IntrepidWombat

Summer is better for handling things outside the house. Maintaining engines, maintaining my property, other outdoor type projects...I've only completed 4 games this year so far, but once winter hits and my son is in school, I'll be gaming a lot more.

Ghost of Tsushima proved that a western developer could make a Japanese game high in quality with respect to the history and culture. I wonder if the backlash would be less harsh if Ghost hadn't set the bar so high.

Took the family out today to see Twisters. It was a fun popcorn flick. Lunch at Waffle House, and now I have a bit of free time. I beat Stellar Blade earlier this week. I tried to get back in to Scarlett Nexus, but it's not holding me. Gave the Rebirth demo a third try, and I just need to come to terms that it's not for me. I'm burnt out on Falcom for now, so those games will have to wait (Tokyo Xanadu Ex+ and Trails into Reverie on the shelf).

I'm studying my backlog now trying to figure out what to play next. I could go back to SB for NG+, though I also have SMTV and Octopath Traveler II in plastic on the shelf. I'm 14 hours into DQ XI, so I may pick that back up too. We'll see!

@Deoxyr1bose The execution and the polish on Stellar Blade is what did it for me. You look at a similar game when it comes to mechanics and game loop like Jedi Fallen Order/Survivor, and you can immediately see the difference. The Jedi games were both buggy with some serious performance issues, especially at launch. They also had the benefit of the most well-established science fiction franchise in any form of media to back up the lore and act as a backdrop. Stellar Blade had none of these things. Good performance, lack of serious bugs, and a brand new IP that needed to be established. It hit the ball out of the park as far as I'm concerned.

@Dalamar I'm with you. I don't understand the love that Rebirth gets - the combat felt so broken to me in the demo. I didn't like it at all. Stellar Blade is incredible though.

I love No Man's Sky and have mad respect for the devs continuing to grind out content for it. Looking forward to seeing more information on this.

Pre-order is a big no from me, but I'm definitely intrigued. I hope we get the demo in the US.

Still have a ton of work to do on the house. I don't know if I'll get any opportunities to play. If I do, it'll be Stellar Blade and the demo for Dragon's Dogma II.

@Dunkin You can't have humanity without greed. Why single out capitalism? Any and every economic system is vulnerable to corruption and greed.

@JackMiller43 Indeed. He just wanted gray eyes.

This was the game I got with my PS2!

The thing I remember best about it is the easter egg in the credits - they animated an audio skit from the Dead Ale Wives of the characters playing a D&D game, and it's hilarious in that late 90's kind of way.

Resident Evil 2 (1998) on the PS3

It's a dead tie for me between Stellar Blade and Persona 3 Reload. I ended up picking P3R in the poll only because I knew it would get fewer votes, but they're 1a and 1b. I have very little interest in Rebirth. I have hundreds of hours in the original Final Fantasy VII on PS1, and I just don't like what they did to my baby. I will play Infinite Wealth eventually, I just need to finish Like a Dragon first. SMTV Vengeance is still in plastic wrap, and I plan on buying Daybreak and Metaphor to wrap up the year.

I completely forgot about this game. It amazes me that they went through all of the effort to make a dinosaur game in RE Engine and didn't make the game that their fans wanted, instead going with the live service slop. At least they can maybe recycle some assets if they do remake Dino Crisis.

Trails through Daybreak and Conscript definitely have my attention. Trails I'll buy right away (just to add it to my backlog - physical copies of these games don't last long), Conscript I'll need to see reviews. If it's anything like Signalis, it'll be an immediate buy as well. American Football is one of my other obsessions, but the games have never really done it for me (except for NFL Blitz!).

Tried spinning up Inquisition last night - just didn't enjoy it at all. It just felt so... Corporatized? I don't know how to explain it other than it just wasn't for me. I'll be skipping this one altogether, but I'm glad anyone who picks it up will be able to enjoy it. I bounced off Bloodbourne and Demon Souls, but games with similar mechanics and easier combat like Jedi Fallen Order and Stellar Blade have been very enjoyable on the standard difficulty. I couldn't see myself turning off death, but people play games for different reasons, and even then, to varying degrees - challenge, story, whatever.

Octopath Traveler launching on PlayStation was a pleasant surprise, but that price definitely had some sticker shock. Digital only on that makes me sad. The 'sale' price is a little easier to swallow though.

Gaming is still Stellar Blade. I made a bit of progress this past week. Hopefully I get an hour or two this weekend. I find that when I'm on, I'm really on. I can power through, beat bosses and standard enemies with few issues. Out of nowhere, I get the yips and start missing blocks, miss Blinks, miss dodges, incorrectly input combos - that's when I know my session with this game is over.

Lots of home improvement on the books for the next week. Dumpster will be delivered Wednesday, and I can finally finish our garage clean out. Two of my bathrooms need new commodes, one bedroom is getting new paint, and my wife and I will be doing furniture shopping for a couple rooms as well. I'm really contemplating new floors too - that will probably have to be in next year's budget.

Hell yes, this looks cool. I'm definitely checking out this author too.

@WiiWareWave That's hyperbole. I live in a rural area of a rural southern state and have 1Gb fiber. It's happening all over the place. Look up CAF and RDOF programs.

I do agree that steaming sucks though. Physical forever.

It should launch around the same time as StarCraft: Ghost.

I appreciate a moderate challenge. Stellar Blade is right at the edge of how difficult I want a game to be. Every time I die, I know exactly why and what I need to do on the next attempt. Same games inflate difficulty artificially with weird mechanics - for example, I've played games with large bosses that charge up for attacks. I get clear in advance, but the boss rotates in place as if it was on a turn table to unleash it upon my character anyway. Why should I expect the boss to move that way? A big lumbering thing like that should have to have some kind of turn animation that takes time to execute, but instead, the difficulty is inflated artificially. That kind of difficulty is really, really annoying because it feels artificial.

Stellar Blade is an example of a game that does it right. Square off against an enemy and try to time its blows for a perfect parry, but oh dang, it pulled that second blow a bit and had a delayed third one. I got complacent thinking I could predict its movement, but it was more erratic. I did a poor job anticipating what it was going to do, so I pay the price. The Resident Evil remakes do the same thing with zombie head sway. That sort of smart, on-your-toes kind of game play difficulty is invigorating and rewarding for me. Running face first in to getting one-shot by a boss that defies the laws of physics and losing an hour of progress is not.

@PerpetualBoredom Xbox wire reported it, and there's nowhere to order a physical copy despite the game releasing in less than a month. I think it's a safe bet.

No disc, no buy (exceptions for <$10). Bummer. I remember having my interest piqued the first time I saw it, but I completely forgot about it.

I actually quite liked the story, warts and all - it really wanted to be Game of Thrones in tone, which makes sense given when development of the game started. The voice acting was on point. It was gorgeous to look at.

I'm mystified by the combat. Nier Automata came out in 2017, and it has some of the tightest action melee in any game ever. FF16 has OK combat (better than FF7 Re-X anyway), but it's disappointing for a main line title in SE's biggest IP to not stack up against a title that they also published 6 years prior. I didn't care for the big Eikon battles - they would just drag out so so so dang long. I was tired of QTEs 10 years ago, and sticking them in a game in 2023 was just...eh.

I stuck with the game, did all the side quests, and even did the first DLC as I was at the end of the game when it came out, so it was convenient. Solid 6.5/10 for me.

@ear_wig Thank you! I managed to beat the bosses in Wasteland today. I'm being stubborn and refuse to put it on easy mode.

@Lord_Malice Cold Steel 2 and RE2R are some of my favorites, so maybe we have some similar tastes. How are you liking Hades? It's been on my Amazon games list for years, I just haven't ever pulled the trigger.

Stellar Blade is so good, but I'm really bad at it. I just reached the Wasteland, and I can't beat either of the bosses I've come across.

I won't have too much time to play this weekend, so I'll play a bit more of Stellar Blade. If I get frustrated, I'll switch back to Scarlet Nexus. Gaming time is hard to come by lately, so I think I'm done buying for 2024.

@wildcat_kickz We'll have to agree to disagree - for me, it has some of the worst dialogue since Resident Evil '96 ("My face is tired.") The characters don't act in ways that make any kind of sense ("Oh hey son/daughter, let's swap using the mask every 60 seconds or so and hurry back to the ship" would have been the logical thing to do for highly trained space farers), and the plot holes need a mass relay to traverse (translators work for races on first contact? Both ways? And they translate idioms no problem? Come on). Those are just examples that come to mind; there was a lot more than that. This is one game where the great combat gameplay wasn't enough to overcome the rest for me.

@ApostateMage Agreed. Andromeda had the best combat in the series, but I can't bring myself to care enough about it to finish it. The writing, character design, disrespect of the lore, and shallow character development just nuked the whole experience. What made Mass Effect successful wasn't the combat - the first game certainly wasn't the belle of the ball in that regard - but the narrative. Mass Effect 2 had an excellent balance of the two, while ME3 leaned more heavily in to the combat while sacrificing narrative in its sloppy wrap of the story.

No clue how Veilguard is going to turn out, but the trailer + EA + recent history doesn't give me warm fuzzies.

Expedition 33 is my most anticipated announced game. I'm chomping at the bit for more. Metaphor is #2, but they'll both be supplanted by a Code: Veronica remake.

I still don't get the big deal about Astro Bot. I really wish I could get excited about Outlaws, but I just can't summon the interest for it.

I never understood the appeal of trophies/achievements in the first place. They could disappear today, and I really wouldn't care.

I could only really pick two - Expedition 33 is what I've been wanting for years. A dark, gritty RPG that's turn-based with a non-anime art style. I like an anime art style, but it gets repetitive. That's shaping up to be a day 1 buy for me. Metaphor is looking better and better too. Nothing else caught my interest, and a few were actively repulsive. Dragon Age in particular looks like an outright parody of itself.

I went ahead and bought Stellar Blade earlier in the week. I started it last night and am enjoying it for the most part. I'm not a fan of Souls-like games, so the combat is definitely an adjustment. I don't find it to be as difficult as the other games I've tried, so that's encouraging. It looks like it will be a busy weekend, so I may not have a whole lot of time to play. If I do and get frustrated, I can pivot back to Scarlet Nexus.

@WhensDinner There's a ROM hack that fixes the slowdown and a couple other bugs with the game. After ~300 hours with the PS1 version from my childhood and ~200 hours on the PSP with the physical UMD spinning away in the little drive, playing the ROM hack through PPSSPP on a PC hooked up to my TV has been the definitive way to play. A few little graphics tweaks and internal resolution scaling, and it looks way better than it has any business looking. The new release would have to be a full on HD-2D refresh like Star Ocean 2 to move the needle versus what's available now.

@Fyz306903 Just curious, what needed to be patched with Signalis? I played it through about 6 months ago and adored it.

All this did was make me really sad for the future of Mass Effect.

Everything I want is remakes in remasters. I guess I don't have any faith in new stuff except for Metaphor, but we have more than enough content out for that game.

Resident Evil Code: Veronica remake, Lost Odyssey remaster, Xenogears HD-2D. That's my wishlist of announcements.

@ChrisDeku You didn't take in to account the drastically lower cost of living in Osaka (where Capcom is based) versus a place like London. Expatistan indicates that it could be 55% lower. That's huge. I live in rural America, and it's famously cheap to live here - Osaka is much, much cheaper than that even. Based on what it costs to live, I'd say their compensation is fine. Their starting salaries are above the median for the area. You can't say that about fast food jobs in the UK.

I must be out of the loop. Why all of the hype for Astro Bot? I know the character was used in some tech demos and things of that nature, but it just looks like a generic action platformer to me. What am I missing?

"Girlboss leader who talks down to men because she's the smartest and most capable in the room at all times" was an interesting character trope 20 years ago. Now it's just so bland and over-used in media, just like everything else we've seen from this game up to this point. If you're doing something that's so heavily clichéd, there either needs to be a market for it (hello isekai anime) or it has to be exceptionally well done. It looks like it's going to be just another Counterstrike clone with stale humor and derivative characters. How exciting.

My first Dynasty Warriors experience was on a PlayStation 2 demo disc I got a few months after the console came out. It had a demo for Dynasty Warriors 2. My friends and I put so much time in to that demo - it was incredible. I went on to buy a bunch of DW games that generation and have a whole lot of fun with them, but it started to get stale after several releases made very small, very incremental changes. I hope this one makes me feel 14 again. Really looking forward to seeing more.

@AccessibleDaydream Cold Steel is a bit, but I don't expect that this one will be. The battle system in Cold Steel is much more involved. There's the school atmosphere, alternating between excursion and down time to bond with classmates. If that's what you like, Cold Steel I&II will scratch the itch - it did for me anyway.

If you like action games with downtime and squad mate bonding, Scarlett Nexus is one I think you might enjoy. Same engine as Tales of Arise, really underrated.

@Zeroo The tropes are there because a lot of people like them. The storytelling peaked in the Crossbell duology unfortunately. Those are worth playing if you want the best of Trails. I bought Reverie day 1 last year, but I've only spent about 10 hours with it. The exposition dumps are tolerable when there's one track to follow, but three is a bit much.

So I guess peeking at Amazon a couple times a day to see if the price has dropped on Stellar Blade is going to be fruitless for a little while. Great news, really.

Oh yeah, this looks like a day 1 for me.

Finished Final Fantasy VIII during the week. What a trip down memory lane.

So far, 20 minutes here and there of RE4R, third run I think. My backlog is enormous. I'll sample a few of what I have, maybe check out Scarlett Nexus, Yakuza 0, and Like a Dragon. Might try to dive back in to Reverie or DQXI. We'll see how it shakes out.

That kind of talk almost certainly means it's going to flop.

I don't do $70 games. I'll probably cave and make an exception here though.

I liked 13 Sentinels a lot. Unicorn Overlord looked cool, but the demo felt like a missed opportunity - the combat just...plays itself? Not a fan of that mechanic.