toxicitizen

You know, now that I think about it, I'm actually kinda surprised my number is so high this year. It's lower than last year but still pretty close even though I played virtually nothing but MGSV for about a month and a half in Sept/Oct and again spent basically all of November focused on TitS SC. Oh and I spent like another full month during the summer playing nothing but SpaceChem and Dustforce, and I still haven't even finished SpaceChem! I guess I ended up playing a lot of shorter games, which balanced it out a bit.

Only 20 games? And you call yourself a gamer?! I feel like Ethan usually makes a separate thread for these but I couldn't find last year's so whatever, posting it here. Asterisks indicate games I had already played before and italics are for games that were 2015 releases. I only marked those to better keep track of GOTY candidates but I ended up not writing anything up for our GOTY thread... I kinda skipped a lot of the major AAA releases this year, anyway. And fuck giving it to MGSV, so TitS SC probably wins by default. Either that or the Resident Evil HD Remaster. Everyone seems to have forgotten about it but it was so fucking good.

It's kinda mind-boggling that they haven't ported Tactics to PC yet considering there's already a mobile version, which is pretty solid from what I heard. It's based on the PSP remake and I think (really not sure on this one) that they fixed the slowdown "bug". Considering that (outside of the XIII trilogy and Type-0) they seem to be working their way upwards through the numbers, I guess maybe they want to get all the mainline titles out of the way first? Could explain why they're announcing this port of IX out of nowhere before even acknowledging the X/X-2 leak.

Both were pretty cheap on Amazon, about 40 bucks for the two. I tried the demo for Theatrhythm and instantly loved it. It's basically Elite Beat Agents (which was amazing) but with FF music instead of shitty covers of pop songs. Soul Hackers was a no-brainer just by being Shin Megami Tensei, but this is actually an updated port (or remake?) of a 90s Sega Saturn game about hacker culture and cyberpunk. How could that possibly not be the best thing ever? I mean, if it's even a little bit like this it is going to kick ass.

Holy shit, I didn't think it was even possible! Good on Square-Enix for not letting it be forever locked on PS1. Glad I'll finally get to play it. People have been calling 2015 "the year of dreams" because of all the insane game announcements we got and, as stupid as I thought it was, this seems like an appropriate enough way to end it. Not getting too excited, though. It's S-E we're talking about, they can somehow fuck this up. Oh, and I guess we're one step closer to confirmation for X/X-2. At this rate, all we'll be missing on PC is I, II and XII. And there's rumors that XII HD remaster is in the works.

Persona 4: Dancing All Night. So, I was really anticipating this one but was completely broke when it first came out. And by the time I was able to buy it, I was kinda swamped with school and then Trails in the Sky SC came out, which pretty much swallowed up all my gaming time for the entirety of November. Anyway, point is I only just now got around to playing through the story mode. Overall, I'm sorry to say it's a little bit of a disappointment. On paper, this seemed like a guaranteed home run when it was first announced. The Persona series has great music and Dingo, the original developers of the Hatsune Miku games, were responsible for making it. But at some point something went wrong, Dingo's name disappeared from the game's website and eventually all we heard was that Atlus took development in-house for "quality concerns". I'd really like to know what happened there because I played the first Hatsune Miku Vita game last year and unfortunately P4D simply isn't as good. :/ I mean, the overall package is much more interesting. The gameplay is literally the only thing the Miku game has going for it. The music is garbage (catchy enough to be fun to play but still garbage) and the whole Vocaloïd thing just seems kinda creepy and weird to me. But mechanically, it's one of the best rhythm games I've ever played. P4D has the great Persona music plus a story mode with the P4 cast. That alone makes it a more interesting game right off the bat. But the most important element, the gameplay, is where it falls flat on its face. It's not a bad rhythm game, it's just...kind of an average one. A big part of that is just how static the gameplay feels. In Miku, button prompts appear all over the screen in a logical pattern over the course of the song, and it just feels so much more dynamic and engaging. Here, you have your six prompts on the screen's outline and they never move, the "notes" or whatever you wanna call them just appear from the center and float to their markers. It's hard to explain to someone that hasn't played both games but it's just not as much fun to play. The weird thing is that I went back and watched the original reveal trailer and it looks much more in line what how the Miku games are. There's prompts all over the screen and some of them even look completely different, like they required different kind of inputs than just button presses. So yeah, I'm really curious to find out what went wrong behind the scenes with this one... Another issue is that there's just not many songs in it. Something like 25 or so (a little over 30 if you include DLC), which isn't much of a playlist for this kind of game, even if it has a story mode. And the limited playlist is made worse by the fact that most of these are remixes of existing songs that were usually inferior to the original versions, imho. I'm pretty sure some songs even have more than one remix in there... Also, you can't just pick any character you like. For some reason, each song has a character associated to it that you can't change. I'm guessing it has to do with them not wanting to animate a unique dance per character for every single song. The one thing I'll grant the game is that its story mode was better than I expected. After playing the fighting games, I expected some shit-tier visual novel with the occasional song to break it up. And, well, it is a visual novel but the story is much better than in the Arena games, even if it feels like yet another rehash of P4's plot. Not exactly a huge selling point and the first half was kinda repetitive and boring but it ended up going somewhere with it that was kind of interesting. That was kind of surprising to me because I was excited for this one solely for the gameplay, after the fighting games I knew better than to expect much story-wise. Then again, I guess it's possible I only enjoyed it because my expectations were so low to begin with... Honestly, now that I've organized my thoughts a bit, I'm starting to feel like this shouldn't have been a P4 spin-off game. It should've been a P3/P4 crossover like the Arena games. That alone would've made the playlist a lot more interesting, if nothing else. But like I said, it's not a bad game, it's just disappointing. It's clear that rhythm gameplay isn't exactly in Atlus' wheelhouse but hopefully they can learn from this one and, should they ever do another one, improve on the formula by looking at other, better games. As it stands, I'd recommend this one only to those that are desperate for a Persona rhythm game.

Went for another round of browsing and ended up grabbing a bunch of really cheap indie games. Most of them were already on my wishlist but there's a couple in there I had never even heard of. A little over 10 bucks for the lot. Even if just one of them ends up being good, it'll have been worth it. I have high hopes for Master Spy, though. At 5 bucks, it was the most expensive of the bunch by far. It's a stealth-based precision platformer, which just tickles me in all the right places.

Don't worry, I won't tell Mrs. Cowboy.

So, I've been having a pretty shitty Christmas week for various reasons, which got in the way of me playing this as much as I was planning to, but I'm about 12 hours into Persona Q now. It's pretty fucking rad! I've never played any of the Etrian Odyssey games, so I had no idea how much I'd actually enjoy this one. Turns out the answer was a whole fucking lot. Having to draw your own map was the main thing I was worried about but after having cleared the first labyrinth, it might actually be my favorite thing about the dungeon crawling. It's just so weirdly satisfying to map out an entire floor. So much so that now I think I'll have to give Etrian Odyssey a shot at some point. It's weird, though. It actually feels like a true Persona game despite more than half the formula being missing. There's no social life sim stuff at all and the dungeon crawling feels completely different, even the combat system is probably more EO than it is Persona. But some core Persona stuff is still very much there, like fusion, magic and item names and, more importantly, the god-tier music. So yeah, they really nailed the balance of this cross-over. Really glad to finally be playing it.

See, that's kind of the problem here! Anyway, this is probably the first time I've been so utterly uninterested in a Steam sale, holy shit. Other than the PXOD Secret Santa stuff I haven't really been paying much attention to it or even buying anything. My 3DS purchase probably has something to do with it but at the same time, no dailies is just kind blergh. No reason to keep checking, so other than a couple games like Infinifactory that I might end up grabbing by the time it's over, I don't really see myself spending much this time. This is the first purchase I've made for myself and it wasn't even directly on Steam. The Deluxe Edition was less than 10 bucks on Nuuvem and I've been curious for a long time, so I went for it. Nuuvem has mostly been locked down at this point, so it was surprising to see this one being purchasable at all without having to jump through hoops. I've been curious about it because it's been described as Souls-like from the very beginning but it's also got a reputation for being incredibly buggy and kinda mediocre. But hey, Mediocre Souls still sounds like something I'd want to play! I mean, Dark Souls II was still pretty good... edit: Started browsing the store a bit out of boredom and noticed this was pretty cheap I've been meaning to get all the old games for a while and it was finally cheap enough for me to bite. Plus, now I finally get to try that Guardian of Light stick shooter or whatever the hell it's called. Keep hearing it's great. Could probably find more junk like this to grab if I looked hard enough but meh.

Was on sale for 20 bucks on the eShop. As uneasy as I am about using Nintendo's shitty online infrastructure, I love Ace Attorney way too much to pass this one up. I've been wanting to replay these games for fucking years. Really wish it was available physically but meh, at least I still own my old DS copies of all 4 games. Having the whole trilogy on my 3DS is more of a convenience thing, really. That and the resolution boost. Hopefully once that whole Nintendo Account thing comes over here, my purchase will transfer over to it or something. I'm still not entirely clear on how this whole thing even works...

Yeah, "LOOK WHAT YA DID YA LITTLE JERK" is Chew's current username on Steam.

Our benevolent overlord Dean got me Shadowrun: Hong Kong and Her Story. Thanks a lot, man!

Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree's Woe and the Blight Below. Man, that is one stupid title. I love it. Anyway, I finished the main story last night. I went into this one having never played any "musou" games before. The genre itself seemed like it could make for some dumb button-mashing fun but I always thought the Dynasty Warrior series looked kinda boring. I never really felt any desire to give it a shot until they started slapping more interesting IPs on top of it, like Zelda or, in this case, Dragon Quest. Now, I'm not the most harcore DQ fan ever. DQVIII is the only one I played, although it's definitely one of my favorite JRPGs ever. I've been meaning to really get into the series for a long time now and Dragon Quest Heroes actually scratched that itch very nicely. It's not much of an RPG but it is a Dragon Quest game through and through. Akira Toriyama's art style, that wonderful orchestral soundtrack and even little details like sound effects are all lifted straight out of the series mainline entries. That alone was enough to sell me on the game right off the bat. It's just full of that Dragon Quest charm. But here's the thing, there's very little depth to the game. You're dumped into a map and slash away at large mobs of enemies. That's the extent of what you'll be doing most of the time. There's a bit of a tower defense twist to it, which is why some people insist this isn't a true musou or whatever but fuck that, it's close enough. In other words, it gets very repetitive and after 30+ hours even a little boring on its own. At that point, I started listening to podcasts while I was doing side-quests and the issue went away entirely. What you're doing is so simple that you can just turn down the sound, focus on whatever else you're listening to and mindless button mash your way through mobs of enemies. It's basically the perfect podcast game. Overall, I really enjoyed it. It might not be worth full price to everyone but I don't regret my pre-order one bit. I got close to 50 hours out of it and I'll most likely keep working on it on and off to finish all the post-game content and get all the achievements. If they end up localizing the sequel (and bringing it to PC), then I'll definitely be getting it. And even beyond that, it's made me even more eager to play some proper Dragon Quest. I've been looking into emulating the Super Famicom remake of the original with a translation patch and it seems to work pretty well. So, that should be fun.

Welp, I was gonna wait until after Christmas but my financial aid for next semester came in like a week earlier than usual so... I didn't want Smash but it was free as a soft bundle so meh. Kinda wish I'd been able to pick another game. I don't really care about the series, so I'll probably just sell it. Also had to get an AC adapter, because Nintendo are fucking morons, and EBGames annoyingly didn't seem to have the official one so I had to order it from Amazon instead.

Trying to decide between the Red and Black n3DS XL and I'm all like Why isn't the metallic blue one available in NA, damnit? Blue is always the best.

So, the idea of getting a 3DS has been floating in my head on and off all year. And, now that they finally announced that Dragon Quest VII and VIII are getting localized, of course it's back in full force. I was looking at prices on Amazon and spotted this for 30 bucks brand new. Finding an Atlus Limited Edition a year after release isn't that unusual but they're usually grossly overpriced. This one was actually cheaper than the regular edition. I figured it had to be a pricing error, so I ordered one expecting it to be cancelled. A week later, my card's been charged and there's a shipping notice in my inbox. Should be here tomorrow. I guess maybe Amazon found some leftover stock in their warehouse and wanted to unload it asap or something? Anyway, so, yeah, looks like I'll finally be getting that 3DS in the near future.

#BanCowboy

Dean, how about bringing back that dislike button?

Maybe in the future, if the studio truly is independent, but it really sounds like this first project is going to be a PS4 exclusive. Sucks but definitely a good catch for Sony. Now, come on, Sony. You know what the next move is: Get. Del. Toro.

Well, that didn't take long. Kojima founded a new independent studio and his first project is in partnership with Sony.

Couldn't resist. I love ASW's fighting games and the price was pretty reasonable, especially after the launch week discount. Also won this from a giveaway on NeoGAF Oh and the guy that made Hexcells has a new puzzle game out It's pretty good. Like a cross between Hexcells and Picross (or so I heard, I have no idea what Picross is). edit: Alright, now I need to stop buying shit until the christmas sale...