Keyrock

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew demo The game looks lovely with a great art style and vibrant colors fitting of the tropical setting. Gameplay is great, Mimimi have single-handedly resurrected the real-time stealth tactics genre. They know what they're doing. I'm not done with the demo yet, it's longer than I expected. As usual for these types of games, one of the very few genres I'm actually good at, I'm playing on the hardest difficulty, which in this case is "cursed". I always try to go pacifist. I did Shadow Tactics 100% pacifist (cut scenes don't count, I have no control over those) and Desperados 3 completely pacifist until the final showdown which, after trying everything I could come up with for like 2 or 3 hours, I determined was impossible to complete without killing the people. Looks like I'm going to have to kill custodes in this game, since knocking them out doesn't seem to break their spell, but I will try to not kill anyone else, if at all possible. The game ran like a champ max settings at 4K. No crashes, no glitches, no stutters. Just buttery smooth.

Secret World is one of my all-time biggest gaming disappointments. I wanted to love that game so much. It's like the game world was created specifically for me. Secret society conspiracy theory stuff is my jam and the writing was quite good, even if it was cliche as ****. Voice acting was solid, it looked good, for the time it came out. *sigh* You know, good writing and an interesting setting can get me through mediocre gameplay, perhaps even bad gameplay, but the combat in Secret World was so terrible and mind-numbingly boring that I just couldn't do it. I wanted to power through it to experience the game world, Lord knows I tried, but the combat was so off-putting that I lost the will to continue. Everything about it just felt wrong. There was ZERO feedback. Characters just floated around like they were skating on ice, everything had an input delay. Just awful.

Cyber Knights: Flashpoint demo Character customization is locked in the demo but you can choose from 1 of 4 presets. I went with wastelander. In the tradition of XCOM, at one point I missed 5 of 7 "70% chance to hit" attacks. Base management is mostly locked in the demo as is the market. The game's not going to win any awards for graphics, but it was the political machinations, trying to navigate a web of backstabbing and deception, that I really liked in Star Traders: Frontiers, and, from the bit I played in the demo, Cyber Knights: Flashpoint seems to have that in spades and will let you make choices that can take you down very different paths, for good or bad.

Cat's Request demo It's a cyberpunk animal people point & click. The art style is nice and there's a ton of neon because cyberpunk. The setup is that all AIs without bodies will be banned soon and the AI you created, Root, doesn't have a body. Hence, you need to get a body for Root before the ban takes effect but you have no money. You can switch between the cat dude you play as, I forget his name and I can't be bothered to look it up, and Root, who is essentially a ghost (?), though I didn't find anything that I specifically needed Root to do, so it was kind of pointless within the small section of game presented in the demo. I think I exhausted everything I could do in the demo in the roughly 20 minutes I played. Beyond the art style there's nothing to really set this apart from any other p&c, it's fine, I guess.

I can end this debate with a single sentence. Sabin suplexes a train.

I'm so sorry.

Prigozhin may find his next meal fortified with delicious and nutritious Polonium 210.

Saint's Row 2 Drug Addict Hippie Shaundi > Saint's Row 3 and onward Shaundi. She wasn't particularly great a character in SR2, but at least she had something going for her, even if that something was a crippling drug addiction. From SR3 onward she was just generic hot girl. ****ing Pierce was a more interesting character than Shaundi.

Kinzie Kensington was the best 3rd Street Saint. Yes, better than Johnny Gat.

I really liked the ATB system that Final Fantasy used from V to IX and again in X-2 (though I didn't particularly like X-2), so the constant march toward more and more action-oriented combat is not something I'm a fan of. That said, I'm not particularly broken up about it because Squeenix has 2 venerable JRPG franchises: Final Fantasy that they keep changing and Dragon Quest that has remained mostly the same. Squeenix can tinker with Final Fantasy to their heart's content, turn it into a live service looter shooter, whatever. I can just play Dragon Quest, and I have, and I will again whenever DQ12 comes out.

I feel like pet the dog is pretty much industry standard now, I'm no longer giving a game points for letting me pet the dog, however I will subtract points for not allowing me to pet the dog. My new standard for 10/10 is scratch the kitty under the chin. I'm not giving points for standard running your hand along the top of the cat, that's same as the dog petting, in fact they could probably repurpose the dog petting animation into cat petting. However, if the dev takes the time to put in an animation to scratch the cat under the chin that's instant 10/10. Put a capybara in the game and let me scratch it under the chin and that's Game of the Year.

Dominik has one of my favorite story arcs WWE has done in many years. He got arrested and spent like an hour in a jail cell and ever since he's now a "hardened criminal". He now talks tough and says stuff like "Run your mouth and I'll show you how we take care of snitches in the joint." Delusional heels are the best.

I would 100% watch a J Jonah Jameson movie so long as it's J K Simmons. Cut the Spidernerd out of it and just make the movie completely about Triple J.

This trailer was more tragic than the Titanic Tour submarine. If they make a Mysterio movie, hopefully it's about this guy: Rather than the lame Spiderman villain. Come to think of it, I could do the same joke for Sandman.

I'm sorry, good guess, but that is incorrect. I'll give Ubisoft this, their games typically have a handful or two of legitimately interesting activities and at least a couple of fun characters. It's the 874 lame collectibles and 36 copy/paste outposts for you to liberate that weigh the whole thing down. Thanks for playing. Be sure to collect your parting gift, a $10 certificate to Ruth's Chris Steakhouse, on the way out. Edit: The correct answer was 8. 8 of the 1246 icons on an Ubisoft map represent something interesting.

The Invincible demo It very much feels like Firewatch... IN SPAAAAAAAAACE There's a lot of talking to a faceless voice as you do walking simulator stuff and weird things happens. If nothing else, it looks pretty.

Not just density but also quality and creativity. Pick a random map from a Ubisoft game, look how packed the map is with icons, that's dense, right? How many of those icons represent something interesting, though?

There's still time. Little Kitty Big City sounds more like a @LadyCrimsongame.

Jusant Demo This game looks a lot like Ico. You climb. The climbing mechanics are terrific. I can't speak to m&kb controls but this game was definitely made for a controller (it even says that when you start it). The triggers control your right and left hands and you use the left thumbstick to search out for handholds. You can place pitons and jump and swing and it's all really well done and super fun. The demo took me roughly 45 minutes and I immediately wishlisted the game afterward. This could wind up being the sleeper hit of the year, assuming it comes out this year. The demo is really chill and extremely fun. Hopefully the full game has extra challenges and secrets to find. I'll probably run through the demo again just to look for secrets.

Gołąbki I normally do 50/50 ground beef and pork, but the store didn't have ground pork and I was too lazy to go to another store so it's beef and lamb.

I tried the SteamWorld Build demo from Steam Next Fest. Spoken like a true politician. Gunn-Britt Gildenwire 2024. Seems like a pleasant enough city builder so far. Fairly simplistic, but I'm just scratching the surface, it may get much deeper later on, though that will likely be beyond the scope of the demo. But yeah, so far so good. Nice aesthetic, runs great, and the road building tool is super easy to use and intuitive. Granted, it's grid-based, so building roads is a simple task to begin with, but it still help when the tool works so well that it makes building roads that much faster and easier. The twist is that you both build a city on the surface and build/mine below it in the mine.

Hunter Biden pleads guilty on tax & gun charges Still Russian misinformation?

Daggerfall IN SPAAAAAAACE.

Listen, when it releases in 2057 it's going to be... alright.

I miss Phil Hartman.