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The Adventure Starts Here!
The Looker is very funny and also a not-bad puzzle game in its own right, too. Highly recommended, particularly if you played and even sort of liked The Witness.
I thought, since it was free, that it was only the garden area, but it really was a few full hours of fun for me. And I'm still not done with The Witness. It just got frustrating and I felt as if I'd hit a point where the next bajillion puzzles were all going to end up happening through walkthroughs.



there's a frog in my snake oil
Looks like the HL2 VR mod is finally emerging mid-september



And with Valve endorsement by the looks. Steam page is up and running.
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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here



That elusive hide-and-seek cow is at it again
well. i did it. =\
since the ole madre has moved back in, i've been rearranging everything. for years, i've mostly just set my computer room up as my apartment. i had a good size tv in there for games and PC use, my music gear, etc., and mostly abandoned the rest of the house. now that i'm spending real time in the living room, i spent some money for entertainment. speakers, a receiver, tv incoming probably next week, and finally.... i found a PS5 available from Sony's website.

it arrived yesterday.
wtf is wrong with me...
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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



After bouncing off Cyberpunk 2077 pretty hard initially, I picked it back up, stuck with it, and I've had a pretty good time with the game.

I haven't particularly enjoyed (or disliked) the main questlines. They're fine. Nothing special. Wish they had more variety, and less talking, but that's about it. Where I really started to have fun is when I realized I could view all those random crimes I kept driving past on the map with my police scanner. I decided to just scour the map and wipe out every one like some kind of futuristic Batman. That was a lot of fun and by the time I was done I was wildly overpowered for the rest of the game (so far, at least).

I'm at the point where I can wipe out tons of enemies without them getting a shot off via quickhacking and the like, which seems dumb, but is less dumb feeling when you offed a thousand criminals to obtain that power. In some ways the quickhacking stuff is just Watch_Dogs, but a bit better in terms of control. Not as fluid, though. Being able to hotkey things would sure go a long way (I'm sure there are mods, but it really needs to be native).

Making my way through the main quest a bit more now, probably just going to rotely finish it. There's a lot to like here, particularly since I picked it back up well after a lot of the major problems were patched. I've run into very few bugs, and even fewer significant ones.

Also, forgetting gameplay, it's probably the most aesthetically striking AAA game I've ever played. I find myself taking and sharing screenshots all the time.






You ready? You look ready.
well. i did it. =\
since the ole madre has moved back in, i've been rearranging everything. for years, i've mostly just set my computer room up as my apartment. i had a good size tv in there for games and PC use, my music gear, etc., and mostly abandoned the rest of the house. now that i'm spending real time in the living room, i spent some money for entertainment. speakers, a receiver, tv incoming probably next week, and finally.... i found a PS5 available from Sony's website.

it arrived yesterday.
wtf is wrong with me...
__________________
"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



That elusive hide-and-seek cow is at it again
So with the new system, I took it upon myself to download Elden Ring and Returnal. Elden Ring might be a poor choice given the distance my living room T.V. is from the couch. I can't read anything and don't want to stand in the middle of the room to play. I'll figure that problem out sooner or later though. Returnal just downloaded last night and I've not had a chance to start it, but it looks great at least in the trailer.

The PS5 system menu is not as intuitive when compared to the PS4. At least in my experience so far. I like the app switcher menu, but find it strange that I need to toggle between two menu lists (the one at the bottom of the screen with the power option, and the one at the top of the screen with the settings icon). I really thought the PS4 menu was pretty efficient with everything available from a single row of menu icons. Too, power-off was like 4 clicks away from anywhere: PS button > right > down > X. Maybe there's a shortcut available on the PS5. I know that I'm trying to apply PS4 standards to a new interface. Probably just me then.



“I was cured, all right!”
Couldn't stand Cyberpunk. All the bugs aside, it still a very bad game imo. But even The Witcher 3, witch was (just) an ok game, I had a lot of problems with. Maybe, CD Pro. Red games are not for me.



Couldn't stand Cyberpunk. All the bugs aside, it still a very bad game imo. But even The Witcher 3, witch was (just) an ok game, I had a lot of problems with. Maybe, CD Pro. Red games are not for me.
that happen to me with witcher 3 i lost all my saved games and dlc D=



That elusive hide-and-seek cow is at it again
PS5 - Returnal


I saw this trailer at a Best Buy in Tallahassee last week and thought it looked pretty great. At a glance, it seemed like a typical third-person shooter with a mysterious timeline slant. I'm always game for that, so I ordered a digital copy this past weekend. Home bandwidth bottlenecking aside, I was able to get it installed Sunday. I think. Last night was the first chance I had to load it up for a test run and I have to say that for what little time I was able to put into it, I am excited by where the potential is here.

Briefly, the story seems to be that your character crash lands on some strange planet. I'm not sure why we're there to begin with, but whatever. We're there. Very early on after the crash, you come across the body of another scout and, upon a quick examination, you discover that the corpse is yours. How could this be?!

Based on the game trailer, the character is caught in some kind of recurring existence loop so that when you die, you wake again at the start of the game. I've not yet died, so I can't confirm, but I've only put in maybe 20 minutes. I must say though that that 20 minutes was pretty great. It's like a conceptual hybrid of one of those impossible Demon's Souls titles and Outer Wilds, what with the death penalty and timeline loop that seems to be incoming, respectively. Controls, game speed and character animation are reminding me very much of one of my recent favorites, CONTROL, so bonus on that front. Then there's the staging environments and mood that take me right back to Super Metroid that I finally got to play, years later, through SNES ROMs.

As I understand it, each death changes the world environments so that each run will be a unique experience. I have a feeling that there will be hidden treasures and discoveries to be made in later runs, very much like how the Metroid titles were designed, requiring considerable backtracking. Oh, and to add to the weird overwhelming comfort in nostalgia, enemies attack in geometric fire patterns that were famous in second generation console space shooters such as Truxton, Thunder Force III, or any of the NES/SNES overhead shooter titles I never really had the pleasure of playing except when staying the night over at a friend's house or the less occasional system rental. The hook? Imagine those enemy fire patterns in 3d space!!! Check out the trailer above, if you've not yet done so for examples. I had a short encounter with three Matrix "squiddy" looking dog things last night, each casting about 8 blue projectiles arcing outward in horizontal bands and that was pretty crazy. I'm excited to get to some of the boss fights highlighted in the trailer.

Anyways. The game, so far, is quite linear, but I think when the world begins to change that will more than make up for it. Color me intrigued.

If you were a fan of CONTROL, then I feel this is the next game to take up. I hope it lives up to my expectations.


EDIT
Here's a more detailed preview from the Before You Buy channel. You don't even really need to hear anything this guy says. Just click around and watch stuff explode:



“I was cured, all right!”


Two upcoming Team Ninja games. Looking forward to both.


Finally, ISHIN coming to west. A dream becoming true.
And its free of all the PC censorship that is haunting gamers around the world.

Pure hype:



That elusive hide-and-seek cow is at it again
It has been a month since I've played a game!? WOW. My theory is that if you need to kick your console habit, then buy the next gen. It happened when I bought the PS3 years ago. After burning through MW and MW:II and probably the Bioshock games, I took a hiatus for about two years. I was all in with the PS4, right up until picking up the PS5. I've downloaded two digital purchases and transferred Ghost of Tsushima and have only put in approximately 1 hour play time between them all. I've not touched either console for more than video access hubs. I DID watch the Akira DVD a few weeks back, so there's that.

Weird.

Oh well. Free bump to the glorious thread.



The Adventure Starts Here!
Aside from blindly (and blandly) playing Bejeweled 3 on Steam while I'm doing other things or watching a TV show or movie, I haven't really played games either, in a few months. Just too busy. I'm sure the coming cold weather will give me time, though, to putz around with some games I recently bought during the summer Steam sales.



That elusive hide-and-seek cow is at it again
I think I made the mistake of hooking my new console to the living room tv. Mom is always watching something, now that she's moved in. Mostly, we just watch something on streaming. I feel guilty for forcing her to watch a game. That and time too. I don't think I've been in my old computer room but a handful of times since she's moved in.

Weird.



A system of cells interlinked
Closing in on Halloween, so I have been playing the remake of the OG Resident Evil. Such a great game!

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“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” ― Thomas Sowell