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The People's Republic of Clogher
The slight ambivalence I have toward 2077 surprises me. I loved the three Witcher games and the game's setting should be right up my ally - I'll definitely buy it, probably day 1, but a big part of me thinks I've reached the top of my open world, story driven mountain with the Yakuza games in recent years, and everything else will be a slight letdown. Those games might well be mechanically variable and with plots denser than day old porridge but they've got more heart, pathos and personality than anything else I've played in the genre.

If it isn't apparent, I'm in the middle of replaying the entire Yakuza franchise

Tesla Force is also great, btw. I'm a sucker for arcade style shooters at the best of times, but one by 10Tons? I'm all the way in. Nikola Tesla joining forces with Mary Shelley and Marie Curie to battle the evil Lovecraft and his squid-goons? What's not to love?

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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan



On my Raspberry Pi 4, I've been immersed in the SNES game E.V.O.: Search for Eden... it's a great game if you know how to "grind"/don't mind "grinding." What's cool is you can totally customize your character and evolve in any specific way you want to with varied stats and characteristics. You can evolve for defense, strength, speed, etc. or different special abilities. It's really cool! I'd recommend it anyone into retro-gaming. (My God, I feel old... to think SNES is "retro" now... I remember playing this and the NES as a kid...)

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Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'?

-Stan Brakhage



If I recall, the Assassin's Creed stuff gets a fair amount of flack for slave driving their employees to hit deadlines for games. I have seen that studio under fire when people review stuff like AC: Odyssey and AC: Valhalla...
i stopped playing assassins creed odyssey and thinking not to buy assassins creed valhalla yet cause i prefer classic assassins creed games back to the first assassins creed to assassins creed origins, ezio is always my favorite assassin like always



You ready? You look ready.
https://www.vg247.com/2020/12/07/cyb...oundup-scores/

Reviews coming in have confirmed what I suspected: press has been bought.

Glad to see PC Gamer and GameSpot haven't fully succumbed to the pandering.

Game reviews have very little objectivity because I can't tell you how many times I have read a 9/10 review that lists off flaws/problems and uses words like "lackluster" and "uneven". Just score it appropriately: 7/10...good game but unlikely to make you change religions. How hard is that?

Originally Posted by GameSpot
"Cyberpunk 2077 has standout side quests and strong main characters, though its buggy, superficial world and lack of purpose bring it down."


The main story doesn't even gel with itself.
Never thought I'd find myself looking to GameSpot again, but they have certainly nailed down the things I was most concerned about (i.e. that the open world really isn't that open at all).

So given that the game isn't what it promised it would be, even the 9/10 reviews are describing a totally different game from what was marketed, and it is inundated with countless bugs that would have destroyed the rankings of any other game...Cyberpunk 2077 is a hard pass for me now.
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"This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." -Baruch Spinoza



“Sugar is the most important thing in my life…”
I “heard” Polygon was not a fan. Thinking about this game and the trend of recent years, none of these games are finished when they are released. Patching is part of it, so I don’t know how hard to grade on that.*

The people will speak!



Maybe the reason they delayed the game was not to be destroyed by TLOU2 at the VGAs ? Doesn’t matter God of War 5 will destroy them next year...



“Sugar is the most important thing in my life…”
Best Buy has a steelbook and $10 store credit that has me flip-flopping. Who am I kidding? I don’t play vgs.

*looks to see if steelbook is still available for preorder *



I never was a fan of the Myst type of games, but maybe I'll give this one a try now that I'm older haha

https://www.ign.com/articles/call-of-the-sea-review



A system of cells interlinked
I wouldn't trust many of these reviews in these initial days. At least some reviewers are being honest and stating that there is no way they can dial in a fair or well-considered review given the tiny amount of time they have been allotted with the game before the full version hits. One reviewer said he was told the game can take up to 175-200 hours to fully explore and play, and was then handed a test copy with massive amounts of draconian DRM that won't unlock, even for the reviewers, until Dec 10. He was able to put a mere 16 hours in, in two long session, before having to write a review. He even says not to trust his review, because he rushed through a bunch of stuff to try to see as much of the content as possible.

I would think McClane is spot on with the assertion that some of these review outlets are on the take, posting a 9/10 review on an unfinished and buggy game. CDPR claims these bugs will be cleaned up my the 10th, but judge the "horse on the roof" problems that plagued The Witcher III on release, I doubt it.

Myself? I will give the game a good 3 months to get cleaned up. I probably won't play it until quite a while after that. The game is directly up my alley, that is for sure, but I can't really swing the cost just now, right before Christmas, and I am quite sure I would need to dial it down to MED settings to get it to run on my old i5, even though I have a recent video card.

Yep, as much as this looks like the game for me, I will just have to wait.
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“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” ― Thomas Sowell



Maybe some people just loved game. Is it so hard to understand? I would rate by experience and emotions which game gave to me, not by technical stuff. Guess if it downright went constantly into game breaking bugs then hell yea F that, but overall tech side never bothered me much and am sure there are others who feel same. If I was reviewer I would do same: list flaws, things which could be bothersome to others, but if I love game, I love game and could still give highest score even though whole scoring thing isn't in my alley.


Just dumb opinion. Personally am excited. Only actual hope is that it really isn't like GTA 5 (hate that game), but judging by stuff I have seen, almost completely sure that it's quite different creature.



A system of cells interlinked
Abandoning my usual approach of avoiding reading a ton of reviews for a game I want to play, I have read several more reviews of Cyberpunk 2077. The writing is mentioned in almost of these (I avoided the larger outlets like IGN etc.) as being excellent, and on a level with The Witcher 3 as far as the quality of both the main and side missions. That is great news, as far as I am concerned.

I think there is a great game out there to play, but most if not all of the reviews also claim that the bugs are pretty out of control at this point. This reinforces my choice to wait a few months on this one.



I'm torn re: bugs. On one hand, yeah, sounds bad. On the other hand I remember reading very similar reviews about a lot of open-world RPG games on release, some of which I thought were fine when I played right away. So I'm wondering if this is bad compared to most games (which are often less buggy than open-world RPGs), or if it's buggy even for one of those, which would be a problem.

Anyway, I still haven't gotten my hands on an RTX 3080 so it's academic until then, anyway.



That elusive hide-and-seek cow is at it again
You should both jump ship, invest in a PS5 (assuming Tacitus' praise is legit) and just dive into Ghosts of Tsushima! Very few bugs that interfere with gameplay and a whole Japanese island to explore! The only things that really grind my gears are boss fights that limit you to just your sword when you have whole lotta cool ninja weapons on you (oh, and those crazy steep jumps in difficult from common world baddies) and siege campaigns where you and at least one other must recapture or defend a location. Game play is very different and often too awkward to really pick up, visually, just what it is you're supposed to do. Other than that you running around decapitating people from the weeds. BRILLIANT!

But don't mind my distractions from the PC master race discussion with my console stories.

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"My Dionne Warwick understanding of your dream indicates that you are ambivalent on how you want life to eventually screw you." - Joel

"Ever try to forcibly pin down a house cat? It's not easy." - Captain Steel

"I just can't get pass sticking a finger up a dog's butt." - John Dumbear



That elusive hide-and-seek cow is at it again
On a serious note, I can't remember the last serious game I played on PC. I had a sub to Warcraft earlier this year but it was around 2012-2013ish when I was more involved with it. I THINK I started EvE Online mid-2000s. Maybe 06 or 08. Not sure. THAT was a monster of an open world if you like sci-fi lore and customization to the point of needing Excel on hand. That game is something else. Maybe it was Starcraft II. I think I finished the campaign at least. I do miss me some Tribes though.



A system of cells interlinked
On a serious note, I can't remember the last serious game I played on PC. I had a sub to Warcraft earlier this year but it was around 2012-2013ish when I was more involved with it. I THINK I started EvE Online mid-2000s. Maybe 06 or 08. Not sure. THAT was a monster of an open world if you like sci-fi lore and customization to the point of needing Excel on hand. That game is something else. Maybe it was Starcraft II. I think I finished the campaign at least. I do miss me some Tribes though.
I tend to use my PC more like a console at this point. I fire up Big Picture Mode in steam, and use my 15' controller cable with a PS4 controller to play titles like Dark Souls 3, The Witcher 3, Assassin's Creed, No Man's Sky and the like in my living room. My office is one room over and I just run the cable out from my PC to the couch.

I do still sit at the PC to play some games, like Civ 5 etc.



That elusive hide-and-seek cow is at it again
I'm still passively looking for an RTS option on my PC. I'm not sure Civ is my cup of tea, but I did play it way back when. Maybe on a Tandy? There was a cheap lil game I picked up on clearance once at Walmart, I'm talking maybe 15+ years ago. Battle Realms was the name. It was pretty simple. You start a village, set villagers to collect water and rice (it too was set in Japan), and eventually you build structures to train warriors, archers, and upgrade to samurai. It was great fun. About halfway into the campaign you were more or less just hoping to make it to the next level, being overwhelmed by enemy camps like a Starcraft Zerg rush, but whatever. It was relatively slow-paced and looked great for the time.

Sometimes I'll pull up Dune: The Battle for Arrakis on my Genesis emulator for a fix. That's about all I got.



The Adventure Starts Here!
I never was a fan of the Myst type of games, but maybe I'll give this one a try now that I'm older haha

https://www.ign.com/articles/call-of-the-sea-review
I just bought this last night and took a peek. Looks interesting. I think it would have made a great VR game.



there's a frog in my snake oil
I just bought this last night and took a peek. Looks interesting. I think it would have made a great VR game.
Good news perhaps
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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here



there's a frog in my snake oil
Ok, so I’ve watched some streams. Cyberpunk just seems to be GTA in the future, ultimately? Without the planes. And with some bonus detective-scan toys and scenarios.

Cool I guess. And I wouldn’t say no to some transposed radio stations and car avarice. But don’t really feel like I’m missing out for now. (Probably just standard sandbox fatigue though, and I’d actually play the hell out of it if I had it )