whatchu playing now

If you've been curious about getting Vampire Survivors, now may be the time to buy because its price is going up next week: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1794680/view/3370402903772168453

I'm hard pressed to think of a better value/price balance than Vampire Survivors

some have spoken of a golden quality / price ratio, the one which all others come from

Not including the free browser version of VS, I've spent 125 hours playing a $3 game. At that ratio, something like HFW would have to provide 2700 hours of mindless fun.

i will play mario+rabbids for 4000 more hours in order to make the equation balance

Enjoying the mood of "Control," which I had no idea was a shooting game (sort of). I think I've accidentally gotten bogged down in a bunch of DLC, so I should probably make my way back to the main game. Is it weird that I'm maybe 75% of the way in and I'm still getting lost all the time, despite fast travel points and detailed maps?

it’s a little hard to navigate

i finished tunic. It changes from "dark souls zelda 1" into "fez/the witness" near the end. loved it!

immortality: tosses out the linear progression of telling lies -- I'm not sure if it's a feature or a bug that you can see 90% of the scenes by clicking on the main character repeatedly. Music cues seemed more random than thought out this time (vs. telling lies, which did them very well). The game certainly has a big mindfuck moment.

xp Josh yeah, I think it's that way by design tbh. Welcome to the oldest house, *badumspsh*!

You may be right. But I keep getting those (optional?) alerts that I have to fight some baddies in some place, and the clock starts ticking, and each time I have to think, huh, where the hell is the Central Fax Processing Unit or whatever.

Those are almost usually optional, at least. I need to go back and do more for that achievement. ...And the DLC content.

I'm also sort of having trouble navigating all the million upgrade trees/varieties, but so far I've successfully been able to muscle my way through most combat, which has not been terrible.

You'll get enough ability points that you can get everything, but in the early stages, focus on health and especially telekinetic branches, which is basically what the game wants you to do.

The hidden bits in the DLC of Control are kind of worth seeking out not just for the power boost but for the weird locations and the way to find the one I’m thinking of is worth reading online because it’s obscure enough it’d probably not be obvious

Because I'm playing for the first time (I think I'm up to the Finnish Tango mission?) I don't know what's DLC and what's original side quest stuff. My missions to-do right now are a mix of all three, but it doesn't say which is which (aside from the default main mission). I *think* I can tell the DLC from the rest because maybe it's a little more wry, a little less spooky?

Anyway, I like this, though I've glitched it out a few times. One level the enemies just kept spawning indefinitely, afaict, another Jessie never totally rendered. One part trapped her in a corner between weird architecture bits until she was killed. Regardless, fwiw I think I'm much closer to the end than the beginning and I've accumulated nowhere near enough ability appoints and materials to unlock even close to everything.

Finnish Tango is fairly close to the end iirc
I didn't unlock the entire tree / all complete weapons on my playthrough, but you don't really need to do to complete the main story

Yeah, you can do the side bits afterwards

The mission after Finnish Tango is probably the coolest in the game. Come back and let us know how the Ashtray Maze bit goes!

Will do! Because I know I already tried the Ashtray Maze a hundred times and got nowhere, figured I was doing something wrong and then googled just enough to learn that no, it was not me, I just needed to finish more of the game first.

Ashtray Maze was so fun that I don't see how the game can top that. But I did get faked out by the post Polaris endgame (which had its own surprise soundtrack).

Bought the new monkey island. Cute so far.

Finished the main game of "Control." I really enjoyed its weirdness and quirks, though all that stuff kneecaps whatever story or emotion they were going for (and being able to hurl objects from a distance made most combat pretty easy). Related, there is absolutely no way I'm going to read the seemingly hundreds of documents I've collected. But I will do all the extra stuff.

I didn't follow the plot for AWE at all, but it has some of the scariest stuff in the game!

I think I played most of that already, pretty creepy stuff in the dark.

I thought about buying Return to MI on day 1 but I think I'll wait until my next credit card billing month. I already bought the Steam Deck this month and it arrived on MI's release day. (It's great so far despite an initial networking hiccup.)

I just got my Deck too, haven't had the chance to even plug it in yet though.

Steam Deck day 1 impressions:
Networking issues: It got online, but then it wouldn't let me login to my Steam account. Seems to be a common issue judging by the google results I got. I fixed it by powercycling it.
I was surprised by how easy it is to go to the Linux desktop.
Extra SD card slot is right on the side, no secret compartment like with my phone.
The games I played ran without issues except for the one time that a game required keyboard input. What a pain it is to pull up the onscreen keyboard. Clearly Valve wants everything to have controller support.
I could feel an area on the back of the controller get warm. No fan sounds yet.

perhaps spurred by JiC's Control posts, i bit the bullet last night.

i like the conversation moments where Jessie is thinking something to herself. it's always a close-up of her eyes as she thinks things to herself in the middle of a conversation. sometimes 10-20 seconds will pass on a close-up of her face as the other person waits for an answer and she's thinking about her past.

hey dude how's it going?

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............................................................................................................................................good what can you tell me about the hiss

on the abilities side i have leaned heavily into the "launch" category, the one where you can pick up objects and throw them. very satisfying!

i have to say, Control _really_ has some performance issues on ps4. i say that as someone playing control on an early model ps4, knowing that it won't be the best. in general i don't really care about frame rate issues or slowdown. i played a shitload of gradius III and lifeforce and i am 99.99% perfectly fine with massive slowdown. but yeah, there's a lot of that here, on an old school ps4. it's testing my resolve and dedication to lo-fi 2010s generation console gaming

xpost lol, I found that stuff hilarious.

I specifically waited until I had a PS5 to start this, because I had heard consoles struggled.

I finished the AWE DLC. Final boss was actually kind of tricky. I've never played Alan Wake but I guess I should, since there's a sequel coming out.

Yeah, playing Control on a heaving, creaking old PS4 ranks as one of the least enjoyable gaming experiences of my life. Which is a shame as the game itself is pretty cool - also Remedy are so so good at tyopgraphic stuff in their games.

I was pretty fine with it on my base PS4 (well, the slim one) with the exception of some of the hairier encounters and boss fights. That said very glad I will get go back to it on a PS5, and also bitter that my save game doesn't transfer over to the Ultimate edition so I will be playing the PS4 version on that PS5.

Speaking of which, now that I know which stuff is the DLC stuff, for whatever reason some of the DLC stuff looks pretty iffy to me, at least compared to the base game. Textures, Jesse's face. No idea why. This is on the PS5 upgraded Ultimate edition, almost like the DLC didn't get a graphics boost. Doesn't affect gameplay, just looks out of place.

Since graphics are the first thing finished in a video game, and CONTROL won multiple awards for excellence in graphics, here is footage from the beginning of development :)

Full video here: https://t.co/l2g7oPhtk7
🔻 pic.twitter.com/cGnmJZXF5E

— Paul Ehreth 🔻 (@bacon_sanwich) September 20, 2022

For context, some idiot on Twitter (redundant, I know) said that graphics are the first thing that gets finalized in the games development cycle and so the GTA6 leaks are what the finished product is going to look like.

Did anyone actually take that statement seriously?

There's more here: https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/gta-6-leak-graphics-are-not-finished-first/

xpost I think it just pissed off enough devs

i think it's because there's very little "news" in game news, even though there are multiple competing 24/7 game news websites.

if they weren't running an article about how one guy said something really uninformed on twitter and no one believed him, they would have to run that one article about the guy who recorded a video of this one really funny bug that happened in Destiny 2 where you float through a wall

I finished most of Control and the DLC. Is there any reason to complete all the busywork side quests? Mold? Shining lights on plants?

The DLC, btw, played fine, but at least for me it still seemed far less finished/polished than the main game. Jesse looked weird, and there were multiple times it glitched out and trapped me in a room or didn't spawn something that was supposed to spawn, forcing me to reboot the game. I'm not sure I've ever had a game I had to reboot before, let alone multiple times.

I don't remember any of the DLC being weirdly glitchy, but it's been quite a while since I played it.

As for finishing the sidequests, that's for getting more ability points and/or hunting for trophies.

But no good battles or anything?

Some of them are just fetch quests, some are to unlock some cat ears, others have tough boss fights. "Swift Platform" is probably a highlight if you haven't already played it, if for no other reason than its great synthwave song (when I played it when it first came out, it was hard af, but they patched it to make it a lot easier).

Yeah, I did that one, it was fun! (At least once I figured out I was supposed to move out of the way of the barriers and not just take them on face-first, lol.)

Return to Monkey Island: another good one from Ron Gilbert. I prefer Thimbleweed Park (the variety of action verb choices led to better puzzles) but it's great that they managed to make another good MI game, after that last two stinky ones. They put extra effort in to make sure that mouse and gamepad were both solid input choices.

I'm about 5 hours in to Yakuza 0, my first-ever Yakuza. This game is hilarious. I had to buy a bunch of homeless guys booze in exchange for information about a shady real estate company that's been pushing folks out of the neighborhood. Each of them wanted something different, so I had to hoof it all over town to various stores.

Somehow, along the way, I run into a TV crew who rope me into impersonating their erstwhile producer. They even give me a pretentious TV big-shot outfit to wear (lavender slacks, white sneakers, a yellow sweater draped & tied over my shoulders). We shoot some scenes for a food show and I have to pretend I know what I'm doing.

Then, the *actual* producer shows up, wearing the identical outfit I'm dressed in, and I have to beat the tar out of him and his cronies, because this is Yakuza. After that, the crew thanks me and they have a heartfelt dialogue with the director about their passion for making TV.

yakuza 0 is a masterpiece

Moonscars -- copies too much of the dark souls formula for me. I didn't feel like grinding for souls -- I think souls can't be banked in this game, so die twice and they're all gone -- so I put it down. at least it's not a roguelike.

tonite i been listening to king crimson & rosalìa

now playing: “sailor’s tale” by crimso