toxicitizen

Looks like Hatsuu's out, possibly for good. I don't blame her and she should obviously prioritize her health but man, I'd be lying if I said this doesn't kill all the cautious optimism I had about this shit show...

So, I put a few hours into RE2 and man, this is how you remake a video game. I was initially disappointed that they went with over-the-shoulder because I guess I assumed it would mean a return to a more action-oriented style but so far that's really not been the case. I thought a remake like the first game's was the best way to go. Basically, I wanted the original RE2 but with a modern coat of paint to "future-proof" it. I'm glad to admit I was way off on that one. What Capcom actually made ended up being far more interesting, I think. To the point where now I kinda want them to remake the original in this style (after the RE3 remake that's rumored to have already entered development), so that we can have the entire original trilogy like this. It might not be first-person but it has more in common with RE7 than the original. It's basically RE2 through the lens of RE7, if that makes any sense. It seemed only superficially similar at first because of some aesthetic and mechanical similarities (upgradable inventory, UI elements, etc) but then I ran into Mr. X and suddenly it was pretty clear. I initially wrote more in a spoiler tag but ended up deleting it. All I'll say for now is that my first impression of him is that he seems to behave in a way very similar to Jack from RE7 but (so far) without the obvious limits that made Jack less intimidating over time. He looks kinda goofy with his Inspector Gadget hat, though: (just a screenshot of him in the tag)

I tried telling myself that I would wait but the reviews just hit this morning and are pretty goddamn stellar, so I caved. I'm hyped as fuck over here because RE2 is basically my childhood. I didn't have a PS1, so I spent what felt like the longest goddamn time waiting for it to come to N64. And when it finally did, I played the shit out of it. So I'm in this weird zone where I kinda remember most of the game but not in any great detail. I don't think I've seen a single full trailer since E3 and I've avoided most of the smaller vids they've been releasing. I played the 1-Shot demo (very slowly and didn't manage to get very far) but that's about it. So, I'm pretty much going in as blind as I possibly could. Friday can't come quickly enough!!!

About time! It was initially expected by the end of the year, so I wonder what took so long. Hopefully once it's out they won't waste any time in announcing Kiwami 2.

Onimusha: Warlords It's basically Resident Evil in feudal Japan. I knew that, so I'm not sure why I was so surprised by how good this was. Melee combat with tank controls felt super weird at first but that was mostly due to the game not explaining its controls very well. Turns out you can actually lock-on, do a kind of side-step dodge and even pull off some special moves, which makes things significantly less clunky than the first boss fight led me to believe. There's also an option for "modern controls" (which admittedly make more sense here than they did in the Resident Evil remasters) but I didn't use them because I'm not a sociopath. Those boss fights can still be annoying, though. Some of the later ones present a bit of a difficulty spike and this game has unskippable cutscenes, so you have to rewatch them every single time. I'm assuming there were technical reasons why they didn't change that because that would've been near the top of my list of things to fix. I'd be lying if I said those moments when I got stuck on a boss didn't sour the experience somewhat but ultimately I still really enjoyed the game and I hope they'll remaster the sequels. I'd love to play a version of this that's (hopefully) been refined and iterated upon a bit.

I don't think there's any save transfer to CSIII, if that's what you're worried about. So if anything, CSIII would be the perfect time for a platform jump. But yeah, they're calling it a PS4 exclusive but I'm assuming it'll come to PC at some point. I'm not sure why they're not announcing it now, though. I want to believe they learned something from their recent fuck ups and want to get it right this time, but even then there would be no reason not to announce it now and say its release window is TBA. Like, literally all they have to do is give Durante a call. If XSEED could afford him, then surely they can too. And at this point, announcing they have Durante porting the game is pretty much the last thing I need to fully give them the benefit of doubt.

Well, shit. It was pretty obvious she got fired (although it wasn't clear why) but I guess life finds a way! I'm still super skeptical about this (especially given those tweets I posted above) but at least now they have someone on board that's actually going to care/obsess over every little details. Hopefully it's not just PR and they'll actually listen to her. The game is less than a year away, though, and apparently they've been on it for like a year at this point. It's obvious they've only recently brought Hatsuu on board, so I imagine there's limits to what she can accomplish here if the work they've already done is all garbage. edit: Can't say I recognize the other names but that Ryan guy seems alright by me.

Not sure who this is but if it's reliable then lol

Nah, like I said, we knew to expect an announcement from them today. Now that the bad news has started to sink in, I'll wait to see if they release more details tomorrow. But damn, the more I think about it the more I realize that the scenario where I start feeling optimistic again is super fucking unrealistic lol. And even if they somehow got all the right people, it's still entirely possible that the main problem with NISA is at the management level... Also, hire Durante to port the damn game to PC, you cowards! We're probably stuck with a NISA translation but that doesn't mean we have to suffer a NISA port.

Is it? I thought they had teased an announcement for today. There's been PR material released and everything so I don't think this is just some leak. I'm also having a hard time coming up with any one person whose involvement could give me a change of heart here. Even within XSEED, the series changed hands quite a few times. Even if they somehow specifically hired the person(s?) who translated CSI and CSII, I don't expect they'll still have access to the series bible that was compiled at XSEED and it's kind of necessary here. edit: Actually now that I think about it, they may have hired Jessica Chavez. She's been tweeting vaguely about being back to work and I saw some posts on ERA where people assumed she was back at XSEED. She worked on Tokyo Xanadu for Aksys and I was pretty okay with that translation. There were some weird decisions here and there but overall there certainly wasn't anything as distracting as a big hole.

NISA and PS4 exclusivity. Lmao holy shit, Falcom really don't give a fuck and it's getting really hard for me not to feel the same way. I'm not expecting a quality localization nor am I expecting them to make any effort whatsoever to maintain consistency with previous titles. Even their vague mention of a "longer discussion" with Falcom about Crossbell just pisses me off. I'm also wondering what the fuck XSEED are doing at this point. If they were simply outbid then that really sucks but with the recent firing of Hatsuu I'm honestly wondering if they even tried to get it. I actually kinda regret getting invested in this series now...

This is one of those series I never got around to trying out, so I'm really glad they're releasing a remaster. Hopefully they're planning on doing the sequels, too.

You've already beaten those two unreleased games??? As for me, I just realized I forgot to post Vanquish, which I beat like a week ago. I played it on PS3 years ago and it didn't really leave much of an impression. Then it came out on PC and I just kinda bounced off of it after a couple hours. Ended up going back to it while I was waiting for the port of Catherine to come out and it finally clicked for me. I'm almost done replaying the campaign on hard and after that I'll only have the challenges left to do to get the final achievement. It can be kinda frustrating at times but then you'll rocket boost up to a robot, backflip off of it while kicking it in the head and finish it off with a shotgun blast to the face in slow-motion before you even touch the ground again. Then you just go "Holy shit, FUCK YEAH!" and forget about all the frustration from earlier. When the gameplay comes together, it's some of the most ridiculously satisfying bullshit ever.

That would be the most Atlus thing ever, so probably not a bad guess. Given the way things are looking on PC lately, though, I'd say it's not bleak enough. Persona 5 Classic coming out right before whatever P5R ends up being, exclusively on the Fortnite store!

Well, there it is. Weird but I loved Catherine, so I'll take it. My optimistic take on this is that they might've started work without knowing about the remaster but IIRC it was announced a while ago so fuck if I know what to read into this. At the very least, there's now some legitimate reason to think that the chances of Persona (and other Atlus games) coming to PC aren't zero, which is an improvement. Prediction: Persona 5 will be announced by the end of the year! edit: !!!!!!!!!!!! Coming from the mouth of John Sega himself!

Admittedly nothing completely definitive, but something called "Catherine Classic" showed up not too long ago. The ESRB rating is for the original as platforms are PC, 360, PS3 and Xbone (BC, I'm assuming). And finally the last few games SEGA teased like this came out fairly quickly after (like 2-3 weeks tops) but the remaster is only coming out in Japan next month with the western release date still unknown. edit: Wait okay I just got caught up and this is getting interesting. The sheep images had Steam keys hidden in them and those that managed to activate them uncovered a secret message! So far it says "Get ready for something sexy" and we know there's 8 keys in total. So we know to expect three more. And in 3 days? Might be an unfortunate coincidence, though lol. Especially since I wouldn't expect a port announcement coming from the Japanese twitter account. Also, each key points to a different app on steamdb. So this could potentially be teasing multiple games, although my guess is they're probably just empty listings made solely for the purpose of the tease message.

Atlus is pretty much the last major Japanese holdout at this point. That's why this could be huge, though I'm personally skeptical until they prove otherwise. There's still some companies that are kinda weird and don't port everything or do late ports (*cough* Square-Enix *cough*) but most of them have some titles on Steam by now. The Atlus situation is really weird, though, because of the rumors I mentioned and the fact that they're owned by SEGA. SEGA's EU branch has a strong PC focus, they own studios like Relic and Creative Assembly and are responsible for most of their late Japanese ports like Valkyria Chronicles and Yakuza. The JP branch seems like they couldn't give less of a shit, though. In the case of Atlus, it's been assumed up until now that something got in the way of ports happening but that might turn out to not be the case anymore. Which means there might still be a chance for Persona 5 (and other Atlus titles) on PC.

So, it looks like Catherine might be getting a very late PC port. Both the Bayonetta and Valkyria Chronicles 4 Steam pages are teasing something with sheep and an ESRB rating appeared. This can be interpreted as a big deal and as a good sign for further titles like Persona or Shin Megami Tensei also getting ported. What's interesting here is that all signs point to this being a port of the original release, not the upcoming remaster with new content. It's unclear what role (if any) Atlus played here but it seems kinda weird to port the old version when a remaster is in development. Another interesting thing is that Atlus have long been believed to have some kind of strong (and idiotic) dislike of the PC as a platform, so it's unclear what their involvement here was (if any). It's safe to assume that this is another SEGA EU port, but I have to wonder if they went above Atlus' heads or if they actually had their blessing. Perhaps Atlus didn't give a shit since they're working on a new version of the game. I've wanted Catherine on PC for a while so I'll be there day one but I'm actually more excited to see if this leads to anything further or not.

Made one last round of purchases before the sale ends. I was tempted to get more but decided to stick with stuff that was either cheap or that I know I'll want to play in the near future. That's the Ancestral Edition for Darkest Dungeon. I already owned the base game but getting the bundle gave me a little more of a discount on all the DLC. It's one of the games on my "To Play in 2019" list, so it seemed like the right time to get all the content. Also went ahead and made the new thread because my laziness got me a slap on the wrist last year. ?

Didn't play as many games this year. I usually shoot for 50+ but that's kinda hard when you spend half the year playing nothing but Warframe. And I've already managed to not finish Grim Dawn by the end of the year because of Rainbow Six Siege, so it doesn't look like things are gonna go back to normal next year lol. I also kinda forgot about my spreadsheet this year, so I'm pretty sure there's at least one or two games I forgot to log. I already converted my backlog into Steam categories so that I can keep better track of it next year. Anyway, here it is. 23 games, all of them on PC and nearly half from my backlog. My only goal for 2019 is for the backlog ratio to get even higher. Italics are games that came out this year. I usually mark them to keep track of GOTY candidates but I honestly don't know if I even have one this year. With all the major releases being console exclusives, I felt pretty out of the loop and stopped giving a shit. Yakuza 0 is the one that surprised me the most by how freaking good it was and EXAPUNKS was the most sheer fun I've had with a game. So I guess those two.

I am seriously kicking myself for not getting Rainbow Six Siege earlier. I had heard that it was great and I thought it looked really fun but I'm always hesitant when it comes to MP-only games. Turns out it's pretty much the perfect MP game for me: slow and methodical, no running around and no need for twitch reflexes. The correct way to play is to find a good spot to camp, cover a narrow angle with your crosshair and shoot anything that walks into it. I've only been playing for a few days and I'm already able to make a difference in matches and win rounds. I still screw up but it's always clear where I went wrong and I learn from every death. This might actually become the first competitive MP game to keep me hooked.

It's almost like this was a quickly slapped together, cynical cash grab!!!

Still in a backlog mood, so I haven't felt the need to buy much this sale. I've been playing Grim Dawn lately and enjoying it a lot, so the expansion was a no-brainer. Same goes for Vermintide 2 as my friends and I are almost done playing through the first one and we've been having a blast with it. I also grabbed all the DLC levels for the first Vermintide because all rats must die. I've been curious about Siege for a while now since I keep hearing about how great it is and the standard edition finally dropped to a price where I was willing to bite. The Division was the only impulse purchase. I never really paid any attention to it before but I randomly felt like giving the trial a shot the other day and it seemed like something I would enjoy. I still have some money left in my Steam wallet so I'll probably grab something else but I have no idea what. Nothing is really tempting me all that much right now.

I'm fine with a lesser focus on Adol, Origin is one of my favorites of the entire series and he wasn't in it. I expect he'll be in the game to some extent, though. Apparently fans weren't too crazy about his absence in Origin. I'm really surprised they're already going ahead with Ys IX, though. I figured another Tokyo Xanadu or something new was gonna come first. I also expected the next Ys to be a remake of Ys V, so I was doubly wrong. I'm guessing with the next Kiseki being a few years away, they wanted their next project to be more of a safe bet. Also, fuck everything. Kondo acknowledged NISA's fuck up but says the financial impact wasn't significant. Please be excited for Ys IX coming via NISA!!! Between this and XSEED having essentially lost and/or fired their main Falcom/Trails people, the future suddenly feels very bleak for western Falcom fans.

We were wrong, @Mal ! This reminds me that I still haven't played Ys VIII. I actually kinda forgot it even existed, tbh...