Keyrock

I would love to share the scrotum of visionary film genius Neil Breen with Obsidian Forums, but I suspect the mods might take umbrage with that.

Zack Snyder: "Watch this, I'm going to make a 4 hour version of Justice League." Denis Villeneuve: "Hold my beer..." #ReleaseTheVilleneuveCut

To cleanse my palate of Chernobylite for a bit (I love the game, but it's very tense and I'm a wuss so I need to take breaks from it and play it in spurts) I decided to revisit Nier: Automata. Right off the bat I will say that the game looks better than I remember. It's been a few years, did they do a big update or something? I mean, there are still some really gnarly low res textures mixed in with the nice looking textures, but I remember the game having this really drab washed out look and it looks a lot better and more vibrant now. I'm not using any texture injectors or anything. Anyway, it had been long enough that I forgot how much I hate the prologue. I mean, it's a solidly designed prologue/tutorial, it shows off all the different camera shifts, both on foot and in shmup fights (I suck at the twin stick parts, always have, but I love the regular scrolling shmup parts), and there's a big flashy boss fight at the end. All that is well and good, the problem lies in the fact that it's nearly an hour long and there are zero save points in a game that doesn't autosave. I'm past that now and there are plenty of save points everywhere, but why would you do that to new players? Why would you make the very first thing you do in the game a nearly hour long slog with no place to save? It's such a bizarre design decision in an otherwise awesome game.

Yeah, Dune is such a monumental undertaking that you're either going to wind up with a 3+ hour movie or you're going to have to cut or gloss over some really important stuff if you don't split it in half. This is why every previous attempt has been a partial or complete failure.

Well, it's a looter shooter so that means you will be getting tons of guns. Now, most of the guns will be just alright, but then there will be shiny guns and really shiny guns and really really shiny guns. You want the really really shiny guns, obviously, but the chance to get the really really shiny guns is astronomically small... That is unless you give them money, then you have a somewhat better chance to get the really really shiny guns. You'll probably have to give them money a whole bunch of times and/or grind in the game for 300 hours to get the really really shiny gun you want, but once you have the really really shiny gun, heh, well then... Then... Then you have the really really shiny gun and you are super awesome, or something (Giga Chad? is that what the young uns call it these days?). That is until they release a content update with a new area and a NEW really really shiny gun, it is oh so shiny. I lack the vocabulary to fully explain just how shiny this new gun is. Then the cycle begins anew.

Liberal use of Inception BWOMMMMMM sound - Excessive reflective surfaces so that you know it's "next gen" - Live service microtransactions shenanigans - Probably

I'm roughly 13 hours into Chernobylite and I'm very much loving the game so far. It's very psychological, it's as much about dealing with mental trauma and phantoms in your head as it is surviving the enemies or the elements. I've been stealthing the game as much as possible. Some combat is unavoidable, but the vast majority, so far at least, has been. I haven't even used my shotgun since I found it, though I did use the revolver I started with a couple times. i try to avoid using my weapons as much as possible, but it does make me feel more secure to have a loaded shotgun, to that end I've made some upgrades to it. I've probably got a good ways to go. I assume that at some point I will have to

@LadyCrimsonIt's a musou, you engage in large, sometimes very vaguely historically based, battles where you run around OBLITERATING thousands of mooks while you build up your charges for your specials. When you run into a big baddie you unload your specials on them. Lather, rinse, repeat. Always repeat.

@LadyCrimsonHere's a slightly negative review to balance your positive one: It seems to confirm what I feared; it's a Marvel movie so they have to have their giant CGI battle with energy blasts at the end. I am so ****ing done with the giant CGI battle with energy blasts. I'll almost certainly watch this at some point because Tony Leung is the man, but I ain't about to go to a movie theater to see another CGI battle with energy blasts.

As a lover of wuxia I'm more interested in Shang-Chi than I would be another Marvel movie, but I'm afraid they're going to Marvel up the movie too much and ruin the martial arts goodness. If it was essentially just a straight up kung fu movie that would be my jam, but the Marvel formula has produced such obscene mountains of money over the past 15 years or so that I fear they will be hesitant to stray from the formula and thus we must have a giant CGI battle at the end with a sky beam, and I have zero interest in seeing that (yet again).

It just dawned on me that we are rapidly approaching the 50th anniversary of one of my favorite movies of all time. My favorite Stanley Kubrick film, and probably his most divisive, A Clockwork Orange. I haven't seen the movie in likely close to a decade at this point, I think it's about time I watched it again. I might treat myself to a 4K Anniversary Blu Ray coming in roughly a month or so. It's been too long since I've partaken in a bit of the old ultraviolence.

What are we talking? Gruyere? Camembert?

I'm rather interested to see how Alder Lake performs in the real world , given the BIGlittle architecture. For that price, it better perform pretty damn well.

I'll probably also wait until the final DLC releases to play the game, but I'll also wait to purchase it until then.

That's pretty steep if true. I don't know the exact exchange rate, but that's gotta be at least $100 more than the R9-5950X.

I'm not going to buy it (yet), but WotR shows as available to buy on Steam for me right now.

Where is this demo? I don't see one on Steam. Was this a crowdfunding thing? Do you have to be a backer to have access to the demo?

It's a good thing I had more patience (read: less money and thus no choice) when I was young and played BG1 all the way through back in the day. I tried replaying it a few years back and it was a rough experience. First the horrendous save scumming at the beginning when I would get 1-shot by xvarts and wolves until I got to about level 3. Then I got to Nashkel Mines and Nashkel Mines broke me. Those kobold archers can go **** themselves. That's where I gave up.

Not a fan of the voice over, but otherwise I liked the trailer. I'm glad you brought this up because I had forgotten about this game.

I used Spicy Latina voice in SR2, Russian Immigrant in SR3, and Southern Belle in SR4. The latter 2 were good voices, but they weren't nearly as good as Spicy Latina.

Thank goodness. Making The Boss a preset character would have been the worst decision in the history of decisions, worse than Hitler deciding to invade Russia.

I was really scared for a while when it seemed like The Boss was a set, premade character (#NotMyBoss), but toward the end of the video they suggested you can still design your own character. Hopefully they still have at least 3 male and 3 female voices to choose from, like before.I suppose it would be too much to ask for the Spicy Latina voice from SR2 to make a return?

I'm assuming it plays like Fallout 1 & 2, except with a 70s vibe, rather than a 50s vibe.

I'm perfectly fine with the game taking longer in TB mode; I'm a slow gamer by nature, I have no issues with combat taking a long time. As an example, I remember a lot of complaints about how long combat took in Divinity: Original Sin. I was not at all bothered by this, in fact combat was the one part of the game I liked, it was everything else (read: poor writing, cringeworthy attempts at humor, lackluster world) that turned me off the game. For me, it's a numbers game; I am perfectly fine with RTwP if I'm controlling 1 or 2 characters. At 3 characters I start disliking RTwP and the dislike grows exponentially for each party member added. Said dislike can be somewhat mitigated if the game has really good companion AI so that I don't have to hold the hand of every single character every single second of every battle, but good companion AI is rather rare in my experiences. Most party-based RPGs have you controlling 4-6 characters, I will pretty much always prefer TB is such games, I find it less messy, for lack of a better term, when that many characters are involved. I find TB makes it easier to play tactically, to keep things organized and plan ahead, and that's worth it to me, even if it takes 3 times as long. Having both options, provided they are both well implemented, is the ideal situation; people can play the game whatever way is more comfortable for them.