TheMightyEthan

Neither do we, but that was the ad campaign.

It's for stuffed crust pizza, the whole ad campaign was about eating the pizza backwards.

Really? I got the info from Eurogamer, and it didn't say it was US only.

The Android versions of the Squenix GO series (Hitman, Lara Croft, Deus Ex) are free on the Amazon app store.

I generally don't either, just thought I'd mention it.

I've heard that if you pirate the dlc the legit base game will recognize it fine. Not that I want to test that on my Origin account...

That's cool that it doesn't need an internet connection. I assumed it was sending images to Deep Mind or something.

The more I think about that video the more disinterested it makes me in this game. I liked the slower, more tactical cover-based combat of ME2 and 3. I'm sure this combat is supposed to look "dynamic" and "exciting", but as Hot Heart said on Twitter it just looks messy.

The three Assassin's Creed Chronicles games are on Humble Bundle at the pay-what-you-want level, so I got them (plus Assassin's Creed 1, which I already have) for $1.

Well at least then the drought would be over...

Supposedly the Switch is not region locked, so you could import the NA version.

I would expect more like 3, but I take your point. Luckily I was already planning to get a nice power bank.

Destiny isn't boring from a gameplay perspective, it's a fantastic shooter, it's just boring from a long-term engagement perspective. But yeah, that trailer put me off. Mass Effect 2 is free on Origin right now (keep forever once you've added it to your account). Sadly all the important DLC still costs a total of about $15,000. It does come with Zaeed, but not Kasumi, Overlord, LotSB, or Arrival. Overlord is skippable, but you're really missing out with the rest of those.

^That.

Wait, yeah, what the shit does 2.5 bedrooms mean? I've heard of half a bathroom, but not half a bedroom...

Yeah, I'm actually kind of glad because it means I'll have my Switch to take on the trip to South Carolina this spring for my sister's wedding.

Welp, Zelda is back on as a Switch launch title, at least in NA and Japan. Apparently the reason for the delay to summer was to give Europe enough time to localize into all their various languages, but at the end of December Japan decided fuck Europe, the Switch needs Zelda at launch. The upshot for me is that now I guess I'm getting a Switch at launch.

First finished game of the new year is Wolfenstein: The New Order! I'd heard great things about this game and was still pleasantly surprised. It played well and they kept up a good variety between levels. If I'd managed to finish it before the end of the year it probably would have even beat Titanfall 2 for my favorite shooter I played last year, which is saying something.

@Mal: I definitely take games off my backlog once I realize I have no intention of ever playing them again.

I consider any game that I am not currently playing and that I haven't either finished or decided I'm never going to finish to be on my backlog. The only exception to that is that if I get a game while I'm currently playing another game the new game doesn't go on the backlog until I finish my current game without starting the new game.

Here come the stats! I beat 43 games this year, which was a massive increase from last year's 18. I thought last year could be explained by some big RPGs slowing me down, but this year I played Persona 3 Portable and TMS#FE, both of which clocked in around 80 hours, so I think it was actually Destiny that explained my poor performance last year. My average time-to-complete was 17.5 hours, with a median of 12.4, so I did have fewer really long games dragging up the average compared to last year. Although my sample size last year was so small that that may not actually mean anything. PC barely beat out PS4 as my top platform in terms of number of games completed, 17 to 16, but it completed destroyed PS4 for hours played, at 262 vs 166. Just like last year Vita wins average hours per game, because I only played one game on it and it was a Persona game. Wii U put in a good showing here, with TMS#FE (also almost a Persona game..) giving it a huge boost. I was doing so well on my backlog right up through the middle of December, keeping it in the low single digits, but then Christmas happened... On average a game was on my backlog for 140.8 days before being removed (this only counts games I've removed, not games still on there) and I played it for 13.2 hours before finishing it or calling it good. Going into 2017 I have 11 games on my backlog, which is still better than the 19 I had at the beginning of last year. Though I am very happy that only one game is more than about 6 months old. Shadowrun Dragonfall is still left from last year's Secret Santa (Sorry GOH!) and that's definite the next thing on my list to hit after I finish Wolfenstein.

I take back what I said about Nvidia's DSR not handling non-even pixel ratios well. Somehow my smoothness setting had gotten turned all the way down to 0%, which is what was causing it to fuck up anything other than 4x downsampling. I've turned it back up to 20% and now it looks beautiful no matter the setting. The higher the % though the softer the image (default is 33% and I think that's way too soft), so I'm gonna experiment and see if I can't get it lower. *Edit - So I played around with it and determined that for me at least (this is partially down to personal preference) I can turn the smoothing down to 15% on 1440p->1080p downsampling, and 10% on 1620p->1080p downsampling before the artifacts start to bother me. I want it as low as possible because at 4k you don't actually need any smoothing at all so it's just softening the image for no reason, but stupidly DSR doesn't let you set it on a per-resolution basis so I have to either find one setting I can live with at every downsampling resolution or adjust it in the control panel each time I change the game resolution. That second option's too much of a PITA, so I decided to just go with the lowest setting that works for 1440p and call it good. Plus side of all this is that between figuring this stuff out and realizing Nvidia's FXAA setting works with Wolfenstein I have now been able to put a good dent in that game's problem with jaggies (apparently that game does the antialiasing at a really early step in the render pipeline so a lot of stuff just flat doesn't get antialiased, and it looks awful).

Wolfenstein: The New Order Great shooter so far, although goddamn does it wear its last-gen versions on its sleeve. I'm playing on PC at max graphics and it is just not a pretty game. *Edit - Oh, and the soundtrack is fantastic.

Alright, housekeeping time: Did anyone who signed up not get a gift?