TheMightyEthan

It's been a long time since I played, but IIRC you raise your shield at the last second to parry, it staggers the enemy, and then you attack while they're open.

Yeah, as far as the non-fighting bits, I don't know if I just wasn't in the right mood for it or what, but it was starting off way too slow for me.

You parry by raising your shield the moment before you get hit. You have to time it just right.

@FLD It didn't feel very visceral or precise, even when you were getting hits in or getting hit it still kind of felt like the people were sliding past each other (except of course the little cutscene special attack things).

I just tried Yakuza 0. Played for half an hour and I don't think this is for me. The fighting is janky, and from the way it's presented I'm guessing that's going to be a big part of the game.

The Last of Us Part II: A Series of Unforced Errors *Edit - It's kinda funny, the ending was actually pretty strong, so my feelings immediately after I finished it were more positive. I even found myself wondering if I had been too hard on it when I was in the middle. Even when I was writing that essay up there last night, I wondered if it was fair to call it a bad game. But the more I think about it, the more the feelings from the very end date, and I realize that no, it's actually a mess, and a bad game. It's sad, because it's so close to being great, and it's such a missed opportunity.

The Last of Us Part II Boy do I have thoughts. Okay, first off, as an overall package I'd say the game isn't that great. I'd give it a 2/5. The actual gameplay/level structure is fine, but it's got two major problems: First, the pacing of the whole story is jacked up so so bad. The non-spoiler version is that if you divide the story into Prologue, Act I, Act II, and Act III, you could remove all of Act II and the game would actually be better for it. Act II just disrupts the flow of the narrative so bad. Just so bad. It's got to go. Admittedly it's slightly more complicated than this, but I'll go into that in spoiler tags. Second, they made a major character completely unsympathetic, and the way they do it is completely unnecessary and easily avoided. Okay, now for the long version in the spoiler tags: Conclusion This is a bad game, but it was so close to being a great game, even an amazing game, but for a couple of really baffling decisions that really aren't that hard* to fix. I really, truly, do not understand why this mess of a game is being heralded as a masterpiece of storytelling in games. I really really don't. 2/5 *Edit - 4/5, for reasons posted here. *I know "hard" is a loaded term here, so I want to explain what I mean: fixing this game's problems don't require any rewrites, or any new levels, or animations, or voicing, or really anything at all to the substance of the game itself. They don't require any new assets of any kind, all the data is there on the discs that shipped. They just require rearranging some levels and removing one scene. If this were a movie I would be able to make the changes to fix its problems.

All very valid points, and I'm sure a big part of why it hasn't already increased.

Apparently NBA 2K21 is going to be $70 on next-gen consoles. This has added fuel to the speculation that $70 is going to be the normal price for games next gen (although 2K is also well known for gouging its customers so it might just be them). A lot of people are saying that's too much for games, but honestly my initial gut reaction is it sounds reasonable to me. I just checked, and a 360 launch game that cost $60 in the US in 2005 would be $78 now when adjusted for inflation, so coming up to $70 now is still cheaper in real money terms than what those games were back in 2005. Like obviously I would prefer they stay cheaper, but I don't feel like I can really complain about cost adjustments over time. Everything gets more expensive, and we've been lucky to keep 2005 prices for as long as we have. That said, I do feel like we've lost the AA price tier. It used to be some games would launch at $40 or $45, rather than going for the full $60 price point, and you don't really see much of that anymore. Not every game is a full AAA game that warrants that same high price. At the same time I can see smaller titles that don't move as many units as the big boys feeling more financial pressure to keep up with inflation just to stay in business, and if you're looking at going up to $50 or $55 you're so close to the "standard" price of $60 that you might as well jump all the way up. So hopefully if $70 does become the norm we'll start seeing more AA tier games priced around $50 or so again.

Still working on The Last of Us Part II, and now I have some actual thoughts about the game itself rather than just the graphics (which again, there's nothing wrong with them, they're even pretty great, they're just not mind-blowing...) *Ahem* I'm not loving this game. I was liking it fine, nothing fantastic but nothing bad, solid 7/10 material, until I hit the second major section (trying to avoid spoilers, hoping people who've played it will know what I'm talking about). It's just dragging on and on. I feel like I understand the point they're trying to make, and that this whole part could have been replaced with like one or two chapters that were much shorter. It's just really really overstaying its welcome. I haven't finished it yet, and I hope I'm wrong and they end up justifying all this, but it's looking less and less likely. I do have a thought for a fairly straightforward change they could have made that would have fixed this whole issue, but I'm going to save that until I've finished the game and can say for sure whether I think it would actually have worked or not.

I think it counts, since that's also why I came in here. So good. The music is great, the play is great, everything about it's great. The worst thing I have to say about it is that the first half is better than the second.

Is there a way for me to buy that version?

I got nothin. That's all just insane.

That sounds like something I would either absolutely love or absolutely hate, and I can't decide which is more likely.

Wow, it had never occurred to me that alt-tabbing and putting PC to sleep wouldn't break the shit out of the game... Like, I'd thought of doing it but just assumed the game wouldn't work right after waking and I never actually tried it... oh my God... Like, it's probably still not usable for me because Windows doesn't like it if I put my PC to sleep with my TV as the primary display, and games don't like it if I change displays while they're already running, but I fully understand that's very specific to my setup. *Edit - I still think console gaming is the way of the future for me, because I can sit back and just enjoy them without screwing with settings every 5 minutes to get them running just right, but I also understand that's a personal failing of mine and not an inherent problem with PCs.

Okay, but you still have to leave the game and PC running. I'm not talking about just switching to another program, I'm talking about "oh, it's time to quit playing for the night".

God damn, playing two console games back to back has me questioning why I ever switched back to PC as my primary platform. The ability to simply put the console to sleep in the middle of gameplay, without having to either lose progress or keep going until you get to a place you can save, is worth all the graphical bells and whistles and mods and anything else PC gaming offers. That's not even mentioning the fact that it saves me the headache of messing with technical stuff. I feel like TLoU2 perfectly exemplifies this, despite actually being a console game, because it allows you to adjust both brightness and contrast, instead of just brightness, and I spent a frankly ridiculous amount of time playing with those settings trying to get it to look just ?? on my HDR TV. It was the exact same experience as messing with stuff on PC, where each adjustment makes only a tiny tiny difference, but because I could in theory get it perfectly optimized I feel compelled to keep messing with it until I do. I thought I had it where I was happy with, but even just writing this right now has me going "well, but maybe I could turn contrast up one more notch..." If it had just been brightness like every other console game I would have messed with it once to get it where I wanted it, and then completely forgotten about it for the rest of my time playing it.

Oh yes, I also preordered GoT at the same time I bought TLoU 2. My hope is to get through TLoU in time to trade it in toward my GoT preorder (I only put down the minimum $5 to secure the prerorder).

Copyright law is so fucked up.

The Last of Us Part II I haven't played much, about an hour and a half, and so far gameplay/story wise it's about what you'd expect. I wanted to comment though that I'm confused about all the gushing I've been seeing about the graphics. Like, it's just not that impressive to me. There's nothing wrong with it, it's actually one of the better looking games, but it's not amazing like everyone acts. The natural environments look great, but all the character models and human made objects (clothes, furnirture, books, etc) just look meh. They all look like flat surfaces with textures pasted on, and not especially sharp textures. I suspect, though I am not sure, that this engine is not using physically based rendering, and that is the problem. I think that would explain why all the materials look the same in terms of the way they interact with light. At a fundamental level they all look like they're made of the same material, just colored differently, not some things being wood and some cloth and some skin, etc. The characters especially honestly look like the PS3 game, just with higher poly counts and higher resolution textures, etc, but not actually any better rendering/lighting tech. Another thing is that the far-distance vistas (mountains, towns in the valley, etc) are really obviously paintings on a sky box, rather than actual physical models in the distance. Again, not something that looks bad, but it keeps catching my attention because of how everyone hyped up the graphics of this game so much. None of this actually detracts from the game, graphics are not all that important really, it's just confusing to me. Like, Death Stranding looks way better*, and that game came out last fall, so why is everyone acting like this is some graphical masterpiece? P.S. I do want to give it one shout-out: the snow deformation when you walk through it looks amazing. That actually does look way better than the same effect in Death Stranding. *I do understand that comparing it to Death Stranding is apples to oranges, since that game only ever has one or two characters on screen at once, and doesn't have all the vegetation and stuff, I'm just talking about the visual impressiveness of the graphics, not the technical impressiveness underlying them.

The Last of Us Part II I traded in some games, and it's kind of complicated, but due to promotions I ended up coming out ahead by buying this. So let's see how it lives up to the hype.

I really liked that game, never beat it though. The slow mo stuff was super cool at the time. I also liked how the enemy barks were very accurate to context, and gave you actual useful information about what they were doing. I just beat Death Stranding. That game was super weird, and super boring, and completely amazing, and I can't even articulate why. The cutscenes at the end did kind of drag on too long, but that's basically my only complaint with the whole game. It was exactly what it was, and it excelled at it. 5/5

Man, the world is a dumpster fire.

Yeah...

Weird how much can change in a year. I don't even remember being this excited for Infinite, and can't imagine why I was. I'll still probably get Infinite, but I'm sure as hell not getting a SeX, nor am I going to upgrade my PC for it...