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Fallout 4 (PS4) by jp (Oct 26th, 2026 at 15:08:51) |
Made it to level 9, did a few more quests and...yeah, I think I'm tired now. Strangely, it feels like there isn't much/enough story for me to continue to want to play, and I got a bit tired of always being under-health? Well, that got a bit better because I "discovered" (figured out) the cooking part of the game - I was finally able to put all these animal/critter parts and learned that lots of the stuff you cook then gets rid of the rads (all the food items I had healed, but also added rads - and I didn't have a way to mitigate that, so it seemed like a negative downward spiral). The no-rads healing food was really a game changer in that way, so that was a big improvement.
Oh, every now and then there's a weird storm - and it was a super cool experience - it sounds and looks incredible and I was genuinely worried...rads going up, lightning noises and stuff. Great ambience!
Maybe I should have gotten to the city I was supposed to visit for the story...but Ilooked at the shelf of over games to play and though..meh.
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Persona 5 (PS4) by jp (Oct 26th, 2026 at 15:01:25) |
This is probably the lamest log I'll write for a game - but I just wanted to document my experience, even when it did not involve playing the game.
I out the disc in, it starts reading and then shows the name of the game in Japanese/Chinese. Huh, that's weird. It happens around the same time I see a little popup notification that an update has been downloaded. Weird, whatever, it should be fine.
I load the game, watch the intro - looks fun. And then I get a UI alert. It's in Japanese/Chinese... weird. I get past that...and get to the game's main menu. Everything is in English. Oh, nice! But I go into the config menu...and oops, it's all in Japanese/Chinese again...and I try toggling things to see if I can switch language to English. No luck.
I go online, "why did my game switch to another language". Everyone says to set the console region language to what I want, and that the game should change. It's already in English. No luck. I try a bunch of things...still no luck.
I look at the game case. Maybe this was a European version of the game and the language got borked somehow. Nope. ESRB rating, so it's US.
I pop the disc, to try a re-install and stuff. The disc is all in English..but it does say "MADE IN JAPAN FOR HOME USE ONLY". I wonder if the disc is Japanese? (in a US case, weird).
It also has a code.. PLAS 05251.
Online sleuthing reveals it's a Chinese disc.
Whut? Sigh. I guess someone duped Gamestop and now...me.
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Crime O'Clock (NSW) by jp (Oct 22nd, 2026 at 08:43:00) |
I'm putting this back no the shelf now - mostly because I started to get a little tired of it. As I think about it, it's abit of a tricky design space and I can see how the design team was trying to keep things fresh and mix things up. They've added a little mechanic where you can tap on some objects that get highlighted to see what's inside. THere's also a "follow the musical pattern" in which you click on things on the map in the right order...following a musical script.
It's all "ok" - not particularly compelling, but I've started to get tired because the also isn't much I find interesting in the story. Each mission feels like "oh, here's a thing that happened, let's fix it" but the characters and the world aren't that compelling, and while there are neat things in the images - they're not really woven into the storytelling. So, I don't feel like I'm learning cool things about this weird/interesting world from the missions themselves - at most I pick things up from the artwork. It's a weird "miss" - because the artwork is super fun and neat to explore, there's cool details and characters - but it falls flat after that.
Also, playing on the Switch is more annoying than it should - I feel the controls are really imprecise - I need to move the cursor to a specific location and I overshoot/undershoot tweak and adjust and it's just...annoying.
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Kill Knight (PC) by dkirschner (Oct 18th, 2026 at 15:28:37) |
Retiring this one too. It's a twin-stick shooter / bullet hell type of thing mixed with modern Doom. Slick, for sure, but I didn't know it would be so arcade-y. There's not much story to speak of, and it's basically a test of mastering the controls to beat, with additional motivation provided by leaderboards. It is fun, intense, for sure, but as with Civ 6 and Noita (although Kill Knight isn't long per se), I don't have the patience right now to commit to it. I might be at a point where I'm exhausted by more open-ended or twitch-based games. I could feel it with Drop Duchy (roguelite fatigue?), which I saw through to the end, but perhaps I should find something more story-heavy with a clearly defined ending for next.
Anyway, like I said, Kill Knight is slick. The controls gel really well. You use RT to shoot pistols, circle to melee attack, and LT to shoot like a shotgun spread. All the attacks synergize in different ways. You have to use melee to get shotgun ammo, for example, which incentivizes running up and slicing enemies. Each attack generates some kind of resource that you need for other attacks (or health, very important!), so you have to vary attacks. It really does feel like a twin stick shooter / bullet hell version of the newer Doom games. I think that's about it...
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Noita (PC) by dkirschner (Oct 18th, 2026 at 15:12:28) |
My first thought was "this is like Spelunky." And of course it is because it's another roguelike where you go down, down, down into the depths, and the only way you get better is to die a hundred times, learn what killed you and why, and just skill up. Also learning the wand system, which is one of the two things that make this stand apart. The other is the pixelated destructible environments.
There are huuuuuundreds of enemies, spells, and perks. I saw like 5% of stuff and made it to the third "biome" a few times. In my longer runs, I had cool wands and spells, like spells that made my projectiles home or explode or that covered a wide range. The way it works is that each wand you find has stats (which seem to just randomly vary), including some number of spell slots. You can find/purchase spells, and you can move them around between wands. This means you can load up your favorite wand with a variety of useful/synergistic spells that'll help you kill enemies, move around, and explore the biomes. Perks are also helpful, like ones that make you immune to certain elements or that give you a little ghost companion to augment your damage output.
The destructible environments are cool. Each pixel is categorized as a type of material (e.g., wood, water, coal, gunpowder...), and they have various interactions. Wood burns, for example, so if you shoot a lantern and it falls on wood, it'll light up and maybe collapse. If you're on fire, go find water to put yourself out. I don't know what "blood" does, but I saw that it ticks up to 100% as you stand in it. Acid poisons you. Occasionally stuff blew up and I wasn't sure why. I'm sure there are a lot more interactions. It reminded me of Divinity: Original Sin 2's elemental combat system.
Anyway, so what this looks like while playing is that you're zooming around (you have a jetpack and can float a bit; this replaces a typical game's jump), firing spells and getting fired at by enemies, blowing up the environment, trying to get gold (to purchase wands and spells), find secrets, do whatever, and ultimately get to the bottom of the biome, where you enter a portal and can buy upgrades and rearrange your spells, and then you go to the next biome. There is often a lot of fire/poison/projectiles/etc. on screen at once and it can feel pretty hectic.
I certainly appreciate the game and the ways that it makes something like Spelunky 2 feel traditional. There's a ton of customization with the wands, strategy in manipulating the environment, and so many things to discover. But having recently bashed my head against the Spelunky 2 roguelike wall for a while, I realize I have little interest in a similar head-bashing-against-the-wall experience playing Noita.
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Aion (PC) by dkirschner |
| Ehhhh. Very sluggish feel, lots of slow running, not too exciting. Just want to fly. --------- And flying is not that great! ------ Ugh, gave it another chance, played to level 16 or so, still boring. |
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most recent entry: Sunday 30 September, 2012
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Tried Aion over the last couple days. P bought a hard copy like 2 years ago, and neither of us ever even installed it. But since it went free-to-play, I figured it was about time. It took me about a month to actually play it from the time I downloaded it because of various login issues and all kinds of stuff that I really can't believe I bothered with the tens of help tickets to fix. Only to play for 2 days!
So the big draw of Aion, when it came out at least, was that you got wings to fly. Sounds awesome. I want to fly around. This was supposed to radically change the way people PvP and give players unlimited freedom and blah blah blah. You get the wings at level 10, so let's talk about what you have to do before then. You slog through an overly long starting zone that has excessive amounts of sluggish running. I can only assume that this is to make flying feel liberating. That's a major problem with the game. It is sluggish, slow. My character felt drunk. There's no oomph in the fighting and the response time for the hotkeys just isn't as quick as I'm used to. I create a mage, and whenever I wanted to do a normal attack, she had to go through this annoying animation where she pulls out her tome, flips the pages, and then casts some magic bolt. Like, just do it faster!
Consequently, enemies take a while to kill. I did make an assassin character and melee is faster than spell casting. With the mage, I was out of mana constantly. There didn't seem to be many ways of speeding up mana regen short of buying potions. Health was okay. You start the game with like 30 bandages. Why wasn't there the same for mana? It's like non-mana classes get a definite boost in speed since they don't have to worry about mana. This is not the case in all MMOs at all. Most have systems in place so that you don't go out of mana every other fight. Otherwise, the mage is very basic and boring. Fireball, ice bolt that slows, earth spell DoT, and a root. Just like every other game. And nothing new once I hit level 10 and chose a 'specialty' class! Learning new skills are few and far between. I think I had a total of 5 abilities by level 10. And it was looking like I'd get one new one or be able to upgrade one every 3 or so levels. Way to spaced out to keep it interesting.
On the other hand, Aion has these things called chains, kind of like semiautomatic macros. So I had a fireball spell and a blaze spell. After using fireball, blaze lights up and you have used a 'chain.' Then blaze goes on a 30 second cooldown. Kind of neat, and they looked to get more complicated and let you have a couple options later on. Speaking of options, there don't seem to be more than a couple. You specialize your character at level 10. By 'a couple chain options later on' I meant like 3 of the chains had two branches. There are no talent points. You unlock some thing called a stigma panel at level 20 where you can like customize some skills or something, and you get 5 slots by the time you're 60. And that's...it? See what I mean about slow? This game is slow and grindy as hell.
The game is also really linear for an MMO, at least to start out. The starter zone was basically a few areas of interest/quest hubs off of a road. You just walk down the road, stop at various points to collect quests, and just continue back and forth down the road. And there is way too much back and forth, so much running, even with a flight path there. But I just really can't believe that skills and things are so few. And that after choosing my specialization, I didn't get even 1 skill for it.
So how about the flight? It is an unbelievable letdown. First of all, the game didn't even tell me I could fly when I hit level 10! There was no tutorial or anything until I found the button because I was like "man, can't you fly at 10? I hope it's not 20. I'll just mouse around the UI...Oh hey look!" Why don't they make a bigger deal out of it? It's supposed to be the draw, the cool hook. But flying is only slightly faster than walking, like any first mount in any MMO. So I thought, well at least I can fly over mountains and things. Nope! Magical barriers prevent you from going all over the damn place. So many barriers. So much for freedom! And there's a timer on it. You can't just go fly. You have to stop and land and let it recharge every minute.
And just a couple other comments and criticisms..the rest of the tutorials worked well in the beginning, the on-demand ones that pop up as you need them. Quest are dull, repetitive and uninspiring. Kill x of these, fetch x of those, and give this thing to that person. Every single quest, for real. And it was rather annoying that I typically only had to kill/fetch 3. It's not even worth the trip to the quest area to kill 3 monsters! Run for a minute, take 30 seconds to kill 3 monsters, run for a minute back. It's fair to say most of my time spent here was running. So not only was the game sluggish, but dull as well. Though it does look nice. The character models in particular are cool. You can make some hilarious characters at creation. Small body, giant head, super skinny legs, fat arms, all kinds of funny stuff. Oh, there is a nice help system with information links on important names and places, but oddly there are few tooltips. I have no idea what my character's stats are for. What is 'knowledge' and how is it different from 'willpower?' No idea. I'd have to go look it up outside the game. They do have this neat tutorial/reward thingy for new players called the Atreian Atlas. It tracks your first character through the main story (in a browser outside the game) and gives you periodic goals to meet and rewards for doing them. I found it quite neat in the newbie zone. But I can tell it would be something I'd soon forget about since the next item on there is level 16. If getting to level 10 took like 5 or 6 hours, 16 is probably another 10 hours at least. And that thing at level 16 is just a solo dungeon. Solo dungeon! What's the point of a dungeon if not for playing with others? I can go solo everything outside the dungeon. Oh, better loot? Man who cares! It's not like the game is hard yet. Story? Make the rest of the quest stories better! And finally, Aion has nice movable windows. I like that. More and more games are letting players move the windows around. I recall Rift's was particularly liberating. Aion also has some neat stuff with the map. There are 4 different levels of the map. You can actually draw on the map. There is a drawing tool in-game. You can also write memos in-game. And you can share locations with other people, which is awesome. I kept observing people doing this in chat constantly, and I'd click and some map would pop up on my screen of another area. Cool way of sharing spatial information.
Sooo, to sum, I'm not a fan. It has a couple neat features, but I was bored out of my mind playing it. Seems very generic and grindy. No thanks.
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