toxicitizen

I don't think it ever did, no. They announced the Steam release months ago and almost immediately after started pretending it didn't exist. It's pretty obvious that some kind of marketing deal with Sony happened and they're not going to acknowledge the PC version's existence again until after the PS4 release. It's been mentioned off-handedly a couple times during streams and such but never in any kind of official capacity. What I'm curious about is whether the March 10th date was old and no longer correct or just revealed prematurely. I mean, even if it was a fuck up it has to have come from somewhere. Given S-E's habit of just dumping their stuff on Steam at the last minute with no fanfare whatsoever, my money's on an announcement on March 8th with a release on the 10th.

Lmao, Square-Enix have deleted the trailer that mentioned Steam and have reuploaded a version that doesn't. This would be incredible annoying if it wasn't so fucking ridiculous. Watch the Steam trailer magically reappear on March 8th...

Damn, if true that's actually a little surprising. I was expecting something like a 1 month delay at best. Kinda fucks with my plans as I was increasingly considering giving the original another shot before Automata's release. Leaves me only ~2 and a half weeks to wrap up Atelier Sophie and do Nier but I'm not anywhere near done with Atelier. The story is wrapping up but I still have so much shit to do, that game is a real time sink. I'm enjoying the hell out of it, too, so I want to keep playing and 100% the achievements.

An important special message from Yoko Taro!

Looking pretty damn sweet!

With Zestiria wrapped up, I can finally justify getting this. I still have Disgaea 2 to finish but I'm more excited about finally trying this series right now.

Tales of Zestiria. I finally beat a Tales game! After I got bored with Symphonia and dropped it after 20h, I figured the series might just not be for me since it's generally one of the most highly-regarded entries. But I still wanted to give it another shot and Zestiria being on Steam made it the natural choice. I'm really glad I did because I ended up really enjoying this one, which is kinda weird because, from what I can tell, most Tales fan seemed to hate it. It probably helped that I went in with incredibly low expectations but I think that was the correct approach for this series. Looking back, I can kinda see why Symphonia didn't click. I went in with the completely wrong expectations. I had heard so much praise for it over the years that I had it built up in my mind as some kind of semi-hidden amazing JRPG that would stand alongside the greats like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI and what not and lmao, that is not this series. But back to Zestiria. You play as Sorey, who becomes Anime Jesus the Shepherd and has to go defeat Ganondorf the Lord of Calamity. As far as JRPG plots go, it's incredibly straightforward and laid back. You're not gonna fight the evil pope to keep him from resurrecting Cthulhu or find an ancient spaceship or go to the moon on a whale or any other kind of typical JRPG nonsense. I mean, I love that stuff but now that all's said and done I kind of appreciate how relatively normal Zestiria was. The main plot is a little dull at times but (most of) the characters are very likable and there's these little optional skits you can watch throughout the game that are way more fun and charming than anything from the game's actual cutscenes. My biggest gripe (and this was true of Symphonia as well) remains the combat system. It's more actiony but you're essentially locked "on rails" towards the enemies as far as movement goes. It ended up growing on me in Zestiria but the side-view camera in Symphonia really made it seem like glorified 2D combat, which was a huge bummer at the time. I started enjoying it more once I really dug into the Artes system and the mechanics finally clicked but I could never shake the thought that I would enjoy it a lot more if the combat was more Ys-like. The game is also "open-world" which is just a buzzword-y way of saying it has these huge open, barren areas you have to cross to move between cities and dungeons. It's so bad that the new game actually introduced a fucking hoverboard to make traversal less of a chore. Although, to be fair, the parts where I had the most fun were when the main story gave me more open objectives (go find/collect all the XYZs) and I was mostly free to explore and do side-quests as I pleased. So the open-world thing is not a complete failure, it just needs some work. Overall, it's not my new favorite JRPG or anything but I enjoyed it enough to want to play more of the series. I'll probably give Symphonia another shot at some point but right now I'm more interested in Tales of Berseria. I'll wait until the price drops a bit but everything I'm hearing makes it sound like it improves on all the issues I had with Zestiria and apparently the story is pretty good (I'm hearing "the best since Vesperia" a lot but I don't know what that means and at this point I take everything fans of the series say with a grain of salt anyway). Oh and if you play Zestiria on PC then definitely install the Zestiria Fix mod. It adds a lot of cool features but the main one is 60fps. I played the first 5 hours or so at 30 and thought it was fine but then I installed it just to check it out and holy shit, it's night and day. The game seriously benefits from the framerate boost, it's very much a "you can't go back" kinda deal. I think the mod had some issues early on where some animations and game logic were sped up but the modder did a pretty damn good job of fixing all of that, so it's mostly flawless now. The only issues I encountered were very minor stuff. Mostly just cloth physics sometimes going apeshit during cutscenes.

Maybe now but he wasn't always one. Also, holy shit, 2011?!? Goddamn, this place is ancient. This is probably the longest I've been on a forum before it died. Well, there's another one that's technically still up but it gets like one post every two years and it's almost always someone going "holy shit, this place is still up?!". Sounds like he did you a favor there...

Resubbed to Humble Monthly. I skipped the last two months because I wasn't interested in the early unlock games but ended up regretting it when they turned out pretty good (especially last month). I've also been meaning to get back into Total War for some time now and this seems like the best/most fun entry point, so two birds one stone. Of course, now that I've subbed for the month, they're probably scrambling behind the scenes to replace all the good games they had planned with shitty ones. I look forward to my duplicate copies of Duke Nukem Forever and Aliens: Colonial Marines. Oh and I still think not calling it Total Warhammer was the stupidest missed opportunity in the history of gaming. I mean, fuck brand recognition. That would've been the coolest title ever!

That's not a very nice thing to say about Chewblaha.

Have you tried Ethan Must Die mode yet? The achievement for beating that is the main reason why I don't expect I'll be able to regain my 100% once the DLC achievements are added on Steam.

You don't even need to go that far, you can just interact directly with the Steamworks API without actually launching any game. There's a program specifically for it but I never used it. I kinda want to sometimes to reset some games (for example, most of XSEED's releases of older Falcom games have glitchy achievements at launch) but I could never get a clear answer on whether or not it's considered ban-worthy, so I don't want to risk it.

Aaaand done. Of course, no platinum on Steam means that this will be short-lived. As soon as they add the DLC achievements, I'll lose that 100%. But still, not bad overall, even after the inevitable -1.

Hahaha well, when they first announced the port he actually reached out to them on twitter saying he was a big fan of the series and would love to help with the port. It sounds like KT US was very receptive but KT Japan wasn't interested. He did say he gave them some feedback but didn't elaborate on what kind exactly. My guess is the code came from the US branch as a kind of compromise since he couldn't get involved more directly.

It sounds like Atelier is a solid port. Durante was able to get a Steam key from Koei Tecmo like a week ago and, while he's under embargo until it releases, he's been dropping screenshots and vague hints in the Steam thread over on NeoGAF. He's a huge Atelier fan and he seems pretty happy with it, so I think it's safe to assume all's good.

I really want to do the same but money's tight and I just bought an expensive mouse and Atelier next week and...

Mother's Basement finally did his analysis video on the Diamond is Unbreakable OPs. Just skip to the 2:00 mark if you don't want to watch the dumb intro skit. Massive spoilers if you haven't watched DiU, obviously. I'm always blown away by how much symbolism, foreshadowing and sometimes even straight up spoilers they manage to sneak into those. If you like this one, he's done similar videos for the previous parts as well as many other shows. They're usually pretty good.

Damnit, Mal! I was gonna post about that! But yeah, it's pretty cool that XSEED went to the trouble of seeking out Durante's help to fix up the port. They initially went with a Japanese team because all the comments in the source code were in Japanese, so they figured it would make the work easier. That makes Durante's work here doubly impressive. He certainly has a knack for reverse engineering. Hopefully sales will pick up a bit now that the port is in a much better state. It was kinda sad to see XSEED's first real porting effort bomb like that, even if it was understandable given the state it was in.

Well, the tension madhouse had built back up pretty much disappeared instantly once it was pointed out to me that One thing I do absolutely love about madhouse is the addition of cassette tapes, though. There really should've been a hard mode that's basically identical to normal but with tapes and no checkpoints. That would've been perfect and I probably would've enjoyed my first playthrough even more on a mode like that.

Yeah, I certainly loved it. That's not to say it's perfect or without flaws but you can probably get it for like 10 bucks at this point and at that price it's a total no-brainer. Especially if you love RE4 but thought it could use a little more survival in its horror.

People that are still comparing RE7 to Amnesia and Outlast either haven't played RE7 or played a very different game than I did because yeah, it really isn't anything like that beyond the superficial "But but but it's first-person!" complaint. It was a valid concern prerelease because for months after the announcement Capcom were still being very secretive about what the gameplay was actually like, but the final game is Resident Evil through and through. That being said I can't say I agree there. These games are basically spooky stealth games. I would argue that hiding and waiting can't possibly break the flow of the game because it's a core part of the flow of the game. Of course, if you don't like that flow then that's completely valid, but hiding is the game. At least, to the same extent that the gun combat is a major defining trait to Resident Evil's identity, which it sounds like you agree with. They're all horror games but I really wouldn't call Outlast survival horror. Amnesia maybe? I don't know, I haven't played a lot of it but iirc there is some minimal resource management with the oil for your lamp or whatever. Anyway, since you seem to love gun combat with limited ammo, I'd recommend you check out The Evil Within if you haven't already. It's basically RE4 but with a bigger emphasis on resource management. There's still a strong stealth element but you're certainly not helpless and I was constantly on the brink of running out of ammo. It also has a pretty cool Silent Hill-esque atmosphere and the plot is not completely dripping with cheese, so it gets points for that as well.

There's also a resume button in there. It could suggest some kind of console-like pause/suspend feature. The main thing I'm excited about is having separate libraries for apps, games, movies, music, etc, though. The way everything is all thrown into one right now is such a huge pain in the ass. I'd love to build a collection of game soundtracks through Steam but it's kind of a headache to manage the ones I have and their player is kinda shit. So, I usually just end up saying fuck it and listening to them on youtube. :/ This looks to me like it could be more than just a UI update. A lot of features in the current client feel like they were hacked in with little to no thought given to integration. I mean, I'm sure they weren't anticipating eventually selling movies and music. Rebuilding the whole thing from the ground up with a more future-minded architecture would not be a bad idea. You can practically feel the bloat in the current client, so a fresh start would be very welcome.

So, these were found in the latest client beta. You'll notice the library in the pic includes games such as Mortal Combat X, Forza Motorsports 5 and Halo 5 Guardians. So, these are most likely just UI mock-ups. But still, their existence does strongly suggest that Valve is looking at significantly updating the client, which is so, so long overdue.

My Deathadder finally reached a state where I can't put off replacing it any longer. It'll be good to finally get rid of that piece of crap. Never buying anything Razer again. It was a bit more expensive than I was planning but it'll be a very nice (and long overdue) upgrade.