toxicitizen

I absolutely loved The Talos Principle. Been waiting for the sequel for what feels like an eternity now (closing in on 7 years according to the "last played on" date on Steam). I'm so glad it's finally coming.

I'm a very slow player in general tbh. And in the last few in-game months I spent a bunch of time in Mementos collecting Stamps and indirectly grinding while watching Twitch. By the end of the game, I was pretty overpowered and had way more cash than I could ever possibly need lol. I can't check since I've already uninstalled the game but I think my in-game playtime is probably somewhere between yours and the one I posted above. Ever since I switched to a dual monitor setup, I'm constantly clicking out of games to go check or do something else. Since the simulation pauses completely when you click out of P5R, I imagine those 5-10mins break added up over time to create a significant discrepancy between the in-game playtime and Steam's.

I didn't really need a new keyboard (although I've started noticing some double inputs on my Logitech one recently so I have a feeling I would have in the near future) but I've been wanting this one for a while and it was almost 100$ off on Amazon + I had 20 bucks of credit I could throw at it on top, so I said fuck it. I mostly wanted a white keyboard to go with the white everything else of my current setup since that was the theme I went for for but this one has the added benefit of being Corsair, so now all my RGBs can sync up nicely. Also, I can finally get Logitech's trash app off of my PC for good! I'm gonna miss the programmable macro keys on the left side but tbh I barely ever used them (I only ever bothered programming like 2 or 3 of them for FFXIV lol). I'll just have to make do with the MMO mouse I bought a while back and also barely used. It has 12 buttons on the side and I only programmed two of them for back and forward when browsing.

That's right! I spent all month working on finishing... Persona 5 Royal What? Were you thinking of something else? I figured I was better off trying to finish it this month because Friday is Street Fighter 6 day. And once that's out, there's no telling how long it'll be before I actually want to play anything else. Anyway, holy hell, this game is long. I mean, Persona games have always been on the longer side of things but even by the series's standards this game is insanely long. I had put like 70 hours into it when I got distracted/busy and stopped playing last Fall and I figured I had to be in the last stretch. Well, according to my final playtime on Steam, turns out I still had about 90 hours to go. Probably a bit less in reality since there were times when I'd leave the game idle for a while but that's still insane! At this point there isn't much I could say that hasn't already been said a thousand times over so I'll just go through my thoughts as fast as I can. I thoroughly loved it! Palaces were a huge improvement over the procedurally-generated dungeons but I'm glad they didn't throw away the idea entirely because I really enjoyed having Mementos as a side thing to do. Especially as the game progresses and Palaces get less and less dungeon-y. The cast was fun, the soundtrack slapped and basically every single aspect of the game felt incredibly more polished than in Persona 4. I know Catherine was originally a game Atlus made to get some HD game development practice but I was still kinda surprised to see how much of the presentation was lifted straight from it. It actually made me want to replay it. Oh and having SMT-style demon negotiation in there was a nice addition. It's kinda funny they put this in only after the series shed the SMT moniker completely, though. I think my biggest complaint would be the third semester. It just didn't feel as organically weaved into the game as the extra stuff from P4G. It felt like the game went through this big climax and then just kinda went "We're not done, this is happening now." It ultimately worked pretty well but the very beginning of it felt kinda jarring. Anyway, it feels good to have finally played it. It took over half a decade to come to PC but my patience finally paid off. Also thank fuck this version has a more sane achievements list because right now I don't even want to think about doing another playthrough. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with the game but, again, so long! I'd be lying if I said I'm not a little disappointed by how much easier it was but, on the other hand, I lucked out twice with the Hardcore Risette Fan achievement. I do NOT want to try my luck with Futaba's achievement. Oh and this isn't a purchases thread but whatever, it's relevant! While i was working on finishing the game I spotted a deal and couldn't resist... Anyway, now I'm finally up to date. Bring on Persona 6! Hopefully it'll actually launch multi-platform this time... Then again, I was reading up on what exactly was new in Royal and man, the original release sounds like it was kinda barebones. So much stuff that I assumed was just part of the game was new to P5R. Hell, Life Will Change doesn't even play after sending the first few calling cards in that version! I mean, what the hell?!? It's so good! So maybe skipping the initial vanilla release isn't the worst thing in the world...

I haven't even really dug into the original trilogy since it launched on PC but this finally hit a price where I just had to.

The Last of Us Part I - Left Behind I forgot to mention it in my last post because I hadn't played it yet but I was a little surprised to see that they didn't take the opportunity to incorporate this into the main campaign for the remake. I could be wrong here but I was always under the impression that it was originally cut content. I guess they maybe just didn't want to mess with the main game's pacing. Oh well, at least the TV show did slot it in, so that's something. Anyway, not much to say about it. It's pretty good. Also, did some chapter select for achievements cleanup. I'm glad it was a quick one to 100% but a part of me is a little disappointed that they removed the original's achievement list that made you go through the harder difficulties as well as new game plus. That's way more interesting of a challenge to me than just "collect all the monkey butts" and "look at all the turds". I played the game on hard because I wanted a challenge but to still have access to listen mode but I would've loved an excuse to try my hand at Survivor and Grounded difficulties. I don't have a ton of free time lately, though, so for now I'll just move on to something else. Maybe I'll come back to it and give it a shot when they announce the port for Part II.

The Last of Us Part I Not much to say about this one that wasn't already said ten years ago. It's pretty good! This is another remake that felt unnecessary but it looks pretty damn good so I'm not complaining. Shame the port launched in such a rough state, though. For the first week or so I just couldn't play because the game would just crash every 15mins or so. Then nvidia released a hotfix driver and that stopped the creashing but the game still ran my system way too hot. Nothing so extreme as to cause damage or a shutdown but enough to make my AIO cooler freak out. Turns out once the coolant hits 60C, the LED on the CPU plate starts blinking red, the software locks out completely and gives a warning about going into "failsafe mode". At first I got worried something was wrong with it but nah, only happens with TLoU. Fortunately, locking the game to 60fps with RTSS kept the temps within a more normal range. The problem with that is that 60fps no longer looks perfectly smooth to me because I've gotten so used to higher framerates/refresh rates. That's definitely a first-world problem, though. Hopefully they'll fix whatever it is the game does that runs my hardware so hot because I'd rather not get a repeat of that when they port Part II.

This isn't the first fighting game I 100%/Platinum but it's the first one I've done completely legit (actually this isn't true, I just remembered I did Tekken 7 last year but that one was quick and easy), and holy fuck was it the hardest one by far. I mean, there's really no way to boost this one. You need to make it to Gold League in ranked. No choice but to git gud. Shit, this is probably the hardest game I've ever completed. Dustforce was hard as fuck but it was still just a single-player game all about execution. In Street Fighter V, other people stand in your way. And some of these people are really fucking good. It's not enough to practice, you need to actually learn how to play fighting games. And I'm really glad I finally did because it's something I'd been wanting to do for over a decade and it made them go from something that looks cool but didn't feel like it was for me to now being one of my favorite game genres. Not that long ago, sinking almost 300 hours in a purely competitive multiplayer game was unthinkable for me. I lose interest way before that. Best case scenario, after like 20-30 hours I start feeling like I've seen everything the game has to offer and I move on. But this fucking game got its hooks into me like no other game ever has. I just can't get enough of it! I've literally seen everything the game has to offer 10 times over by now yet I feel like I've only just scratched the surface. Anyway, I made it to Gold a little over a month ago. So why am I only now posting my 100%? Because this achievement list requires you to earn 1 million fight money and Capcom, in their great wisdom, basically nerfed every single way to earn FM. So going through some characters' story modes and doing some tutorials and combo trials early on and playing about 250h of ranked got me a little over halfway there. I then went through all the story modes for the remaining characters and watched some character specific demonstrations and that was good for another nice little boost. Then the only viable way to get the remaining ~350K was to play survival mode. Survival mode kinda sucks! This was such a tedious fucking grind. Making it to Gold took way longer but at least that was fun. This was so time consuming that at some point I started listening to the Always Sunny Podcast while I was grinding survival runs and I made it to episode 30 before I was even done! But anyway, I'm done now. I can rest. Until the next fight.* *and by that I mean Street Fighter 6

Not sure if this qualifies but I just finished my hardcore run of RE4 and making it so the garradors end up killing all the surrounding ganados without ever knowing where I actually am was just so satisfying in that fucking room right before the throne room. Fuck those assholes! I am not looking forward to doing professional difficulty on a fresh save file...

Thanks for the heads up.

Ooh right, I remember thinking it was in early on but by the time I made it that far into the game I completely forgot about it. I'm pretty sure I found a file that made reference to it, though. So yeah, it might be saved for DLC.

Wait, which one? It's been almost a decade since my last playthrough so I'm drawing a complete blank here. Surely you don't mean the Salazar robot?! edit: oh wait, didn't the original have another gigante fight in the farm area? My understanding is that the console versions have deadzones on the analog sticks that are way too big. IIRC it's even worse on Xbox. I think the issue isn't as pronounced on PC. I played with an Xbox One controller and it felt fine to me (I did switch to mouse aiming for those shooting mini-games, though, because fuck doing that with a controller).

Can't fucking wait! Fanatical has been running a pretty decent pre-order discount for a while (made even better by the fact that they still don't charge taxes in Canada) and I've been telling myself for a couple months that I should grab it while I still can, just in case. Went for the Ultimate Edition because I don't mind dropping that much upfront on a game I'm most likely going to be playing for hundreds of hours. I just passed the 250 hours mark in SFV and I started playing it years late. And most of that playtime is just from the last couple years, when fighting games finally clicked for me. If Street Fighter 6 turns out even half as good as it looks to be, I'm going to be playing it non-stop for years.

See, if they were to remake RE5 I would hope the co-op shit would be something they'd get rid of. It just wasn't the right direction for a mainline Resident Evil and the game suffers as a single-player experience because of it. I think it's a case where there's no way to please everyone, though. I like RE5 but I'm not especially attached to any particular elements of it. That's one game where I'd be perfectly fine if they did more of a complete re-imagining rather than a faithful remake. There's an opportunity to take a game that's merely good and make it great. There's also an opportunity to make a less racist game lol.

Resident Evil 4 I didn't think that RE4 needed a remake, and I'm still not sure that it did, but the best thing I can say about this one is that's... it's Resident Evil 4. Which, as far as I'm concerned, is a fairly high bar that most games can't reach. After the remakes of RE2 and RE3, I expected this one to get significant cuts or to be compromised in some way. It's been a while since I've played the original, so my memories of it are pretty foggy at this point but i can't think of a single major thing that was missing. Some sections were compressed and others were expanded but all things considered this is a pretty faithful remake that also manages to feel fresh by reinventing the locations a bit. It's obviously way less goofy than the original and feels like a more polished game overall. I was prepared for a shorter experience but I think it's actually longer. This may be due to me being a slower player in my old age but according to Steam it took me almost 24 hours to finish it. This is obviously inflated a bit and my actual in-game playtime at the end of the game was lower than that but I'm pretty sure it's longer than the original if you take your time and go out of your way to complete all the requests. In the first half of the game I was super into it and planning to jump right into NG+ once I was done but for some reason I wasn't really feeling it as much in the last few chapters and now I'm not sure if I wanna do another run immediately. Honestly couldn't say if it's me or the game. That being said, I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out. Out of all the recent REmakes, this is probably the best one. It's Resident Evil 4 but better and it doesn't feel like anything significant is missing. I really wonder where they'll go from here. Resident Evil IX is probably next but as far as remakes go I can't imagine they'll stop here since they're kind of on a roll. RE5 seems like the logical one but I honestly can't think of a more pointless game to remake. It's not that old and it wasn't that memorable or beloved. There's admittedly a ton of room for improvement, though. I think Code Veronica is the one that needs it the most, though. Especially since when they were remastering all the old games they never bothered putting it on PC. I'm still baffled as to why and it remains the only mainline RE game that I still haven't played because of it. Or they could just stop with the remakes. This seems as good a point as any to call it a day and focus on new stuff.

I still need to do a professional run of this version to get the last achievement. How bad was it? Professional difficulty in RE5 had times when I wanted to fucking scream lol.

No DLSS I shudder to think of the performance hit with RT on...

I've been interested in it for a while but really couldn't justify spending money on a dead game with no sign of a rollback update. Now that they've confirmed a sequel/update with rollback and crossplay, though, I've been on the lookout for a deal. I'll probably have to pay for the update to Rising but at least now I won't feel like I'm wasting my time on a dead game while playing this.

I still haven't found the time to start Zero but come on. I can't not get this day one. Maybe now I'll play them back-to-back. Oh yeah, speaking of JRPGs I don't have time to play, there was a sale on Atelier games recently so I spent a hundred bucks cause I have more money than sense lately.

Holy shit, I... I did it. It's not a platinum/100% yet but this is definitely the hardest achievement I've ever earned. It was my goal to get it before Street Fighter 6 in June but I honestly never expected to actually pull it off. I can never play ranked again lmao.

I love how they just finally confirm this on a random Tuesday morning with no trailer or even a screenshot, just some key art. I mean, I get that it's roughly the game's one year anniversary but still.

I guess it's samurai week or something... Kinda forgot this was coming so soon. I just got started with Returnal last night and still haven't finished P5R nor Midnight Suns (oh god and a friend gifted me Hi-Fi Rush last week, so I gotta continue that as well lol), so idk when I'm gonna get around to it. But since this one doesn't have any sequel baggage preventing me from jumping right into it, I don't mind supporting it day one. I'll probably just start it whenever I feel like it and just keep bouncing between all of these games for a while, I guess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I tried Samurai Shodown the other night. Seems pretty fun but uh, the rollback netcode definitely needs some more work.

Why, you little- Nevermind, we're good.