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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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2323 registered gamers and 3394 games. 7934 GameLogs with 13449 journal entries. 5111 games are currently being played.
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Brotato (PC) by dkirschner |
| Fun, simple twin stick bullet hell roguelike. One screen, lots of characters to try. ---------- Gets repetitive, but all the characters are fun to mess around with. |
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most recent entry: Monday 15 July, 2024
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Brotato...silly name, simple game. This wasn't on my radar until I was browsing the Game Pass catalog looking stuff up, and saw it was rated "overwhelmingly positive" with like 50,000 reviews on Steam. That's a compelling recommendation! I like these twin stick shooter/bullet hell/roguelike hybrids (Binding of Isaac, Nuclear Throne, etc.) so I downloaded it. It's got a whiff of Vampire Survivors, too, the auto-play (whatever that's called), which I also enjoyed.
After thoroughly trouncing the game, I am unsure why it's at like 97% overwhelmingly positive with so many reviews on Steam. Like, it's good, but it's not THAT good! The gimmick here is that you can equip 6 weapons (or 12 with one of the unlockable characters) and that there are about 50 characters to unlock and play with. It is undeniably fun to equip 6 weapons and try out all the wacky characters. It's so over-the-top. Weapons are either melee or ranged, they go from tier 1-4 (weaker to stronger) and they come in different sets like precise weapons, medieval weapons, unarmed weapons, ethereal weapons, and so on. Having multiple weapons of any given set grants set bonuses. You can upgrade your weapons by combining two of the same thing (e.g., two tier 2 ethereal axes become a tier 3 ethereal axe). There are also explosions, mines, turrets, and other manner of thing that can damage enemies. You'll also be able to purchase a ton of items that affect your stats. Most add something but take away somewhere else (e.g., +2hp but -1 damage%).
So, as you progress through the 20 waves of enemies in a run, you accumulate experience and materials to level up and buy things. Based on what's available in the shop, you might start building out your character in many different ways (e.g., focusing on melee damage, focusing on high HP and regen, etc.). Your character affects this too, and this was a lot of fun tinkering with different characters. Dealing with constraints imposed by their specific limitations was cool. For example, Crazy gets 100% range with precise weapons, +25% attack speed, starts with a knife, has -30% dodge, -10% engineering, and -10% ranged damage. So basically, you want to buff up his melee and attack stats, and since his dodge sucks, you will avoid +dodge items and go with HP, armor, or something else. I think I had my first win with Crazy.
Other characters I remember having fun with include: Old (-25% enemy speed, +10% harvesting, -33% map size, -10% enemies, -10% speed [he was fun because of the compact map]), Loud (+30% damage, +50% enemies, -3 harvesting at the end of a wave [fun because of massive hordes of enemies]), Ghost (10% damage with Ethereal weapons, +30% dodge, dodge is capped at 90% instead of 60%, -100 armor [super fun, and my Danger 5 victory, because you can reach 90% dodge chance, but you have to build so as not to get one-shot because you start out taking almost double damage!]), the Artificer and the Glutton, who are both built around creating massive explosions, and the Masochist (+5% damage every time you take damage until the end of the wave, +10 max HP, +20 HP regen, +8 armor, -100% damage). I think the Masochist was my Danger 4 victory, and he was a lot of fun because each wave you start off with super low damage, and you need to get hit a lot to increase your damage. So, I built around boosting HP, regen, life steal, and armor so I could take a lot of hits, and then started getting + damage items later to negate some of the damage starting penalty. By the end of later waves, I was doing nearly +300% damage, which is insane. Basically, your damage % stops increasing later in the wave because you are one-shotting everything before you can get hit!
After you win a run on Danger 0 (the first difficulty), you unlock Danger 1, and it goes up to Danger 5. I considered beating the game at Danger 5, so that's what I did. I started questioning the overwhelmingly positive ratings when the game started getting repetitive and easy, which, all things considered, didn't take that long. It took me a handful of tries to beat Danger 0 and Danger 1, but Danger 2, 3, 4, and 5 each took 1-2 tries. And I used a different character each run, so it's not like I was perfecting my strategy with any given character. I just figured out how the game worked, some generally optimal strategies and items, and it was easy after that.
There is also only one map. The entire game takes place in a small space, and every run is basically the same in terms of what enemies spawn each wave. There are only a handful of enemy types, mostly of the "they're going to charge you" variety, and even bosses only have like three attacks between them. I'd see a new boss and be like "yeah! What's this one do?" and it would attack the same way as the last one. And every run is also basically the same toward the end. You've built a beast of a character, and you wade through enemies without a care in the world because you do so much damage, or your armor is so high, or you have 90% dodge chance, or there are health pickups everywhere, or whatever. So, by the time you've beaten a couple runs, you've probably kind of seen everything. There are more characters to unlock, some more rare items to get, but fun as it is for what it is. Worth playing if you like these kinds of games, but others have more longevity and variety.
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