one-armed dwarf

It's a very slow opening I think. I had a lot of fun in the sky island but was glad to leave, but then when you 'touch down' you still don't have your glider which you really do need to feel 'complete'. So I ended up skipping cutscenes cause it was getting to be a bit of a faff tbh, and it's not what I'm here for. But once I got the glider back I had a great time, but from the outset I would say I prefer BOTW's "GTFO out there and kill Ganon" approach to this. I suppose though this game is a lot more complex with its systems, and there was greater concern here to have a more slow-paced onboarding. They don't hold your hand, but they make sure you see enough stuff at the beginning that it will stick in your brain for later, I think. I'm playing it as I did BOTW which is to vaguely make my way in a certain direction. Except last time I went northwest, this time it's north east. Cause an NPC made it sound like a good idea It's fun to go into areas you're underlevelled for and kill them with environment interactions. It's dangerous but exciting, hylian pine nuts ftw. I don't know how people have issue with the breakable weapons in these games tbh, they throw so many weapons at you and different ways to deal with stuff. If anything I need to break more of my weapons Just random early game combat footage, not spoilers. The inventory UI in these games still leaves a bit to be desired with the left->right back and forth for the thing you're looking for. At least they have a sort by 'most used' function when looking for arrow attachments, that's nice. Archery is a lot of fun now cause everything is ammo, and has stacked effects. Firebombs, flashbangs, freeze etc I've not come up yet with some really clever fusion ideas, or superhand constructions. The building aspect of the game looks like it would take a while to be fluent in.

Maybe I'm wired weird but I take a few dissenting opinions as a positive than a negative anyway Who the fuck wants a game that tries to please everyone, a game like that is doing nothing interesting or challenging

I probably said it maybe, but for me the no-cut stuff kind of came as a hindrance in a game with so many characters to focus on. It had to come up with weird reasons to cut across to other characters and develop them in a way that made me feel like it didn't quite work. On the other hand maybe developing characters at a glance like that is more interesting in itself, and letting you fill in the untold details. Give you the tip of the iceberg, a little bit. Still though I sort of feel 8/10 on it as well. It's a messy, uneven game but its got the money on screen in a way other projects can't pull off and the main cast put in good performances. Also beating the berserks up was fun

I'm not much in due to pesky sleeping, got two of the thingygummis you need to get at the start. The intro area is pretty well done. It still does that great viewpoint-oriented form of exploration, albeit your viewpoints are few and far between in the sky island at the start. Maybe a way of easing into things, instead of hiding things around corners, hills and valleys it's hidden beneath the clouds Main thing I can say is since turning it off I keep thinking of things I want to do in it. Mostly cool/evil things involving creative ways to explore and kill things at once using the physics of the world. Just have to get back in and unlock the stuff to do that, and get into the map proper

You should hang out around here more often Maryokutai, we hardly ever talk about that stuff

I'm going to build the equivalent of Homer's car and kill Ganon/Ganondorf with it

The general sense I get is that it sounds like BOTW++. Which is fine for me, I never even fully explored that game anyway. It's more or less what I expected (and wanted, to a certain extent). But it does sound like it won't be changing many people's minds on this form of Zelda in either direction. Unless they do the right thing and turn the pro hud on of course.

Summary I saw elsewhere I'll be mostly playing portable so sounds pretty good to me

They gave it 4/5 https://www.eurogamer.net/the-legend-of-zelda-tears-of-the-kingdom-review

As a sidenote, these new OLED docks have ethernet adapters on them. I thought that was neat, the old ones do not.

There's an Arkane game for you to try @Nag

Done Pretty cool DLC, but also very overrated by Skill Up I think. The biggest takeaway I got from it is that save scumming is the Achilles heel of immersive sims, as it takes away the very cool ways you can adapt to unexpected situations. It's better to just roll with the punches, and figure out other ways, which is what you have to do in this thing cause it's run based. But at the same time, it's not particularly difficult to trivialise the things that get thrown at you. You get around a lot of stuff once you learn how effective EMPs are, honestly once you do that it seems you've beat the DLC. Nowhere near as good as the main campaign, though oddly everyone on the internet suggests its way better. It's not, but it shows you different ways to play Prey and that still makes it a very cool companion campaign to the main game and one of the coolest DLC I've seen in general. Just not as good as people make it out to be though. As a roguelike its possibility space is quite small and linear. There's a few small quests I still have to do, but I've had my fill with it.

DLSS requires certain types of tensor cores I think, it's not available to everything. Maybe FSR is more of a universally available software solution, again I dunno. But AMD stuff has generally been more compatible than Nvidia I think My only real experience using FSR tbh was using it once on the steam deck with Mass Effect, and it looked very mushy. But Mass Effect didn't have FSR built in, it was a global graphics tweak on the hardware level I think. It will probably look fine I guess but generally IMO I don't like how these reconstruction technologies look in motion, with FSR and DLSS. Maybe it will be more stable on a lower detail game like Zelda though. It's not like it needs the huge amount of detail that something like Cyberpunk has

FSR on a 720p game? hmm. Hopefully that's not too aggressive cause it can resolve things weirdly, even on home console stuff like Jedi Survivor you can get this smushy pixel crawl sometimes in motion. I can take the framerate fluctuation tbh. I've no knowledge of spoilers but people who did play that leaked version only seemed positive about it, the pirating bastards.

Not that they are bad games, far from it, but sure looks like Monster Hunter and Resident Evil are doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Hopefully that success would spread out a bit into their other IPs. I got to say I find it hilarious, tho unsurprising, that there's been around 4 Resident Evil games since DMC5 came out lol. Need a Dragon's Dogma II trailer now.

There's not a whole lot to catch up on really, the 2013 reboot was the last film. There is a TV show, but it flew so under the radar and I think nearly nobody watched it. Despite it being supposedly quite good. Also its snubbing is part of the reason Bruce Campbell retired the character as it was so much work for something which didn't really reach people. Pearl is good. I thought it was better than X which was kind of underwhelming in my view. What I think is interesting though is how you can view the films in any order and the order will still work, which isn't usually the case with prequels

I tried this out and wolves ate my legs, seems like edgelord shit but I don't know. As an aside, I find that this guy just spoils everything he talks about. It makes me not want to watch his videos in case the thing he is talking about interests me 🤔

Made a start at Mooncrash I usually don't like rogue like stuff but I find this one interesting so far. The premise is you have 5 characters who need to escape from a base on the moon. There is a timer, but the timer is more about spawning in more difficult foes than it is about making things difficult to complete on time. If one character uses a certain means of escape it is not available to others. eg, only one character can use the shuttle to escape, another uses an escape pod, another uses Soulkiller from Cyberpunk lol. The state of the world persists across runs, so if one character rummages every drawer for every resource in the crew annex early on it will make things more difficult for others. If a character dies they can be revived as a dangerous phantom, but you can also prevent this with certain equipment (and loot their corpse, whether they are phantom or not). So there's a layered approach required, and careful planning ahead. The 5 characters have different strengths/weaknesses. An engineer who excels in wrench combat, a scientist who scans enemies and can sneak around, as well as raise the dead and turn them into personal minions. A sort of psi-mage who can burrow underground and 'immersive sim' the shit out of things and a more bread and butter slow-motion shotgun specialist are the 4 I've unlocked, I assume the 5th is a hacker. Speaking of to set up certain escape routes you need to mix and match the characters' skill set. The engineer can repair a door and a hacker can setup something else to create one route for instance. It's cool I think as the character classes force a more broad knowledge of the ways you can play Prey, rather than playing the strict version of Morgan you do in the main game (any character you level yourself will eventually funnel into a pretty limited playstyle, I find). It's interesting going from a character who has the ability to fling heavy objects at stuff to one who does not. Means you need to not only know how to gravity gun things to death, but also how to throw a light canister up at the air and aim a gun at it to shoot everything at once. You've got to know how to play both the strengths and weaknesses and adapt. If an engineer can hack a few turrets it can also help out some of the weaker characters in their runs. The DLC also has randomised environment hazards that force different strats (or can be leverage against enemies, perhaps). Sometimes you need to go out of your way to bring a spare battery to fix the tram that connects the 3 main areas, so there's a sort of PSX Resident Evil 2 style 'zapping system' aspect to how you try to leave the moon base in a good enough state for the next character to come through on. It kind of assumes advanced enough knowledge of the game's systems, so it's not something that you should probably bother with without playing the main game first. It also has some story stuff that connects into that, but it's fairly lightweight. A time sensitive roguelike game isn't something which is a good fit for poring over emails. Will try to get the 5 escapees on a single run before ToTK comes out. Here's a video explaining what it's about, probably better than I can manage

Shenmue 3. Wasn't very good though imo I wish Pathologic 2 had a late backers option, the backer rewards for that are cool. I wanted to back it way back when they announced it but was broke (back in 2014, I think)

I pre-ordered Forspoken lmao

Somehow knew from the motion blur and chunky looking combat it would be a Korean game lol Looks like an online co-op Dragon's Dogma. Tbf, they actually made that game but never released it here. That said, stuff like Black Desert Online also looked really cool but playing it is a different experience (a shitty, superficial one). All you did in that game was grind stuff over and over, at least from the hours I played of it. Cool character creator and graphics tho. But a good online game needs more than this

Beat this now, after taking a multi month break from it. I had to take that break cause well, it's fucking long. Or for me it was anyway, granted it was on the highest difficulty and I basically studied every room like a combat puzzle, which isn't something that's very sustainable. Especially in a game as respawn happy as this is. Still, it's a seriously good game, in a sort of understated way. It's derivative but also a game that flexes its muscle in every category. The intertwined character narratives which piece together a backstory for the station, and the station itself make it one of the more impressively realised 'spaces' in a video game. Even just like the amount of attention put into things like what everyone's living arrangements are, the number of amenities. Even the number of fecking toilets. Every email sent has a recipient, who has connected stories with other members. It's hard to keep track of tbh, but it's very Outer Wilds. Lots of people say the combat in this game is bad but I really disagree, unless it's just people talking about the act of aiming and shooting a gun (and doing it on a controller, maybe). The level design and powers have lots of cool interactions and opportunities to take advantage of. Like this bit where I realised I could lock a nightmare in a room using remote manipulation and kill it through a skylight. Or where I get some robot and turret friends to help handle some operators. There's also neat details like how fall damage effects enemies, and how nullwave/psychshock will cause flying enemies to retreat up higher and lose their shielding against the GLOO gun, which makes them fall like a rock. Lots of brainy ways to use the levels, enemy behaviours and weapons/skills to your advantage. That said it's a bit overly combat heavy I'd say and the game could maybe do a better job of giving the player a break from all the psychic clobbering. There's none of that social stealth stuff, no interesting NPC interactions. Story triggers respawn new enemies all over the station and do it very frequently, you don't need to do many missions to trigger a station wide changing of the guard. I cleared away a bunch of operators late in the game and felt pretty good about it, but returned to the shuttle bay and it was full of fire phantoms and a nightmare. It impacts the pace negatively, and would be my one major complaint with it. There should be imo ways of handling threats that aren't always based around combat interactions, but that is more of a Deus Ex thing I guess (and why that game remains better than this one, even though this is still great). Also story reactivity seems to boil down to what sidequests you do I will try Mooncrash, tho it seems repetitive. At some point I'll try and replay this maybe with just the human powers, but turning yourself into a pomegranate and rolling down a corridor to possess operators is too much fun I think. How could you play this game any other way? I don't see how you could find the fun with just human abilities, but maybe if you're really into stealth, hacking and run n gun it could be interesting To a post mfnick made in the redfall thread, I think an 80 metacritic seems a bit low (considering the score inflation with video games), but imo games like this aren't super conducive to a review environment where they have to rush through things and don't really have the liberty to explore the extent of the game systems. You kinda have to meet the game halfway a bit and be ok with going through it slowly, in my view.

I'm about to wrap up Prey, I think IMO it's really only behind Deus Ex 1 in terms of design excellence in its genre I feel it mostly gets ever so slightly overlooked cause it's very iterative on System Shock and Bioshock. From what I read though the hassle that dev is talking about is coming from other people in the industry. So you get these types of shitheads even there.

Increase in revenue would be offset by rising inflation, I'd have thought. I still also just don't think that it's a small drop (303.2 million units to 264.2 million) with the fact that is a huge increase in hardware sold in the same interim. But it's hard to talk much about this one way or the other cause the covid tech bubble has kind of muddled the appearance of what is a healthy market and what sustainable growth looks like. The attach rate post-covid of software can't easily be compared. Supply and demand now compared with the past couple years is completely different, it's like an elastic band snapping back. These companies want growth forever but of course that is not going to happen. There's no reason why Sony, MS or Nintendo would be immune to the tech rout currently going on, it's going to be a difficult time for all of them, no matter what happy spin is put on it. Though by the looks of things it's going worse for MS. But at the same time they've a lot of things in the pipeline

Well based off what was in that other thread Sony seem to be struggling on the software sales side of the business. I don't know how it's going with Nintendo but the switch has been out a long time and people are probably just waiting for the next gen system from them. I think a couple things really didn't work out for MS, obviously the reasons are completely understandable but STALKER 2 would have been a massive release for them and a really appealing IP. Them putting so many eggs in the ABK basket seems like it was a mistake. Like exclusives aren't the only thing that matter but they definitely increase the cachet of these systems imo. Immortality can be played on a laptop, and even Netflix. It's not a strong reason to get one.