Hey everybody. Hope you all had a great week. This week I chugged along with my NG+ playthrough of Persona 3 reload. Not much gaming other than that as I have been out of town since Thursday. Hope you all have a good week!
Played my first few sessions of Majora’s Mask (I think somewhere between two to three full cycles?). It’s a lot to take in at first, but I’m really intrigued! Totally different in tone and arrangement to Ocarina of Time, which I played for the first time recently—I’m really impressed that they went in such a bold direction even though the development cycle was so short. I’m still just getting my bearings inside the town and taking copious notes (both with the in-game notebook and my own text file) as I learn the townspeople’s routines (already thwarted a robbery!), so I haven’t tried to tackle a temple yet, but that’s probably what I’ll do in my next session.
Im not the biggest Zelda Person but I always thought the Zelda Series PEAKED with Majoras Mask. Just such a WEIRD game in all the good ways.
MM is the best Zelda game but I feel like you need to play Ocarina first to fully appreciate it
Yeah, a lot of the base mechanics are better tutorialized in OOT and some of the off-kilter atmosphere is from the re-used characters and concepts of OOT in a new place, with new names and personalities and stuff.
Exactly. You need the prior context of the character models to get that surreal feeling.
The Gothic 1 Remake. It’s an *excellent *remake, in that it’s janky as fuck, frequently infuriating, and full of slow backtracking and quest directions that are utterly inferior to Morrowind (where directions were pretty damned good… I think, it has been a while…). A huge amount of content seems to be gated behind meeting some random dude and learning to climb, and it’s very serious about you starting as a loser - all your skill animations are worse, and you need to scrape together the resources to get taught how to actually swing a sword. Kinda cool, and I respect the commitment to that, but tracking down trainers and finding the identically grubby NPC who teaches you how to flip pancakes is a pain in the ass.
Very pretty though, and kind of nostalgic (though I never played the original!). The writing is often quite clever, and it avoids leaning on idiot balls to drive the plot - instead there are just straight up mistakes made by major characters, for understandable reasons, which cost them dearly.
Good game, maybe more interesting than good, but still good!
Starting a new character in Cataclysm: DDA
She’s an unwilling mutant that escaped from a lab through some kind of ventilation shaft, leaving her stranded in the woods. On her way back to civilization she found a radio tower with a maintenance shack that had some clothes to change out of the horrible experiment jumpsuit, then climbed the tower to get a lay of the land. Mostly wilderness, but the remains of a city to the south. Armed with a fire-hardened wooden spear, she’s going to take on the world while her body continues to randomly mutate. So far she’s grown some dog ears, her eyes turned green and glowing, and has developed some kind of healing factor. So far, so good?
EDIT Shit she just grew a photophor on her head and now glows in the dark, making sneaking impossible. 😅
EDIT 2 Okay, so I found a food dehydrator before all the milk and eggs spoiled, so I can powder those. I also found a really nice car without any damage, a couple duffel bags (they’re great because they don’t take a lot of moves to take off, so if you spot an enemy you can drop them and attack), an atomic coffee maker, a ton of seeds, and killed a soldier zombie to take his combat knife. This run is looking pretty good so far.
Finishing up my second playthrough of Rogue Trader, this time as an Arbitrator who dual-wields two-handed shotguns and leans Dogmatic. I missed the Infinite Museion content first run through and I’ll probably put the game aside until Processional of the Damned comes out, whenever that is, but damn it’s a good RPG.
Silksong, getting close to the end, trying to finish any loose quests
did a lil of the DLC in elden ring but i’m kinda burnt/fatigued by it (was just summoning mimic tear towards the end of the basegame so i could finish) so i switched up to death stranding 2, very sad very beautiful game super boring too lol great palate cleanser from mashing everyone’s faces in in ER. waiting til new stellaris stuff gets in a more stable state before i dig into the new DLC and some new(er) mods. also just reinstalled palworld…
I found a new psobb server so I’m starting over from scratch with a ranger.
I finally played Red Dead Redemption to see what all the fuss is about, and it’s a pretty fucking good game. Although I seriously do not understand the pacing of the game whatsoever.
Spoilers
From what I’ve seen on the wiki, there are 57 mission, 35 of which are in some way related to hunting Bill Williamson, who’s presented as character who’s dumber than a pile of bricks (then what does that make John?). Moving at the pace that Russia does in Ukraine, the game has you chasing this prick for around 60% of it’s playtime, only to kill him in the most anti-climactic way possible, in a place that doesn’t even feel natural for him to be found in. To add insult to injury, the guy Bill barely ever even appears during all of this, and since at some point you are not only chasing him but also Escuella, I half expected at the end that the game would tell me that the princess is in another castle, in South Africa where Elon Musk’s great-grandfather is helping them evade the wrath of Uncle Sam. John’s stupidity doesn’t help anything either, where for some reason the game makes you help out both sides of the civil war instead of simply letting you make a choice which side you will support. It’s especially stupid that in the penultimate mission working for the government, it’s directly implied that De Santa sent you and Espinoza to your deaths, yet John decides to trust him at the end anyway (whilst also not even mentioning the whole 20k pesos he promised you whatsoever) and to the surprise of no-one, gets betrayed. The death of Luisa too, is rather a tragicomedy.
Then after the whole Mexico chapter, we get back to America, to take on the omnipresent figure of Dutch. Yet despite him being the Godfather of you original enterprise, it only takes a measly 7 missions to take him out. The character of Dutch himself and his aspirations aren’t even clarified or presented all that well, where Arthur just kind of says “The guy went mad and started killing people”, but from the fact that Native Americans are joining his gang, it’s clear (and said by Dutch as well) that it’s much more complicated than that. And whilst he has a somewhat befitting send-off, the heavy lifting of actually building his character is left for RDR2.
But the most ridiculous part of all this is that the epilogue of the game, where you do everything you already did with Bonnie McFarlane, gets dragged to 9 mission, so longer than the Dutch saga in it’s entirety lmao. They seriously could have condensed the 9 mission into like 3 or 4, and the Uncle missions don’t really do anything for the narrative either.
Apart from that it also suffers from certain characters like West Dickens, Seth and Irish being way too weird, and rather (as people on the internet already observed) more fitting as relegated to stranger missions, rather than being actual characters necessary for the development of the main plot.
Im getting back into Civilization 6 . I have “only” about 200h in the game but I always thought I could easily put another 500h into it if I wanted to. Trying to familiarize myself with CIV6 again cause a buddy of mine wants to try and get into it. I honestly love teaching people strategy games in multiplayer. I hope he likes it.
Played through Jagged Alliance 3 again. Third playthrough this year. It’s just sooo good.
This week I will check out the System Shock 1 remaster (wonder how those visuals feel like on a strong sativa weed) and then maybe Mixtape and 93 Kuindzhi, a Russian game about the siege of Mariupol (free to play on le Steam).
slay the spire 2. when i win i have good cards and deck comp. when i lose i make an absolute FOOL of myself by picking up like 15 superfluous cards, or none block cards.
some other random stuff. dome keeper, everything is crab, gta6 (for the first time), some Mina the Hollower.
Football Manager, regressing to the mean after a title last season
Back to playing and trying to 100% Mario Kart World since the new 2 Knockout Tours released last week. It’s so stupid Nintendo is going to dripfeed these things. 2 tours is like, what, maybe 30-45 minutes of content if one includes mirror mode?
It seems like as long as you use or print a map the 100%ing isn’t going to be so bad this time, unlike MK8/DX where you need to farm coins for like 8 hours straight. Just a lot of small challenges m, some much harder than others. One of them has the player drive on top of a plane wing, then drive onto neighbouring parallel plane wings as they shift in and out of alignment as they fly from an island to a skyscraper top in the main city. Which is fun, I wish more of the P-switch challenges were this creative.
Catching up on my YouTube backlog while I play it at least. Most retro anime videos, some marxist explainer channels, etc.
I gotta’ finish Ultimate Ghosts 'n Goblins after this.
Mostly Warframe, as per usual. Missed the Haalvu twitch drop because I was at work and my PC didn’t stay logged in so fuckin’ RIP to 100% mastery.
A tiny bit of Devil May Cry 4, found out that using alt-enter to exit fullscreen lets you alt-tab without crassing. As for the game itself, I would say it’s not very good. Level design feels lackluster and the cutscenes are way too long and boring. The grab ability with the devil breaker is very cool, as attacks launching enemies away has always been a problem, but I don’t get what the idea was with the Red Queen’s revving ability. Even if it actually does a lot of damage (which there is no way to observe as a player), given the choice to either press L2 a bunch or just keep attacking, I’ll basically always do the latter. Finally, the menus are all SO FUCKIGN SLOW OH MY GOD JUST LET ME CONTINUE AND RESTART THE LEVEL WITHOUT IT TAKING 10 FULL SECONDS AARRRRRRRRRRGH.
Edit: Dude FUCK the Dante bossfight, just horseshit input reading.
Played a little bit more Nioh with a heavy armor build and it’s so nice actually having poise and not just getting thrown around like a ragdoll.
The new weapon should be acquirable sometime later from what I’ve read online. The Haalvu is pretty cool, I got look up some build for it.
Yeah it’ll probably be something that rotates through Baro’s shop but that’s potentially a looooooong time off.
playing Kingdom come deliverance 2, and holy shit the combat is jank af. I think i just started to get the hang of it after like 20 hours
still have no idea what I’m doing in an unarmed fight
the game is pretty tho
