Nodima

I've got nothing at all against the combat, it feels as if they basically imported Resident Evil 2-2 into a Last of Us game, but I've also gotta say this is the third game this year where I'm so glad there's not much directly tied to difficulty level. I played Star Wars on Hard and Spider-Man on Super-Hard, and I'm playing this on Normal...until I hit a boss fight. Being that the combat is even less of a primary draw compared to those games I even feel really great about it. While a few of those games' bosses inspired me to figure them out, some of them just dragged on and on without much of the same implication of accomplishment the Souls games I've played offer.

After the second Saga boss I'm considering just sticking with Story difficulty for the rest of the game, because I just wanna keep moving and even then I died on my first attempt and finished with red all over my screen the second. So I do seem to suck at this game anyway. We'll see.

Well, it's definitely very much a survival horror game.

The first couple hours of this game are pretty fantastic, though I was soured a bit by wandering in circles for what felt like an hour because I went full Brad and either missed a tutorial or just wasn't intuitive enough to realize the reason I couldn't pick up an object was I needed to hit it with my flashlight first.

But I'm also definitely gonna have to start the whole damn thing over in classic survival horror fashion because I was treating the game a bit linearly (the map system is kind of bunk even though it appears straightforward - weirdly, it was also easier to get around Control by memorization than by map) and apparently missed a bunch of ammo and health pickups...which means I've given the first boss fight three college tries and completely ran out of ammo each time. Looked up a guide and it seems like there's several phases to the fight, too...so unless the Story mode means "you don't need bullets", even changing to that for a spell won't help me here.

What a nostalgic feeling I haven't felt since, oh, 1998!

Alternatively, both my launch controller and the one I got for some two player stuff a year later are still very awesome. But I also never saw fun glitches in GTA3.

I’m seeing this as a get ready to work and can’t wait to read much later tonight, but had to hurry up and share that I really loved this era of Lucas games, in part because they worked on the family Apple PowerPC sure, but they just felt so unique compared to the litany of licensed SNES platformers I was renting from Blockbuster.

And, perhaps even more than Full Throttle, the atmosphere of this game really clicked with me. I even read the damn novelization! It seems like real readers didn’t enjoy it much, but as a pre-teen it was in regular “can’t sleep, kill time” rotation.

I know if this game were brand new and I were the exact same me there are a handful if not majority of puzzles in this game I would hate the shit out of, but in my memory this will also just be solid writing delivered by fun voice actors bumbling about a world that felt mysterious to the very end.

Though that dead turtle and the rat it rode in are free to get ridiculed until every memory of this game turns to dust.

@marino: if Rousey beats Fox, it’s only because her role is much more prominent. Fox isn’t just flat, she sounds like an American overdub of a Chinese action movie. Except she’s in an American action movie.

Like others have said, I don’t feel that she’s primarily let only solely to blame for her performance. The whole of it hangs her out to dry, almost like NRS was attempting to allude to said bad dubs of foreign action films but assigned it to a character with very little to do in the story and almost no connection to the fan base.

I'm nearly halfway through the Invasions maps and I still don't really understand the Kameo system at all, honestly, and I only just realized that I probably should've been swapping characters a little more often than I have been. Not only because it turns out your "Invasions level" is separate from your character level, so everyone is leveling up whether you use them or not, but also because in the Tarkatan Colony you face a lot of enemies that are weak to Ice damage and I am absolutely shredding through it in a way that's very, very satisfying. In that sense it's nice that I have my go-to flow with Sub-Zero, but it makes me look back on some of the more frustrating parts of the other maps and wonder if they would've been just as easily shredded up if I'd paid more attention to the element system.

The game has its fair share of problems, namely that Invasions has some pretty stupid gimmicks meant to spice things up but really just make it intermittently more frustrating than it deserves to be.

But the combat just has such a nice crunch to it that even though I can tell I've barely scratched the surface of its more complicated juggles (and likely never will), I'm definitely gonna clear all the Towers for the epilogue chapters of each character's story and I look forward to the DLC characters.

Online is already a nightmare, though, which is a bummer since SFVI was pretty fun in the Battle Hub for about a month before it got loaded mostly with killers.

On the downer side, this game seems to remain capable of producing some pretty remarkable glitches from innocuous sources. I've had the visual glitch caused by Silverhand's first attempt to bumrush your skull for about 2 hours now, and since my original experience with this game was an impressionist's oil painting interpretation of it, I'd been rolling with it and assuming I just needed to keep pushing the story forward.

Turns out, I called Johnny a "psycho" during a dialogue tree and, direct from CDPR themselves, it's a known issue that this response locks the visual effect in and it's a priority investigation for aan upcoming patch. I can't help but be a little impressed - and happy I don't have any visual issues that make this as utterly unbearable as I'm sure it would be for plenty of other players.

So heads up - don't diss Johnny!

I'm going Cool for...whatever reason. I want to be Cool, I guess? From my memory of the original version of the game, Normal difficulty is hilariously stupid so I'm not too worried about my attribute choices mattering no matter what I do, really. At some point I'll find a pistol that auto-aims at headshots and also lights its bullets on fire and every combat encounter will be an amusement park bonfire.

So far what I'm most fascinated by is just seeing the game that some people had already seen in it way before it got Actually Good. I was one of the rubes that bought it on PS4, though I had read it'd probably be a rough go and can admit I bought the game partially because, as a non-PC gamer, I just wanted to see what it looked and felt like to play a game that's ugly as sin because the hardware just can't deliver it properly. Somehow, I squeezed 20 hours out of that particular nut before getting my refund.

For $30, it's nice to finally see how impressive this game can look, I already knew it had great sound design. I'm also not intentionally trying to ruin it this time so I've got the female V instead of the male. It's already been said a bazillion times but it's truly absurd how much better her performance is. I can't believe the same company that brought us Geralt was cool with...whatever male V was going for.

I thought I couldn't just turn around and leave the dungeon I thought I was stuck in from my last post, but once I remembered I needed to wear a mask to go back through the door it didn't really matter because my character seemed to go insane the moment I crossed the barrier and the game insisted on playing along, losing all interactivity without hard locking every time. Yuck.

...That being said, I've also re-rolled as a githyanki monk (of my own volition, swear!) and A) have really enjoyed the subtle differences in a lot of the dialogue between this and my half-orc bard character but also B) way, way, way, way prefer playing this game on "easy" mode. The enemies still hit like brick shithouses but at least my characters can take a punch like the heroes they're purported to be.

It's also been weirdly entertaining to play Act 1 while knowing what I'm in for, as I'm not only able to purposely mix things up and see how/if the game accounts for it, but am also moving along much more quickly overall while stumbling onto several small side quests I missed. Plus I didn't accidentally kill Halsin this time, so I didn't go all in and massacre the druid camp, so I've not lost half my party with the snap of a finger. I won't lie and say I wish that old save didn't seem so borked so I could compare how the game progresses with or without, but the gamer-hoarder in me sure does feel more complete with all the homies in tow.

I've got no good excuse for pummeling the story into submission in a single sitting, none at all. All I can say is that it's significantly convoluted and I needed breaks during the others.

Fun game.