TheMightyEthan

I did Kerry's, but not the other two you mentioned. I will probably do another playthrough when the first expansion launches.

The Touryst I got this game mainly because it's pretty/charming as all get out, and turns out that's the only thing it has going for it. Aside from the art it's a bad puzzle game with worse platforming elements. The puzzle solutions are either blindingly obvious or absurdly obtuse, no in-between, and the platforming is plagued by lack of spatial queues combined with camera angles that make it impossible to tell where you are when you're in the air (there's a reason Mario always has a shadow directly under him). The art is amazing though. It's a voxel style with a tilt-shift depth of field effect that is . It also runs at 8k60 on PS5, made possible by its simple style. It's really lovely to look at. Grade: D+

I did do some of the bigger ones, Judy's and Johnny's specifically, because those felt emotionally important to V, so it felt natural to do those before finishing the main quest, it was mostly the random jobs I didn't mess with. As far as the end goes

Cyberpunk 2077 Beat this last night and I've been cogitating on it, and the more I think about it the more I think it's one of the best RPGs I've played in a long time. I got the Devil return ending, and it left me feeling kind of empty and unsatisfied, but I think it was supposed to, and it really works well. As I mentioned in the what you're playing thread, I didn't do a lot of the side content, because the game was so engaging that I really felt like I was V, and V had bigger properties. What I did see of the world felt really deep and fleshed out, where lots of RPGs feel like theme park towns. It's a shame the launch was such a clusterfuck, it overshadowed a really great game. Grade: A

That was all surprisingly comprehensible and concrete, thank you! I can't wait for Monday, I wish I'd ordered it yesterday...

I am shocked this thread didn't already exist. I just ordered this game, and I want to give it a real shot. I've bounced off every other From game, but I've never played one near launch, and I've never engaged with the community discussion around them, which I hear is a major part of the experience, so maybe this time it'll be different. It's arriving Monday. What do I need to know before I start? Are there any beginner videos anyone recommends? Halp!

Is Elden Ring gonna be the From game that finally hooks me? We shall see.

It's kind of amazing how much of an outsized influence Russia is able to have on geopolitics, considering its economy is roughly the size of Florida's. *Edit - I guess that's nominal GDP, and to be fair you should go by purchasing power parity, which puts it more on par with California. But still.

I beat the game and did a NG+ 100% run and still never got that one.

Death's Door I originally shelved this game on the third main boss, cause I thought it was too hard. Here's what I said then: Well I went back because all the talk of Tunic made me feel like I should give this game another go, and I beat that boss on the 2nd try, with no additional upgrades. So idk what my problem was before, maybe I was just being too greedy about trying to do damage and not dodging enough. This game is hard but manageable, and checkpoints tend to be reasonably placed, especially before bosses and stuff. It's a little bit Zelda, a little bit Souls, and it works perfectly. Really the only thing I'd want them to change is to add a map, as some of the areas can be pretty confusing even after you've been through them several times. I say it's a little bit Zelda because the world exploration is in that vein, but it's definitely a simplified version. You do get items like bombs or a hookshot (I forget what it's called in this game) that allow you to access new areas and change how you move through the world just like you would in Zelda, but there's only a couple of them. The game as a whole is smaller too though, so I think it fits well with the scale of the game. As far as the Souls aspects, there's the obvious one which is the difficulty. There's also the combat, which is based around dodging. You are definitely not a tank in this game. Every time you get hit takes 1 health, and by the end I had 6 total health. I think there was 2 more I could get, but that's it. So combat revolves around dodging to avoid damage, and getting hits in where you're able. Also like in Souls games, you collect souls to upgrade your stats like damage and speed and whatnot, but you keep them when you die so there are no corpse runs, and in that way it's a little forgiving. If an area is too difficult and keeps killing you you're still making progress towards upgrades, so it doesn't feel so much like a brick wall. (The exception to this is bosses, because if you don't kill the boss you don't get any souls, so no progress is made.) Overall, this game is fantastic, and I highly recommend it. Grade: A+

P4G is a rough platinum, I have every trophy but Hardcore Risette Fan, and that one requires you to hear basically ever Rise combat line, which means you have to have like every possible situation arise in battle. It's ridiculous.

Oh no, lol, I understood what you meant, I was just making fun of your government for focussing on people helping the defenders and claiming that's warmongering while ignoring the people who actually invaded the country in the first place.

I've been playing Cyberpunk and really quite enjoying it. The general consensus seemed to be "there's actually a pretty good game buried under all the bugs" but I'm actually enjoying it more than that led me to believe. The world is really cool, and the hacking stuff is well integrated into combat. Honestly the biggest issue I have is that it's too engaging, something about it encourages me to really really roleplay, doing only what my character would actually do, and not do things for out-of-game reasons. The reason that's an issue is because it means I've been doing almost no side content, since V's got some pretty damn good reasons to want to deal with the main story ASAP, so I feel like I'm not getting the most out of the game (though I have been doing sidequests that feel emotionally important to V, so mainly the ones that deal with main characters, just not the random job type ones). The other thing is the shooting doesn't feel good at all on a controller, but since I'm playing a netrunner I typically avoid most combat, and now I have a smart gun that auto-targets with guided bullets so it's really not an issue. I'm coming up on the end now, and assuming it sticks the landing I anticipate giving it high marks.

More than anything else I've heard that comment makes me think Elden Ring might actually be for me, even though none of the other From games have been. QoL improvements is what it needed.

Gran Turismo 7 I am simply not enough of a car nerd for this game. From the very beginning, the interminable, unskippable opening credits that do the Star Trek Enterprise thing of like showing the history of car technology, but like 1000x slower than that, which then segues into like 5 minutes of in-game footage of races, also unskippable, had me fed up with the game before I even got to start playing. I mean yeah, those in-game races were pretty, sure would be great if I were driving in them. Then I've got to talk to all these assholes so I can learn the history of Japanese coupes, then I get to do a couple races, then I have to talk to the assholes again to learn about more differenter cars before I can do more races. I mean, goddamn, I played for an hour and a half and got to do like 5 races. The racing itself was fine, nothing stand-out, except somehow contrived to make me feel like I was going 20 mph the whole time. I would rather be playing Dirt or Forza, but if I didn't have any other racing games available this would be an okay option. As I said, I am not enough of a car nerd for this game. Grade: C

Well, strictly speaking, the West supplying weapons to Ukraine is prolonging the war...

Grass is always greener.

That game is near the top of my "to play" list.

I've never heard of I Am Dead, but that banner sure makes it look enticing.

Permanently missable as in you can't even get it on NG+?

Holy shit, I thought ER took at least 3 playthroughs to plat.

The Touryst, the only native 8k game on PS5! (downsampled to 4k because the PS5 doesn't actually support 8k output yet) That tech is cool, but that's not the only reason I got it, I've had my eye on it for a while cause it looks like a neat little puzzle game, and then it went on sale.

The Senate passed a bill to make Daylight Savings Time permanent! Now we just need the House to do the same. The only part I don't approve of is that it won't take effect until next year. Make it this year you cowards!

Looks like we have official word, from CNN: So the "make sure that they don't spiral out of control" part makes it sound like they intend to act with restraint as much as possible. We'd probably only see a full-fledged response to an unequivocal attack.

Well, in the event we do end up in a war between Russia and NATO it seems Russia is giving us good data on their new weapons tech: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/14/us/russia-ukraine-weapons-decoy.html That seems like the kind of thing you don't deploy for a "small-scale" conflict like this, because you want it to be a surprise if you do end up in a war against a stronger foe. Now NATO knows about the countermeasures and has a head start on developing counter-countermeasures. *Edit - lol, I wrote that last paragraph before finishing the article, but farther down: *Quote edited for conciseness.