MetalCaveman

Prey (PC) Still fun. Originally I had intended to do a different run, maybe even try some typhon powers and stuff, but I ended up doing mostly the same build lol, while I did put some points into repair and hacking, I was still running around Talos I at superhuman speed blasting typhon into bits with an upgraded shotgun. Went by superfast too, mostly because I remember enough from my first run, I did end up doing some new stuff though Also tried Mooncrash, but that one will be left for later, it is fun, but between corruption levels and the graboid bastard it's also a bit too much. Grade: A+ Lone Survivor Short little psychological horror, the concept and story aren't bad, but there's a bunch of technical stuff that holds it back a fair bit. Controls are a bit awkward, with escape quitting the game, not pausing, the font they use is super blurry and it actually made my eyes hurt trying to read certain things. The aspect ratio change did nothing and, having no options menu, there's no way to set it to windowed or making some changes to maybe help with some issues with the resolution of the game when playing on 1440p. The survival stuff was also a bit annoying for me, specially the sleep stuff, felt like that interrupted progress way too often. You do get an item to help with this, but it affects the ending you get. Grade: C-

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Wolfenstein The Old Blood I think I got this at launch, played for a bit and then stopped. With spooky season starting it seemed like a good time to play it and remove it from my backlog lol. Now I remember why I stopped playing, that first chapter is such a pain. The rest of it though, is pretty fun, if you've played New Order, it's mostly more of the same, with the addition of zombies. Mowing down hordes of nazis and nazi zombies with dual shotguns never gets old. It's also pretty short, took me about 5 hours to beat, but that was without exploring or looking for secrets and mostly ignoring the perk system. Grade: A-

https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates That's going to be a thing, while the changes to Unity Personal are mostly an improvement, their new per install fees are going to be a huge issue for a lot of devs.

https://www.amiami.com/eng/detail/?gcode=FIGURE-159646 Been waiting for pre-orders to go live since the first, unpainted prototype, pictures were shown. \m/ \m/

Looks cool, from some early impressions some people are saying it's their "least buggiest game to date", though I'm sure there's still some issues lol, that said, between limited budget and limited time, I think I'll pass for now. Definitively looking forward to playing it at some point though. The Tested stuff has been pretty neat, always cool to see how stuff like that is made. \m/ \m/

Seed of the Dead: Sweet Home Holy mother of improvements Batman! Yes, the first game didn't exactly set a high bar, in fact the bar was pretty much underground, but still, this is the biggest leap in quality I've seen from one game to the next. The gameplay is way better, it's actually fun to play now! Weapon variety increased, now there's a fair amount of weapons including some sci-fi stuff and even magic swords, best of all, all of them are actually viable now, yes, some are still better than others, but all can still be used without issues. Enemy variety also increased a fair bit, several new mutants and different zombie models, so you don't run into just the same one over and over (and over and over and over and over) again. The last boss was awesome from a design perspective, super creepy and cool as hell, wouldn't look out of place in Dead Space. Levels are bigger and more varied, each level being unique, there's no more going back and forth the same area a bunch of times, levels now have side quests too, like protecting supply crates, holding back a zombie horde while the girls rock out on stage, etc. Fun stuff all around. Characters now level up, improving their stats, and in the case of the player character, you can also unlock skills, things like more health, more ammo, more stamina, the usual stuff, along with other skills that replace the basic pistol with a revolver and, eventually, a laser pistol. The story also improved, it's still far from good, REALLY far, but it's fun, parts of it were like a low budget Resident Evil, each of the characters also has some extra story chapters for themselves, expanding on their personality, role in the new survivor city and other fun things. There's now a base that you go back after each stage, you can collect materials during the levels and then use those to improve the base, unlocking more areas and character events. That stuff can also be turned off now if you want. Not to say there aren't issues though. Character models improved, but there still rough around the edges, now that there's a base with NPCs walking around, the art style of the main characters sticks out even more than before. Certain animations are still pretty awkward, some reloads make it look like your characters arms are made of spaghetti, The last boss was a bit of a disappointment, though given that weapon spawns are random, maybe I just got really lucky, the rocket launcher wiped it out in a couple of shots lol. However, as much as I enjoyed it, it's still hard to recommend, if only because of the character designs, along some of the content which is most certainly not for everyone. If you've ever wanted a Highschool of the Dead game though, this one's for you. Apparently they're already working on a third one, hopefully they'll continue with the improvements. Looking forward to it. TL;DR: A huge improvement over the first one, in all aspects, though I still wouldn't recommend it to most people. Grade: B-

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Hero By Chance A tower defense game, looks and plays like old flash games lol, still kinda fun though. Grade: C Warlord by Chance A sequel to Hero, some improvements to gameplay, character art, unit variety, etc. Both are pretty cheap, so they got that going for them, but if you were to be in the market for a game of this style, I'd recommend Duel Princess instead, way better all around. Grade: C+ Mortal Shell A fun Soulslike that has some interesting gimmicks. For starters, you can't customize your character or make builds, instead, the game has the shell system. There are four shells, your characters, they each have different stats and skills, so one is the all around jack of all trades, one has a ton of HP but almost no stamina, one has a ton of stamina but almost no HP, one is specialized on using skills. The shell mechanic also plays into death in this game, dying doesn't send you back to the last checkpoint, instead, you're kicked out of your shell, revealing your true form, in this form, a single hit kills you, but if you can get back to your shell you can continue, there's even a shell that allows you to unleash an explosion when recovering your shell. Normally you can only do this once per checkpoint, but there are skills that allow you to regain this ability after defeating some enemies. There are items that allow you to change between shells whenever, though this items are consumable so best use them with care. There's only four melee weapons, but each have a couple of upgrades that unlock skills, the mace was my favourite, skill 1 covers it with fire, dealing damage over time, while skill 2 does a powerful attack that explodes and damages all enemies around you. There's also one range weapon, the ballistazooka, a fun weapon that's pretty useful for dealing with enemies from a distance, but that takes forever to reload. Then there's the Harden mechanic, you can't block in this game, not in the normal way at least, instead, you use a skill called harden, which turns your body into stone, allowing you to block one attack. This can be used defensively, but I found more use offensively, attack an enemy, harden when they're about to hit you, continue attacking. The problem is that it takes a bit of time to get used to the timing and the cooldown. One of the shells can be built around using harden more often, the others sorta need to work around the limitations. There's also a parry, but the timing is hard to get down. The highlight for me however, is the soundtrack, or rather, the soundtrack pack that's available for free. This replaces boss tracks with songs from Rotting Christ. Not to say that the base OST is bad, it's just, kinda bland IMO, the Rotting Christ stuff is way better and still fits with the theme and atmosphere of the game, there's only one boss were I would replace Ze Nigmar with something like Demonon Vrosis or P'unchaw Kachun-Tuta Kachun. The usage of for the last boss was awesome. There were some issues though, some enemies are really annoying, specially the crossbow dudes, I had some bugs including one which forced me to restart the game. Some enemies would sometimes skip their getting up animation and instead just automatically teleport and hit me, other enemies would sometimes freeze after blocking with harden and the biggest issue I had, this game makes my GPU fans run at almost 100%, even after lowering a bunch of settings, fans still ramped up a ton. The hub area is also a mess to navigate, even a map doesn't help that much since everything looks the same and it's all a labyrinth. TL;DR: Fun Soulslike that's a bit rough around the edges but still worth it, Rotting Christ should appear in more games. Grade: B+

Seed of the Dead Man this is a thing. I like the concept, more shooters (FPS or TPS) with an anime art style would be most excellent, however, in this case, the execution is a mess. Not to mention the healing gimmick and some of the more... questionable content it has. Gameplay is pretty janky, most guns feel useless, any of the auto rifles are so inaccurate the safest place during combat is standing right in front of them, trying to aim down sight doesn't really help either. The only cool weapon that actually sorta does work is the non-copyright infringing lightsaber. One of the biggest issues is that this game is mostly made up of assets, nothing against assets, but the devs didn't bother to try and find stuff that worked well together, or that even made sense, so you'll go from a neon-lit city stage, to a hospital that looks right out of Outlast, to a "laboratory" that for some reason has demonic statues with fire coming out of them, it's all just a mishmash of different art styles, settings, textures, etc. This extends to enemies and the main characters, there's a limited amount of monsters, including one enemy that's a giant dickhead (literally and metaphorically ), the main enemies are zombies, or zombie as it were, as there's only one model, enemy variety is practically nonexistent. The main characters meanwhile, stick out like a sore thumb, the art for them is kinda nice, their models, not so much, animations are also pretty awkward. Then there's the healing gimmick, instead of using health kits or whatever, characters here take this song very literally: Yes, the way you heal during combat is This is a rhythm mini-game, and completing it heals both characters and gives you a shield. The length of this and the awkward animations make this quite the annoying mechanic. So yeah, this was a thing, don't recommend, can't recommend, even for me, this was a bit much lol. That said, I've been playing the sequel, and that one is quite the improvement in every category, though it also has a bunch of issues. I hope Snowbreak is good, after Hoyoverse cancelled the TPS they were working on, I want more and better shooters with an anime art style, this, most certainly, is not it. TL;DR: Not good, avoid, stay away, menu screen art is the only good thing about this game. Grade: F (0/10) Daemon X Machina This one was pretty good. Basically, this is to Armored Core what Code Vein was to Dark Souls, in short, this is anime Armored Core, cheesy melodramatic story included. Gameplay was pretty neat, close to AC4/ACFA in terms of speed, with some enemies just zipping around the battlefield at Mach 666. You can equip three weapons, two in each arm and one shoulder weapon, there's also pylon weapons, you can swap between your currently equipped arm weapons and weapons stored in your pylons whenever, which gives you some freedom in terms of strategy and equipment. You also have support weapons, this range from extra boosters, to grenades and healing items. The main thing here is Femto energy, you can use this for a couple of different things, normally it acts as a bit of a shield, but you can also choose to redirect it to increase boost speed, or weapon damage. The damage boost is super useful and was my most used ability. Weapon variety is nice, there's a lot of weapons that are just upgrades of basic ones (so assault rifle, assault rifle 2, assault rifle 3 etc.) but there's still a bunch of stuff to choose from, including variations of some weapons that have an autofire mode, which means they will automatically fire on any enemy in range. Not really useful as they don't deal as much damage as manual weapons but it's neat that they're there. Enemy variety is somewhat limited, but for a game like this it doesn't really bother me, the fights against the other characters were the highlight, much more fun and challenging than just wiping out normal enemies. Boss fights on the other hand can be a bit annoying, specially the first one, since you won't have weapons that are strong enough by the time you face it, so it's just firing at a bullet sponge, occasionally going after the weaker enemies that spawn and that are there to help you recover ammo and energy. I did have a couple of issues while playing though, during one mission, enemies bugged out and became immortal, I was sure I was doing something wrong and there was some strategy to dealing with them until I looked up a guide and realized it wasn't supposed to be like that. During another mission and enemy glitched through the ground, making it impossible to deal with them, which meant that I had to restart the mission. There was also an unwinnable mission that I restarted a couple of times before realizing you're not supposed to win, learned this after reducing the enemy's health to about 20% and then noticing that no matter how many times I hit them, their health didn't go down any further. Finally, the last boss was the biggest annoyance. A long level where you have to fight two of the strongest enemies, followed by a really annoying boss that's incredibly hard to hit as it doesn't zip around so much as it just teleports around the arena. Then finally the actual last boss, which is the bullet sponge to end all bullet sponges, insane resistance to all attack types, some really annoying attacks, including one that just outright steals your weapons from you and an arena that isn't really suited for that kind of fight. Thankfully you don't have to go through the whole thing when retrying, otherwise I doubt I'd have bothered to finish the game. Story was kinda cool though, although the silent protagonist thing doesn't work here. Characters will talk to you: "We need you in the briefing, we could use your opinion" "What do you think about this?" "What is your answer?" "Are you ready?" And other stuff, and yet your character never responds, not even in text, even during cutscenes, your actual character (outside of your mech) only shows up a couple of times. This leads to some rather awkward moments were certain characters might as well be talking to themselves. All in all, I'd highly recommend it if you're interested in this kind of game, specially with AC VI coming out soon, bonus, if you've been claiming the free games on the Epic store, chances are, you already have it. TL;DR: Anime armored core, really cool, annoying last boss, but overall, highly recommended. Grade: B+

NEW DETHKLOK!!!!! \m/ \m/

Finally used all the D'Addario strings I had, so it was time to go back to ol' reliable lol. D'Addario XLs ended up being a disappointment, two strings snapped when changing them, they rusted super quickly, and couldn't stay in tune for more than a couple of days. These are already a huge improvement, installed them last Friday and they're still in tune.

Question about TotK

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild That was MOST EXCELLENT. Though I did have some issues. Weapon durability is insane, ridiculously so, this one was almost a deal breaker. Horses, taming a horse isn't so bad, took me a while to get the hang of it but eventually I got it, problem is, even at max bond, sometimes the horse just does whatever it wants, specially dangerous when crossing a bridge and your horse just decides it wants to walk off to your death. Another annoyance, not being able to call it from wherever, DLC does add a solution, but it's still super annoying. Ragdoll, anything that knocks down Link can be instant death depending on where you are, this was a huge issue when exploring certain areas. Other than that though, I really liked it, pretty much all of the positive stuff you've heard about this game, I can confirm. Elden Ring is still the king of open world games for me though. Grade: A+ Think I'm going to play some other stuff before jumping on TotK. Might go back to Daemon X Machina, now that a sequel has been announced lol.

If you want to make it less depressing, there is (or was, don't know if it's still available) a Serious Sam DLC, replaces With Serious Sam lol I should go back and finish it, played a bunch, made some progress and then stopped because some of the puzzles were melting my brain lol.