TheMightyEthan

Infinite Warfare was the first Call of Duty I really liked since the original Modern Warfare, but sadly no one else seemed to agree.

How far in are you? If you're right at the beginning you might try starting over again and seeing if you get a better starting location. My wife played that game maybe a year ago and liked it quite a bit for a while, though she kind of petered out. I played for about 20 hours at launch before the progress slowed down enough that I lost interest, and I tried it again after the big update but for whatever reason it never grabbed me.

Dishonored Definitive Edition I got the whole Dishonored series cheap on PS4 (this is actually a coincidence to the Bethesda buyout, I wasn't even thinking about that when I bought these), just finished platinuming the first one yesterday, and goddamn that game is just as good as I remember. Sadly it never got a PS4 Pro upgrade, and 1080p30 is almost painful for me to look at now*. I've gotten used to it again now, it just took longer than I was expecting, and I still laugh at how muddy everything is and how just a few years ago I would have thought this was an amazing image. I am kind of impressed with it's antialiasing though, even at this low resolution there are basically no jaggies, it's only on very high frequency details, like metal grates and such, that I ever see any shimmer at all. Having recently played a little Bloodborne, which is also 1080p30 but with no AA, I have to say I still prefer good AA, even though it makes then image softer, than an un-antialiased image with tones of aliasing. Anyway, tech stuff aside, it's a fantastic game, still lives up to my memories of it, which is impressive for a 9 year old game. I still highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys stealth games. I was going to play another game as a pallet cleanser before moving on to The Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches, but I think I'm going to go straight to those since I'm already acclimated to the 1080p30, and I don't want to break that by playing something newer in between. Luckily Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outsider did get PS4 Pro patches, so I won't have that problem with them. *Normally 30fps doesn't bother me, it's only with PS5 that graphics have gotten good enough for me to prefer 60fps lower resolution performance modes over 30fps higher resolution quality modes, because now even "low resolution" performance modes are as high a resolution as the quality modes were last gen, but this game doesn't even have motion blur, which makes it seem even extra jerky.

Persona 5 Stikers Got a "Used - Like New" copy on Amazon that says it includes the unused bonus DLC code for $48, which is the cheapest I've found it anywhere, so I finally bit.

No, you're right, it was A-to-C. I was thinking it was C-to-C because I bought myself a longer C-to-C cable for charging the controller, because at launch there was a bug where the USB-A port on the front wasn't getting power in standby mode, so you couldn't charge a controller off of it. I wanted a longer cable anyway so I could charge while playing, so it didn't really affect me, just meant I bought a different cable.

PS5 games are actually smaller than PS4 games, despite the higher resolution assets, because the hardware decompression allows them to compress it more without making loads take forever. You can see it if you ever install both versions of the same game. It's not a ton, but it's significant, an average of between 10-25% smaller for the PS5 version depending on the specific game.. But yeah, CoD is insane. If you install all the modes, Black Ops won't even fit on a launch 500GB PS4 at all.

Yours didn't come with a C-to-C cable?

If you got a USB 3.2 external SSD it wouldn't be as fast as the internal drive, but it would still be faster than the PS4 Pro. You could also use it for shuffling games faster than downloading them, by moving them back and forth between the external drive and internal drive.

It's not really a full terabyte though, the drive itself is only like 825 GB, and then you can only use like 680 of that for games. I agree it's not enough though, even I've had to juggle games and I'm not someone who keeps big games sitting around on the drive forever. Did they ever fix the problem where having a USB drive plugged in when you put it to sleep causes it to crash? If they did, you could always move your PS4 games onto one of those.

What all do you need ports for? I have PSVR using both ports in the back, then I have a USB-C to USB-C plugged into that port in the front for charging the controller, which leaves the USB-A in the front for the dongle. I agree it's less than ideal to have the dongle in the front, but as far as number of ports it seems like enough. You could also probably use a USB hub in the back to get more ports back there.

Yeah, my first thought when I heard about it was "well, everyone wanted to get back to normal..."

Which puzzles?

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim This game deserves its hype. I've never been so captivated by what is essentially a visual novel (with an ATB strategy game bolted onto it). But holy shit, this thing is amazing. I'm in awe of the writers, developing this absurdly complicated timeline with interacting stories of 13+ characters. It's nuts, and so good. 5/5

Nice, those look great. And the tracking from the headset explains how it's only one wire.

Super Mario 3D World: Bowser's Fury This game is pretty good by Mario standards (so really good by overall standards), and is a great experiment in an open-world Mario game, but it definitely has some rough edges that show it's just a first attempt. The most obvious thing is that since there aren't "levels", there isn't really a hard break when you get a shine, it's more like any other collectible, you just grab it and keep playing, but they still used the classic 3D Mario mechanic of each shine changing the level in some way to set up the next one. However, since there's no break and reload, it doesn't happen immediately, you have to leave the area and come back for the island to reload, which can get kind of tedious if you're working on a specific island. The bigger thing, though it's not as obvious at the beginning, are the Bowser fury attacks. They gradually get more and more common as the game goes on, so at first they're not too bad, but later on they get frequent enough that their disruption can make it much harder than it should be to get certain shines. It's not a huge issue, but it's the kind of thing that starts to get pretty irritating over time, and needs to be fixed in any follow-up. Really though, on the whole it's great, and the little niggles are just that, the kind of thing any first entry in a new series (or in this case new take on an old series) is going to have, and I'm sure can be fixed in future games. I look forward to a full-sized game in this style. 5/5

I doubt it, they've been putting their own games on Steam for the last couple years.

See I absolutely loved all three Dishonored games, as well as Prey, so I am very much going to miss them. At least I still get Deathloop.

Yeah, they can do whatever they want, but by the same token I don't have to buy their products or services if I don't like what they're doing. Honestly Arkane is the part that hurts the most. I like stuff like Wolf, TES, and Fallout, but it's no great loss to me. Arkane, on the other hand, is a real blow.

I did the time trial trophies, they actually weren't hard once you know the solutions. Honestly the one I had the most trouble with was the very first one, where you're just walking through the garden with no "puzzles". Pro-tip for if you ever decide to go back and do them: if you reload a save earlier in the level it voids the trophy, so if you mess up you have to restart the whole level.

I actually thought it was the perfect size, and would have liked it less if there had been more stuff.

I started playing 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, and oh my god does this game have its hooks in me.

Yeah, there's a huge difference between developing an exclusive IP and buying an existing multiplatform IP and making it exclusive. Or an entire publisher's worth of existing multiplatform IPs.

Phil Spencer is now saying that future Bethesda games will be exclusive to "platforms with Gamepass", which isn't surprising, but really sucks. He says it's all about giving Xbox gamers great exclusives, but Bethesda games were already on Xbox, so he's not actually giving them anything, he's just taking them away from Playstation. This does not benefit any customers, other than the fact that the games will be on Gamepass, but that doesn't require buying the company or making them exclusive. This actually makes me less likely to buy an Xbox/sub to Gamepass because I don't like feeling like they're trying to coerce me.

@Thursday Next Maquette solution to the puzzle you're stuck on: That was one I had to look up, and when I did I realized I would literally never have figured it out.