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2021 VIDEO GAME CATCH ALL THREAD


RIPPA

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Honestly I’d go with either WD_BLACK, but that’s my second WD harddrive so I might be bias?

Anyway, Xbox has a nice little sale going on (whaaaaat???) so I picked up Blasphemous, Force Unleashed 1 & 2, Silent Hill HD Collection, Splinter Cell: Double Agent, Death’s Door and Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.

And banked like 6,000 points or whatever for buying $40+ worth of Xbox One or X/S games, so that’s nice ? Merry Christmas to me. Now I just need the other 360 Splinter Cell games, the Metal Gear games (besides Revengance) and Cyberpunk (on PS5) to go on sale by the end of the year. C’monnnn!

Edited by Casey
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13 minutes ago, Chaos said:

Cyberpunk has been $9.99 a lot lately. I picked it up a few months ago from Best Buy at that price. 

I'd leave it in the box until after the next major update, which should be 1.4.  Maybe by then they will have fixed the issues with enemy aggro distance. 

Next gen update should hit in 1Q 2022, but that could be any time between the first of the year and the end of April, and CDPR does enjoy releasing shit at the last possible second.

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And I'm already done with the main story on Halo Infinite. I think I only have a few bounties to kill and 3 or 4 more multiplayer cosmetics to find and then it's back to playing multiplayer until they release more story content. 

First the positives. I really loved it. It's an awesome jumping off point for revitalizing the Halo series. It takes some of the coolest parts of Halo and basically makes that into the whole game. Being able to go anywhere and do anything is a shit load of fun. And the gameplay is flawless, just like a Halo game should be. I know a lot has been said about the addition of the grappling hook, but it really does improve the gameplay a ton. I can't tell you how satisfying it is to grapple onto an enemy fly towards them, Superman punch them, use the grappling hook to grab a far away exploding barrel, throw that at another enemy, and then grapple onto a Ghost and hijack it to them run amok over everyone. I was also a fan of the story, but I probably like Halo way too much. This at least wraps up much of the stuff from the past and gives a launch pad to the future. 

Unfortunately, there are some downsides. I miss the different biomes. It would have been cool to get another swampy area, a snowy area, and more. Night and day cycles would be welcome too so you could make use of your headlight. The combat does get repetitive. Even though you can approach taking over FOBs or other mission points in a ton of different ways, they still just function as combat arenas. Go in, kill everything, claim the FOB or compete the objective, rinse, repeat. And finally, I'm not a fan of half the guns in the game. I mainly tried sticking with the BR and the shotgun. So many of the Covenant/Banished weapons suck or they rely on arching your shots. Plus, some stuff like the needler have been way nerfed. There's still some good ones though. The spike gun thing is awesome and is the best weapon for taking out Hunters. 

All in all, I'd say it would be worth $60, but you don't need to pay $60! It's on Game Pass! I don't think I have bought a single game for the Series X yet. It's all just Game Pass downloads. 

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Completed Chapter One of GoTG.  Beat Rocket in the shooting contest despite the cooldown for Element Guns and Rocket cheating by giving himself five points.  

I am slowly getting used to the combat scheme.  I need to do a better job of not targeting enemies with more than one Guardian.  I was happy that I did not fuck up the team huddle. 

Marked for the appearance of the Acanti space whale and was horrified when it got eaten by the mystery nano-thingies.  

Gameplay is pretty good but the achievements / trophies are a buggy mess. (BEWARE ANDREW POE~!)  Unlocking Guardian Collectables is hit or miss.  Sometimes the entries show up in your Galactic Compendium and sometimes they don't.  

Edited by J.T.
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Some reviews, starting with a re-score!

SOLAR ASH [2]
I quit it when it introduced a mechanic I had no interest in dealing with, in a section where I hated the narrative angle and experienced the second most frustrating dialog exchange in the game. I'm beginning to feel like the narrative direction is the fault of the publisher, because Annapurna's brand is like NPR Devolver Digital and it cant just put out a cool action game. So between this, 12 Minutes, and Last Exit, Annapurna has burned all its good will and has nothing really to show for it. I used to take note of games they were putting out and now it's going to be an uphill battle to get me to check out anything they release.

GEARS OF WAR [3]
GEARS OF WAR 2 [4]
GEARS OF WAR 3 [2]

A friend of mine have been replaying the Gears of War series kinda just to do it. Well, not "kinda just to do it." I've hit this crisis point with game design where I am finished with more genres than not. I don't want to aim down sights anymore, I don't like open world games, I don't like battle royales, I don't want to compare numbers on items, and I don't want anything runbased or procedural. You may notice that's 90% of video games now! Yeah! I'm in trouble! I just want to play a game with some levels in it! Levels were cool! So from that we talked each other into playing all the Gears games.

-Gears 1 in my mind was A Classic but there's so many quality of life things they added in 2 that I forgot were not in 1 that I can't regard it the same way anymore. At the same time, Gears 1 is also the game that gave us the camera for Every Modern Video Game. From Sony Prestige Games to those awful Batman games, to Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Gears of War is the fundamental building block. How it swings its camera when your in control to point out the next spectacle is how every single game works now. It's easy to shit on Gears for being monochromatic, but remember that among the people singing the praises of Gears' camera usage was Hironobu Sakaguchi, which he adopted for Lost Odyssey to showcase how to map that dynamic camera usage onto a JRPG. Gears of War is phenominally important to every extant video game, but it's not the easiest thing to go back to.

-Gears 2 is a for real action game masterpiece. It doesn't push anything forward with camera usage or anything (which will bite it in the ass later) but what it does do is fix up the engine of the actual gameplay. It is a gameplay focused sequel. Plus, Horde Mode. I would suggest Gears 2 Horde Mode, if standalone, is the unquestionable best game of that whole decade.

-Gears 3 is bad. When we started playing it my friend and I kept remarking "wow I remember none of this but I remember beating it!" It turns out that if you make two cool games about firefights in heavy cover, and then make game 3 a game where you run around and fight monsters in open areas all the time, it's kind of a drag! It's like you got this sports car and use it mainly to go get groceries. It's also weirdly prescient of the direction games were going in. In the intervening time between Gears 2 and 3, Uncharted 2 happened. Uncharted 2 ate Gears' lunch as a spectacle delivery system and started touching on the idea of using Gears' camera tech to play at dramatic gravitas. As a result, Gears 3 tries to go for dramatic moments and uncomfortable moments more heavily. It fails. It fails really hard. All the time. It fails so bad that Epic ends up going "well shit, maybe we can compete with minecraft" and stops making single player games.

POLYBIUS [4]
From the Steam Page: "The inspiration for POLYBIUS was an old urban legend about a strange, abstract, psychedelic arcade game that was supposedly released for a brief time in the 1980s. According to the legend people who played the game experienced strange and rather unpleasant psychological reactions after becoming addicted to it. There was talk of the CIA and Men in Black. Of course the legendary game has never actually been found but - especially with the advent of VR - we thought it might be fun to make a game inspired by the old legend. Our version is intended only to have positive effects on the minds of its users though!"

It works. It's also not for people with epilepsy. It's also from the Space Giraffe guy.

TETR.IO [4]
This is one of those experiences where it really puts into perspective how far behind 90% of the game industry is with the internet and how to use it. This is a Browser Based Tetris, with amazing netcode, unlimited size player lobbies, multiple leaderboards for either Ranked Competitive, 40 Line sprints, or High Score runs, and easily accessible replays for everything where all you have to do is copy a link and look at it. Setting up a lobby lets you customize everything from how the pieces are randomly seeded (there's like six different algorithms) to exact decimal points on how gravity accelerates over time. It also has serverwide events that you can watch unfold on their official twitch account if you don't think you're a big enough tetris badass to compete. This is all by one person. Oh and the music's great. Like literally everything about this package is one of the best games I've ever seen in my life, and it's a free browserbased game by one person. Lord, they're running behind.

= = =

btw just a reminder but Play Cruelty Squad. I am watching a lot of game of the year stuff come up where Cruelty Squad isn't even being mentioned and its starting to drive me insane because the gap between it and every other video game released in the last few years runs the risk of endangering the entire industry.

I could scream about it for another five hours here but I will stop and just say Play Cruelty Squad, It's The Real Game of the Year.

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10 hours ago, RIPPA said:

Played and finished Firewatch

Still not sure how I feel about it

There are a couple of guys at work playing it for the gamerscore, but I've heard there is a pretty decent story there.  Also heard that there are some sketches in the main character's journal that may make you want to douse your eyes with bleach.

Edited by J.T.
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The voice acting carries the whole game

The thing I am grappling with is that a major plot point revolves around something that is a very sensitive subject for me and the family at the moment. (I am also struggling to come to grips with how I feel about one of the characters.)

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29 minutes ago, RIPPA said:

The voice acting carries the whole game

The thing I am grappling with is that a major plot point revolves around something that is a very sensitive subject for me and the family at the moment. (I am also struggling to come to grips with how I feel about one of the characters.)

Yeah, I've heard about Firewatch from the guys and if it is the subject I am thinking of, I think it would be hard for me to play that game knowing what I know about certain characters.

There is also talk about adapting the game into a screenplay and making a movie.  

Edited by J.T.
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The Xenoblade Chronicles update is that I'm up to level 37 or so and just got Melia. I sort of got Melia, explored that entire area and went back to sidequests. To be fair, I'm playing while we're watching things a bit too so it's easier to knock off side quests than to move the plot on. I spent a bunch of time last night building my affinity in Colony 9 to 4.5* by talking to everyone a million times, which let me open up the Pessimism skill tree. I've figured out skill links and that you don't use up the coins now. I'm very hesitant to mess around with forging crystals though, even though I have a bunch of materials, full affinity between Reyn and Shulk and Shulk's fever boost skill. I have no idea how tension works either. There also seems little point to trading until you get affinity up high enough except for to get materials to make some sidequests easier. There are just a lot of systems in this thing.

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13 hours ago, Death From Above said:

 

I'm so happy this gained traction. I stumbled across this myself and had to stop and do a double take before I destroyed the thing. I just sat there laughing.

There are more grunt "easter eggs" too that talk shit about the Halo series. I can't remember them all at the moment, but I just know they happen and the grunts have a ton to say in this game. They're basically Minions.

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7 hours ago, Matt D said:

The Xenoblade Chronicles update is that I'm up to level 37 or so and just got Melia. I sort of got Melia, explored that entire area and went back to sidequests. To be fair, I'm playing while we're watching things a bit too so it's easier to knock off side quests than to move the plot on. I spent a bunch of time last night building my affinity in Colony 9 to 4.5* by talking to everyone a million times, which let me open up the Pessimism skill tree. I've figured out skill links and that you don't use up the coins now. I'm very hesitant to mess around with forging crystals though, even though I have a bunch of materials, full affinity between Reyn and Shulk and Shulk's fever boost skill. I have no idea how tension works either. There also seems little point to trading until you get affinity up high enough except for to get materials to make some sidequests easier. There are just a lot of systems in this thing.

re: crystals - just fuck around. Level II and III crystals eventually turns into Level IV and V soon enough. Smoosh stuff together and see what happens, they're completely positive equips without being nerve-wrackingly crucial.

Now is a good time to pair up party members that don't have good Affinity. Get used to benching Shulk on smaller side-quests, Reyn and Sharla aren't the best characters but Melia is a lot better under player control + the upcoming characters are a lot of fun to play as.

Edited by John E. Dynamite
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1 hour ago, John E. Dynamite said:

re: crystals - just fuck around. Level II and III crystals eventually turns into Level IV and V soon enough. Smoosh stuff together and see what happens, they're completely positive equips without being nerve-wrackingly crucial.

Now is a good time to pair up party members that don't have good Affinity. Get used to benching Shulk on smaller side-quests, Reyn and Sharla aren't the best characters but Melia is a lot better under player control + the upcoming characters are a lot of fun to play as.

Being overleveled means that so long as I don't need the Monado, I can definitely do some exploring, progression with them. I had just switched Reyn and Sharla out to put Melia and Dunban in to build affinity with Shulk, but I guess you're saying I should be focused broadly on everyone having affinity with everyone more so than just Shulk having affinity with everyone.

I'll start messing around with Reyn and Shulk with crystals later on. I've farmed a bunch just by exploring.

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Well, I fucking give up on Metroid Dread.  Fuck this noise.  If the Ghavoran Chozo is that hard, I have zero hope of actually progressing any further.

If anyone wants to buy it off me, let me know.  I have a few other Switch games I'm looking to part with, for that matter, and I don't want to give 15% to eBay or some other scumbag corporation.

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I'm playing the Guardians of the Galaxy game on PS5 now, and while I don't have a Series X to compare it to, it does look freaking awesome on the 70" 4K TV.

But I die a lot. Like, a lot a lot. I did pick it up after having to put it down for a few weeks but man. . .maybe there's just stuff I'm not exploiting or something but a lot of the battles seem really hard.

I don't know squat about the Guardians of the Galaxy outside of the two movies, which I really enjoyed, but I'm still enjoying the hell out of this game.

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I'm finally playing Borderlands 3 and it's another great case for the "wait until all the patch and DLC cycle is winding down to buy games" argument because this game is really fucking great, and I feel like all I heard about it for 2 years was complaints. But I'm having an absolute blast. It's everything the other games are but smoother, better, more options. Just a fantastic loot porn experience. I kind of forgot just how fun the Borderlands universe can be but this game really really scratches an itch for me. 

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4 hours ago, Death From Above said:

I'm finally playing Borderlands 3 and it's another great case for the "wait until all the patch and DLC cycle is winding down to buy games" argument because this game is really fucking great, and I feel like all I heard about it for 2 years was complaints. But I'm having an absolute blast. It's everything the other games are but smoother, better, more options. Just a fantastic loot porn experience. I kind of forgot just how fun the Borderlands universe can be but this game really really scratches an itch for me. 

Weird.  I played it heavily from launch, and didn't really have any complaints that I can remember.  Only thing I remember really hating was Maurice's stupid flying skulls, and they added an option to get rid of those.  I'm kinda curious how much it's changed since I haven't really touched it this year.

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