palaver

I was just about to write a post complaining about the last boss until on my very next run it glitched out and stopped doing anything. Bit of a relief in the end but great game overall.

Having some consumables equipped can be useful because Mimic Friend will pop them for no cost. Not that anyone would abuse Mimic Friend like that.

Pretty excellent stream where Alex and Vinny (in the same room) "finish" their Def Jam: Fight for NY playthrough that was postponed by the pandemic. It's a rollercoaster. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1421495861

I'm enjoying perhaps the biggest reveal in the trailer.

The secret is to log in first thing in the morning and then not log out. It feels like it starts kind of slow but when they put their foot on the accelerator...umm...it goes places.

I really enjoyed this. None of the individual elements feel particularly original but it really does mash it all together into a charismatic whole. It moves along at a really decent pace and doesn't lore dump anything, being satisfied with showing and not telling. The characters again are a bit like things you'll no doubt seen before, but for the most part they all have relatable flaws and you do in the end want to see how the core relationships work out. I did feel like I was missing something by not knowing anything about LoL but from some retroactive reading it seems that they're pulling a pretty stand alone thread out of a jumble of years of bits and pieces. And you could probably watch it just for the visuals. The action, the use of what seems like 2D animation on top of the 3D for certain effects, the framing of the more static scenes. It's a load of fun even when it's not being particularly subtle.

Can't wait to see Arya Stark's super special move where she feeds Shaggy a pie made out of Scooby Doo.

You would think that once you break the e-plastic on your game NFT it would be worthless, but no! I will happily mint you another NFT asserting the quality and rarity of your NFT, therefore increasing it's value!

What nags at me is that I suspect the only reason the city is so good is that they were planning on some GTA Online style infinite money printer rather than Witcher DLC treatment, but oh well. The Tim Rogers thing is wild, I went for the discourse which was mostly about Keanu and then another one which was a deconstruction of cyberpunk then like an hour on the authenticity of jackets so...okay.

I'm getting near the end of this after leaving it for a bit to see what they were going to fix. I've had a lot of fun with it but I'm not sure it's...good. In a lot of ways it follows the same template as Witcher 3, and has a lot of the same issues but they're dialled up to 11 like the inverse difficulty curve, the wonky UI, the pretty perfunctory crafting system, etc. Witcher 3 got progressively easier as it went on, but never reached the point where you could kill all the bad guys from across the street without them ever even seeing you. Geralt didn't have a silenced pistol with 100% crit chance allowing you to stroll through the most enemy packed area vapourising heads before anybody noticed what was happening. I mean it's fun, but in a sort of brain dead way. It feels like it's balanced around expecting the player not to play it. Night City is amazing and I'm still coming across new unique places that I've never seen before. There are a ton of great characters and main missions and side missions. It's a shame that there's a bunch of stuff that just sort of...ends...without a particularly satisfying conclusion. It's frustrating because it feels like it's 75% there in so many ways. HOWEVER! The biggest crime is not allowing you to at least hide your stupid hat. Geralt didn't have to deal with only ever finding sparkly light blue cowboy hats.

I will happily admit that Storm of blood! Born from blood! Of our fallen brothers! gets me almost as hype as that bit from Shadowbringers.

But it's not just any creepy doll! It's a $1000 creepy doll!

Jesse Cox did a relatively concise and spoiler free lore video about the broad strokes of the background that's pretty good fun: I had never picked up on all where all the different eras were supposed to fit.

It sounds like there have been fun times today.

Are y'all just queuing for the Ivalice raids? Are people still doing them? I've never done them but have recently been going through a lot of old content just for the sake of it. I am a big fan of everything Ivalice but for some reason I've never done them (the reason is terrible anxiety).

Squadrons can also earn decent experience from like 20 to 50-odd-ish but need a bit of up front investment.

No.

CHAOS

Kotaku's article is still up and doesn't exactly pull its punches. https://kotaku.com/as-palestine-suffers-a-call-for-action-1846903598 (I know Kotaku isn't mentioned in this resurrected thread but screw using old threads for unrelated stuff)

Most of them have been sounding increasingly worn out but it's still pretty gutting. Giant Bomb has been a lot of my comfort listening/viewing for quite a while. Hard to even guess at what will come out of the other side now.

This was a script generated by a neural network that somehow got turned into a film, right? It's almost perfectly generic. Even the action only verged on okay, and nothing that you won't have seen a bunch of times before.

I wasn't exactly sure what I thought about it, but I think this pretty much sums up my thoughts too. It flirts with a lot of "big" ideas but just swerves out of the way of a lot of them and doesn't land the few that it sticks with. It's a weird one.

This reminded me about the train in the trailer. Is there a working rail system in the game? I guess not. Anyway, this game is some paper thin broken trash but also pretty good fun.

The Polygon article is also up there on the "Am I Really Reading This?" scale. Only the most non-political of games flirt with recent war crimes! Edit: I of course somehow missed deerokus talking about it