Dropped FULL THROTTLE for now, but at some point I'll have to finish it out of nostalgia. I also didn't turn 13 SENTINELS into a podcast game, but I also haven't installed it. I finished YAKUZA ZERO; the hostess club battles rule, the real estate battles drool. I kind of want to play the whole series now? I'm scared. Maybe I'll just go to JUDGEMENT instead?

Anyway...

NIER: AUTOMATA I finally decided to buy at half-off because I've just been playing so many Japan-origin games these days compared to the past decade and figured I finally ought to see it for myself. I was a little surprised I beat the game in just 11 hours, and I'm not finding stumbling into alternative endings terribly charming so far, but I know the joke endings aren't what the B run is all about and I'm excited to see what all the hype's about. The combat's mashy but it's fine, the music is incredible and every set piece in the game is terrifyingly memorable. I'm really happy with this.

BREATH OF THE WILD, meanwhile, I'm having a much more conflicted time with. I played about 100 hours of Genshin Impact last year, and have played Horizon: Zero Dawn to nearly 100% completion on both Hard and NG+ Ultra Hard, so I'm struggling to not notice all the things those games do better than Breath of the Wild. The game looks pretty sloppy on a big screen most of the time (and beautiful almost at random), the menus and to an extent the controls are clunky and misshapen, weapon and ammo management is an absolute joke compared to just about any open world third person game with an inventory even contemporaneously (GTA V and Horizon come to mind first) and a lot of the survival elements, while clever, threaten to get in the way of progress without adding anything "fun" or "enjoyable".

But then there are those magic moments where I find a solution to a problem, look up that puzzle on the internet and realize I may have been in just a handful of people who did this thing this way because nobody has said they did they same thing on the internet and it makes me grin so damn wide. The NPC barks, audio cues, everything sound related is magical - this soundtrack is so fucking weird, man! I've put tons and tons of hours into this, and while it's hard to trust the Switch's 90+ hours it's probably not much less accounting for idle time. That's not insignificant for a game I'm mostly unimpressed by in 2021 - but I'm glad to have gotten a crack at it finally, if only so I can confidently sound the horn on Horizon demanding more respect on its name for the rest of eternity!

HADES, meanwhile, has kept me firmly away from BotW the past week and I may not go back to Zelda until I beat Hades for the first time - which was very nearly just this morning. I'm 40 attempts in and felt incredibly self-conscious when I looked up a player survey post-1.0 release and most people were saying their first clear was in the 9th to 14th run range (!!!) but I'm just stupid and brain dead when it comes to these sorts of games and try to brute force my way a lot of the time, especially when I'm just tired of a certain area or enemy. Totally makes sense this was nearly a unanimous GotY pick last year, though again - what the fuck is up with Switch games looking like shit on TVs?! I wouldn't hesitate to buy this game again on PS4 if it would look as clean as it does on the handheld when projected on a 55" screen.

I gave EA Play a shot with the $0.99 month trial and played both BURNOUT PARADISE and MADDEN NFL 20 through it. I get the hype for Burnout, I wish I'd played it at the time! That's all there really is to say about that. And maybe it's just skipping Madden for nearly a decade, but Madden NFL 20 seems weirdly hated on? I liked all the RPG aspects they added to the Franchise mode and I think the weekly training modes are a brilliant way to both teach Madden and football concepts in general. Players' knees still look terrible and the running game still feels...silly in a way I don't remember it being back in Madden 2005, but I was pretty impressed and got about halfway through a season with the Bucs in a single evening...before never touching it again 'cause I'm just pretty out on football these days. But I thought it was cool!



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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
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