toxicitizen

Mortal Kombat 1 I completed the story mode, which is what I count as "beating" the game even though I'm nowhere near done with it. I put a few hours into Invasion and it's pretty fun but I don't really count that as a main mode. It's basically just a replacement for the Krypt and the Towers of Time from MK11. You unlock a bunch of stuff in there and there's seasonal content you can go through. Unclear if it'll go away entirely once the season ends. I don't know how long I'll keep playing or if I'll keep coming back for future seasons but I'm enjoying it for now. The matches are only 1 round, which makes it feel much faster than Towers of Time. Just doing towers repeatedly felt like kind of a slog in MK11, so to me Invasion is definitely an improvement. Anyway, the story mode. For something called Mortal Kombat 1 and marketed as a fresh start in a completely new, rebooted timeline, this sure as shit felt like a direct sequel to MK11 lol. I mean, it starts out like a reboot and actually tells a pretty fun story. But by the last few chapters all the new stuff gets benched when it starts to tie in directly with the ending of MK11's DLC. The last chapter was insane in the best way, though. I can't help but wonder if they felt pressured to top the climax of MK11 because it goes off the rails pretty abruptly and, while it wasn't necessarily the most satisfying ending narratively speaking, I loved every second of it. They said they intend to support this game for a long time but they said the same thing about MK11 and that only got about two years of support. I really hope they mean it this time because the last chapter of the story mode opens the door for some really insane stuff as far as costumes and customization goes. I don't think there's a ton of that in the game in its current state, which is a step down from MK11, but hopefully that's going to change over time. Other than that, the gameplay is pretty damn good. It's way faster than MK11, so there was a bit of a difficulty curve for me. I'm also still not super good at using kameos effectively but I'm slowly learning. I don't think it's going to replace Street Fighter 6's ranked mode for me as far as the competitive side goes but it's definitely a fun time online.

I'm so curious about this but I don't want to get spoiled... I kinda feel like rushing the main story is the wrong way to play a Bethesda game, so I'm really torn on this lol. Then again, if I take my sweet-ass time and spend 100h on my first playthrough, I'm probably not gonna want to do NG+...

The Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure Whew, finally. This one wasn't particularly long for a Trails game but it kinda felt like it because I accidentally put it on hold for like 3 weeks while I was hooked on MK11. I was planning on playing both Crossbell games back-to-back but that didn't quite work out. There's not a ton to say about Azure specifically that I haven't already said about Zero. Much like Trails in the Sky SC, this is the payoff game. And it doesn't waste any time throwing shit directly at the fan. Even having secondhand knowledge of these events from having played Trails of Cold Steel, I was still on the edge of my seat for some of these chapters. This game is a hell of a ride. There's even some unexpected twists in there (including stuff that I had been spoiled on but hadn't quite put together correctly). I'm not ready to jump back into Cold Steel right away but I can't wait to replay CS1 and 2 now to see how much more I get out of them. There's so much stuff in those game that you don't really have the full context for without having played the Crossbell games. And it goes the other way, too. In Azure you get a lot of secondhand info about the events going down in Erebonia and it actually spoils Cold Steel 1 and 2 about as much as Cold Steel spoiled Zero and Azure lol. It's honestly baffling to me how Falcom handled this. Even at the very end of Azure, there's a completely unnecessary info dump that ruins some late-game twists from Cold Steel 2. I can't help but wonder if this is like with Sky where they planned to make just one big game and then ended up having to split it in two. Because otherwise it really doesn't make a ton of sense for them to have gone back in the timeline as far as they did for the starting point of the Cold Steel arc. At least, not when you consider the glacial pace of CS1 and how much padding there is in the game. I feel like you could cut out a good chunk of CS1 and 2 and combine what's left to make a much better version of the same story. Anyway, now I can finally focus on Starfield. In the end, I didn't get much out of the early access period lol. Put a little less than 20 hours in and haven't touched it in 3 days. Mostly because I was starting to really enjoy it and felt like I should go back to finish Azure before it could get its hooks into me. I wanted to make sure to finish Azure this week and that wasn't going to happen if I was obsessed with Starfield. Anyway, it turned out I had longer to go in Azure than I thought I did, so now I don't have enough vacation time left to really get into Starfield as much as I was hoping to. At this point I think I'll just not play Phantom Liberty at launch. I'll keep playing Starfield without rushing it until MK1 comes out and then just juggle the two for a while. Besides, while I'm rooting for CD Projekt RED to finally turn the game around fully, going in day one after the last time might not be the best idea lol.

I was hoping to get this done before MK1's release, and, well, mission accomplished! The achievement list was mostly easy but there's a few really grindy ones. If I'd started playing the game earlier, the one for completing 250 towers would've been a fairly reasonable ask. I would've done it over the course of several months and it would've been fine. But I had like 3 weeks to 100% the game lol. I did about 100 legitimately over the course of just playing the game and doing all the other achievements and did the rest the lazy way. I opened Twitch on my second monitor and just went into Endless tower, started the first fight and immediately went into the menu and selected "Finish Tower". So it was like an hour of mindless button mashing while barely looking at the screen lol. That this worked at all just goes to show how pointless of an achievement this was. It used to be I hated it when fighting games had achievements like "win 200 online matches" because they seemed impossible to get. But now I'm disappointed when they don't have those. Online is where most of my time is spent and I understand now that as long as you just keep playing you'll get there eventually. The only problem is when you play the game after the online is dead. I'd love to try and 100% MK9 and MKX but that's basically impossible at this point. Anyway, getting back into MK was such a blast. This series is super nostalgic for me in a way that Street Fighter simply isn't. I really wish I had done this years ago. This was so much fun. Can't wait for MK1 next week!

That's possible. I read that any mods that modifies game files will disable achievements but I didn't verify for myself, I didn't wanna take any chances so I installed the mod just in case.

Worth noting that this one replaces game files and it sounds like this disables achievements. So the Achievement Enabler mod is also handy if you want to prevent your save from being flagged as modded. But yeah, this mod is kind of a must. It's baffling that they'd have those UI elements run at 30fps. The PC version is lacking some really basic stuff...

Gave in. Don't disappoint me, Todd!

Didn't realize you could do that but I kinda don't want to own anything tied to Microsoft's shitty app. It's cheaper but if I'm going to be spending money at all I'd rather it be on the Steam version. It was never the price that was giving me pause, anyway; just the fact that I bounced off of Bethesda's previous two games. Plus, this is a game that's guaranteed to be a better experience a year from now once all the DLC will be out.

I don't think that would let me play on Sept 1st, though? That kinda defeats the purpose for me. By the actual launch date, I'll be halfway through my vacation and probably wouldn't have enough time left to really dig into it. I'd like to have a realistic chance of finishing it before Phantom Liberty, and with MK1 early access on the 13th that's not going to happen unless I can pretty much finish it before having to go back to work. Besides, if I were to get into it and play for a hundred hours, I'd rather be earning achievements on Steam. I still haven't finished Trails to Azure anyway, so I might end up not getting it at all to focus on that. Or maybe I'll just get Armored Core 6 instead.

I'm really torn on whether to get it or not. I bounced off of Fallout 4 pretty quickly and couldn't get into Skyrim the last time I tried. I've been avoiding the marketing mostly because I kinda didn't care. But now the early access comes on the exact date my vacations start, so it's tempting to buy it if only because I'll actually have 10 days to no life the game and Bethesda RPGs are kinda perfect for that. It being a sci-fi game also makes it way more appealing to me. Kinda wish Starfield and Phantom Liberty had swapped release dates, though, cause I'd much rather have that time to sink into the latter tbh :(.

Got the premium edition because there was a decent deal and I want Homelander. Also, with Premium you get the game a week earlier. So that's nice. Not so nice is the fact that the pre-order beta isn't available on PC... I know the series has a history of shit ports (although MK11 seemed pretty decent to me) but I really hope this one at least has full crossplay with consoles. Like, that's literally a basic QoL feature for the genre at this point. Almost as important as rollback netcode. Although if not, then at least this is a game that's likely to have a fairly healthy playerbase for years to come even on PC.

Mortal Kombat 9, Mortal Kombat X, Mortal Kombat 11 + Aftermath It felt weird to me that Street Fighter is the series that got me into fighting games in a big way when Mortal Kombat is the one I played a shit ton of as a kid. I'd rent Street Fighter II every now and then but I played the shit out of my copy of Mortal Kombat II on Genesis. So, for the past couple years I've been feeling like I should try to get back into MK. Well, the trailers for Mortal Kombat 1 have been looking insanely good. So, I figured what better time than now? I had never played the story modes for MKX and MK11, so I figured I'd just do the whole trilogy to get caught up for MK1. The story mode of MK9 is pretty sloppy but it's really fun if you're like me and have a ton of nostalgia for the original trilogy. MKX is basically a really solid Mortal Kombat movie and MK11 just improves upon MKX in every conceivable way. Aftermath ends things on a bit of a dud, though. It's not bad but I felt like it undermined the insanely fun climax of MK11 and mostly felt like unnecessary filler. Other than a small teaser for MK1 at the end, it doesn't really add much beyond getting to play as the bad guys. Once I made it to MK11, I also started dipping my toes into the online portion as a test run of whether I wanted to get MK1 or not. Well, I've basically played nothing but MK11 online all week and haven't touched Trails to Azure since last week-end. So, yeah, I'm getting MK1 lol. Much like when I tried Tekken last year, it took some getting used to. MK is closer to Street Fighter than Tekken but the movements are kinda stiff, so the matches have a different kind of rhythm to them. Also, goddamn did I need to relearn how to use a block button. At first, I kept eating shit because I would always try holding back instead. I've gotten used to it now but that was definitely the biggest hurdle to overcome. Even the different way combos work was easier to adapt to. I just needed to get a feel for the timing, so I figured out a string I liked with Scorpion and just practiced it for like 20mins before trying to land it in an online match, and that was basically it. But between online and story mode, it took me like a week before I was blocking effectively lol. I'm kinda regretting not doing this years ago. I've managed to get all the online achievements for MK11 pretty quickly because it still has a fairly decent population on PC (despite no crossplay) but MK9 and MKX are completely dead at this point, so there's unfortunately no way to complete them now.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero Man, it feels like I've been waiting for this one forever. It's been like 5 years since I last played a Trails game because I refused to continue on to Cold Steel III because of how important the missing games were going to become. According to Steam, I beat Trails in the Sky the 3rd in May 2017 and Trails of Cold Steel II in March 2018. So yeah, it's been a while... After years of hearing people talk about how the Crossbell games were the best ones, it was hard not to go into this one with insanely high expectations. I didn't necessarily expect them to be my new favorites but I did expect them to be among the better ones. So I'm happy to say the game actually exceeded my expectations! It manages to recapture the same comfy vibes as the original Trails in the Sky while having a plot that's more immediately engaging. It's a slow burn like the first Sky game but even the early chapters have you investigating stuff that feels important. You only find out how everything is connected later in the game but, unlike my first playthrough of Trails in the Sky, I didn't spend most of my Zero playthrough wondering when the plot would start. I can now appreciate that Trails in the Sky was actually setting up a shit ton of stuff but it took a replay for me to end up loving it as much as I do now. That being said, Zero simply has the better story. The last few chapters in particular were very my shit. The game takes one hell of a creepy turn and I was super into it. It also manages to tell its own story while simultaneously paying off on things set up in the Sky trilogy. I was pleasantly surprised by how often Estelle and Joshua showed up and the way one particular plot thread left hanging in the Sky trilogy was wrapped up in Zero was pretty great. I even teared up a little. Another similarity to Sky is that Zero focuses on a smaller, tight-knight group of characters again. In Sky, you get Estelle and Joshua as your main two and the other two slots are filled by a rotating cast of characters that are gradually introduced and each given time to develop and shine. In Zero, you get your four mains out of the gate and, other than the occasional guest party members, that's who you'll be playing with for most of the game. So they all have their moments and by the end of the game you actually care about everyone, unlike Cold Steel where like half of Class VII could jump off a cliff and I wouldn't really give a shit. I think my only "issue" (I wouldn't even call it a nitpick, really) was the ending. I love me a good cliffhanger and I was bracing myself for the game to hit me with something at the last second that would make me need to start Trails to Azure immediately. And it just... never happened. The game ends with a few big questions left unanswered but by the end of it the current crisis is resolved and you leave everyone on a satisfying note. Hell, even that one big spoiler you inevitably get if you play Cold Steel first didn't happen! I was sure that was going to be the focus of either the ending or the final chapter but nope. That's not something I can hold against the game, though. So yeah, I was expecting the ending to make me need to start Azure immediately but it just doesn't. I mean, I still want to start Azure soon. It's not like there's anything else I'd rather play right now, I just don't feel like there's any rush now lol. Although if I don't start it now, I might cave and get Baldur's Gate 3 because the hype is starting to get to me. And then who knows when I'll have time to get back to Trails...

Yeah, I wondered about it at first because of how much the opposite side lifts when you push a direction (and because it actually came loose during shipping) but now that I've actually played with it for a few hours I can tell it's anchored in there pretty well and won't come off from normal use. This has to be the best d-pad I've ever used, I just can't get over how good it feels to use.

I've noticed the rubber on my Xbox controller's analog sticks is so worn down it's become completely smooth on top. The blue plastic underneath has even become visible on the left stick. So I figured it's only a matter of time before it starts breaking apart entirely and the stick just becomes annoyingly uncomfortable to use like my old Steam Controller. I briefly looked into buying replacement parts but the options I found seemed kinda crappy and I don't really feel like opening up the controller to mess around in there anyway. So that flimsiest of excuses was enough for me to get a brand new one. I'd been wanting to get a white one for a while now to go along with everything else in my current setup and I've always thought those Elite ones looked really cool. Haven't had time to actually try it yet but but I took a quick look when it got here and the first impression was pretty good. I'm especially digging the d-pad. Didn't realize it would be magnetic. I kinda wonder if it popping off during play will be an issue but it also gives it a much "looser" feel, which makes me think it might actually be a solid option for fighting games because it makes circular motions feel way more natural. Had to get the components pack separately because the white model is only available as Core but it definitely seems to have been worth it. At least this time I'll have spare parts for the analog sticks and it also comes with a charging dock, which is neat. I've been using the play and charge kit for my regular controller because I'm not gonna keep buying batteries. I mean, what am I? A caveman?! But my experience with it hasn't been the best. It doesn't seem to hold its charge for very long (and it almost always decides to die when I'm in the middle of a boss fight!) and I always need to fiddle with the cable and the pack itself before the LED will turn amber to indicate it's charging. I end up playing wired most of the time because of it. So yeah, really glad to have a controller with a built-in battery again. It's kinda baffling that it still isn't standard for Xbox controllers... Oh and I'm finally playing Trails from Zero and fully back on the Trails hype train, so I just had to get these. Not opening them just yet for fear of spoilers...

Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin This is a pretty chaotic game. No, really. It looks (and kinda plays) like a PS360 gen game and is one of the most impressively dogshit ports I've seen in a very long time. The writing is meme-worthy trash and the plot is borderline nonsensical. I think the original Final Fantasy is retroactively a sci-fi game now? But seriously, what an absolutely garbage port. I actually had to turn off the e-cores on my CPU but I can't even say with 100% certainty whether it really helped or not. This game made me feel like i was going crazy. When I set the framerate to 120fps the game could barely stay above 100 and often dipped into the 70s. Not a big deal, that's what g-sync is for. Problem is when set to 120, the game slows down when it drops below 90fps. At least, that's what I read online. I'm pretty sure it slowed down even above 100. Fine, I though. I'll lock it to 60 and have it be rock solid. Lol, nope. When set to 60, it could barely stay above 50fps. I'm not exaggerating when I say this is the most mindbogglingly awful port I've seen in a long time. It's a complete fucking technical mess. I just cannot wrap my head around why the game works the way it does. It felt better after I went into the BIOS and disabled my CPU'S e-cores. Maybe I just got used to it but I never really noticed any slowdown after that. At least nothing as bad as the first time I played. I feel like this game was either rushed or made on a shoestring budget. I can't help but get the feeling that someone, somewhere, just did not give a shit about this project and I'm really curious to know whether that was Square-Enix or Team Ninja. All that being said, I still kinda loved it. There's something deeply satisfying about the combat. When I wasn't stuck on a boss, I could've kept grinding missions for hours. I don't think it would be accurate to call it a Soulslike. I guess it's more of a Niohlike, if we wanna go there? It feels much simpler while still offering plenty of variety Then again, I ended up going for the same strategy with every single job I levelled up: find a hard-hitting move I'm comfortable with and just hit enemies with that combo as quickly as I can to open them up for a Soul Burst. I did rage at a few bosses but tbh that was just me playing like an idiot. Once I slowed down and started learning their patterns, I always got them. The final boss, though. Goddamn, that one was fucking hard. I played carefully from the start and it still took me a shit ton of attempts before I got him. Ironically enough, that particular fight never frustrated me. I mean, I was feeling pretty exhausted after so many failed attempts but I never got angry about the fight itself. Oh but one mission in particular was complete fucking bullshit. Maybe it's cause I was playing on hard and it's not as bad on normal but jfc. You don't have your party members for that particular section and the game likes to put large groups of enemies together in small areas. You literally can't even finish your attrack string on one before another one throws some bullshit at you. It's insanely infuriating and I just cannot fucking grasp what the hell they were thinking. Once I realized this bullshit was impossible, I just ran past the enemies but there's a section at the end where you have no choice but to take a similar crowd on. I don't even feel like I figured out a strategy or played well, I just got fucking lucky. I'll gladly admit it was my own fault when I raged at boss fights but this mission in particular was complete fucking garbage. Anyway, I still have the DLC to play as well as Chaos difficulty but I think I'll put that off for now and come back to it later. This seems like the kind of game I could easily sink over a hundred hours into like Nioh, but right now I'm really feeling the itch to play some Trails. It's been way too long.

Alright, I need to stop for real now lol. I only bought Reverie because NISA does this annoying thing of having extras that are only available during launch week. I don't mind supporting Trails day one and I usually regret it if I miss out on the launch week bonuses but in this case I'm not going to be playing it anytime soon. I've got the two Crossbell games to play first and then Cold Steel III and IV (probably gonna need to replay at least CSII while I'm at it). Got CSIII as well because why not at this point. So now I'm only missing CSIV and Nayuta. I think I just added like six months worth of games to my backlog just over the past week... I can't wait to be caught up on Trails and Yakuza because I'm so far behind on both that it feels like I need to focus on those series to the exclusion of almost everything else lol.

Back for another round! Mass Effect and RDR2 were total impulse purchases. Can't wait to finally check out The Quarry, though. I love that kind of 80s horror movies, so the trailers made it look right up my alley. Just couldn't justify paying full price for it.

Yakuza 4 Remastered I put this one off for like a year because of how utterly miserable of an experience Yakuza 3 was but that turned out to be a mistake. This one is actually pretty great! I played on hard again, because I don't learn from my mistakes. Fortunately for me, the combat in this one is nowhere near as obnoxious as in Yakuza 3. There's still some bullshit with boss enemies attacking or blocking in the middle of your combo string, which might be deliberate but seems fucking insane to me. And some large groups of enemies in some chapters will sometimes decide to all try to hit you at once and you end up getting stun-locked for a solid minute, which seems like incredibly sloppy combat design to me but what do I know? Anyway, the game overall was super fun so unlike the miserable slog that was Yakuza 3, here it's a minor complaint. The story is actually pretty good. At its best moments I was reminded of Yakuza 0, which is basically the highest praise I can give to one of these games. And at one point Majima referenced something that happened to him in the 80s and I got really excited that the game would have some kind of retroactive tie-in with 0 but it turned out to be some other event that happened 2 years before 0. I went into the game fully prepared to complain that there wasn't enough Kiryu (and he does play a disappointingly minor role in the game) but I ended up loving the new characters way more than I expected, so it turned out to not be such a huge deal. Akiyama is just a great character and Saejima is a fucking badass brick shithouse of a man that lifts dudes over his head and throws them into walls. What's not to love? That being said, most of the combat issues I described happened with the other characters. Once I finally got to play as Kiryu, it was like turning the game's difficulty down. I guess normal people just can't compare to the Dragon of Dojima. I was kinda meh on Tanimura as a character but apparently he doesn't come back in future games because his voice actor quit or something. The best part of his section was the gameplay because it kinda felt like proto-Judgment but we have Judgment now and Yagami is a much better character, so I guess that worked out in the end. Speaking of Judgment, maybe it's because it's the last one I played before this but I kinda felt the game's age while playing Yakuza 4. The textures on non-main characters are just a blurry mess and Kamurocho feels way more artificial by comparison. It's really tempting to jump right into Yakuza 5 so I can get the PS3 games out of the way and only have the more modern Dragon Engine games left but I'm worried about getting burned out on the series. Think I'll probably give it a month or so to play something else and come back to it in the near future.

I already owned Yakuza 7 since a friend gifted it to me a while back but rebuying the Legendary Hero Edition was the cheapest (and only) way to get all the DLC. If only Steam had features to help in cases like this like, idk, complete-the-bundle or upgrade paths for game editions... Normally, I'd say I'm not planning on buying anything else of the remainder of the sale but at this point I know better than that.

I've been waiting over a decade for this All that's missing is MGS4...

System Shock That would be the remake that just came out. The original System Shock is one of those games that I've always been meaning to play but never got around to. And now I don't need to because I feel like I just played a better version of it. Not a re-imagining but the exact same game with some modern QoL improvements. Even visually, it looks great while still using an art style that evokes the feeling of playing a retro game. Digital Foundry called it the greatest remake ever made and I can kinda see where they're coming from. And it's not just the visuals that feel retro. You can see the immersive sim DNA with a story told through audio logs, weapons and mods, even metroidvania-like upgrades that let you access new areas. But you can tell this is the grand-father of the genre because there's not that much variety in how you tackle things and the game really doesn't hold your hand: no explicit objectives or quest markers and there's no one talking in your ear the entire time telling you what to do. You get some "live" calls here and there but they're usually mostly for story purposes and often get cut off by SHODAN before they can actually give you any useful info. You better be paying attention to those audio logs because that's where all the info is. You need to figure out for yourself what to do next and I found myself googling for help a few times because I would often reach a new floor of the station only to explore basically all of it with seemingly no meaningful progress to show for it. There's a locked door here with a keypad but do I already have the code or... ? Sometimes I'd google for help and find out the thing I assumed I needed to do next was actually for much later in the game and I was supposed to do this other thing instead. It made for some aimless wandering around at times, but when I wasn't stuck I had a blast exploring Citadel Station. Until things kinda fell apart at the end... Not completely. The last few levels are alright, just smaller because it's the climax of the game. But that final boss is some complete nonsense. For half of it, I wasn't even sure what I was supposed to be doing. I think they knew it was hot trash, though, because you literally can't fail lol. If you die, you just respawn with no progress lost. I still kinda want to play System Shock Enhanced Edition to contrast with this one but man, those Doom graphics are gonna be tough to go back to now. Also, now that I have a better understanding of the critical path through the game, I'm curious to replay the remake and try paying super close attention to the audio logs to see if I can pick up on all the little details that are meant to guide you along. I'm also looking forward to System Shock 2 Enhanced Edition more than ever now. I actually did start SS2 several times years ago but never got very far into it. Hell, I honestly kinda hope Nightdive tries their hand at remaking that one as well. It has definitely aged way better than the original but it's still from that era where 3D graphics still weren't quite there yet.

While I'm personally offended by this, Prey did have some issues with enemy variety and peaking like 5mins into the game (that opening sequence is so fucking incredible that the rest of the game, while fantastic, simply can't live up to it lol). So I can understand that one getting docked a few points by clueless reviewers who can't appreciate one of the few truly good immersive sim when we get one. But man, I really hope the MS acquisition means Arkane will be free to go back to their roots because Redfall feels like the first step taken by many great studios that are no longer with us...

Was feeling too sluggish to play Street Fighter 6 Saturday night so I bought this on a whim. I've been looking forward to it for years since the System Shock games are on that list of classics I've always wanted to play but never got around to. Just about 4h in and so far I'm completely in love with it. It feels old-school but with just enough QoL modernization to not be annoying. I'm really digging the visual style they went with. It looks modern but mostly preserves the original's art direction and the texture have a retro-looking pixel-y look up close. I'm honestly kind of baffled and annoyed that it scored in the 70s with reviewers, tbh. And not just because it was my pick in the pool! It's one of those cases that kinda makes me feel validated in no longer paying attention to game reviewers.