MetalCaveman

Year of the bunny. Also, got the Anatomy for Sculptors book, saw an artist I follow on twitter recommend it, been going through it but it's going to be a while before it shows (if that ever happens lol).

Yup, you have Main Jobs, Side Jobs and some other stuff that shows up in the Journal (houses, cars, and other stuff), then gigs are on the map, these don't show up on the Journal, you have to track them via their map icons.

Ah gotcha, looking forward to that then. I finished quest line (or I think I did, hasn't called me in a while, though I did get some texts lol), which started with a story mission and then branched into its own thing, thought the Peralez stuff would be shorter since from the start it was just marked as a side job.

Is it? I did that last night.

I think Cyberpunk might be shorter than I expected? Been taking it easy, doing side jobs, gigs and other stuff in between main jobs, but I just noticed I'm 60% through the main story? That is, if I'm understanding the percentages that show up at the top of the character menu correctly.

Cyberpunk 2077 Got back to it after playing for a bit during launch, PS5 upgrade is pretty neat, beyond the graphics, which do look pretty cool, the way it uses the dualsense features is the best part IMO. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order Been watching a bunch of Star Wars stuff on D+ so I got the itch to play this one, combat is fun, exploration is neat, but some of the platforming is killing me, 100% on me though, I just can't handle third person platforming. After a detour into hell I went to the planet I'm actually supposed to be in and it's much easier, still no purple lightsaber though .

Waifu Uncovered This went downhill fast. Played this one because I saw it on my library, though I have no recollection of when, how or why I bought it (I mean, I kinda know why, just not when lol). The first couple of stages are fun, a light shmup, more in the lines of Aero Fighters or Ninja Commando than the bullet hell stuff. Then the last two stages turn into hell, not even bullet hell, just hell. Upgrades are neat, and some of them are pretty cool, but they're few and far between, powerups and other pickups are similarly rare, and worst is that sometimes you'll move to pick an upgrade only to have an enemy spawn right under you, dealing a bunch of damage. Bomb pickups have a ridiculously low drop rate, specially considering that some ships can only carry one. You also only get one life, whether you're playing normal or arcade modes, that's it, die once and it's game over, which is one of my biggest issues with this game. The next issue is the difficulty spike, the last two stages just throw every enemy in the universe at you, if you haven't gotten the right upgrades and powerups you're toast. Bosses are also lame as hell, they're all the same in terms of attack, and what's worse is that while you can only shoot forward, bosses tend to spend a fair amount of time at the bottom of the screen, away from where you can shoot. Finally, the thing that really made me take several points off, Easy difficulty is locked behind paid DLC. Had all stages been challenging, with the difficulty slowly ramping up, it would have been fun, that, or at least give the player more lives, that alone would also make a huge difference. Or just make it easy as hell and let players unlock the gallery, arguably the main selling point for a game like this lol. Grade: F

Aeon's End Apparently based on a table-top game, though I don't know if that version is as rage-inducing and frustrating as this one. Even with a cheat sheet of what cards do what, what's best to play, how to get good spells on your deck, etc. It just feels impossible to win. Boss decks seem filled with "Fuck you, your base AND your HP!" cards. Hey you're one spell away from defeating the boss, and your base has 12 HP left! Neat! Fuck you, here's a card that automatically deals 8 damage to your base, removes one of the spells you have prepared and deals 4 HP damage to you, also that minion the boss played last turn? It deals 20 damage to your base! FUCK YOU! Hey! You have some pretty neat spells lined up, the boss has half HP and your base hasn't taken that much damage! Neat! FUCK YOU, the boss just played a minion that forces you to use your spells on it, deals damage to the base each time it gets hit and when defeated allows the boss to unleash it's special, destroying your base instantly!! FUCK YOU!! Well, in the words of R.J. MacReady: I don't think I've been this annoyed at a game in a while lol. It's a shame, I like the concept, and I do enjoy these types of games, but this one just seems ridiculously stacked against you, like one post on the steam forums said, the only way to ensure your base isn't destroyed is to not start a game in the first place.

Wish: Israfil Saga A simple, nice, relaxing match 3 type of game, with some... Special scenes (if you download the patch ). Originally I was going to give it a lower rating, since some stages are quite challenging and upgrades are fairly expensive (1300 gold and upwards), couple that with the fact that replaying a stage only gives you about 30-50 gold and I was sure it'd be hours of grinding, until I realized you can replay other character stages, and those give you 900 gold per re-run, so that improved things a fair bit. The story is... There, kinda. The concept itself is nothing new, evil emperor, small ragtag group of heroes band together to defeat said evil emperor, peace returns to the land, etc. The issue is that most of it reads like it was translated with the crappiest machine translation software in the world, and chapter 3 just reads like they threw random words in and called it a day. A certain character's name changes spelling every time, tons of typos, tons of sentences that don't make any sense, and my favourite, instead of using beastfolk or monster girls, it goes for... Furries, and that leads to some very, very funny lines. Still, all issues considered, for less than a buck, it's not bad. Grade: B+ (for gameplay, characters, and art style). F (for Fuck if I know what's going on with the story ).

Something different Kept the rough outline done with the brush I usually use for sketching, all color was done with the basic opacity brush, as opposed to relying on the colorize mask, shading was also done with that brush, could use some better/smoother blending, but for something I did in about an hour, it ain't that bad IMO.

Dragon's Crown Pro This is one gorgeous game, Vanillaware's art style is always most excellent! \m/ \m/ My only issue is that, while you can skip all of the early stuff when starting with a new character, the gate you use to get to the dungeons never gets fixed, and there's no way to get it to it's working state, so you're left with a gate that drops you in a random dungeon, or paying to use the stables, which increases in cost every time you use it, not a problem later on or in higher difficulties, but when starting with a new character this is kind of a pain. Grade: A+ (A for Amazon and Sorceress make the best party members )

RIP

Ghostbusters: The Videogame Remastered This was really fun, the different options available for the proton pack on top of the usual capture stream were cool, and having the original cast voice their characters was most excellent. Only issue for me were a couple of fights against flying books and skulls, those were kinda annoying as it was easy to get swarmed leading to several "deaths", only a couple game overs though, as most of the time you do have at least one other Ghostbuster with you who can pick you up. Later on, once you get the Meson Collider weapon these enemies become much easier to deal with. Your AI teammates and fellow ghostbusters actually do stuff, capture ghosts, send out traps, use different equipment, they're all really helpful, their lines reacting to certain things are a plus, during one section Ray suggested flanking some ghosts, after I went the same way he did on accident he said: "Flanking generally means I go one way, you go the other, we catch them in the middle, I know you're a rookie but this is basic stuff." The story was pretty good too, honestly feels way more like a sequel than Afterlife, which makes sense as it was written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis. Overall, a fun TPS that changes things by being more about capturing ghosts and not just blasting them into oblivion, and a nice combination of humour and creepiness, also, you get to be a Ghostbuster, what more could you want? Grade: A+ (Bustin' makes me feel good!! )

Apparently they recaptured Ovidio Guzman, so, Culiacanazo 2.0 time. Except that this time they immediately took him away from Culiacan and into CDMX, supposedly there were USAF aircraft around Culiacan as well, but I don't think that's been confirmed, although given the precision and speed with which the whole thing was done, I wouldn't be surprised it this was another Black Swan. It's going to be interesting to hear what our president has to say, I'd imagine his next monthly meeting with Chapo's mom is going to be... heated lol.

Thought about getting some other stuff, but my backlog currently has a bunch of games I actually really want to play, so I'll be trying to get through some of those before buying anything else for a while (so I say lol, let's see how long that lasts ). Some of the games I want to try and finish: Dragon's Crown Pro Valkyria Chronicles (PC) Valkyria Chronicles 4 Metroid Dread Monster Monpiece Moero Crystal Seven Pirates H Cyberpunk 2077 Nier Automata Death Stranding Ghostbusters Ghostrunner Scarlet Nexus Sekiro Daemon X Machina And more... But those are the ones at the top of my list lol.

Pokémon Scarlet Holy cow that ending was cool, it legit brought tears to my eyes. Didn't expect that. The three different story paths, Titans, Team Star and the Pokémon league were all fun, granted, I cheesed the hell out of the titans (Nacli and Naclstack FTW!!! lol), but it was still neat, Team Star had a "Are We the Baddies?" kind of feel to it, until you realize Penny, Nemona and Arven are all fun characters, specially Nemona, I love how hyped she is about finally finding someone who can battle her at her full strength and still remain friends with her, win or lose. It was also interesting to see how The open world thing works well, yes, if you open the map, there's a bunch of icons, but they all mean something, it's not just pointless filler, you can see the tera raids available, the location of your next objectives, fast-travel points and Pokémon Centers, making it not feel cluttered. However, it also has some serious issues, textures have some fun shenanigans going on, popping in and out all over the place, even in the same area, if you take a couple of steps, textures and shadows disappear, reappear, and then disappear again. NPCs move at 5 FPS in certain areas and during cutscenes, tera raids run like they're drunk, an attack will empty the boss' HP, only for it to instantly go back to full, then half, then empty, even with an empty HP bar bosses get an attack in before instantly fainting, etc. The game also crashed a couple of times for me. That said, I still had a ton of fun with it, funny thing, I don't have that many Pokémon games (I checked, the only ones I own are Y, Sword and Scarlet), but every time I play one I have fun, makes me wonder why I don't buy them more often lol. If this had released in a... Less broken state I'd imagine it might be considered one of the best in the series, maybe. Grade: Most Excellent! (A+)

Another one of the Genkai Tokki series, been eyeing this one for a while, and it finally went on sale as part of the holiday sales.

My final list for 2022: 1-Halo Infinite 2-Dark Souls 2 Scholar of the First Sin 3-Duel Princess 4-Remnant From the Ashes 5-Elden Ring 6-God Eater 2 7-She Will Punish Them 8-Moero Chronicle Hyper 9-The Future You've Been Dreaming Of 10-Prison Princess 11-Aperture Desk Job 12-XCOM Enemy Within 13-Dead Space 14-Dead Space 2 15-Dead Space 3 Awakened Last year it was 24, so down 9, but also last year, 12 of those 24 were Resident Evil games, this year there was a bit more variety in there.

Daemon X Machina I don't want to call this Dollar Store Armored Core, because it is kinda fun,and it does have some cool features, but parts of it do feel like "Armored Core at Home" lol. Still early in the game, but the hangar feels a bit pointless, you can only walk around the main area, and you can't talk to any of the NPCs that are around, looking at your mech is cool, but that's all you can do, the main thing here is just the terminals you use to launch story missions or multiplayer stuff. Combat also feels like it's lacking impact, guns sound too weak and pretty much all bullet type weapons I've used look and sound like BB guns, missiles do look and sound better, but not by much. Characters look weird under certain lighting, this could be the result of this being a Switch port, but there's some odd shenanigans going on with their faces. All that said though, until Fires of Rubicon comes out, this is the closest you'll get to a new AC, and since it was free on EGS, it's not bad.