A couple of RDR idle screens from around Macfarlane’s Ranch.
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I’m restarting for the fourth time Detroit: Become Human. I always stopped it because I was playing other games. This time I want to finish it
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I think last year I caught the Fortnite OG Season event by coincidence too.
Anyway, since I was sick and at home yesterday, I felt okay enough to at least sit back and watch/experience this year’s Chp. 2 Remix Finale event. Basically more of a concert, but they usually do great jobs on these. Took some pictures of my POV.
Keep in mind, it still blows my mind that they get these digital showcases streamed to millions of people all around the world at the same time. Wild.
(Nice throwback to the original Chp. 2 event that I missed way back when…)
(You’re separated from other players for a minute, and Ice Spice does… this dance in front of you… this feels wrong…?)
I think I’m a fan of Juice WRLD after this sequence. He’s got some really nice chill songs.
I hreatly enjoyed this one. Definitely a lot of time and budget went into it… which I guess explains why I felt the Prelude thing to start this short season felt like such a cop-out. (It was basically an in-game livestream with effects around the screen.)
And… now for something completely different… 
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What could get me to play Arkham Knight again when I just played through it all 2 weeks ago? The ability to play it on PC with mods of course! It also feels nice to finally play Knight at more than 30 fps, and the smoother framerate seems to make things like flying the Remote Batarang and doing the Blade Dodge Takedown much easier than it was on console. Plus, it isn’t randomly crashing like it does on PS5!
I’ve been playing with the Lego Batman mod, the daytime mod, and the Jokermobile mod (really dumb Rocksteady never let you use it as a skin in the game)
While Lego Batman can look really good in some scenes, the camera and animations get messed up quite a bit cause he’s much shorter. When rotating sticks for passwords I can’t see the screen at all so I just have to go on sound and vibration to get it right. Also thugs get stuck in the ground when you use the Silent Takedown on them. But the drawbacks are outweighed by the fun of playing as him! Though I am surprised that Lego didn’t cease and desist the mod considering how protective they are.
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Funny because I have been playing LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham.
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I really enjoyed Sea of Stars. The story isn’t the greatest, but the characters are charming and exploring the world is fun. Plus, it’s got epic 90s JRPG vibes, with some great pixel art. (Seriously, I need Chrono Trigger on a modern console. 
)
And I’m closing in on Completionist++ in Balatro…so naturally I decided now is a good time to buy the game on Switch so I can do it all again. 
But between that and Slay the Spire, I figure I’ve got everything I need for those rare occasions I want to game away from home.
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Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is a phenomenal bookend closing out 2024 major releases, and is probably one of the best Indiana adventures since Fate of Atlantis.
The game focuses on what made the original trilogy of adventures so endearing and fun. Troy Baker does a really good job capturing the character.
Only downside of the game is the combat where it’s a bit repetitive if you choose to engage with Facists of varying factions.
The biggest take away is despite Todd Howard’s involvement with the game, it has a lot of soul and it’s evident Machine Games put alot of love and care into the creation of this game.
I recommend it, just don’t expect Uncharted.
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Glad to hear it’s getting positive reviews! I enjoyed the Wolfenstein games so think this will be a lot of fun. I will be purchasing, but waiting for the Steam winter sale to see if it’ll get a small discount.
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I just grabbed Dying Light on a $4 Steam sale, haven’t played the game since it was first released so I’m looking to it. I feel like I miss the comfy vulnerability that you had early on in the story, just finding a safe place to rest for the night actually felt like something of an accomplishment. I was looking at gameplay videos of Dying Light 2 last night for comparison, and it doesn’t seem like it captures the same feel at all.
Oh and I also grabbed Buckshot Roulette, I watched yms play it on twitch one night and it seemed like a ton of fun.
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I´m happy to hear the game has lived up to its potential, and can´t wait till I have a chance to play it at some point, but I can´t help but feel that building it around mandatory ray tracing was a bit of a dick move (at least where PC is concerned anyway).
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Sadly same thing happened with STALKER 2. It uses lumen for lighting.
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I mean it’s a give and take, the downside is mandatory ray tracing, but the upside is the game has no mandatory DRM and is well polished to the point of the game running really well.
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Booted up Starfleid recently and I’ve been having a lot of fun customizing ships. Probably my favorite part about the game. Here’s a few of the new ones I did.
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Suicide Squad Kill The Justice League: Season 4 launched today, the first half of the final season of the game. And of course the biggest thing about it is that Deathstroke is added to the game! And I really like his design:
The story is that Deathstroke was the first choice by ARGUS to deal with the Brainiac threat, and so he’s spent a while in the medieval Elseworld and he was able to kill 2 Brainiacs offscreen. They did a nice subversion where you think that this episode will have yet another reused boss fight, but Deathstroke just stabs Brainiac in the back before the fight starts.
The VA for Deathstroke isn’t the same as the one from Origins and Knight, but he does a great job and sounds a lot older and more grizzled. His personality is also a lot more serious than the other characters. My favorite line from this episode is that when you do one of the navigation challenges as Deathstroke Riddler says “I should have put your one weakness in the challenge, a single punch from Batman”. At the very least, this game treats Deathstroke better than Arkham Knight did!
Once again, this Elseworld has a ton of detail and effort put into it with a ton of unique buildings, decorations, and banners. You can see castles, sunken ships, broken windmills, the ashen remains of peasants and archers, etc. If only they had done Deathstroke and this great Elseworld for Season 1, the game might have managed to be more successful!
The Battle Pass skins this season are called LexCorp skins, but outside of some Kryptonite and “L” branding they’re more themed around Greco-Roman aesthetics. For instance, Joker’s skin has a comedy or a tragedy mask to wear, and Deathstroke has a sort of Roman soldier looking outfit:
Of course, the biggest thing missing from this episode is a Justice League member returning. The first episode of Season 2 had Flash, and the first episode of Season 3 had Green Lantern. The question remains how are they going to finish the game off in Episode 8? There are three Brainiacs still at large, and while some people thought they would just have Deathstroke kill 4 of them they kept in that he only had killed 2 of them offscreen. There’s 3 Justice League members left to save, so maybe they’ll just have you fight 3 Brainiacs in Episode 8 and each one was guarding a hero. I don’t know if the game will even get a final end cutscene, as they didn’t even finish the intro cutscene for Deathstroke this episode and just put the dialogue into an audio log instead.
What’s weird is in Deathstroke’s final interview tape he talks with Amanda Waller about how she has the Justice League under her control, and they specifically mention Batman and Wonder Woman even though they haven’t been confirmed alive yet. In other audio logs, they have Mrs. Freeze suggesting that the evil JL were clones, but the ones we’re rescuing are the real ones. Even though earlier audio logs implied that the JL we’re rescuing are the same ones who were evil and therefore not clones. Probably a case of them playing both sides so they always come out on top.
And yet despite the shortcomings with the game’s plot especially in this update, Rocksteady managed to finally get a W, the first one they’ve had in years, by adding offline mode to the game. From what I’ve played of it so far, it works perfectly, and I can freely and easily swap between the online profile and the offline one, with even an option to start fresh and do it all over again. They could have easily broken their promise and not added it, and I guarantee that it cost more to implement it than they’ll get from additional sales of the game. Yet now, the people who call this game a “dead game” are wrong, as it won’t die now and will last as long as all the other digital videogames. And it’s crazy to think that as it stands now someone decades from now will be able to play Suicide Squad and have an experience pretty much the same as people who play it today, but someone who plays Hitman won’t be able to.
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After 84 hours, I have finally managed to finish my STALKER 2 playthrough.
First half of the playthrough was played on a PC that didn’t meet the minimum requirements; GTX 1050TI, I5-8400, 16GB Ram, game version 1.0 and the second half was a PC that did meet the minimum, with an RX 6650 XT GPU, the game version being 1.3.
I’m a hardcore STALKER fan, been waiting for this game for 15 years and been playing the original games since 2007. The experience of playing STALKER 2 under the minimum requirements was pretty much how I played STALKER: SoC, on an FX 5500 GPU, P4 1.19GHz CPU and 512MB DDR1 Ram. We really came full circle. So my review of the game will probably be biased, so take it with a hazardous amount of salt.
I’ll have to start with the negatives, first and foremost, the bugs. You wouldn’t call a game STALKER if it didn’t come packed with it’s trademark jank and STALKER 2 is loaded with them. Even after patch 1.3, I encountered plenty of these so called anomalies such as weapons spawning in your backpack, sometimes the game equipping them and having a big surprise to draw a sniper rifle instead of a shotgun in a close quarter encounter.
Performance issues are another thing. While it runs smoothly in the wilderness, the moment you enter a location with many NPCs, your framerate will noticeably drop. You might also experience frame drops when a number of NPCs are spawned in your area but that can depend on your hardware. Biggest performance issue are the memory leaks. Every now and then you’ll be wondering about the Zone, minding your own business and all of a sudden the framerate drops to single digits for no reason, needing a game restart.
Richter didn’t recover from the last emission…
Now you’ll say, okay, a game restart doesn’t sound that bad but keep in mind that at the start of the game, you are required to wait for the shaders to compile which can take from 1-3 minutes, depending on your hardware. What’s worse about the shader compiling is that it can take up to 15 minutes or more if there was a GPU driver / hardware change so I hope you have some games on your phone or go do something else like take a leak or make yourself some coffee or tea.
And the biggest red flag as of the time of writing this review is the A-Life or better said the lack of it and the issues caused by the AI system that is currently in it’s place. You will never encounter NPCs, mutants or stalkers, wondering about the Zone, getting into gunfights when encountering opponents in a natural way as it happened in the original trilogy. Now the game spawns NPCs around the player to give the impression that there is some sort of simulation running in the background.
These spawns are just Skyrim random events spawning near you. It can be friendly NPCs wondering about, enemy Stalker / mutants or a combination of both in which you’ll see a fight between them. Smoke and mirrors, it 's all it is. Issues with this is that they spawn very close to the player and the moment they spawn they are agro on you so kiss stealth goodbye if you thought of sneaking by someone or something. It’s clear why the player cannot use binoculars, since there is no need for reconnaissance when the enemy spawns near you. Same with NV, you’d want to keep the flashlight off during nighttime to not alert enemies but they are alerted to your presence once they spawn a few feet away from you.
Out of me way, peasant!
Furthermore, related to stealth, I just don’t understand it, the stealth mechanics are your average modern Far Cry 3 stealth but the way it’s implemented is amateurish. When you are spotted there is a bar that fills up the more you are seen but sometimes this bar pops up even when you are behind cover what’s worse is during missions even if you were sneaking about the game puts the AI on high alert and they will spot you immediately through walls, knowing your exact position. Even more baffling is that you are equipped with bolts which you’d imagine could be used for distractions, again rocks from Far Cry 3 but nope, the moment you throw one it alerts the enemy to your location. For someone that could manage the stealth in the original trilogy, which wasn’t great to begin with, this is a total letdown.
Returning to the bugs, first half of the game is okay for the most part but second half is held together with duct tape and it’s mostly because of the AI and the way it spawns, sometimes dying immediately, or is placed, sometimes multiple NPCs spawning in one another, or how sometimes it respawns, sometimes in the same place right after killing them, even worse, spawning as an invincible NPC. Speaking of spawns, I. AM. TIRED. OF. SPAWNING. BLOODSUCKERS. Especially when they come in a pack of 3. EVERY. FIVE. MINUTES. Or SPAWNING. AFTER. I. ALREADY. KILLED. 3. OTHER. BLOOSUCKERS. Damnit!
Now for the last part of my negatives rant, the ending section / point of no return. When I said that the second half of the game is held together with duct tape, the end section is held together with sticks and mud. Jesus Christ, it is the most rushed, frustrating, boring, unimaginative and repetitive section that only exists to test your patience. If you thought the end sections in SoC and CS were bad, well, you’re all in for a surprise. At least with those you were finished in 30 minutes to an hour, this is several hours of BS. And if told yourself “it’s over” during the ending section, I guarantee you that it’s not. Again, Jesus Christ on a cross, a part of me wanted to go to sleep and the other to punch the monitor.
The devs knew that the end game sections were terrible, so they threw loads of ammo and medkits your way to slightly remedy the issues…
Okay, positives. Phew… Visuals are amazing, there were plenty of moments when I would just stop and look at the scenery, probably trying to get that perfect screenshot, the lighting with the art design is just perfect. A minor issue is that sometimes areas can either be too dark, even with the flashlight and lamps turned on in the room or during the day, walls can look flat, even ones made out of brick, because there are no real time dynamic shadows, again, umlike the original trilogy. Other than that, the visuals are fantastic, during all times of day and during all types of weather. Those thunderstorms… perfect.
Animations and facial animations are also top-notch. Bethesda could learn a thing or two from the GSC developers. They lip sync their dialogue, for both English and Ukrainian VO, though main cutscenes lip sync is only for Eng VO. Not to mention when NPCs talk, they show emotions and gesticulate in a natural way and I’ll be honest, I didn’t think NPCs having different dentures would make a difference but surprisingly it does. Plenty of times I would stare to see how many times a day the Stalker I was talking with brushed their teeth.
Audio is so-and-so. The ambient music, radio and guitar songs are great though ambient music is not as memorable as in the original trilogy, though they sneaked a couple of them for nostalgia and hey, it worked. Gun sounds are beefy and they sound amazing in interiors where there is reverb. The English VO is where the audio falls flat. It’s not good, it doesn’t sound good, it doesn’t feel good or natural. It sounds either Scottish, Irish, Hollywood-esque, just awful. Play with Ukrainian VO and English subtitles please. You’ll do yourself a big favor.
Another big no no related to audio is the ending sections, there is a surprising lack of ambient sounds. I didn’t get music even during the end credits…
Story is great, some say otherwise but I didn’t mind it, it pushed the plot forward without me rising an eyebrow or anything and the characters you meet during the course of the story are all well done though because how things are structured, you won’t be able to see everything during a single playthrough. One negative about the plot is how the factions are used, as in not that well. The story centers around Spark, Ward and Noontide with the heavy hitters such as Duty and Freedom not being used at all which is a damn shame. Actually all other factions are used poorly and since there is no A-Life to see certain events happening in real time, you’ll only learn about things from hearing rumors from talking with generic Stalkers, such as the truce between Duty and Freedom being broken at some point in the game. I didn’t see anything, I didn’t even see a single fight between Duty and Freedom. Maybe this can change with the introduction of A-Life, maybe…
Mutants are back and deadlier than ever, with 3 new aditions, such as the Cat, Deer and rat swarm. All three mutants that at some point were cut from SoC / Oblivion Lost (yes the Deer was a horse in the concepts but still). They are great aditions, the Cat being my favorite one that is able to atract it’s victim with human cries for help and such and then trying to put it’s victim to sleep and the Deer calling wild animals to it’s aid. Some of the old mutants got some new tricks, such as the Burer being able to use it’s TK powers to fire weapons that were laying around, even your weapons if it manages to grab them from your hands with TK. Only problem with the mutants is that they are bullet sponges, even with the 1.1 patch and there is no reward for killing them.
I can be a d*ck too, game!
Mutant body parts were planned but scrapped and at Rostok there is even a place where a hunter of sorts would have existed but it’s empty, Hopefully all this can come back as a free update or in one of the DLCs.
Anyone home?
As for the map, it’s big, it’s extremely detailed, it’s atmospheric but because of the lack of A-life… it’s damn empty, just one big stroll from point A to B with nothing to witness happening naturally, just the spawns happening near you. Plenty of locations from past games make a return, in one way or another though not all are utilised during the main quest or side quests. I passed the Military Warehouses and Bloodsucker Village plenty of times but didn’t have any reason to enter those places except out of curiosity. Again, maybe with A-life, things can change…
Party! Party! BOOM! BOOM!
All in all, it’s the sequell I have been waiting for 15 years but like all STALKER game at launch, it’s a diamond in the rough. Even with all the problems, I enjoyed it and by then end of the playthrough I was thinking about my second one but that will have to wait until several patches are released and A-Life is brought back. I rate it 8 / 10, do not play it. Only play it if you’re a hardcore STALKER fan, you know what you’re getting yourself into in this rough state and also have a PC that can run it decently. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that GSC can solve most of the issues and refine some of the game mechanics, not to mention restore some stuff that were clearly planned for the finished game but couldn’t because of time.
Good hunting, Stalkers!
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Very nice review! Much more informative (and objective) than the “professional” ones. Probably since you as a hardcore fan notice things that most people wouldn’t
Anyways, It’s surprising and disappointing at the same time to hear about the absolute lack of A-life, or staples like Duty and Freedom not having any prominent presence. I hope the devs address that in the near future (along with stuff like the spawns, enemy sponging, or rubbish stealth), or it gets fixed in a Heart Reclamation Project or something. The way you describe the final section of the game also isn’t particularly reassuring. Even though I don’t mind the finales of SoC and CS as much as some people might, I still would’ve expected them to do better.
But yeah, I’ll definitely hold out a bit till they address at least some of these issues (and I can get my better laptop working properly)
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