TheMightyEthan

I agree with a lot of what you said, but I do think it needs some kind of a quest log. I'm not asking for map markers or detailed directions or anything like that, it could be as simple as a record of what NPCs have said to you, so it would still be up to the player to put it together for themselves, just something so you can refer back without having to go straight to a guide online.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land This game is aggressively fine. As my wife said, "there's nothing wrong with it." There's nothing especially great about it either. It's charming enough, but not in a way that stands out among Nintendo's other offerings, it's as close to "generic" as I've ever seen from Nintendo. It's also so easy it fails to be terribly engaging from a gameplay perspective, though if I had young children this would probably be a good game for them. As it is, I was just bored more than anything. Grade: C+

Yeah, we use whine, just never whinge.

I've only ever heard it from you limeys.

Interesting, I really love the HD rumble, and even moreso the haptics on PS5, which is basically the same thing but better.

Does your Switch make a bunch of noise when it rumbles? I can totally see why it would be an issue if the child was like in your lap. Good choice though, that game is awesome.

The save transfer feature was built into the game on PlayStation, it gave you a mission where you had to physically carry your save data to the Capital Knot City to upload it into the chiral network. Because Kojima is a mad genius. Hopefully they did the same thing on PC.

Magical offense, started as an astrologer and have stuck to that basic approach. Though I'm wearing regular soldier armor cause I haven't really encountered many magic-wielding enemies yet so I wanted more physical defense. I'm assuming that will change in the future.

Well that's Godrick dead. One down, seven more to go...

Beat Margit this morning, first time I've ever beaten a major From boss. I think this game may have hooked me.

If you look at the history though NATO didn't silo Russia after the end of the cold war, they did it to themselves. There was lots of goodwill and let's all be friends and everything through the 90s, but Russia didn't want to become just one of the nations in the club, they still wanted to play the superpower and control Eastern Europe, so they rejected integration with the West, and here we are. (Obviously that's a massive oversimplification, since you can't accurately sum up something like that in one sentence, but that's the gist of it.)

I played it on Switch and it was great.

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.