toxicitizen

Ah, ok. It was already pretty high when I first checked so I was wondering if they had some early big investors or what. The late 2019 date isn't too surprising, though. It's clearly in the very early stages. They refer to all the art as being "prototype screenshots" and the gameplay trailer really looks like more of a pre-rendered proof of concept than actual gameplay. Also, did you follow the whole legal thing surrounding the investment aspect of Fig? They only managed to clear that very recently, so until like last week Psychonauts 2 still couldn't receive the investment half of its funding.

Looks like moving to Fig didn't have much of an impact on their chances at successful crowdfunding. The campaign launched today and it's already a little over 75% funded. Seems like a sure thing already. I would've been really tempted to get in for a free copy of Stasis but the 25$ tier is sold out, for some reason. :/

Dude, beat your own damn games! I already have enough trouble keeping up with mine as it is...

Ended up cancelling most of my Fall pre-orders except for Trails of Cold Steel II but I just got this as an early birthday present. Probably won't get around to it for a little while (I've barely touched Cold Steel II and I'll have to finish that first) but I was a little worried it would become hard to find sooner rather than later, so I'm glad to have my copy waiting for me on the shelf.

Quantum Break. (sorry about the double post but this is going to be another wall of text, so I thought it better to keep them separate) God. Fucking. Damn it. Why did I even play this? I should've known better. I knew the IP is essentially DOA and I knew I would love the hell out of it. After Alan Wake and this, it's getting kinda hard to be a Remedy fan. I really hope that if they ever make another big, story-focused game (and they've hinted that they have 2 such projects in development atm) that they'll at least be smart enough to NOT set it up as the first installment with the assumption of sequels. Like, seriously, it's basically a curse at this point. Max Payne killed off most of its cast and left little room for a sequel: massive hit and they regretted doing so when the time came to make Max Payne 2. Alan Wake and Quantum Break were both set up as obvious first installments with sequel hooks and cliffhangers: both fail to sell enough to get sequels greenlit. Just... fucking hell. And I don't think Remedy own the Quantum Break IP, so unlike Alan Wake, there's no room for delusional, wishful thinking "a sequel totally might happen one day!" hopes. But I digress. Quantum Break's pretty great! Not sure why some people thought it sucked, to be honest. I mean, it's no Alan Wake but it's kind of like a Max Payne spiritual successor? I've been kinda meh on shooters for the past 2-3 years and it's a Remedy game, so the story was obviously the main appeal here. But I genuinely loved the combat in this one. The time powers are pretty rad to play with. The only time you need to hide behind cover is when you're waiting on your powers' cooldowns. As soon as they're ready, you go right back to time dashing, time stopping and just generally fucking all kinds of shit up. It's pretty goddamn fun! ...except for the final boss fight. He has this weird instakill attack that was some horseshit-level garbage. It's the section of the game I had to restart the most. Way to end a great experience on such a negative note. Although, to be fair, I didn't go out of my way to explore for upgrade points, so none of my powers were maxed out. It's entirely possible I was underpowered and made it more difficult than it should've been. Another aspect where I didn't expect the game to blow me away like it did is the production values. It's admittedly been a while since I've played any kind of huge blockbuster kinda game, though. So, I guess it might not have been as impressive if I had played Uncharted 4 or Rise of the Tomb Raider earlier this year. But yeah, Quantum Break has some pretty impressive stuff going on. There's your more "typical" action set pieces, like crossing a bridge that's half-frozen in time mid-collision with a huge boat. But there's also some pretty cool looking visual effects. One area has this whole fucked up time thing going on so it's constantly shifting as you walk through it. You see not only the lighting changing constantly to reflect the passage of time but also the entire geometry of the area is changing on the fly around you as you see the machine that was in there get built in fast-forward. Here's a clip of it, finding a good one without some obnoxious let's player's stupid-ass commentary over the footage was way more difficult than it should've been... Anyway, cool stuff! Contrary to what you might've heard about the UWP version of the game, the Steam version is actually pretty solid. The one major drawback is by design and it's that the game uses some pretty heavy (as in computationally expensive) global illumination, so it doesn't run as well as you'd expect it to. I wouldn't say it has performance issues, though, because the scaling option is there to try and mitigate it, which is something. Basically, if scaling is on then the game is actually rendering at a lower resolution (in my case, setting the game to 1080p meant it was actually rendering at 720p) and upscaling to your selected resolution. This makes the game run much better but results in the final image being super blurry, which really sucks considering how good the game looks otherwise. On the bright side, this game is going to still look pretty good in a few years once we have hardware that can brute force through it and run it at high resolution with scaling turned off. Oh and there's also that TV show thing. I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about that, to be honest. It wasn't as awful as I expected, I actually kind of enjoyed the episodes. When it was time for one to start, I never felt like skipping them or turning the game off or anything. And it does allow them to flesh out some of the villains in a way that wouldn't have normally been possible in a game. Here's the thing, though: this IS a game. The TV show aspect didn't hurt the experience but I don't think it particularly improved it either. Having little live-action clips playing on TVs in Alan Wake was a cool idea, it helped flesh out the world, set the tone and just generally added to the experience. Having about a third of Quantum Break's story being relegated to actual TV show episodes didn't feel particularly necessary or even worthwhile, though. Especially since you can actually skip them and not really miss out on anything crucial. I don't think the game would've been worse off without them. Gonna have to call this one a failed experiment, I think. So, yeah, really glad this one made its way to Steam. I really enjoyed it, despite the few unresolved plot threads that were clearly intended to be picked up in a sequel. The most frustrating part of that was Microsoft's bullshit PR spin: "Quantum Break sold, like, totally super great, you guys. Totally. Just, you know, not every game needs a sequel and stuff." Then there's the fact that Microsoft and Remedy's partnership has ended. At least it had something of a satisfying conclusion to the game's events. It's clear the story's not over but it's not a straight up cliffhanger like Alan Wake, it's more like a sequel tease. Speaking of which, those Alan Wake easter eggs were just mean. Prior to QB's launch, Remedy seemed to be strongly hinting that Alan Wake 2 was next but that's clearly not happening. But hey, at least their next game shouldn't be locked down by bullshit exclusivity to shitty platforms. So, that's something... Anyway, now that I've wrapped this one up, it's time to get started on my spooky games marathon!

I beat a bunch of puzzle games. So, after beating Talos Principle, I kinda wanted more quality puzzle goodness. So, first I fired up The Witness because I still had that timed challenge thing to do. Kept me busy for a couple hours and reminded me of how awesome The Witness was, which is what led me to the first entry: Braid. Like I said, I was reminded of how great The Witness is, so I decided to revisit the game that originally brought Jonathan Blow into the spotlight. I played it years ago when it came out on PS3 and thought it was alright but had a little bit of trouble with it. This time, it felt much easier and I actually appreciated it a lot more. There's some pretty clever puzzle design in there. I didn't even attempt to do the speedrun achievement back then but I'm tempted to go for it now since it's the only one I'm missing. I also had no idea there was a true ending, so I'll probably keep at it until I've at least collected all the hidden stars. Q.U.B.E. Director's Cut. Basically, a Portal-inspired first person puzzle game but without any of what made Portal so great. I played the original release a while back and thought it was kinda meh. Not bad but not particularly fun. Pretty sure I got this rerelease for free, so I thought I'd see what's different. For one, they actually added a story that's entirely told through voiceovers. It's pretty fucking lame and dumb but I love that they cared enough about their mediocre little puzzle game to actually go to the trouble of adding it. I can appreciate that. I don't think the actual campaign changed at all except for the ending sequence, though. I don't think I'd recommend it. Unless you already own it, I guess. Puzzle Dimension. This one I had been playing through back in july/august but ended up stopping, for some reason. I think because Deus Ex came out or something like that? Can't remember when I stopped exactly but it wasn't because of the game itself. It's actually pretty damn good! It originally came to my attention a little while ago when Matthewmatosis did a video on an old PS1 puzzle game called Kula World in which you control a ball through abstract, grid-based 3D levels. I thought the game looked fun but I wasn't going to bother hunting down a physical copy for an obscure PS1 game. Then someone on reddit recommended Puzzle Dimension as a similar game, and through the magic of cheap game bundles the game was already in my Steam library! Anyway, it's essentially the same game as Kula World and was even made by some of the same devs. It's pretty good, if you like this type of game it's definitely worth a look. Oh and I guess I also finished Picross E last night. Bought Picross E2 right away. I don't know what I'll do once I make it through the entire series, I don't think I can go back to pooping without Picross!

Ghostbusters' a good one, actually. It might not be horror/spooky but it's definitely Halloween-y. I played a little bit of it when it first came out and it was pretty good, think I'll add it to my list. Would probably be a good idea to play some lighter stuff between games like Amnesia and Outlast. Metro 2033 is great and has some pretty spooky parts! Oh. Well, it's bound to go on sale around Halloween. Speaking of which, there's currently a robot-themed Midweek Madness sale on Steam. SOMA is on sale, if anyone's interested. I recently played it and it's pretty damn good. The Five Nights at Freddy's games are also on sale, if you're into those.

First Alien Isolation and now Alan Wake?! Man, you guys have much better games to play through than I do. Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure I have Dead Space 3 on Origin but I wasn't a fan of the direction they took it into, so there's a reason why I still haven't played it. But if I somehow manage to beat my entire list and need something else, I think I'd be more likely to do that Resident Evil 4 professional difficulty run I've been putting off for a while. Oh and I guess I still need to play through the RE5 DLC episodes. And I'm just now remembering that the Penumbra games exist. Yeah, Dead Space 3 ain't happening. As for whether specific games count or not, let's just say anything that qualifies as even remotely horror-ish/creepy counts? I mean, I've got Grim Dawn on my list. I forgot to cancel my Humble Monthly sub in time, so I need an excuse to play it lol.

Alien Isolation is a legit great game regardless of spookines. You should play it anyway. Sure, why not? It's basically Resident Evil in space. Necromorphs are totally spooky.

You guys planning on playing some horror games this month? Each year, I tell myself it would be fun to play some around Halloween but I never end up actually doing it. I was already trying to convince myself to finally play Amnesia soon, so I figured I might as well just run with it and do a full month of focusing on my horror backlog. Had a look through my Steam library and here's what I've got so far: Some of these have been on my backlog for a while, so it would be good to finally scratch them off. Anyone else planning something similar? If so, share your plans/progress in here!

That's pretty awesome. I played a ton of Uplink back in the day but never actually finished it. Might have to give this mod a shot at some point.

Ha, really? You've certainly picked some rather niche, very Japan-centric ones to focus on. Not that I disagree with your choices, I just never really thought of those as gateway games.

Seems there's some fuckery going on with the physical edition, with people apparently getting emails about a delay from Amazon and being asked to confirm they still want their order. Was already kind of annoyed about not having my copy shipped until next week, so it sucks but I decided I'd rather miss out on the physical extras and get to play the game tonight rather than wait and risk it being delayed beyond next week. Cancelled my physical order and bought it directly from Steam instead.

That's the date the crowdfunding goes live on Fig. Coming to PC, Mac, Linux, PS4 and XO. Speaking of which, this should be moved to multiplat. (ffs, Ethan!) Also, sounds like they've teamed up with the Stasis guys for the art/art direction. So, that's an interesting choice. That game looks pretty damn good. Some more details:

So, uh, this is actually pretty alright? I would've expected complete shit but it almost sounds like old-school Metallica.

Damn, had to go to bed right after posting but this revived the thread more than I expected lol.

I'll simply preface this by saying that it's all speculation but there seems to be some evidence to support it, so potentially massive (and I do mean massive) spoiler for Mankind Divided sequel? Essentially, the theory is that Which, considering the missing chunk of his memory and what the Harvester side-quest gets into, kind of wouldn't be completely out of left field? Then there's the main menu art... Here's where it starts to be potentially very convincing, though. Those of you that picked the Versalife bank vault option, can you confirm whether this is actually in it? http://imgur.com/a/5wsZO Obviously, the main thing of interest would be very easy to miss there. Ideally, someone still has a save they can load up and check?

SOMA. After not touching it for almost two weeks, I finally decided to quit being a baby and played through the last hour and a half of the game last night. That was a hell of an ending. I felt a little disconnected from the main character because his reaction to what happens made me go "Uh, yeah, no shit dude? We already went over this, how are you still not getting it?", but it was perfectly in character for him so I was fine with it. Overall, this is a damn good sci-fi game but only a decent horror game. Despite the first sentence of the previous paragraph, the game is actually not that scary. Or rather, it's not "Amnesia scary". The game was scarier whenever monsters weren't around. The atmosphere and sound design are fantastic and do a great job of building tension and keeping you on edge but then you run into a monster and it doesn't quite work. Take Alien: Isolation for example: whenever the Xenomorph would show up, I'd pretty much instantly go "Nope. Fuck this shit. I'm hiding under this table right here and never leaving. This is my life now. Under the table." In SOMA, it was a bit more like "Oh, shit! ... well, I guess I'll just kinda go around it this way and... yeah, that works." That's not to say the encounters weren't tense but like I said, I'm a fucking pussy when it comes to horror. I tend to get really immersed in stuff, so horror games are particularly effective on me. I was also playing exclusively at night and wearing headphones for the entire game, so I pretty much set myself up for the game to be as scary as possible and I still felt like it was a bit lacking in that regard. It was stressful but nowhere near as scary as Alien: Isolation was. In the game's defense, though, there's actually a good amount of variety to the monsters. So, there was always the uncertainty of not knowing what I would run into next, and that certainly added some tension to it. And, to be fair, some of them did work a little better than the others. The story, on the other hand, is where the game was the most effective. I could tell almost immediately why the general consensus seemed to be that it was a great sci-fi game that could've used a bit less horror. The plot is actually pretty interesting, to the point where the stress of the horror gameplay was almost getting in the way of me just wanting to see where the story would go next. That being said, I don't think removing it entirely would've worked. The plot actually gets into some pretty heavy existential horror stuff, so there's a consistent tone there. I think what happened is that, after Amnesia's success, Frictional knew what kind of expectations they would be facing and likely felt that they had to have some monster hide-and-seek stuff in there. The thing is, the monsters end up being the most forgettable part of the game while the ideas it explores and what those ideas imply are what's truly scary. That's what will ultimately stick with you and creep you out the most, not the interchangeable monster chase sequences. I don't think I would remove them entirely, but toning them down and not billing the game as another monster hide-and-seek thing might've been a good idea. ------------------------------------ The Talos Principle. I initially started this one shortly after finishing The Witness last winter but I stopped playing and left it unfinished until now. I didn't stop because it was bad or anything, I just got busy with school and then I think something else came out (XCOM 2?) that kept me busy long enough for me to kinda forget about it. I started it over a couple days ago, mostly because while there wasn't much going on plot-wise, what was there was pretty interesting and I barely remembered any of it. There's honestly not a whole lot to say about this one. As far as first-person puzzle games go, it's up there with Portal. It doesn't have any mechanics as unique or novel as the portal gun and it's not as AAA in its approach to storytelling (it's also not a comedy, so the tone is completely different) but there's a really interesting story in there if you're willing to do some light reading. It's kinda funny to be making a double entry for this and SOMA because they both deal with very similar themes and ideas (to the point where there's even some overlap in names used for plot elements). It was realizing this that made me get off my figurative ass and fire up SOMA to finish it last night. It was pretty interesting to see two games explore the same ideas with completely different tones and genres, so I'm really glad I ended up playing both of them around the same time. I haven't played the DLC yet but I'll get to it soon, either later tonight or tomorrow. Not sure what it's supposed to be about but I'm definitely eager for more. Speaking of which, Talos Principle 2 hasn't been officially announced but Croteam did confirm that it would happen eventually. So, now I really want them to hurry up and get Serious Sam 4 done already so they can get to work on it ASAP.

That would be the physical edition coming out at the same time as the Steam release. Haven't bought a physical PC game in forever but it's the same price and comes with some bonus stuff, so I figured why the hell not. I assumed it wouldn't even be available in Canada at all, so it was a nice surprise to find it on Amazon.ca. Also, man it's good to finally be able to buy this one. I love Remedy but not even them could get me to buy from the Windows 10 store. Really hope QB isn't an exception and that we'll see more of MS' PC releases eventually hit Steam. I'd like to also be able to get ScaleBound at some point down the line. Unless it sucks, I guess. I trust Platinum and Kamiya but nothing they've shown so far has looked particularly amazing.

Grabbed a couple things in Humble's end of summer sale. Both are games I'm planning to go back to and finish in the near future, so why not.

So, turns out all that talk about which is better between Phantom Blood and Battle Tendency was a complete waste of time because holy shit, Stardust Crusaders blows them both out of the water. Like, seriously, how is Battle Tendency the fan favorite one when Stardust Crusaders is this fucking good?! Halfway through season 1, some of my thoughts so far: Oh and that OP is SO GOOD!

Because they're Real Gamers™ and anything that compromises the integrity of their sacred hobby by being inclusive to less skilled players (or, you know, people with fucking handicaps) is Sacrilege™ of the highest order. Yeah, picked it up after folks from here were raving about it. Unlike you, though, I loved the more experimental elements of it. That stuff was great. It was the moment-to-moment gameplay that killed it for me. I remember the exact moment I stopped, too. It's one of the only games I can remember actually making a conscious decision to drop. I lost against a boss and had no desire to replay the entire dungeon that led to it, which made me realize I wasn't enjoying the game all that much. I kinda want to give it another shot, though. Especially given what I've heard about NG+. It's why I'm kinda hoping they'll remaster it. I'd really like to know how necessary it is for the sequel. Given how fantastic Automata looks, it would make the difference between waiting and hoping for a remaster vs looking for my disc and actually turning on my PS3.

If by best game on PS3 you mean game I quit halfway through because it just wasn't fun. Also, apparently the game has an auto mode that takes care of the fighting for you, so that anyone can enjoy it for the story even if they can't handle Platinum's glorious combat. I wonder if this game is niche enough to fly under the radar and avoid the idiotic outrage this kind of news usually causes. There's already some rustled jimmies on NeoGAF but those guys can be... let's go with "special".

Yeah, if IX and X came to PC, this is most certainly coming as well. The only question is when. The real question is what they'll do with Kingdom Hearts. I'm also curious about their stance on spin-offs like World of Final Fantasy. I assume it'll come but you can never be sure about what goes on in S-E's demented brain.