toxicitizen

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.

That's more or less where I'm at. And looking at Charles Martinet's credits on wikipedia, it sounds like he's done basically nothing but Mario. And he's great in the games but that's mostly short catchphrases and nonsensical idiot noises. Like, do people seriously expect that delivery would work in a 2 hours long movie with actual dialogue lol? For all we know, the dude may simply not have the range to do a normal role, let alone be the lead of a big movie.

I laughed out loud when Jay pulled out the 4090. The 3090 he shows is basically the same size/model as my 3080 and it's already so ridiculously massive. The thing barely fits in my gigantic case. Like, we're talking literally a few millimetres of clearance. The more info I hear about the 40 series, the happier I am that I didn't wait for it. I would need a brand new case and likely a new PSU as well due to the next-gen connectors these cards use. I'm not replacing my case within a year of building the PC and I sure as shit am not replacing my PSU for the second time within a year!

Alien Isolation is fantastic and it's a fucking crime that we never got a sequel. The campaign is a bit on the long side but there's just enough immersive-sim DNA in there for me to not mind. I've been meaning to give it a replay for years now although I don't think I'll have time for it this spooky season. Maybe I'll finally do Amnesia instead.

Tekken 7 Finally gave this one a shot because of the Tekken 8 hype. My first impression of the game was not great. It's so different from every other fighting game I've played this year. I mean, going from Street Fighter to Guilty Gear isn't that much of a paradigm shift. Guilty Gear is faster and crazier but they have a lot of fundamentals in common. Tekken is a whole other ball game, though, and it took me a while to get used to it. I played through the story mode, which is so insane that I actually had to stop and go on wikipedia to read the plot summaries of Tekken 1 through 6. Turns out this series goes hard on its nonsensical plot. Then I came back to it and it still seemed fucking insane but at least I had some kind of context now. I also watched Tekken Bloodline on Netflix. It's surprisingly decent. Not sure how much you'd get out of it if you're not already invested in the story of Tekken, though. Anyway, by the end of the story mode I sorta had a better sense of how to play so I picked Kazuya and started practicing some of his simple combos. Played online for a bit and it's actually pretty fun! I have no desire to try getting good at this, though. I've already put so much time into SF and GG that I don't feel like dropping them for something completely different. It's a pretty fun game to play casually and I'm happy to leave it at that. Oh and it has a pretty straightforward achievement list, which was a pleasant surprise coming from a fighting game.

Hey, we're back! I can finally post this. I've waited so long but it's finally here. ...although it's been out for a week and I still haven't started it. I really need to stop getting distracted by side-cases because at this point it's gonna take me another week to finish Judgment and then I won't have enough time left to wrap up Trails from Zero before Persona 5 comes out. I may end up keeping Zero for after P5R, to be honest. I mean, I've already waited like half a decade. What's another month or two?

Didn't they once send a PI to intimidate a modder or something? They'll probably hire a hitman this time lol.

They've actually become desperate enough to announce it Alongside like three more AC games. Which one of these projects will be the next Skulls & Bones-type disaster is anyone's guess! Personally, my money's on this one. It would be perfect. Everyone's been begging them for a Japan AC game just like they were for a pirate game after AC4. My prediction: announcing so many projects at once and so early that they only have codenames is pretty unlike them for their big IPs. This is them trying to either make themselves more attractive for acquisition or manufacture some goodwill to salvage their reputation. I would not be surprised in the least if most of these games never actually see the light of day lol.