2023 VIDEO GAME CATCH ALL THREAD

[Doc Townsend]

I think an internal SSD is a must.  Unless you just don’t buy many games, I don’t know how you wouldn’t run short of space.  Honestly, I feel thwt way even with 2 tb SSD’s installed in both Series X and PS5.  Both systems also have external hard drives plugged in to give me another 6, 8 tb each.  I’ll need that space eventually, especially on Xbox where I buy most of my multiplatform games and have large X360 and Xbox One libraries.

Actually, one of the Series X’s selling points for me is that you can have more than one USB drive plugged in.  Unless it’s been changed by a recent update, the PS5 only lets you use one USB drive.  I probably won’t fill all my PS5 storage in 3, 4 years and need a second usb drive, but I could imagine doing it if if PS5 was the only system I own or was my go-to for third-party games.

Lol, that’s something else I do not understand about console warriors. Seems like you’re really limiting your space options if you buy everything for one console.  Lot easier to spread files around, especially if you don’t want to/can’t afford to keep buying more memory (My SSD ran me $400 apiece, think i paid around $150-$200 for each of the USB drives.).

Edited January 6, 2023 by Doc Townsend

[Andrew POE!]

Got my 275th Platinum trophy with God of War III Remastered for PS4. Basically, the Combat Arena glitch works on PS4 version - start a combat arena with a Gorgon after you finish Challenge of the Gods and after you beat the game the first time to unlock Titan difficulty and set your character to have infinite health/magic/stamina. Let the Gorgon kill you until it asks to change the difficulty. Say no. It'll throw  you back to the main menu. Then start a new game on Titan difficulty, play through it until you go to Hades, and destroy the judges. After that, it'll take you to the final boss.

Not sure what's up next....likely to do ICO or maybe finish up Army of Two The 40th Day or Shift 2 Unleashed on PS3.

[Casey]

6 hours ago, RIPPA said:

Yeah - I think my upcoming birthday present to myself is buying some sort of external HD for my PS5 as despite having it less than a month, I am already terrified about having space issues.

Just remember that any external harddrive will store PS5 games, but you can’t play them. They need to be on the default internal PS5 SSD or you need to buy an SSD stick and install it inside the system. I have a 4TB external for PS4 games, and use my default PS5 storage and the 1TB stick for PS5 games.

On the Xbox all I have is an external 1TB SSD, but my Xbox is mainly a backwards compatible and GamePass machine. 

Things get real dicey for me when you talk about the SteamDeck storage, though. I have the base model, so internal storage is already down to around 40GB because of the OS and shit like that. I have a 500GB SD card, but I’m already down to around 160GBs because of a handful of games (the main perpetrator being DOOM Eternal at almost 100GBs) and stuff like emulation and shader caches.

[Raziel]

I've been meaning to ask, how's the SteamDeck with prehiphal's set up (hooking up a keyboard and mouse), since it's supposed to be a standalone PC you can dock like a Switch as well.  I'm actually looking at one in lieu of waiting for a PS5 to be available.

[dogwelder]

nvm

Edited January 6, 2023 by dogwelder

[Contentious C]

I gave Marvel Snap another go and...eh, it's all right.  I'm too risk-averse to play match after match and think about losing ranks.  I'm glad I don't have an addictive personality for stuff like this, I suppose: just your standard, everyday operant conditioning.

[Casey]

8 hours ago, Raziel said:

I've been meaning to ask, how's the SteamDeck with prehiphal's set up (hooking up a keyboard and mouse), since it's supposed to be a standalone PC you can dock like a Switch as well.  I'm actually looking at one in lieu of waiting for a PS5 to be available.

I have a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard connected for when I go into desktop mode for emulation. No lag or input issues, you can use them on the gaming mode too. I haven’t tried to play a game with mouse and keyboard, because that’s not my jam, but that’s a possibility if you’re into that.

At least for me while in docked mode on the gaming mode side, there’s some pretty obvious issues with some games and controller input lag, graphics, frame rate etc. That might be because of my individual game profile settings, though.

[RIPPA]

9 hours ago, Contentious C said:

I gave Marvel Snap another go and...eh, it's all right.  I'm too risk-averse to play match after match and think about losing ranks.  I'm glad I don't have an addictive personality for stuff like this, I suppose: just your standard, everyday operant conditioning.

Yeah - I play it and fortunately (at least for this game) don't let it suck me in. Usually a match or two and then hop off

And I really don't care about my rank (which I know I should) - It is more just trying to unlock new cards and upgrading said cards

[odessasteps]

On the other hand, I’m only a few days away from my 9th anniversary of playing Marvel puzzle quest. Today will be (\checks game) day 3280., thru birthdays, vacation, deaths in the family and so on. 

[SirFozzie]

Hello fellow MPQ user. I was in a fairly hardcore alliance, but just got back into it after my like, fourth significant break from the game. SCL9.5 player here.

And Backlog of Shame Day 0 Report: Also known as "I DID WHAT?"

Yesterday was my last chance to get things installed, for today's move. (It's actually going on as I write this. I'm staying far far away from the madness)

So, yesterday afternoon I was installing some of the games that were on the list and not already installed and ran into one game that wouldn't finish installing. Baldur's Gate 3. Quite a large game (63GB download), and at the 60 GB mark, it would stop with the message "Corrupt Download".

I took the recommended steps, trying it on different disks, cleaning the download cache, blanking out the downloading folder.. no change. Each time, after I had downloaded 60 GB it would stop with the same message and not go any further. Three different attempts. Nearly 200GB of download time.

So, looking for info, I came across several third-party "help" sites that suggested uninstalling and reinstalling Steam would fix this issue. I promptly went into Windows 10's "Add and Remove Programs" settings program and uninstalled Steam.

It was going by rather quickly, and I was all set to reinstall Steam, when I noticed some of the directories that were listed as being deleted. It showed one of my game directories.

Wait, uninstalling steam means uninstalling all the games in the Steam Library?  All, say, FIVE HUNDRED GB OF MY GAMES?

This is what we generally call an OH SHIT moment. Or, the alternative title to this report. "I DID WHAT?"

(Just as an aside, this caught folks I griped to about this. The post where I found the solution mentioned there's a way to uninstall/reinstall Steam without losing your Steam Library. Would have been REALLY nice to have known that.)

So, 12 hours before the move starts and the computer will be without reliable internet for at least one week and possibly two, I have to reinstall all the Steam games. ALL OF THEM.

Thankfully, I could queue up a bunch of downloads while finishing packing things, but I keep an eye on things. I'm not sure I can get all the games back before I have to shut down, so it's prioritizing which games are more important, and also, size. Do I want one game that takes 75 GB of download time (Cyberpunk) when I could get four games for the same download-time (say, the two Pathfinder RPG games, Pro Strategy Football and Football Manager, each of which could probably distract me for at LEAST a day or two on their own). Cyberpunk didn't make the redownload list, because I can always play this other stuff that's on the Backlog of Shame instead of it.

So, I wake up this morning at 7, an hour or so before the move officially starts, and I had budgeted my time well. The last game of 65 was downloading. Well, really the 64th of 65.  And 10 minutes later, when it finished I was left with one game in the Downloads queue.

Baldur's Gate 3.

Corrupt Download

(Insert Fozzie swearing like Donald Duck on a three day meth bender)

so, hunting through more help pages, I come across this on the 2nd Page of "Patch 9 Notes on the Developer's forums", after all the other things that I tried (Patch 9 is the current patch level for the game)

"In the client, in the Steam menu select Settings, then Downloads, and try changing your Download Region."

What the hell, it's worth a shot.

It works instantly, and finishes normally.

And below that, there's a note that if you have to reinstall Steam:


You could also try reinstalling Steam. You can effectively do this without having to redownload any games installed on the same drive by deleting everything in the Steam install folder except for Steam.exe and the SteamApps folder, rebooting and running the Steam.exe executable.

So it turns out there was two opportunities to save about EIGHT HUNDRED GIGABYTES OF Downloads (remember, multiple attempts to download a 60GB game as well as reinstalling all my games), and I missed the metaphorical equivalent of the off-ramp both times.

 

Facepalm moment. Actually, it might qualify for the double facepalm

[odessasteps]

I recall a bunch of folks here playing MPQ early on. Not sure who still plays. 

At some point, I was in an alliance with, at various times,  @MushroomJones, Al Kennedy from House to Astonish and TNT’s Ethan Page. 

[RIPPA]

And because I didn't have enough to play already - I downloaded Vampire Survivors from Game Pass due to the folks in here and the fact that I watched my favorite streamers playing it

[Zimbra]

2 hours ago, odessasteps said:

I recall a bunch of folks here playing MPQ early on. Not sure who still plays. 

At some point, I was in an alliance with, at various times,  @MushroomJones, Al Kennedy from House to Astonish and TNT’s Ethan Page. 

I got back into it last year but haven't played for a couple of months.

[odessasteps]

It's hard to keep up with all the new characters, esp since they started doing a 3 and 5 star version at the same time.

[SirSmUgly]

On 1/7/2023 at 11:32 AM, RIPPA said:

And because I didn't have enough to play already - I downloaded Vampire Survivors from Game Pass due to the folks in here and the fact that I watched my favorite streamers playing it

The guy who made it worked on slot machines for a living before he made it, so I hope you like digital crack. 

I've somehow not even played it yet today. 

[RIPPA]

Yeah - the fact that it has like 2 trillion achievements really is unfair

[Kang]

Gonna sim WWF SD2. Then move on to JBI and then HCTP and then SVR, 06, 08, 09, 10. Then WWE 12, 13, 14.

At some point I want to dig into The Pro Wrestling and few of the older Fre Pros too with no edit move guide and find out what's what.

[Craig H]

I'm way too addicted to Marvel Snap. My collection rank is around 1800 and I'm getting close to getting all of pool 3 collected. And despite having a couple tier 1 decks collected, I can't seem to make it past the level after Gold.

[RIPPA]

A little irritated with myself - ended up about 90 seconds from completing my first full run in Vampire Survivors

I still am not quite sure what killed me as at that point you can't fucking see what is on the screen. I am assuming it was the mob pushed a boss into me

[Andrew POE!]

Got my 276th Platinum trophy with Need For Speed: Most Wanted on PS3. Most of the game wasn't bad except for "Needle Point" speed run. That took me over 2 days just to get gold on.

[SirFozzie]

So, the backlog is a little reduced, but we STILL don't have home internet and won't until the 20th (it was scheduled for "1-3 PM" on Tuesday, and at 2:45 PM they changed it to the 20th due to an unspecified "engineering issue")

[Casey]

I'm not sure if anyone here has a SteamDeck, but if you do and you like customization on your artwork/the interface of the home screen, etc. then the Decky Loader is a MUST. I've got my UI looking like Persona 5, and every Steam and non-Steam game in my library now have custom artwork, logos, the works. And I have an AKIRA custom boot animation.

I'm constantly gushing about this thing but man it's so awesome.

[SirFozzie]

backlog of shame reviews (Plus a couple bonus)

Instead of a numerical grade, I'm going to give it the "Foz Quick Review Scale": (in ascending order)  Yuck, Ugh. Meh, Ok, Good, Great, Awesome)

Troubleshooter:Abandoned Children (No, not the action-adventure Pen and Paper RPG based off Belgian and French Comics (That's The Troubleshooters), nor the pen and paper one that was the base version of Paranoia two versions ago (Paranoia:Troubleshooters). This is basically K-Pop X-COM. A massive city forbidden from having its own standing forces due to international pressure, and the Criminals are more and more brazen, destructive and over the top. So, they created private security forces with the power to investigate, detain and arrest criminals (by hitting them with large swords and various explosive abilities, natch). Kinda like Judge Dredd without the fascism and with a serving of Anime Tropes (I can think of several past animes that did this kind of concept). It's like someone saw X-Com's game play, and decided to bolt on a whole shitton of extra things on it, including online play if that's your forte, but I'm talking more about a Final Fantasy style mastery board and endlessly grindy stuff. I think the grind is going to get to me after a while (I've done a few missions, and the amount of extraneous stuff is mind blowing) and I think they could have toned it down several degrees, but it's a good concept. It's not a short game, a single complete (not completionist) playthrough is estimated at 60-100 hours, and that's if you don't decide to grind endlessly. Not sure I have the willpower/energy for a 100 hour game with all the other games on my backlog (including all the other games that I play that are endless time sinks), but it feels like that it could fill some time.

 

Foz Rating: Ok, but your thoughts on very lengthy/grindy games may raise or lower this rating in your eyes.

 

Pro Strategy Football 23: A football sim that is more strategic then Madden, but less in the weeds then say, most Sports Sims. This focuses on more of the coaching (on-field aspects, as at the casual level, all you do is select formation and playtype (Inside run/outside run/middle run, Short/Medium/Long Pass, trick plays, Special teams, etcetera). Expert Level lets you set more stuff like setting blitzers on defense, or setting up receiver routes on pass plays. It's all strategy based, and tries to find a sweet spot in career play between minutiae and speed of play (there's no contract system, instead a number of players are randomly selected from each team each year to become free agents (you can control how many, and if you can keep one would-be Free Agent per season as a franchised player, and then there's a draft on Free Agents before the usual Draft). Its setup is very much like a mobile game (they even tell you to tap or click rows to select them), but no monetization stuff. I'd like to see more official support in non-NFL setups (it needs more base leagues to start from then the standard NFL-style setup). If you love the grognardy stuff, you may want to try other games like the Draft Day Sports football games, with the bonus there being that you can link their college and pro games together for a shared universe), but it's not super expensive ($20), and I've gotten more than its purchase price from it already.

 

Foz Rating: Good to Good+ based on my own tastes.

 

Monster Train: One of my go-to "I have 35 minutes to waste before going to bed or going out" games. It's kinda like a card game-tower defense mashup. You have a four level train barreling through hell to relight the frozen flame of hell, and angels move through your train attacking anyone on the level and trying to move up through the train to the top level to attack your pyre. If your pyre takes too much damage, you lose. It's good for bitesized game play and I have my favorites. One suggested mod is the "Restart Battle" button, as it will allow you to correct mistakes (putting the wrong monster in front, for example, as all enemies attack the front monster until it's dead or the turn ends), and definitely install the mod that gets rid of the opening cinematic which is cool the first time, but annoying if you launch the game repeatedly. I'm giving it a great in that  it fills a short amount of time, and while there's cosmetics available, and some gated stuff by XP, you can play as little or as much as you want, and each run is independent of the next (you'll get different units/upgrades depending on the faction you play as, but again, no mobile transactions, except for a DLC, which is pretty standard these days). It's pretzels. Quick, filling, and lets you move on without stuffing yourself or consequences.

 

Foz Rating: Great

 

Slay the Spire: Definitely a tougher 35 minute card game, I do like the custom mode. I haven't got the "official" ending that requires you to start with a base deck, do several challenges in a run, then defeat a super-boss at the end of your run, but taking one of the four base classes/decks that come with the game, and setting up modifiers (my personal favorite is setting max difficulty, but giving myself the ability to draft a starting deck out of 30 random cards rather then the base boring cards, and giving me and the enemies bonus strength). Again, a very addictive, but bite sized game in that each Spire run is different. I average between 20-35 minutes a run in the balls to the wall mode (and that's even with the double boss but no super-boss). Super addictive

 

Foz Rating:  Great

 

 

 

[TimLivingston]

On 1/2/2023 at 4:05 PM, Casey said:

Chained Echoes is fucking great. I can already tell it’s going to be one of those games where I play it on multiple platforms. I’m absolutely dying to play it on the SteamDeck but I’m going to go all the way through it on Xbox (Gamepass) first. By the time I finish it’ll be on sale on Steam, probably.

It’s everything you want from a 90s JRPG with the best possible modern touches. It’s well written, it’s engaging, the combat is challenging, just a total blast. I’d been wanting to play it since the first trailer many moons ago and it absolutely has lived up to the expectations. 
 

On another front, I just 100 percented Xenoblade Chronicles 3 after 233 hours of play. I don’t think the story was as good as 1, but the gameplay was definitely better than 2. It’s an easier game to cheese out in battles than the others, where you had to really work for it in a lot of ways, but it’s still a hell of a game and a fitting end to the trilogy. No idea what Monolith comes up with next, but it’s going to have a lot to live up to. 
 

Still To come: Sports Story, finishing my Horizon Forbidden West play through, and then starting Elden Ring. With the hope to finish all 3 by the time Zelda arrives. 

[J.T.]

On 1/11/2023 at 8:18 PM, Andrew POE! said:

Got my 276th Platinum trophy with Need For Speed: Most Wanted on PS3. Most of the game wasn't bad except for "Needle Point" speed run. That took me over 2 days just to get gold on.

We all live vicariously through Andrew.