Keyrock

I'll always take quality over quantity. Look at Portal, that game is only about 3 hours long, but those are 3 GLORIOUS hours. I'll take that over 40 hours of mediocrity any day. The same goes for open worlds. Ryu Ga Gotoku's open worlds are some of the smallest out there, but they can take the Pepsi challenge with any giant open wotld because they are filled to the brim with atmosphere and have fun and engaging activities and stories around every corner. That's not to say that you can't make a giant open world fun and engaging, we've seen it done, but more often than not you wind up with a lot of ctrl+c & ctrl+v throw away content when there is 1000 square kilometers of open world to fill.

I'm home for a couple days so I took a ride just across the border to Fort Mill SC and hit up Frugal MacDoogal's for some early X-Mas shopping: The Laphroaig isn't for anyone in particular, I'm just bringing it so everyone can try it. I can almost guarantee my mom (if she even tries it) & my sister (she'll try it) will hate it, I don't know if my dad will like it... I don't know if I like it and I've had it before. It's such a distinctive flavor (I call it "drinking a campfire") that every drinker should try it at least once. The Campari is for mom, the Camarena for sis, and the Suntory Toki isn't for X-Mas. This will be the second Japanese whisky I've tried; I'll have some tonight while watching AEW Rampage. I'll report back if it's any good.

Sounds like Dak will play this Sunday. I would still sit him if he's even 90% on Sunday morning, but if he's fully healed up then start him.

You are a wise man.

Hey, it's something, at least Intel isn't getting smashed in efficiency AND performance any more. Baby steps.

Seems Intel got their **** together. This is good news for everybody.

It just dawned on me. Why did the (sith) empire waste so much time and money continually building giant superweapons that come standard with one fatal flaw to blow up planets with? They should have just hired Samus Aran, she's really good at blowing up planets. I don't know what her fee is, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it's significantly less than building a gigantic battle station that's just going to get blown up by a X-wing anyway. The sith's greatest flaw is being very irresponsible with their money.

Honestly, Metroid games don't really fit that description well, they're not bullet hell-y. There are of course some regular enemies that fire projectiles at you, but they are few and far between. There are usually a few boss fights that get a little bullet hell-y like Mother Brain every time she makes an appearance, Phantoon, and in Metroid Dread some of the later central unit battles have a bunch of projectiles flying at you, but those CU fights are so easy you can mostly tank the damage and just unload on the central unit. The irony is that later in Metroid games you don't generally do a lot of shooting. I mean you can, if you're dead set on it, but once you have speed booster and screw attack you just run or spin jump your way through regular enemies and even some bosses. You don't need to stop to fight regular enemies once you have screw attack, you just go. Samus Aran's greatest weapon is her mobility, which is why Super Metroid and Metroid Dread are easily the best games in the series, because they have really good, fluid movement and tight controls. As an aside, I think it's bonkers that speedrunners already have Metroid Dread any% down to 1:15 and 100% down to about 2 hours. I just spent 19 hours beating the game. Granted, I did 100% and I'm a very slow gamer.

And January. Anyone that still has their decorations up past the first week of January is a psychopath in my book.

My mom had COVID last year, before vaccines were out (she's fine). Despite the fact that Rodgers has personally assassinated muh Boys multiple times, I wish the man a speedy and full recovery.

I only just started, I've played the game for an hour, if that. Right now it's just my boy Beefstick, Elvis, and Adelle, who has thankfully yet to sing any ultra depressing songs.

Bravely Default 2 For those not familiar with the series, it's essentially old skool Final Fantasy in everything except name. I brought back an old character name staple I hadn't used in many years. Everything from Final Fantasy of 20+ years ago and is here: Active turn-based combat, job system, familiar item names (e.g. phoenix down), familiar battle music. The new wrinkle is the brave and default (hence the series name) combat abilities. Brave lets you do extra actions (up to 4 total) while default defends and accumulates bravery points (bp) to use with brave. There's more to it than that, but I don't feel like typing out another paragraph. The environments can look quite lovely. I like how it shows a cutaway when you enter a building. The chibi-ish art style probably won't be to everybody's liking, but it doesn't bother me. Check out the pompadour on this guy!

Well, he is, outside of Tommy Terrific, the league's golden boy. As for the vaccines, they're not 100% effective at preventing catching the virus, no drug is ever 100% effective. It just makes you more resistant and you get over it quicker and easier if you do get COVID.

I like backtracking in a game, metroidvania or otherwise, so long as there is no level scaling. Coming back to an earlier area much more powerful and slicing through everything like a hot knife through butter is a fun power fantasy for me.

It is the year 2036. Bethesda Softworks just released Skyrim 25th Anniversary Edition for Playstayion 8 and XBOX Ə%<Œ. TES 6 is still in "development".

My experiences end with XP, so I have no comment on Vista or later. I didn't hate 98, ME was GARBAGE, though.

I scooped up the Castlevania Advance Collection on Switch. It's available on everything, but Switch just seems like the ideal way to play GBA games. $20 is a bargain for 3 great and 1 good game. The one disappointment is that it's Dracula X and not Rondo of Blood. I mean, Dracula X is still good, but why not include the superior version of the game instead? Oh well, I didn't buy it for that, anyway, I bought it for the GBA trilogy. Part of me wants to go into Aria of Sorrow directly, because it's so freakin' great, but I'll probably play through the entire trilogy in order (Circle of the Moon, Harmony of Dissonance, Aria of Sorrow). I just finished Metroid Dread and I don't want to do back to back metroidvanias, so I'll break it up with something else, but Circle is coming up soon.

Those rules lock you out of nearly all of the games I would put in my own highest tier of metroidvanias: Super Metroid, Metroid Dread, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, La-Mulana 1 & 2. There's so much gaming content out there that there's no point in playing anything that isn't your cup of tea, so play what you like.

I finished Metroid Dread with 100% item collection. Great game, it's definitely in the running for GotY. If you like metroidvanias you will probably love it, as it's one of the finest examples of the genre. If you don't like metroidvanias this probably won't change your mind. The final boss fight was really badass. There are 3 phases, 4 if you count the short bit at the beginning, but it's basically just part of the first phase. Phase 1 is easy once you learn all the different attacks because there are plenty of opportunities to replenish health & ammo, so mistakes can be corrected. Phase 2 is the hard part as there is no way to replenish. Everything can be dodged, you just gotta execute. Phase 3 is like phase 1 but with some newly added attacks. There are opportunities to replenish, though. Phase 1 took me 3 tries, phase 2 took 7 or 8 tries, and phase 3 I did on my second try.

Shinespark madness continues: That should be it for these. There were other puzzles I didn't bother recording. The game is nice enough to give you a collection percentage for each separate area and I have 100% in every area except the one I haven't visited yet, which I presume is just the final boss fight

I see Baker Mayfield as Kirk Cousins 2.0. He shows just enough to get someone to overpay him and apologists to invent reasons why the team isn't getting the job done (it's the coach, the receivers, the O line, never the QB). I don't ever see him being The Guy.

I keep giving the Chiefs the benefit of the doubt, because they've been in the last 2 superbowls big games and won 1 of them, but they look super shaky this year. I know they won last night, but that was an extremely unconvincing win over the lowly Giants. In other news, I was very wrong about the Browns. At the start of the season, I picked a Browns vs Rams superbowl big game. Half of that seems on-track, it ain't the AFC side. In retrospect, that was a really stupid pick by me. I mean, their QB is Baker Mayfield. The Browns are stuck in a really weird place that I refer to as The Andy Dalton Conundrum (alternatively The Jay Cutler Conundrum). Legit starting QBs are a prized commodity because there are never nearly enough to go around. Baker Mayfield is a legit starter, but only just barely. I can't say that you can't win the big game with a QB of that level, because Trent Dilfer has a ring, but you need a historically good defense, which they don't have. What do you do? Do you build around and overpay a mediocre QB in hopes you can build a team strong enough to win it all anyway? Getting a better QB through free agency or the draft is going to be quite tough, especially since you will be picking mid-round every year. Even if you mortgage the farm to move up in the draft, there's no guarantee one of the top 2 QBs in any given draft will truly pan out.

More shinespark puzzles. It's almost unfair to call them "puzzles", but that's what Metroid players have always called them. Figuring out what to do is the easy part, executing is the much harder part. This first one to get power bomb ammo was quite easy, only took me 3 tries: This one to get missiles, on the other hand, was the hardest shinespark puzzle I've done so far: I suck at executing mid-air shinesparks, and this required two of them. It took me at least 30 tries, I lost count. Hopefully that's the hardest one. I'm at a point where I could head to presumably the final boss right now, I'm just getting 100% item collection. None of these shinespark puzzles are required to beat the game, btw. They're only necessary for 100%. Any shinesparks required to beat the game are childishly easy and straightforward, there's no puzzle to them whatsoever.

A couple of the more challenging shinespark puzzles in Metroid Dread that I just completed: