. I recently discovered Shudder and I'm kinda tempted to cancel Netflix and just sub to that, though. Their library is more limited but the horror focus means it's much more relevant to my interests. It also helps that it's only like half the price. I feel like Netflix is a tad overpriced since the last price hike, especially considering how unreliable they are about keeping content on the service.

I can't say I see what you guys mean. Aren't those shows confirmed to be short 6 episodes series? If anything, this seems like less of a commitment than before. And unlike the Netflix series, they're actually going to matter to the overall MCU. Plus, the shorter episode count likely means none of the pacing issues that plagued the Netflix shows. My only problems here are that I don't care enough about Hawkeye to want a show focused on him and Vision is the fucking worst, so I don't want more of him either. What If seems like it can easily be ignored if that's not your thing. Other than that, Shang-Chi and Eternals both seem to have potential (especially the latter if it's going to get even weirder with cosmic bullshit) and I need those Doctor Strange and Thor sequels right in my veins.

Congratulations to Disney for breaking the record and dethroning Disney!!!

Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana Fuck, this game deserved better. It's so freaking good! It's probably my favorite Ys game yet and definitely the most ambitious by far at over double the length of the previous two. And unlike the Trails series, it doesn't suffer from pacing issues at all. Every single time it seemed like it was about to overstay its welcome, it threw a new curve ball to keep things interesting. The one criticism I'd make against the story is that the lack of a proper antagonist is kinda weird (without spoiling anything, the "antagonist" is more like an abstract concept/force of nature) but Ys was always about dat adventure over anything else, so a survival angle works for this series. Believe it or not, I thought the re-localization was completely serviceable. I played with the (redone, I think?) english voiceovers and it seemed mostly fine to me. The only noticeable issues related to the actual text of the game were typos. Most of those I noticed were early on but it's entirely possible my brain just started filtering them out at some point. It wasn't on the level of XSEED's work but it does give me a small amount of hope that there's a chance, however small, that they won't completely fuck Trails up. No, the real problem was the port. I guess I was among the lucky ones because it only crashed on me about half a dozen times. It sounds like it's still completely unplayable for some people. It was the most annoying kind of crashes, though. The game would completely lock up and remain the top window without actually closing, preventing you from tabbing out of it. So the only option is to reset your PC. The framerate is also all over the place in some areas, which is absolutely ridiculous considering how basic the game looks. This I'm willing to (at least partially) blame on Falcom having shitty coding practices, though, because even Durante had to rewrite the entire rendering pipeline of Cold Steel I and II to get them to what he considered an acceptable framerate on a high end desktop. He also added unlimited draw distance, which Lacrimosa of Dana sorely needed. So yeah, absolutely LOVED the game but I'm crushed all over again knowing that Trails is now in the hands of these fuckers. You'd think that hiring Durante's new studio to port Cold Steel III would be the obvious move but at this point I wouldn't put it past them to either lack the common sense or just not give enough of a shit. Ugh....

Goddamn, those Trails of Ys jokes about Lacrimosa of Dana weren't an exaggeration. I just hit 30 hours of playtime (which is longer than both Seven and Celceta) and it honestly feels like I'm only just getting into the real meat of the story. And it's not like it was light on story before, either. Going by my % of map completion and assuming the same amount of side-missions going forward, I can easily see this lasting another 20 hours or so. This is easily the most ambitious Ys game yet. I can't help but wonder if the faster turnaround means Monstrum Nox is scaling things back or just going for a different formula altogether. I kinda hope it's the latter because I'm loving the hell out of Dana but they basically perfected the Celceta formula at this point. I think it might be time to try something new.

Been listening to this one daily for like two weeks at this point, never has a band had better lore lol. I mean, how could you possibly top "You know that part in Infinity War when Thor arrives in Wakanda and it's basically the most awesome thing ever? Yeah, this track has that too." It also led to this wonderful shitpost.

Also, I'm really digging Grailknights and Wind Rose! I guess the easiest way to find cool new metal bands is to pay attention to what @MetalCaveman posts in here.

No idea but they certainly seemed to have less marketing budget/capabilities than NISA. I still remember the launch trailer for the Steam release of TiTS FC. It was pretty rough. IIRC, it was edited by Hatsuu and she was basically having to learn how to edit a trailer on the job. You bring up an interesting point about Kondo running a fansite but I imagine he's super busy these days. Like, NISA had him for like a week and the reddit AMA they did was such a disaster due to time that they had to come back hours later to answer more questions. Kondo answered like 3 questions during the actual AMA and it was still only like 20 questions or so when all was said and done lol.

Easy Allies interviewed Kondo. I have to admit, getting him talking to western press isn't something XSEED ever managed to pull off, as far as I'm aware... Still watching but at the 4:15 mark he basically confirms that the Crossbell games are in the early stages of being ported to modern platforms. It could be a mistranslation but the answer sounds uncharacteristically definitive for Kondo. Remasters/rereleases would pretty much be the biggest chance for localization we've had yet. It would be a fucking NISA translation of course, but whatever, I'll take what I can get at this point. On that note, the patched translation for Ys VIII actually seems serviceable so far. I'm admittedly not the most qualified person to really appraise it but the only things that have really stood out to me were typos. There hasn't been anything as weird or stilted as the screenshots I've seen from the initial release. If they can get Cold Steel III-IV to at least this level (ideally above it) AND maintain consistency with the previous games, then my only real concern would be port quality. I've been lucky with Ys VIII in that I've only experienced one crash (so far, in ~16h of play) although I hear for some people it remains essentially unplayable. There was one weird bug where a cutscene before a boss fight played twice, for some reason. The framerate is all over the fucking place in some areas but between this and Durante having to rewrite the entire rendering pipeline to get Cold Steel I and II to run like you'd expect them to, I'm starting to think at least part of the blame here is on Falcom having shitty programming/optimization practices. We can only hope NISA have the common sense to hire Durante's company...

The short answer is because I hate myself.

Sane people that value their time: Me:

I dunno about that. I just finished Yooka-Laylee last night and I feel like I was pretty miserable the entire time.