>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.


Beat this game, got nearly every ending. I'm not over the moon about it the way other people were, but I did know some of the twists ahead of time. Pure B-game with A-ambition, glad I played it but honestly I was happy to be done with it when it was all over. I'm not sure why I didn't sacrifice myself for someone else later, I guess I was just too tired and didn't realize what was going on.


>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!


Yea, I haven't really touched this since. I think about it sometimes, but I beat the Divine Beasts, about 50 shrines, and I could go do Ganon but the bosses weren't exactly my favorite part of the Beasts...if the Switch had achievements I'd probably wrap this up, and I do find the Eventide/Master Sword challenges intriguing but...I dunno, man. Time and place, I guess?


>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.


Still really enjoying this, though now that I'm past 60 runs and still haven't beat Hades' second form even once I...feel gamer-shame. There's nothing more deflating than piling up the boons and feeling really good and then suddenly you're in a room that seems completely designed to fuck your current look all the way up.

---------------------
Otherwise, some random other stuff...


INJUSTICE 2: Played this coming off the lows of Justice League - now THIS is a trash story, man. I've really enjoyed Netherrealms' fighting game story modes, including the first Justice League, but I just have no idea what's going on here, and I feel like I'm only really catching a vibe with Aquaman, Blue Beetle and Superman. I'm near the end of the story but after the first round with Brainiac I'm really not looking forward to whatever bullshit Netherrealm cooks up to make him a classic MK-style boss fight. I might just be done since I'm not taking myself online.

DISCO ELYSIUM: Released on PS4 finally and I like what I see, unfortunately the menu system is completely broken right now and the game is, well, all menus. They announced a patch yesterday, hopefully it gets pushed through soon!

KENTUCKY ROUTE ZERO: Finally played Act V; wanted to kind of see how it might've felt to wait 2-3 years for that last installment. Was pretty much what I expected - super melancholy, super ephemeral, not much to it really and yet exactly what I wanted. Just like the rest of the game.

CIV VI: Still plays awesomely on PS4, FYI. Perfect podcast/reading the news game.

SHADOW OF WAR: Man is this game conflicting. It feels way more, like, pointless? Every story mission is just a tutorial for another mechanic, and on Normal the game is almost awkwardly easy until suddenly you come up on a guy with the right set of weird perks and the wrong number of projectile tossing assholes encircling the combat arena. I've put about 10 hours in and can launch my first fortress siege when I want, but the fortress' level is three times as high as mine, so...? The basic loop of "be an invincible elf-possessed weirdo" is just as fun as I remember from the first game, there's just so much MORE stacked on top I feel a little overwhelmed and misguided. Definitely glad this was a Playstation Plus game.

GREEDFALL: After my love affair with VAMPYR I've kinda been scrounging around for a low budget Euro-RPG to sink into and, buddy, this ain't it. The animation is awful, the combat is no fun at all and doesn't even hint at fun down the road, the city is a disaster of environmental design...I'm glad somebody somewhere liked this game but this was one of the quickest uninstalls I've gone through in a minute. I think I got an hour and a half out of it before I pulled the plug.

XCOM 2: Sort of like Shadow of War, it's the old game with more on top, and the more on top might just be too much for me? It also seemed a significant amount harder, as I was almost always one soldier short for an op with just barely enough money to buy a new one. I never had that much trouble with the first game, and without the sense of character progression I fell off after a handful of hours. Another Playstation Plus casualty, but this one's probably on me as much as the game.

RED DEAD ONLINE: On the plus side, it doesn't seem to randomly boot from the server every 30-60 minutes anymore, and there are actually animals to hunt in the environment. Imagine that! On the negative side, it still feels like you're never making any progress and it's not a great feeling to put 4 or so hours in on a night off and log off without any new guns, horses, clothes, jobs, ANYTHING to speak for other than having spent time in Rockstar's beautiful wild west. It's absolutely wild that two years later I still remember routes through these woods and mountains, it's a real testament to world building and all that but...it sure would be nice to feel like you were getting ANYTHING done (or if all this content were just duplicated into the epilogue of the single player game). I give this a shot every half year or so just to see if its finally for me, but this is probably the time I learn to accept if I ever want to get wrapped up in this game again it's gonna have to be a second playthrough of the campaign.




>~~~~~~~~~
>"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
>http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
>Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz