toxicitizen

Not gonna play it any time soon (still need to play the Hitman 2 expansion levels and I want to 100% the game before moving on to Hitman 3) but they just announced they'll delist the first two games and rebrand Hitman 3 as Hitman: World of Assassination. It'll now include the H1 and H2 levels, so they'll also be jacking up the price. Since I already own the first two games, I decided to grab the game now while it's on sale. Oh and I forgot this one in my last post but I also got this: It was paired up with Gloomwood in a bundle on Steam, which immediately got me curious and then I realized I had seen a trailer for it a while back and it looked really cool. I still haven't touched the full version of Gloomwood but I'm always down for some retro immersive sims.

I had no idea the first game was due for a ray-tracing update. Thanks for the heads-up. Although, if recent similar updates are any indication, I'm starting to suspect my 3080 will turn out to be nowhere near as future proof as I expected it to be. I ended up deciding not to replay Witcher 3 right now because you basically need DLSS3's frame generation to get a decent framerate. It honestly runs like shit* on my 3080 and I wouldn't expect Plague Tale to be any different given how demanding the sequel apparently is. I'm sure my ultrawide monitor's resolution plays a role here, though. *by shit I mean consistently sub-60fps, which isn't a huge deal but it annoys the hell out of me considering how much I paid for the damn card and it's just low enough for gsync to not be able to help smooth things out

Already 33% off. I was considering it day one so why the hell not? Also grabbed some Age of Empires games (Definitive Editions) cause they were like 5 bucks each along with Which I've been meaning to get for a while now. It sounds right up my alley and I've been itching for a proper stealth game ever since it became obvious that there isn't going to be a third Styx game...

I never finished the PSP version back in the day so I'm glad I get to give the game another shot. I'm like 3 hours in and it's pretty fun so far.

I think this is one of those games where the critics are kinda missing the mark because apparently it's been doing insanely well on Game Pass, which is probably driving sales on other platforms like Steam as well.

Holy fuck did I speak too soon. From looking at pictures online, it seemed like a 32:9 monitor would be massive but a 21:9 (what I got) would only feel slightly larger than my old monitor. But no, this thing is huge! I had to rework some of my cable "management" just to get my two tiny speakers to fit on the desk alongside both monitors lmao. At this point, I'm just going to need a bigger desk, I think. My PC is close to the radiator, which is fine in summer since it's off, but now winter is coming and I no longer have anywhere to move it to. At least the side facing the radiator is the back chamber with only the cables and the PSU. The vent on that side is exhaust from the PSU, so at least it won't suck any hot air in. Hopefully that'll shield the rest of the PC from the heat somewhat... Edit: oh and while I'm here The thing about 40K is that it's so rad that it makes you want more 40K. edit2: Godammit, Darktide! They haven't made a 40K Total War yet so this will have to do for now.

Yeah, if you have a nice TV that you play PC games on then a high-end monitor probably isn't worth it. In my case, it's not just for games. My PC is basically my TV as well. I watch everything on it. That makes high-end monitors significantly more appealing. I'm sure eventually I'll want to upgrade again to a 32:9 monitor...

What's that? I bought a brand new monitor less than a year ago? Well, it's not an ultrawide ok?! Shut up, Ethan!!! But yeah, I've been eyeing this particular model all year and was already considering buying it as a personal reward/celebration. And then they finally announced the release date for the Witcher 3 update and gave me the final little push I needed.

1440p. I updated my drivers tonight and tried using DLSS on Performance mode and there was a noticeable improvement. The game could definitely use some more optimization but it's definitely manageable. And if you can live without ray-tracing then it's a non-issue.

With ray-tracing (at max settings) on it can barely hold 60fps on my RTX 3080 at the best of times. It'll shoot up in an elevator or whatever enclosed area but when shit's going down it dips pretty hard. The most demanding area is, weirdly enough, the main hub. My framerate drops to the low 40s in it. It looks absolutely incredible, mind you, but yeah. The game also kept crashing for my friend but that stopped (and performance really improved) once he turned ray-tracing off completely. He's on a 3060, though. I haven't done much tweaking yet but I'm hoping that with DLSS and the right settings I can get it to stay above 60fps even with ray-tracing on.

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide I had briefly tried one of the betas a few weeks ago but my friends and I pre-ordered and finally had a proper co-op session last night. Holy fuck, this game is great! Like, Vermintide was super fun but 40K just makes everything better. They really nailed the 40K aesthetic so it's a real treat to see the grim darkness of the far future (where there is only war) done justice in such high fidelity. Can't wait to play more!

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story I've never been a huge Weird Al fan but I got curious about this when a friend of mine told me it's not a biopic and more of a Walk Hard-style parody that just happens to also be about Weird Al. And yeah, this is a pretty solid comedy. It's obviously mostly bullshit and at times barely even operates on real-world logic but I thought it was pretty fucking funny. I especially loved how

My friends and I played a shit ton of Vermintide 1 and 2, so this is a no-brainer.

Normally I'd never pre-order so far in advance but Voidu has a 30% off code that works on basically everything and I don't anticipate finding a better deal than that. I'm basically getting the deluxe edition for 30 bucks off. I was tempted to grab more like Miles Morales but my playthrough of P5R has kinda slowed down over the last week so I don't anticipate being done with it anytime soon.

You'd think three people all having stopped on the first puzzle would be a red flag but it honestly makes me even more interested in the game lmao. Kinda like when a movie has a low audience score on Rotten Tomatoes but the critics scores is either high or close to 50%.

I've been hearing the same buzz and it got me curious. I haven't watched it yet but I have seen a short clip that I'm pretty sure is the exact same thing you describe in your spoiler tag, and yeah I had the same reaction. It's definitely gory as hell but it's so over the top that it becomes comical. My expectations for the movie changed completely after that lol.

I'd argue that's Dead Space 2. More action-y but still very much horror. Dead Space 3 is the Resident Evil 5 of the series. It went too far in the other direction. Although I've admittedly not gotten very far into it, so my impressions could be way off. All I know is I checked out early on when I was getting into Uncharted set pieces and gunfights with human enemies. I should probably give it another shot at this point. This far removed, I no longer care or have any expectations so I'd probably have an easier time enjoying it on its own merits. Pretty sure I grabbed it when they finally released it on Steam, too lol.

What's your playtime? The 180h it took me to 100% the first one has me kind of apprehensive about digging into this one lol.

It's finally here I was hoping to play it at midnight but I slept like shit all week and crashed pretty hard around 10PM. It's gonna be a long day...

Shit, is that really an issue? I kinda figured the two series would coexist independently without ever really acknowledging each other. Didn't think I'd have to worry about Yakuza spoilers here lol. Oh well, I was planning to focus more on Yakuza before getting to it anyway. Thanks for the heads up.

Judgment Man, that took me way longer than I expected. My plan was to get through both Judgment and Trails from Zero before P5R's PC launch but I barely made it through Judment... I was actually getting worried that I wouldn't even finish Judgment in time, so near the end I stopped doing all the side-cases as they popped up and focused on the main case just to be safe. On the one hand, playing through Yakuza 1-3 (especially 3...) had me a little worried that Yakuza 0 was a lightning in a bottle kinda deal. They were all good but none of them came close to reaching the same highs as Y0. On the other hand, I had high hopes for Judgment because the detective/serial killer premise sounded so cool. Well, I'm happy to say that Judgment blew even Yakuza 0 out of the water. Maybe it's down to personal preferences, but yeah this game was very my shit. The characters were great, the plot was insanely compelling (and only got more so as it went along) and, considering how repetitive the Yakuza games can get, the gameplay was surprisingly fresh. It could've leaned a little bit more on the detective aspects, though. You do plenty of tailing missions but early on they introduce different detective mechanics like choosing the more important questions to ask first to get bonus points or having you put on a costume to infiltrate a building but the game seems to kinda forget about all that stuff. Like, there's a friend event that has you doing quick jobs for an actual locksmith and it's the most lockpicking I did of the entire game. It honestly felt like they went "Wait, shit, we forgot about the lockpicking. Quick, add something!" I could've done with less tailing and more breaking and entering. The chase sequences were fun, though. So yeah, if I have one hope for the sequel, it would be for it to lean even more into the detective stuff. Break the Yakuza mold even more. Other than that, the combat felt like such a massive improvement after Yakuza 3 lol. I stubbornly went for hard difficulty again and by the end of the game even the boss fights were trivially easy thanks to Tiger Drop. Yagami's faster, more acrobatic fighting style was a welcome change from Kiryu's slower brawler move set. Vaulting over dudes and launching into a backflip from a wallrun was so much fun that I barely ever went for my usual weapon of choice: the trusty bicycle. At first it was kinda weird to run around Kamurocho as someone other than Kiryu but that's probably just because I'm not far enough into the series. I haven't made it to the games with multiple protagonists yet. Like I said above, the story was fantastic. Not all of the twists and turns were great and, at the time, I thought the reveal of who the Mole is was handled weirdly and could've been a bit more dramatic but everything that came after had me on the edge of my seat. And, when you take all the subsequent reveals into account, it all falls into place quite nicely so the way it was handled makes sense in hindsight. Also, that opening theme is such a banger! Every single time I booted up the game, I would go into the cutscenes menu to watch it like I was starting an episode of a TV show. Don't know when I'll get around to Lost Judgment but I'm really looking forward to it now. It also has me hopeful that the games really improved over time so I'm way more excited about continuing Yakuza now than I was coming out of Yakuza 3 lol. But for now, there's no time to start anything and hope to finish it by friday so I think maybe I'll try to finish Spider-Man instead. I'm like 70% of the way through the story according to the game, so it should be doable.

The last thing I need is more games to play right now but I saw that Code Vein was down to like 8 bucks for the Deluxe Edition and it finally made me go "fuck it, I've been wanting to try it for years". And then I thought to check if Scarlet Nexus was also discounted and that one was more of an impulse purchase.

Some PC updates. RGBs: So I mentioned that reverting to a months old nvidia driver allowed me to sync my GPU with the rest of my RGBs in iCue. Well, Spider-Man forced me to update my driver because it was having graphical glitches on the old one. So for the last couple months I've been keeping an eye on r/nvidia whenever a new driver version comes out because that's where I found out it was driver-related. Conversation about this particular issue seemed to have died down, so today I went back to google to see if anything new came up. And, well, yeah... Turns out this entire time the issue could be fixed by running iCue as administrator. Setting it to always run as admin breaks the "launch on startup" option, so I have to start it manually every time but hey, at least I'm back to having a fully synced up PC! Random restarts: These happened very unpredictably so I'm really hesitant to claim anything definitively but I haven't had a single one since upgrading to a 1200W PSU. IIRC I only ever experienced them with FFVIIR and I was almost done with it when I did the upgrade but I finished it without experiencing any more and I've since spent a significant amount of time playing other demanding games without any issues. I can't rule out the possibility that there was something about FFVIIR in particular that taxed my 3080 in a weird way but otherwise I'm pretty sure Ghostwire Tokyo, GotG and Spider-Man were all more demanding since I played them with RTX on. So hopefully both of these issues are solved permanently!

That's an ad read, though, not exactly deep acting. And even then it kinda proves my point. It got annoying pretty fast. Not that I'm trying to defend Chris Pratt here, mind you. I expect him to suck lol. I just don't think people going "It should be Charles Martinet!!!" are thinking too hard about this.

Digital Deluxe Edition is currently the star deal on Fanatical and also happens to be the historical low price. With P5R finally coming to PC in 10 days, I have no more reason not to get this. It's still baffling to me that the spin-off sequel released on Steam literally years before the base game but at least the nonsense is finally coming to an end.