Mera'din

I've been looking at this game a lot more recently. What I've seen of it seems almost more like a Mass Effect sort of play style. It's looking pretty interesting so far. They have video breakdowns of each classes skills and abilities and have been really open about what all the game entails and how it works. Apparently the end game isn't just "play everything you just played again, only harder". Beating the campaign unlocks new areas and new missions and what not. At this point I'm pretty interested in getting it, but was holding out to see if anyone else was planning to play. If anyone is interested, they pushed back the release to April 1st, but they're doing a free (as in, no "pre-order beta" bullshit) demo that includes the first few "hours" of the game both single player and co-op on Feb. 25th if anyone wants to try it. Progress made in it will carry over to the main game on release as well.

Based on how the company I'm working for is disappearing our special "COVID PTO" on January 3rd, I was under the impression the virus was going to evaporate into thin air in a couple days. >_>

I managed to avoid any family fighting luckily. My mom was trying to get me over to her place because my youngest brother decided to DRIVE UP FROM TEXAS. So that's a thing. And my other brother was supposed to come down from the cities here as well but we had a massive snow storm the day it was going to happen and I worked the next 3 days after so he bowed out immediately (pretty sure he was just looking for an excuse) and I noped the fuck out of it too. Also was supposed to have a thing with my in-laws including my wife's brother's family (who live in South Dakota. The one who's wife thought it was a good idea to go out drinking at bars every weekend during a pandemic in one of the worst states to be in). My wife ended up going but they did it super early so I was able to skip out because I work until 7am and so generally sleep until 2 or 3pm. Mostly I'm trying to avoid people like the plague because I've already burned my "COVID PTO" on testing scares and would like to avoid having to use my personal PTO if I can. >_>

New year, new topic time. Hit 30 games for 2019. Think it was fewer overall than 2018, but I was playing a lot more "continuous play" style games this last year as well as beefier games content-wise for a lot of it so I was expecting that. Time to start it over. 1.) Vampire the Masquerade: Coteries of New York Was interested in seeing how this would turn out since it seemed like there wasn't a whole lot of time between it's announcement and it's release. Mostly it's pretty much a visual novel with some light game mechanics here and there. Not the best game but it was an interesting story. Choices didn't feel like they meant much and it was probably too short even considering replayability. There are a bunch of side quests you can participate in but not NEARLY enough time to do even half of what is available it seems like. Plan on playing through more, but not expecting too much. Lot's of grammatical errors too. English was definitely not the language the game was made in. Or at least not the first language of the people that made it. Think this was their first game though so I can forgive a lot of what felt off. Liked it enough that I'm interested in seeing them expand the game with more clans and more story but this was basically just filler while waiting for Bloodlines 2. If you're super into VtM I'd say it's worth a play. Maybe not worth full price though. Solid sale item if you have an interest. Probably not worth it otherwise.

24.) Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory This was actually kind of impressive. IS basically one of the 3DS Theaterhythm: Final Fantasy games (which were excellent)but turned into a full console thing. It functions as a summary of all the KH games via the music from them, though it kind of starts phoning it in by KH3 which was a bit disappointing, but overall it was a fun distraction with some cool new stuff thrown on at the end (thus continuing the tradition of literally EVERY KH release, no matter how trivial or unimportant seeming, being used to advance the story. XD ). Some of the music was really fun for a rhythm game setting to and had a small sampling of actual Disney songs here and there too. Might actually be able to get the Platinum on this even but we'll see. Depends on how many songs I can do flawlessly on the highest difficulty. Think I'm about halfway and if I can manage that one the rest is a cakewalk (if a bit time consuming).

Lots of Destiny 2, lots of Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memories. Waiting on dat Cyberpunk.

Episode was great. One thing that I couldn't help but think about though...

I watched a few of the trailers but was kind of on the fence about it. It didn't seem BAD, just not all that interesting. Maybe I'll give it a shot at some point as I too used to watch the original show religiously as a kid. XD

Overall, I would say yes, but it has a relatively serious undertone. Not as outright funny as their stuff usually is but still enjoyable.

Most recent was probably Truth Seekers (new Simon Pegg/Nick Frost series on Amazon) was interesting. Not as good as their old stuff, but not bad. Before that I think was both seasons of Cobra Kai now that it has moved to Netflix. That show is WAY better than it has any right to be.

It took me a while before I realized the thing had a built in mic. All the stuff I read about it was purely about the haptic feedback and "3D" rumble stuff. Was examining it a few days ago and noticed the button and hit it and when it did a mic mute thing was like WUT. O_o Didn't realize it legit recorded for that stuff though. Jesus I can only imagine the hilarity that has already spawned from that, though the example you gave is starting it off strong.

Found a feature that is kind of a space hog if you aren't aware of it and is on by default. Whenever you pop a trophy in a game, it takes a screenshot just like on the PS4, but on the PS5 it ALSO takes a 14 sec. video of the time leading up to the trophy being awarded. This doesn't seem like much, but media can only be saved to the SSD even if you have an external drive hooked up, and considering that space is a premium commodity, I would recommend turning it off. It adds up fast. JUST from Spider-man trophies I've got so far, it had already eaten up almost 2gigs of space. It's a neat idea, but poorly implemented I think as you can't relegate them to an external drive, and the only customization to it is the length of the video. Wouldn't be so bad if you could designate trophy rarity for it or something at least.

23.) (PS5) Miles Morales: Spider-man This was tons of fun. Story was a little weaker than the first game, but it had its moments and wasn't entirely unexpected since it was a decent amount shorter. Combat was interesting with the addition of Miles' powers and though it felt harder than the original at first, I'm going through on New Game+ now to clean up trophies and being used to the new abilities is letting me absolutely tear through everything. Length wise, at a guess I'd say it a LITTLE longer than the length of the 3 DLC chapters but WITH all the side quests and collectible content of the original game which gives it a pretty decent length if you do everything. Probably could have benefited from a lengthier story ultimately, but I don't felt that it suffered much as is. Some of the costume options you can unlock were really cool too. Villain spoiler stuff:

Was playing Spider-man and ran across a side quest that literally amounted to finding this. I can only imagine the triggering that's going to happen considering how some people reacted to Kamala in Avengers.

We have this problem too. The website for our grocery store is missing a ton of stuff that we KNOW they have at the store and it's not like ours is some fancy super big grocery store either. We live in a town of 4k people. We have a tiny ass grocery store compared to most that doesn't carry a lot of what the bigger ones do.

Battery life seems pretty solid so far. I only got to play the day I got it (have been working every day since), but I had the controller on from the point I turned it on until about 1 or 2 in the morning and I don't think I got a low battery alert until near the end of that stretch so a good 12 hours minimum I think (though wasn't playing stuff the WHOLE time), and if it's anything like the PS4 controller battery alert, that means it would probably go for another hour or two at least before ACTUALLY dying. XD

The grocery store here gave up on the arrows a couple months ago? I would always get super annoyed when I'd see people ignoring them, but with what we know about the virus at this point, it's not something to really get bent out of shape over unless it's one of the old people that Anelle is talking about. It's definitely not just you. XD I'm the guy who if there's an old person inching along down the aisle, I'll wait at a distance until I can pass them with a decent amount of space, so when I have one that's riding my ass it gets to me pretty fast. If it keeps happening, I'll usually just zoom out of the aisle and circle back around if I still needed stuff from that aisle.

Honestly, the games were nearly as scarce as the system where I am. XD Went to 2 different stores (Best Buy and Walmart) and found a combined total of 3 games available for sale. I grabbed 'Spider-man: Miles Morales' personally and it's the game I wanted most, though was considering a couple others. I've never played Demon's Souls, Blood Borne or any of the Dark Souls games so was tempted to give the Demon's Souls remake a shot but still not sure if I want to bite that particular bullet. Was also considering Assassin's Creed: Valhalla but I absolutely refuse to give Ubisoft money, so if I decided to get it at some point it will be used. I've also been going back and forth on Godfall. It seems visually impressive but I don't know that I'm feeling the combat and Gearbox is kind of shady quality-wise outside of the Borderlands games, and will ultimately probably just wait for Outriders in February since that one looks a lot more impressive. It's nice that I can just switch my external harddrive from my PS4 to my PS5 at will too and play all of my PS4 games on it with some slight improvements.

The worst part is a lot of it is purely belligerence over some perceived attempt to steal their "freedoms" from under them. I've seen it first hand now as I had to go to South Dakota to pick up my PS5 and they have NO restrictions there and the governor their refuses to add them, but I saw more people wearing masks while I was in the state than I ever do at any given time here in Minnesota (at least locally. Bigger cities seem to be much less obnoxious about it). Not that SD is doing terribly well despite that. I'm sure their bars and shit are a fucking nightmare.

Sorry, yeah, that's what I meant. The game suspending thing doesn't work when you fully power it off. I know it happened for 2 different streamers specifically with the Spider-man remaster. Hadn't heard about it happening with anything else yet. The one thought it had something to do with him using an external drive initially, but ended up finding out that wasn't the case after some testing and talking with Sony. Not hooking my drive from my PS4 up to it yet anyway just to be safe. >_>

Yeah, the HDMI cable it came with was short as hell for what I needed. Had to completely rearrange like half of my entertainment center to put it in a spot I could actually get it attached to the TV. As such my PS4 and PS5 are on opposite sides now and the power cables on both are short enough that my surge protector is basically hovering like half an inch off the ground because of them. My next day off I'm going to have to lower the shelves a bit to take some tension off of the damn things. I honestly don't mind the way it looks. I have mine on its side and the only thing that really bothers me about it is the placement of the disk drive. Feels weird that it's towards the bottom of the system instead of the top (or just in the middle), and the design of the shell means there's a bit of a lip above the slot so when you eject a disk it's a little awkward taking it out. As a side note, if you got the remaster of the original Spider-man game, might want to take a pass on it for a while. It's apparently been nearly bricking systems. Seen a few reports of it now. Supposedly it only happens when you turn the system off without closing the game, but I'm not taking any chances. XD

We did that with out 2nd grader (can only imagine how hard it is to keep restrictions up with a school full of kids that young or younger), but sent both of the high schoolers back as they had a lot of trouble keeping up with their work at the end of the last year so I'm not looking forward to dealing with that again. XD Only downside is for us, the distance learning is not through the schools here. They hired a 3rd party online thing for it and it's absolute garbage. If my wife weren't home 24/7, he wouldn't be learning a damn thing. The course material is full of errors (both grammar based and material based), questions that weren't covered in the material, and a set of 4 lessons about researching/writing for a essay that is repeated across EVERY single class (including math,PE, Art and music). I honestly don't know how the school district thought this shit was a good idea. At this point, my son finished an entire semester's worth of work about halfway through the first quarter and the school principal had to force the company to give him the rest of the years work to keep him busy. XD