toxicitizen

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.

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.