40 hours in B4B now. I should move onto nightmare soon. Friends need better cards though.
JM 384 Released
I’ve recently discovered that the best tuna salad sandwiches are the ones with no mayo, made with tuna in oil. Add some Italian style peppers, some nice cheese, some onions, and a bit cucumber/green onion/other crunchy greens and you’re golden. I can’t go back to having mayonnaise tuna sandwiches anymore. It’s just not right.
Back 4 Blood finally came out (only if you buy the packs with DLC, but whatever) and I’ve been having a blast with that. Zombies go blarggh, gun go pew. Way more entertaining than stuff like the new Battlefield game imo. Shame it’ll only last so long.
It sucks that we have a game drought, but in a way it’s also a good thing. Next month is national novel writing month, and I’m planning to do a bit of a sprint.
JM 382 Released
Only 1 week left until Back 4 Blood. Finally a decent game to burn some time on…
Also, MI’s cover art has now received its second and presumably final pass.
JM 381 Released
Kokomi is trash. Genshin devs can’t do math and they’ve made the same design mistake of creating a character that doesn’t have a niche 3 times in a row now… You’d expect them to actually fix their shit after 2 rounds of backlash, but I guess not. The only last minute buff she got was to the icd of her jellyfish so it actually applied water on every hit.
I really don’t get why they struggle with the whole niche thing. It’s literally character/unit design 101…
Another mistake they keep making is putting extra forced downtime into the characters’ kits. It’s obvious that they’re doing it because they’re afraid of another Ganyu situation, where the strongest char has 100% uptime on all their stuff, but the result is that the characters don’t feel as good to use. Somehow their character design is still not as egregious as their system design though. Jfc the progression system is bad.
JM 380 Released
Tales of Arise not great. Overall, I actually think that this entry in the series does a lot of things much more poorly than the older ones instead of functioning as an improvement. I want to like it, but the animation lock really hurts the game imo, especially when you’re playing someone that isn’t the MC. The enemy attacks are also really slow and telegraphed as a result of the animation lock + the implementation of perfect dodging with animation lock. It just… doesn’t make sense to me. If they wanted to do perfect dodging, they shouldn’t have animation lock. It feels a lot clunkier than previous entries, especially Berseria, where it felt like you were tearing things apart and moving around a lot more actively. Perhaps not replaying Berseria right before playing Arise would’ve helped my impression, but the combat portion of Arise really does feel like a massive step backwards.
Another thing that bothers me a lot is the art. The semi-photorealistic lighting they use courtesy of unreal contrasts with the style imo and it doesn’t really look as great, especially because they tried to go with a more western style for the environments while maintaining an eastern style for the characters, as if to partially follow in the footsteps of games like FF15. I personally hate the contrast. It bothers the hell out of me, especially since it feels like they missed out on a bunch of lighting tricks, so the lighting looks kind of terrible? Facial animations bother the hell out of me too. They’re in uncanny valley territory, and I cringe every single time I see them. It doesn’t look like they were mocapped at all. Either that, or the skeletal meshes are missing a few parts. In some instances, especially Shion’s, it almost looks like they’re just moving and scaling the face’s components instead of actually making her talk. It’s disgusting.
I also want to complain about something really weird, Shion’s skin tone. She has lighter skin in the opening, and it looks fine. The darker skin on her in game model feels like it’s either too dark or too light. I feel like they should’ve made her tan a little darker to contrast with her outfits and the environment if they wanted to go the tanned route, and the lighter skin in the opening seems to suggest that it was a last minute change.
I will finish the game eventually, but I’m playing it a little bit at a time now because I can’t really sit down with it for a long time without getting mad. Might play Deathloop then come back to it afterwards, even.
JM 379 Released
Only 1 more month until Back 4 Blood actually comes out. I’m rather excited. Tales of Arise came out earlier this week as well,. I haven’t had a chance to play it just yet, but that’s what I’ll be spending most of the rest of the day doing. My current playtime total amounts to 7 minutes, the entirety of which has been cutscenes and adjusting the settings.
Another game I’ve been meaning to play more of is Orcs Must Die 3, but the characters irk me so much I have to keep stopping every time. I miss Maximillian… These new protagonists are just so obnoxious that I can’t. God damn it Robot, give me OMDU back 😦
In other news, a new character has been introduced to MI. There’s finally someone for the protagonist to speak to, after all this time.
JM 378 Released!
This has been an interesting week for me in terms of games. I finally managed to get to the final day in NEO TWEWY. I didn’t finish it though, for some odd reason, my motivation in that game has been at an all time low ever since Neku showed up. Just makes me remember how good his character development was and how crappy the second game’s MC is in comparison…
Raiden came out in Genshin as well. She’s hot, and hot garbage at the same time. That isn’t to say I didn’t whale for her though, since she’s hot. It seems a bunch of people are in the same boat since she has record breaking sales, which is not surprising by any means. I just wish she wasn’t total crap, and Eula wasn’t the only character she could pair with. It’s kind of funny and sad at the same time, but including her is mostly a downgrade.
The entire resolve mechanic is really shitty because stacks don’t persist between abyss floors, or even chambers. And if I use three ults, the entire floor is already dead. Ulting without resolve on the next floor isn’t worth it, and I might as well just use the ult-less characters. A c6 Fischl tends to do far more damage than her over time and will regen twice as much energy if you know how to abuse the hidden Fischl mechanic, and the ult boost on her E is kind of useless because it adds to the add damage modifier instead of final damage. Really shouldn’t scale off the energy consumed imo. Low energy ults already don’t work with the resolve mechanic. Lowering the buff’s effectiveness for cheaper ults just gimps Raiden even more.
In more exciting news, Tales of Arise is next week. Finally.
JM 377 Released
I fucking hate how every new multiplayer game that releases and its mother is survival crafting. I’ve never liked the genre and now I’m even more sick of it due to oversaturation. I especially hate how all the crafting systems are complete garbage and require nothing beyond gathering materials. As much as I dislike the roguelike fad, because I think most of the games that come out of it are poorly made and extremely unoriginal, I have to say the survival crafting one is far worse for the same reasons and more.
JM 375 Released
It’s time to be momentarily excited about Pokemon again. Idgaf about the DP remakes, almost entirely because they’re not like ORAS was to XY, even though gen 8 mechanics are shit, but the multi-turn stuff in legends looks interesting. It’s not an innovative system at all, but it’s the first time they’ve tried mixing up the formula. Too bad the main line games will stay forever shit and whatnot. And that 1v1 is a dumb format and they should go back to 2v2 only.
JM 374 Released
I dropped Neo TWEWY during the second scramble slam. “Hey go do 20 10-chain battles in a row” is just obnoxious. Yeah, no.
On the bright side, Back 4 Blood is great. Beat the game on vet with a few friends yesterday, need to do it on nightmare now. Last time we tried, we had a rando that instantly opened an alarm door and died on the first stage. Very interdasting.
