TheMightyEthan

I beat the base game in 50 hours, Hearts of Stone in about 4.5, and Blood and Wine in 7. I played both of them the same way I played the base game: mostly focusing on the main quest, and doing side quests that caught my interest. *Edit - How Long to Beat puts Blood and Wine at 15.5 hours for most players, 40 hours if you 100% it, so I was fast but you were very much on the long side.

The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone This was basically just a big side quest chain. I liked parts of it (the heist, the last quest) and really really didn't like others (the wedding, the house). So, very mixed, but I liked the way it ended, which is the most important part. Grade: C The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine This was good, but I think it was overhyped. Everyone made it sound like it was this amazing epilogue to the main game, when it pretty much has nothing to do with it whatsoever. But, that aside, it was well done, and I found it interesting throughout, none of the lows of Hearts of Stone. And Touissant was very pretty, I didn't realize how drab and grey the Witcher main game was until I got there. Overall, it's up there with some of the better DLC I've played, it just wasn't some amazing capstone on the game like people made it sound. Grade: B+ As an aside, playing Blood and Wine made me really really want to go back to Cyberpunk, I wish we knew when that expansion was coming.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt I don't know if any of you have heard this before, but this game is actually pretty good. It took a while to hook me, which I thought was a bad sign after I bounced off the first two, but after about 10 hours it got its claws in me, and once it did I was on straight through to the end. The combat is a little clunky by modern standards, but the characters, world, and story are very well done. I see why everyone was so hyped for Cyberpunk. I made the decision to go in blind and not look up what endings were available or how to get them, and I think I made the right choice. I also managed to get an ending I'm satisfied with, even without looking. So yeah, if you like RPGs I would recommend checking this one out. I now definitely have my eye on the Witcher 1 remake, when before I had no interest. Grade: A Now on to Hearts of Stone, and then Blood and Wine.

Am I probably going to buy Returnal to 100% again, even though I already have too many things to play? Yes, mostly likely I am.

For me there's no "correct" version of Persona 3 to port, but P3P is the best of bad options. The inability to control your teammates in FES is a dealbreaker for me. That said, I wish they'd made some kind of ultimate edition that includes all the upgrades from both P3P and FES.

Whaddya know? That's where I quit!

I really like the shininess.

I wonder if there's something wrong with your particular deck's wifi? Mine is crazy fast, it might be the fastest device I have.

So here's my best guess at what's going on in Signalis:

So, because I'm insane, I decided to get a 4070 Ti, though my brother in law is going to buy my 3080 from me, which will cover most of the cost. So I'm upgrading for just a couple hundred dollars.

Somerville I actually liked this game, not sure why it was panned so bad. It's from a new studio started by one of the creators of Limbo and Inside, and while it's not quite as good as those games, it's close. Certainly captures the same feel. The main change is that it's "3D", although really it plays more like 2.5D, you tend to be moving in one direction and have a small amount of cross-wise freedom, but it's limited enough that I think it could easily be converted into a fully 2.5D game like Inside without really losing anything. The powers you have are cool, and really the worst thing I can say about it is a couple of the puzzles were kind of obtuse, but that's to be expected in a puzzle game. Basically, if you liked Playdead's games I'd say give this one a try. Grade: B+

I already had a USB-C hub with HDMI for use with my Switch when I take it to other places, so we could play Mario Kart or whatever, so I've used that a few times. Mostly I've used it when I need to do stuff in desktop mode, but also broke it out at my sister's house on New Year's to play Jackbox.

Yeah, I really loved the art style a lot.

Signalis This game is basically Dead Space x Dino Crisis, with a 32-bit aesthetic. The plot was weird and confusing and I barely understand what happened, and I loved every second of it. Grade: A+

Yeah, I'm noticing the same thing with my 3080, and it's rather upsetting. I'm probably going to end up getting 40-series card, which makes me a sad panda. Apparently with the Witcher specifically though, it's actually a CPU bottlenecking issue, not GPU. I believe Plague Tale is actually better balanced in that regard, so it may hold up better. With G-sync I'm fine all the way down to about 50-fps, it's below that that things start feeling rough to me (though apparently even with a 4090 and 12900k The Witcher 3 update will be in the 30's-40's in the major cities unless you turn on DLSS3...)

I'm still waiting for the ray tracing patch before playing Plague Tale.

Ooh, what's Heaven's Vault? Banner looks intersting.

First of the year! I was hoping I'd beat Signalis and get to name the thread.

"Kinda okay" is a good description of how I felt about that game. I've been playing Signalis, and holy shit is this game good. It's like Dino Crisis x Dead Space, done in a 32-bit game style, and I love it. Someone had suggested it to me at Halloween, but for whatever reason the visual style didn't appeal to me, but that's because I was obviously suffering from a massive psychotic episode, because this game is gorgeous. The gameplay itself may not be for everyone, it's third-person fixed camera, survival horror, find the keys to unlock the doors type experience, but it's really clicking with me, and I definitely recommend checking it out if it sounds even remotely interesting to you. And it's on Game Pass!

My list: Scarlet Nexus Quantum Break Chorus Psychonauts 2 Pokemon Legends: Arceus Horizon Forbidden West The Forgotten City Carrion Death's Door Cyberpunk 2077 Elden Ring Tunic Returnal: Ascension Bridge Constructor: Portal Triangle Strategy The Gunk Unpacking Ghostwire: Tokyo Assassin's Creed: Valhalla: Wrath of the Druids Assassin's Creed: Valhalla: Siege of Paris Tales from the Borderlands Sifu Assassin's Creed: Valhalla Assassin's Creed: Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarok Hades Prey: Mooncrash Deliver Us the Moon Lego Builder's Journey Hardspace: Shipbreaker Far: Lone Sails Forza Horizon 5: Hot Wheels As Dusk Falls Exapunks TIS-100 Shenzhen I/O The Looker Jurassic World Evolution 2 Jurassic World Evolution 2: Dominion Biosyn Death Stranding PC Escape Academy Deathloop Tinykin The Spectrum Retreat Escape Academy: Escape from Anti-Escape Island God of War: Ragnarok Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope The Outer Worlds: Peril on Gorgon The Outer Worlds: Murder on Eridanos Weirdly exactly the same number as last year. But wait! There's stats! Playstation saw a massive decrease in the proportion of my gaming spent there. In 2021 a whopping 92% of the games I beat I played on Playstation, accounting for 88% of my gaming hours. In 2022 it was just 23% and 32%, respectively, even losing the top spot to PC (though just barely). The biggest and most obvious explanation for that is that I got an Xbox (increased from 0% in both categories last year to 25% of the games and 23% of the hours this year) and a built a new PC (up from 4% to 44% in games and 7% to 33% in hours), both with Game Pass. But even that doesn't account for all of it, because Switch saw a rise from 4% of games and 5% of hours last year to 8% of games and 12% of hours this year. Not a huge bump, but it did go up. (Here's a link to my post from last year for comparisons.) In terms of the amount of time spent with each game, Horizon: Forbidden West takes the top spot, with 69 (nice) hours, and Elden Ring right on its heels with 68 hours. On average I spent 22.6 hours with each Playstation game, 22.5 on Switch, 15 on Xbox and 12 on PC. I think Xbox and PC's averages were both dragged down by Game Pass encouraging me to play more little indie games, since I don't have to buy them individually. So that's my year in gaming. I'm honestly surprised how well balanced I was between the platforms. I'll be interested to see what next year's looks like, and if I get an even bigger skew towards PC now that I have a Steam Deck.

Good shout out for As Dusk Falls.

As a follow-up to that, I got it working and running Game Pass games natively, without cloud streaming. It's pretty cool. My one tip to add is that I couldn't figure out how to configure SWICD at first, and it was sending both button presses and keyboard inputs simultaneously, so that was a problem, but the trick is just that by default it launches minimized to the tray, and was hidden in the little up arrow. Once I went in there and configured it everything worked great.

I would also like to add these two guides for creating a bootable Windows SD card: https://wagnerstechtalk.com/sd-windows/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-to-install-windows-steam-deck/#dt-heading-boot-from-a-microsd-card-or-usb-drive Lets you effectively dual-boot (because actual dual-booting currently isn't supported), without having to split your internal drive and without having to nuke your Steam OS installation. Also SWICD, here: https://github.com/mKenfenheuer/steam-deck-windows-usermode-driver/wiki/Installation, which lets Windows recognize the Steam Deck controls as a 360 controller so you don't have to launch your Windows games through Steam.

I started Metal: Hellsinger last night, played the first two levels and really enjoyed it. I never got on much with the modern Dooms, and this is a similar feel but is really clicking with me. It just feels so good to be doing everything to the beat, and the music is great. It starts out with just a beat, but as you build your multiplier it layers on more and more of the track. It's so hype when you hit a 16x multiplier and the vocals kick in, up there with the Persona 5 music when you're doing you're final thieving run on a dungeon. It does have weird performance characteristics on PC. Adjusting the graphics settings doesn't seem to affect framerate at all, resolution is the only thing that seemed to matter. On the main menu (which has a 3D scene in the background) at 4k ultra I got 84 fps, and at 4k low I got 85 fps. Turning it down to 1440p got me to locked 120, but again other settings had no effect. It's not a major problem, I can play at 1440p, it's just weird.