TheMightyEthan

Yeah, Halo (at least all the ones Bungie did) has the best soundtrack I've ever heard in a game by far.

I'm really impressed how well Halo CE holds up, especially considering it's a console shooter. This is the game that basically proved that genre could work and the fact that it's still enjoyable 20 years later, after all the evolution the genre has gone through, is a testament to how well they nailed it.

I was gonna hold off until after I played Persona 5 Strikers, but everyone talking about it just wore down my resolve.

Hell yeah!

Holy crap, that's a really good translation of that picture into comic book style.

Returnal I rolled credits anyway, though the story doesn't feel done (you can continue playing after you beat it, so hopefully that will provide a little more closure, there are more audio logs and stuff to find). It's funny, this game is basically the opposite of Lost Gods, where I absolutely loved it all the way through, but felt like the ending was a little abrupt and unsatisfying. It left me with more questions than answers, but not in a good way. It honestly felt like the ending should have been the end of act 2 in a 3 act story. But again, I'm hoping the "epilogue" provides act 3. Okay, that's enough negativity, overall I love this game. It just feels so good to play. Combat is Bungie-tier. And unlike with Hades, I didn't find the restarts frustrating or disheartening. General consensus is this game is really hard, and I've even seen the word punishing thrown around, and like, I just don't see it, and normally I'm a complete baby about frustrating difficulty. I was on my 15th run when I beat it (really 13th, since I don't count the first one where there's a scripted encounter that's supposed to kill you, or my second run where it crashed), and it took me 21 hours. That's an average of 2 tries per "level", which is really not bad at all. None of that is meant to be a criticism, like I said, I loved it, but for me at least it wasn't nearly as hard as I was led to believe. Checking trophies 11% of players have beat it, which is pretty good for only a week after release. So don't let the perceived difficulty scare you away like it almost did for me, it is very doable. Other than the one crash I was never once frustrated, and even after that I still wanted to dive right back in (and there have been two stability patches so you probably don't need to worry about that). This is easily my favorite game I've played this year, which is saying something given how much I love Hitman. 5/5 *Edit - Yeah, looks like there's more to the story after the credits. (Very minor general plot structure spoilers, no actual plot details.)

Had your joycons broken, or are you just one of those people for whom they're not comfortable?

I've heard 8-12 hours depending on how thorough you are.

I loved that game, and I think it sold really well, I'm surprised we haven't heard about a sequel. *Edit - yep, apparently it's the best selling Switch game that's not published by Nintendo.

Second boss down on my third try. Bring on biome 3!

It hadn't happened to me either, that's why it fucked me up so bad, I was not expecting to suddenly be attacked. ?

Yeah, I was specifically talking only about the Activision part of the business.

I beat the first boss last night, my second try. At the beginning of that run I'd got fucked up real bad by a surprise enemy, and thought the run was ruined, but I actually managed to recover. Made it into the second biome, and got killed in the first room with enemies. ?

Returnal I'm only a few hours in, but holy shit I'm loving this game so far. I was a little nervous I would find it too frustrating based on how hard I've been hearing it is, but that is very much not the case. The combat is fantastic, I honestly can't think of a non-Bungie shooter where I've had this much fun fighting. It might just be because it's a shooter, when most Hard (TM) games are either third person action games like Souls, or side-scrollers. Shooters have always been something I've been good at, even though I'm pretty picky about which ones I like, so I don't play many of them. Back in college I used to play almost all shooters on the hardest difficulty, so I may just be better prepared for this game than others that are known for their difficulty. Also, the difficulty, at least so far, feels very much like "fair" difficulty. I know I'm still barely into it, but at least so far I've never run into a situation where I felt like there was no way I could have survived. It's always felt like I had the tools I needed, and it's just on me to utilize them effectively (pro-tip: dash constantly, you're invulnerable while dashing*). I did have one crash, on my second run (there's a stability patch coming out today so hopefully those crashes stop), but when I loaded back in I still had all the permanent stuff I'd collected on that run, so while it's obviously not good it at least wasn't any worse than if I'd died. So yeah, at least so far this is on track to be a GOTY contender for me. *I've just realized something: my only complaint about the gameplay is that dash is on , which means you have to take your thumb off the right stick to do it, but looking at a control map I see that for some reason the game doesn't use R1 for anything, and it has the option to completely customize the controls, so I think I'm gonna move dash up to R1.

Immortals Fenyx Rising: The Lost Gods Of the base game and three DLCs, this was my least favorite, but I think that's more me than the game itself. For The Lost Gods it changed into a top-down, more old-school action RPG, and that just isn't really my cup of tea. I was always annoyed by my inability to see very far due to the top down angle, and I was annoyed by the fact that everything cost resources (fast travel, saving, everything). But again, I don't think that's the game being bad so much as it is me not liking what it's going for. The only really "objective" negative I have for it is that I didn't feel like the gods were very well developed as characters in this one, and I didn't feel the overall plot terribly compelling. I will say for it though that it really stuck the landing, I really liked the final boss fight and associated story progress, and so I came away at that point feeling fairly positive about it. Overall though I don't think it was enough to overcome the blah-ness of the rest of it. 3/5

I think the mainline games were declining, but then Warzone came out and started printing money. But yeah, eventually CoD will lose its luster, so it's really stupid of Activision to put all their eggs in that basket.

Yeah, the really shitty thing is that Crash 4 actually sold really well, it made them a lot of money, it just wasn't CoD levels of money.

I was on the fence about Rift Apart, I liked R&C 2016 okay but wasn't super in love with it, but goddamn this looks fun, I think I'm gonna get it.

Knives Out Holy shit this movie was good. The kind of mystery that really keeps you guessing, but that also feels solvable if you just pay enough attention. In fact, about 20 minutes before the end I paused and told my wife what was going to happen so she'd be impressed when I was right (turns out I was only about 75% right though ?). I highly recommend it. Also, best line of the movie: ?

Active Neurons This was a fun, if short, little puzzle game. Basically you're sliding around a box in a 2D environment trying to activate various switches and whatnot to clear each level, but the surface is frictionless so once you start moving in a given direction you don't stop until you hit something. I enjoyed it enough to buy Active Neurons 2 and 3 (all three are on sale on PSN right now). 4/5 Immortals Fenyx Rising: Myths of the Eastern Realm This was more IFR, which is what I wanted, so that was good. I do think it hewed a little to close to the form of the main game though, even taking into account it's set in China. The basic structure of the plot is the same: a chaos being broke a mountain, you have to collect magical whatsits to help gods so they can fix it. Like they started with the same outline and just dropped in different names to fit the Chinese theme. There are only two gods/realms to help in this one, but the smaller scale it to be expected in a DLC versus the main game. It was actually made by a Chinese studio though, so that's cool. 4/5

Returnal I was waiting for reviews for this game, and they're pretty great all around. It sounds like it has the kind of sci-fi/supernatural horror that I absolutely love, and wish we had more of (especially in movies). I'm slightly worried that I might find it too frustrating based on the way people are describing it, but that's why I got a physical copy, so if it's not for me I can sell it to someone else. I'm also pretty sure this is the first purely next-gen game I've gotten, everything else has been either last-gen or cross-gen. *Edit - This is probably related to it being a true next-gen game, but reviews are also saying it makes excellent use of the DualSense features and 3D audio (perfect for my new headphones ?), possibly the best out there besides maybe Astros Playroom (but since that game was specifically designed to show off those features it's hardly surprising it's still king).

I'm still playing Surviving Mars, but watching all the little drones go everywhere carrying resources around has made me realize I really really want a city builder where you're an ant colony.

Well, it's been nice knowing you...

I believe we were sending AZ vaccines to Canada because they're approved there but not here

Hisense 55" H9G The TV in our main room bit the dust, so we needed a replacement. I did my research and this TV looks like it's in the sweet spot where you get the best bang for your buck. There are better TVs out there, but they're close to twice as expensive, if not more, and they aren't that much better. As a bonus (because I wasn't looking for gaming performance since I don't play much on that TV), its game mode is really fast, like less than 15ms of input latency, which is getting into gaming monitor territory. The only thing it doesn't do is 120Hz (it has a 120Hz refresh rate for response time, but won't actually take 120Hz signals), but since I wasn't looking for gaming I figured that was okay.