TheMightyEthan

I bet VR will really work well with the diorama effect, it did in Humanity.

Was going to wait to get one of these until either Ghost of Tsushima 2 or Death Stranding 2 came out, but then Trump won and his tariffs are expected to make electronics increase in price by like 40%, so I figured I'd snag one now while I can get one for MSRP.

Preordered all of these a few weeks ago.

Well as of this past Friday we made it through our 7 day trial period and we are keeping it. We really like it, there's a couple small little niggles (like the trunk light is on the side instead of the top, so if something is on that side it blocks the light from the whole trunk, little stuff like that) but overall it's really great.

Alan Wake 2: The Lake House This DLC is great. You're playing an FBC agent investigating an FBC facility that they've lost contact with, so it's basically a little mini-episode of Control, but with the Alan Wake 2 mechanics, just a flashlight and guns, no super powers or anything. The narrative is spot-on, as is the encounter design and everything, except for the final boss (which I feel like is a problem Remedy often has). I can't say much more without spoiling stuff, but if you like Control and Alan Wake then this is definitely for you. Grade: A

Yeah, visiting my wife's family in South Dakota is the only trip we make with any kind of frequency where it'll be annoying, having to charge would add an hour and a half or so to the already 7 hour long trip. But that's a trip we make like once every other year, so we didn't think it was worth basing our car decision on that. Everywhere else we ever go we should be able to cover in a single charge (or with only a few minutes' charging during bathroom breaks), and we aren't getting rid of our good gas car yet so we'll still have that option if we want it.

Jelly that it's MQ3 exclusive.

Hehe, "Tew 2" sounds like "tutu"

No, we were only getting a car at all because we wanted electric. I had been looking into it and there are enough chargers around that even in Kansas it's very feasible now. It has a ~250 mile range, so like driving to visit my wife's family in South Dakota would take more planning than it would with a gas car to make sure we're recharging where we need to, but other than that it's far enough to easily go anywhere we might want to without risking being caught somewhere without a charger. We also have a whole home solar power system, so we'll be able to charge it off 100% clean power when we're at home, so I am very much looking forward to having a car that I don't have to feel guilty about driving.

2023 Chevy Bolt. The picture isn't the exact one I bought, but the same year and color. Get to pick it up next weekend.

I'm holding off until I find out how the PC version runs.

Black Myth Wukong I really liked this game. It's kind of a soulslite (rather than soulslike). The combat feels a lot like a souls game, there are shrines that function as bonfires, and normal enemies respawn when you use them. It's missing an actual souls mechanic though, you keep everything when you die, which changes the risk-reward dynamic of exploration. It also doesn't have the shortcut-heavy level design, which makes more of a difference than I would have expected. Overall it's very well done, the world is cool, the game is gorgeous, it's great. However, there are a few weird decisions that drag it down. There are entire really basic mechanics (such as upgrading your armor) that are easily missed entirely. There's no map. The entire structure of the last chapter is... a choice. Ultimately it was fun throughout, a few frustrating bosses aside, and it ended strong, so I'm happy with it. Grade: B+ It would have been at least an A-, possibly an A, if not for those weird choices dragging it down. Hopefully they do another game and improve upon that stuff.

Astro Bot This game was cool, lots of great level design, varied mechanics, most of it pretty easy but with some real kick-your-ass challenge levels to change things up. My only complaints are really small things, like I wish it had a big bad with personality, like a Bowser or whatever, and I wish each nebula had some kind of overarching theme, but none of it really detracts from the experience. It's just a great platformer with lots of love for Playstation's history and a real sense of joy and whimsy. Grade: A

New mobo and ram arrived this morning, I got them installed and after it initially failing to post (because of course) it's working now! And I'm getting the performance I would expect.

I ordered that CPU like a week before hearing about all the issues, and I specifically chose it because I didn't want to have to replace my mobo too... *Edit - As for the 4090, I have no justification besides the fact that several games came out recently that I've been very frustrated with the performance of my old card, and I got tired of waiting for the 50 series to be announced (it'll be next week now that I actually bought one). I am at least confident that once this PC is *working* I shouldn't have any trouble running games at least until the PS6 comes out.

I have been on quite the adventure the last few days. It all started off, as you may recall, with me getting a Core i9 14900k in May. That led to me being dissatisfied with my GPU performance, which ultimately resulted in me breaking down and buying this: RTX 4090 ftw! I had carefully measured to make sure it would fit in my case, so I was very excited when it arrived and ready to install it immediately and start gaming. It did not fit in my case. So! One 2.5 hour round trip to Wichita later and I have this baby: Corsair 5000D RGB mid tower. Plenty of space, has the nice panel in the back to hide all the power cables, really a nice upgrade that was a long time coming, my old case was like 15+ years old. Anyway the new case can let you control the front fan colors with the temperatures of your system components. Neat! So I started setting that up and uh oh, turns out my CPU is regularly getting up to 100C during regular gameplay. Guess my CPU fan isn't cutting it. No problem, I can solve that! Cooler Master MasterLiquid 360mm water cooler! Hooray! That'll keep my CPU nice and chilled out. The water cooler arrived this morning, I installed it before work (didn't have to be in until 10:45 today), went to check how my CPU temps were doing and... it won't post. Go to work pissed, because by that time was out of time. Came home, did extensive testing, and determined that the entire B memory channel on my mobo was dead. Slots A1 & A2 both work, but putting anything in either B1 or B2 causes it to fail to post. As you are no doubt aware, the PC can only access one RAM stick per channel at any given time, so while putting sticks in A1 & A2 gives you the same total capacity as A1 & B1, it effectively cuts the speed in half. This is unacceptable. Which brings us to my most recent purchase, made only minutes ago: New motherboard and 32GB of DDR5 RAM, set to arrive Sunday. So anyway, basically I wanted a new CPU and have ended up replacing every single part in my PC except for the power supply and one fan (the rear exhaust). To close, I'll leave you with a comic:

I broke down.

Sonic Superstars I recently played through all of Sonic Origins (1, CD, 2, 3, & Knuckles... and learned to my shock I'd never beat 3 & Knuckles before) and Sonic Mania, then went straight into this one, and I gotta say it's a mixed bag. First off, the good: Sonic controls perfectly. The physics are exactly like the old 2D games, it feels perfect. That's something that Sonic has always struggled with, but they nailed it here. The bad part is that the level design just never lives up to the old pixel games, with the exception of one act in one zone, which was absolutely great. They just aren't as complex and interesting as the older games (save Sonic CD, which I didn't think was all that great either). It was a real letdown going straight from Mania, which I still think is the best 2D Sonic game, into this one, which I think is tied with 1 for 2nd-worst, only ahead of CD. Then to add insult to injury, the 3D art is just bland. Nothing looks particularly interesting, it's just the most bog-standard simple 3D models you can imagine. Which all of that does make it sound worse than it is. I enjoyed it, it was definitely the best non-pixel Sonic game we've ever gotten, taking that title from Generations. It just didn't hit the highs of 2, 3, & Knuckles, or Mania. Grade: B

Yeah but the DNC is just a party convention, it's not an official government proceeding.

You're not alone, I'm the weird one, it has Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam.

Stray This game is pretty, and the cat acts like a cat, but that's about all it has going for it. The gameplay itself is boring at best (outside of a very small few highlights), and tedious at worst. The whole thing is basically a series of nuzzles (a word I recently learned coined by the Darksiders devs which means "not-quite-puzzles"), so there's never anything to really engage with, it's just going from point A to point B, and doing a bunch of annoying fetch quests in between. There's really just nothing to the game at all, besides the cat. Grade: C

Tim Breaker, who Door was supposed to be played by Reddick, but then he died. But actually in the DLC

Alan Wake 2: Night Springs This is the first DLC for Alan Wake 2. The premise is it's 3 episodes of the in-universe TV show Night Springs, and each one represents a separate failed attempt by Alan to write himself out of the Dark Place. There's one with Rose, the diner waitress, one with Jesse from Control, and one with the dude from Quantum Break. Each one is about an hour long, they all have very different tones, and are very cool. I definitely recommend it if you like Alan Wake. Grade: A

Well that's on my wishlist now.

Baldur's Gate 3 This game was really cool. It has more player agency than any other RPG I've ever played, it's like immersive sim levels of "if it seems like you should be able to do this, then you can." I did think the plot at the end was a little weak, with a couple characters making decisions that just seem weird, but it wasn't enough to really detract much from the game as a whole. It's the closest you can get to playing D&D in a video game. Grade: A