asmo917

When the President Talks to God - Bright Eyes

Last to Die or Devils and Dust* - Bruce Springsteen

Without Chains - Patti Smith

Bu$hleaguer - Pearl Jam

16 Military Wives - The Decemberists

Any of a number of tracks from Green Day’s American Idiot album.

*Devils and Dust is probably the better and better known song, but was written for the first Iraq War, so may be disqualified from being associated with this brilliant idea of a game.

Funnily enough, I took today and tomorrow off in large part due to Hitman’s release. It wasn’t the only reason I picked these days, but I looked what was going on at work, saw Hitman would be out, and figured it was the perfect time to give myself a four day weekend.

I don’t do this often, but thanks to the company “use it or lose it” policy with vacation time above a certain amount of hours. I lost nearly three weeks of vacation last year. It was never “the right time” for me take off (by my own logic - no one ever told me I couldn’t have time I requested) or I just never planned anything after the start of the pandemic, including my traditional week off o watch GB E3 streams. So this year I’ve vowed that ain’t happening again, and if video games releases can help me facilitate that, I’m not saying no. And if a game is delayed or has server issues, I have plenty of games in my backlog and other things I can do on those days off.

Not ideal but I enjoy these games enough that I’ll pay the Hitman 2 Access Pass price to see it on my PC, as well as getting it for PS5 and XSX with the free imports. I hope that for those who have it on Steam and choose to wait, they’re not just hit with the same deal in a year.

Ben and mine's taste in games was a Venn diagram with some, but not a lot of overlap, and I think that's why I appreciated his presence. Ben had an enthusiasm for titles and genres that encouraged me to give them a second look. Ben's endorsement didn't mean a game always stuck with me, but I often found something in there that I had overlooked.

@fisk0: I’d take that reception with a grain of salt. So far I’ve played 3-ish hours and the only technical issue I ran into was the first time I closed the game on launch day, it refused to actually close. It wasn’t in my Task Manager but it showed as running in Steam and couldn’t be killed. I restarted my PC and all he been fine since.

Gameplay wise I think it’s good so far, although there are some things that aren’t explained well or fully. Examples: how to use taxis confused the hell out of me until I looked up that they’re more like fast travel points than mounts. You click where you want to end up, not a close one that then takes you elsewhere. I also got a quest from one of my first hires to check on her man. I did, helped him out and he wanted to work for me but hated the other guy on my crew. So I fired the guy he hated, but then couldn’t afford the upfront cost of the guy I had just helped and who volunteered to work for me. I don’t know if that would have played out differently if I’d fired the other guy first?

I still feel more like I’m poking and prodding at the systems. So far I worry that instead of a game that’s a mile wide and inch deep, it may be more like 10 miles wide and several feet deep. There are a LOT of systems at play, but I need to see how they come together.

For what it’s worth, I have enjoyed my time with it so far.

@mikewhy: I think you hit the nail on the head - I usually chase damn near every collectible/point of interest in an AC game but while in Norway I feel like moving from place to place is more tedious than I'm used to, and I think some of that is knowing, like @humanity said, that there are a lot more systems and things waiting. Since I can always come back, seems like it's time to kick the story stuff into high gear tonight.

I remember shortly after Dragon Age: Inquisition came out, there was a flood of tips online of people saying "Get out of The Hinterlands ASAP." While I still tried to do as much in that starting area as possible, those people were right, you started playing a better and more interesting game when you left the Hinterlands.

I'm about 5 hours into Valhalla and I'm enjoying it, but I haven't made a lot of story progress, mostly just wandering from marker to marker to see what I can find. Is this a game I'm going to find even more rewarding if I "fast track" some of the main story? I'm getting that impression, and hope if that's true I can come back to Norway and don't have to try to do/find everything here before moving on.

This 100% has me interested in coming back. But NMS is one of the few games I bought on disc for the PS4. Have Sony detailed how or if this upgrade works for disc-based purchases?

Edit: found it. It's as expected, the PS5 will read the disc, you need to download something from the store, and keep the disc in to play. Pretty reasonable. https://support.playstation.com/s/article/upgrade-ps4-games?language=en_US

@bisonhero: Thank you for putting into words how I've felt since this news started to break.

I would very much like to try this out, and I have Game Pass Ultimate, but I cannot get this to install. I've downloaded the first installer from the Windows store with no problem. I run that as Admin on my PC, and it installs the next 92 GBs. From here, I get a screen titled "Content Manager" with some release notes, and it indicates it's trying to download another 3.68 GB file. It never makes any progress. I've tried literally everything in this Kotaku article.

Some of those things I've tried multiple times; I've tried a 100% fresh install 7 times and always get the same results. I don't think I'm meant to try this game.