I downloaded Metropolis: Lux Obscura on the PS4 on Friday because it was cheap and I enjoy match-three style puzzle games, particularly with a nice twist to them. This one does well at a comic-noir style storytelling, clearly inspired by things like Sin City and organized crime stories. I tried a demo of it on one of my friends' Switch previously. Much shorter than I expected, and also unexpected--I finished it with the Platinum trophy last night. Not a hard game to 100%. Decent overall storytelling, if a bit cliche at times.

Earthfall is the slightly lesser little brother of Left 4 Dead, the Liam to L4D's Chris Hemsworth. Instead of Infected? Aliens. Instead of a Tank? You fight a Beast.

Not a bad buy for $30, but if L4D/L4D2 weren't two of my all-time favorites I could see not enjoying it.

What difficulty are you playing on?

I know it's tempting, but try not to reply to spambots. It only encourages them.

I didn't even realize I was responding to an invalid.

Finished Bloodborne yesterday. For the most part, I didn't have too much trouble with it, save for the fight with Gehrman at the end. Holy shit, he was tough. Took me probably around 20 tries or so before I beat him. As far as the game as a whole, I really, really enjoyed it. I'm not sure if I like it more that DS3 so far, but I'm gonna run through at least NG+ yet and see how I feel after that.

Sunday, my girlfriend had to work all day. So I had nothing to do. It was the first time I've sat and played a game by myself for more than, say, an hour, in months. I played the Far Cry 5 Lost on Mars add-on. Nearly finished with it. It's pretty cool, and I love the movie references.

Logged about 12 hours on Octopath Traveler and I can say I'm enjoying it a lot. Which is kinda strange because OT has virtually all of the complaints I had of Bravely Default that made me stall out on that game. For whatever reason though, they don't bother me in OT. Maybe I'll go back and give BD a second chance sometime.

My boner for anything Transformers specifically G1 Era is completely out of control right now, so I dug up the copy of Transformers: Devastation I had that I barely played for some reason. The combat is real satisfying and all the characters look so good.

They did not put a whole lot of work into the environment and sometimes it's hard to tell where you're going, because everything seems identical, but the animation for transforming and the sound are so perfect that I can put up with it.

My girlfriend's brother in law has a RetroPie 4. I've spent the last few days going back through Comix Zone, Turtles in Time, Streets of Rage 2, Super Smash TV...damn, I forgot how punishing some of those games were. Depleting health because an enemy blocks? Fuck youuuuuuuu...

I still need to get back to Fall of Cybertron. One of these days... one of these days.

I'm buying it. Fuck it.

My need to engage in Transformers behavior on a massive scale cannot be corrected.

Oh, well then you're going to definitely want some new Predaking.

Holy shit!

I was banned from the Facebook page of a video game reseller for pointing out he was gouging people. Like hey shitlord, if you can't handle that, go fuck yourself. Game collectors, first off, stop being grade-a suckers and paying top dollar for old shit. This is a hobby, not a career and not your fucking retirement account. You want to retire on something? Get a 401K and an investment account start investing money.

The guy was selling Mario Kart 64 for a pants-shitting $60. This is one of the most common games on the console, and by far the worst Mario Kart game ever made. It should not, in any capacity, be more than $15. Pointing that out is apparently "negativity" to someone who can't handle criticism and is desperate to steal money from gullible morons and fanboys.

To be clear, I'm not mad about being banned for some petty reason from a pathetic little nobody. I'm mad that resellers are destroying the retro and collector's market with unabashed, unwarranted, and illogical greed. I love my classic games and consoles. I love having them, playing them, and diving into the history. These dicks just love money. Fuck them.

If you think that's a good price for Mario Kart 64, please post photos of your credit card number, the billing zip code, and don't forget the 3-digit number on the back. You clearly aren't handling money well in the first place.

I've found that with tonnes of old games, especially Nintendo, they're still priced insanely high for no reason at all. I don't understand in the slightest why people think they can charge $60+ for Super Mario 64, or Smash 64/Melee, Sunshine, etc. These games sold hundreds of thousands, if not millions of copies. Especially in the case of SM64, where it came with the fucking console.

I've been trying to replace games that I had when I was younger, or that got lost for whatever reason, and it's a fucking nightmare. And this isn't even a problem with just collector shops; regular people will charge these prices too, cause they see that's what the market is at. I recently saw on a local buy/sell page on Facebook, where someone was trying to sell an N64, no games, controllers, etc, for like $200. Absolutely insane.

The market and the demand sets the price. If copies of Mario Kart 64 are regularly selling for around that amount, there's literally nothing wrong or stupid or indecent about doing the same (and obviously if you can find a copy for much cheaper, people won't be buying it. it's pretty simple). It's a video game, not a necessity. I've seen crazier things at yard sales, and yet no one ever bitches about the fact that people can set their own prices for the possessions they sell at those events. More power to him IMO.

I definitely understand your frustration with jacking up prices on old games and agree it is bullshit.

However, the N64 Mario Kart was my favorite out all of them. I felt the controls on the SNES version were too stiff. The N64 version really loosened up everything IMO.

But, I also think the N64 Smash Brothers was the best Smash Brothers which I don't think anyone on this planet agrees with me on.

Take my gripe with a grain of salt, as I am a collector and actually enjoy this hobby and loathe gougers.

However, and I tend to downplay this because the greedy use it lazily to justify high prices, Mario Kart 64 goes for around $20-$25 on eBay. That's still well more than I'd ever pay for the fucking thing, but that goes to show the level of gouging here. A store I supported regularly that closed recently here sold Ocarina of Time, in it's box, for $40. That was fairly reasonable, depending on if it was the gold or gray version (I don't remember the version). So this guy is totally gouging for suckers, but hardcore Nintendo fans are the easiest gamers to gouge, because they erroneously believe all of Nintendo's stuff is magically infinitely valuable. Nintendo partly encourages this by keeping MSRP's inflated far longer than Sony, Microsoft, or any other rational publisher.

I have also seen crazy and stupid things at yard sales, and if I disagree with the price, I just walk away. One garage sale this summer, I bought three carry bags, two of which were Playstation branded (the other was just some travel bag I bought for my Lynx), and the guy wanted $15 each on those. I literally brushed spiders off one of them and they were all coated in dust. When he saw me put them down, he asked what I'd pay, I said $15 for all of them together and he reluctantly agreed. It's a fucking garage sale, not the Antiques Roadshow with Bonus Dust and Spiders. The guy's friend tried to claim they cost that much new, and I said, "yeah, but this is a garage sale."

Once, a woman tried to sell a Playstation 1 (which she called a "Nintendo") and half a dozen sports games for $35, and a Genesis in the same vein for about the same price. I walked the fuck away from that. Sports games have no value even as a collector, and a PS1 should never be more than $20. There is literally a hundred million of them out there.

But a good garage sale from a month or so ago, I picked up 2 Atari 2600s (4-switch models), around 45 games, around 20-30 manuals, a Sega Master System, a dozen games, and a pile of controllers for both--for $100. That is good pricing. That is reasonable. That guy was doing a garage sale correctly, and after I cleaned the years of dust and grime off of everything (and reaffixed several Atari game labels), everything worked out pretty well. Garage sales have even less business charging premium prices since the people often don't really know what they're selling, and no one is greedier than suburban housewives or the elderly on this front. Figure that one out.

I have generally no problem with market demands. I do have a problem with wide-eyed fanboys getting into this and allowing gougers to artificially inflate market prices--and yes, there have been people artificially inflating prices. And this guy I was talking about was grossly inflating a price on something that is absurdly common--and he fucking knows it or he wouldn't have banned me for calling him on it. If it was a reasonable price and I was in the wrong, he could have explained that and defended his pricing. And anyone who spends that much money on something this old and this common is a fucking sap who deserves to be leeched dry--except that it just makes it harder for the rest of us to afford any of this.

I've seen people try to sell a Jaguar with nothing else for $1000. A guy try to claim his GameCube "collection" was worth $300, for only ultra common titles and sports games. Some jackass trying to sell a Dreamcast for a staggering $500. This is not "fine," this is greed. You think "more power to them," I see assholes destroying a culture and hobby because they want to make a living ripping people off while pretending to like video games.

And here is how eBay ruins this shit--because these greedmongers look up their item on eBay, see whatever the highest Buy It Now is, and think they can sell for that, something I encountered this year to an insulting degree. If it sells for that much on eBay, then fucking sell it on eBay. Quit pretending a garage sale or flea market is a high-value antique show, and quit pretending video games--fucking video games, many of which are extremely common--are some kind of ancient heirloom like a fucking piece of art or a couch from 1700's aristocracy.

Selling these games for these prices in this day and age is absurd. It's like selling a VHS or HD-DVD for high value and claiming you're justified because it's "old" or "they didn't make many." They still made tens of thousands and the reason there aren't many is often because they were crap to begin with. The number of rare games that are also amazing titles is extremely low. Very rarely was a quality game not produced in a reasonable number, like Mario Kart 64 (granted, I think that game is crap), but they still made several million of the fucking things. If it's rare because it's crap, it shouldn't be expensive, if it's common but quality, it shouldn't be expensive, and if it's a fucking video game, it should be affordable. Nearly all of them are available to download online anyway these days. So why the fucking gouging?

"Old" does not automatically mean valuable and "rare" is a word so misused these days it's lost all meaning. Even then, just because something's rare doesn't mean it's worth the time, effort, or money.

Gave up on the DLC final boss of Hollow Knight (though I did clear that 3rd Colosseum wave at last). Too fast, too hard, my charm loadout doesn't make a difference, any retry means zero progress... yeah, time to give up.

Instead I moved on to some other games. I decided to go with shorter little games this time.

Played Owlboy and finished it in about 9 hours. It was... okay. A bit disappointing and not because of its short length (that suited me just fine). The graphics are absolutely gorgeous; some of the best pixel art I've seen, maybe the best (only Slain! can compete I think). A few charming characters. But its gameplay is sadly very mediocre. Controls are clunky and even several hours in I'd often push the wrong button or do the wrong/unexpected thing because of the bad control scheme. Combat is mediocre; you can only fight by picking up an ally and then aiming twin-stick style, but when you get hit, you get knocked back and drop your ally, which obscures your view if you fall down too, and sometimes you're knocked back/juggled outside of the screen and can't even see what's going on (happens mostly during the more hectic kind of boss fights).

There's also too many absolutely baffling design decisions, such as unskippable scenes before and even sometimes during boss fights (longer scenes can be skipped, but, say, the opening animation of the fight can be lengthy and it's frustrating on retries, not to mention mid-battle "grrr this isn't over yet, I'll get you!" dialog from the boss...), forced stealth that are absolutely tedious, shoddy platforming where you can't see the next platform in advance, an incredibly annoying knockback that makes it so that, if you are close to a wall, your character will slam against the wall and get stunned even longer and start sliding down... and the most WTF of them all, a section where you ride this giant worm going super fast and twisting around but you can only control it to avoid obstacles by pressing up or down except sometimes the world is upside down, and it's borderline unplayable because everything moves so fast... yeah.

So basically, a lot of the challenges are more frustrating than fun. The only boss I found legit fun was the last one which was at least pretty cool. Exploration is okay, at least, and flying around can be fun, and some puzzles are OK too but usually fairly easy.

There's also too much story to be honest. Dialogue and some scenes can be interminable, or maybe I'm just an old impatient woman yelling at cloud, I dunno. What story there is, is OK, at least, but it does have some annoying/frustrating moments where the characters behave in ways that make no sense just for the plot to move forward.

I really wanted to like this game more than I did. It was made with a lot of love, was in development hell and took 10 (!) years to make, and its visuals are just really THAT good. But the gameplay is just serviceable at its best, and annoying at its worst. I suppose if I had to rate it, I'd give it a 6/10. Its short length works in its favour because I was kinda glad to be done. Worth picking up for super cheap just for the graphics, I suppose. It has a glowing Metacritic rating for some unfathomable reason (huge disconnect between press and reader ratings here, hmmm), so hey, maybe I'm in the minority. I basically generally agree with this review though the reviewer is harsher than I'd be (for instance, I didn't mind the dark areas that much).

On to Momodora next... barely an hour in, but so far it already looks a lot more fun!

So, a couple of months ago I quit playing Dark Souls cuz I was a bit stuck at Sen's Fortress. Last week, I bought the remastered on PS4 and started the whole thing from the beginning, this time as a knight. Finally beat the damn fortress in 3 tries and now I'm at Ornstein & Smough. I found Anor Londo quite easy so far, but them... ouch! I will beat them eventually for sure. Fuck em!

*Edit* : Mario Kart 64 was by far the best. Double Dash (I think... the one on Gamecube anyway) was the worst imo.

Loved what I played of Momodora, but as always I found myself at a point where I simply can't find "the next thing" even with the damn map. I think maybe I need to start over.

Weird. I think I'm pretty far in (map is at, I think, 70%) and I never got lost so far. It's fairly easy to navigate compared to other Metroidvanias.

I can't wait to play Darkside Detective.

^Sounds real good.

What do you think my chances of this coming to a console are?

*fuck me. I see it's coming to the Switch. I wish that shit wasn't so fucking EXPENSIVE.

Oh man, Death's Gambit and Dead Cells are both about to drop on PS4. So glad I've got two job interviews this coming week. I want them shits! DG still looks like the cooler game to me.

I should get back into S&S. Never beat it.

Gave No Man's Sky a download since it's been updated and fixed. A total grindfest just to get going at all, but I had a lot of fun with it once a couple friends joined in. Had a dogfight with 3 other players and won with ease.

I'm also giving Elite Dangerous a try. Anybody have experience with i

HDMI adapter arrived yesterday for my Dreamcast. Only works on the 60Hz ports on the TV (my TV has 5 HDMI inputs, and 2 of them are 60Hz), but holy shit, the Dreamcast has never looked better. The games looks crisp and sharp, the aspect ratio is corrected to 4:3 in the way the games were designed and the Dreamcast naturally outputs. I'm downright excited to be after more Dreamcast games now. More than ever.

YES! Death's Gambit looks awesome! I appreciate you making me aware of games like this.

Yeah dude! 2D Souls! Actually started playing Salt and Sanctuary again because hype.

Seriously though, you guys. Brawlhalla. Amazing. Finally got up the nerve to try some 1v1s and it's very satisfying, especially on the rare matching where you're even-footed.

Brawlhalla looks interesting enough for me to try it.

It also looks like I'll end up putting the controller through the TV at some point.

I meeeaaan its been out for awhile and I'm new so yeah I get my shit wrecked. 3 stocked on the reg. But sometimes I do it to others and feel a momentary taste of power.

So I finally got Salt & Sanctuary (bought it on my Switch) and I'm totally obsessed and addicted. One of those games that just feels like it was made to perfectly meet your taste. I remember the first time I played Dark Souls I thought "aw man, this it was a 3D Castlevania could have and should have been!" I feel like S&S meets both franchises halfway, and it's glorious.

So I've been plowing through it pretty steadily since I got it two nights ago. Currently in Hager's Cavern. Playing a strength build and using the Shrouded Bulwark at the moment. Took me a while to come across an Amber Idol so I only recently transmuted my greatsword and holy crap does it make a difference, hardly died in the last two areas at all.

Loving everything about this game. The level design and interconnectedness of all areas is incredibly impressive. I'm doing my best to search through all corners of an area before progressing to the next, but I'm positive I've missed a bunch of secrets. Are there quite a few totally optional areas in the game?

You rat BASTARD. I was up past midnight playing this game last night.

I can feel the pull to play it while I'm at work right now.

Dead Cells is fucking tight, I put a ton of time into the early access. It's kind of a bastard at times and very dependent on how lucky you get with randomized weapons, but then most roguelikes are.

Nice! That's a really good weapon, strength builds are powerful compared to dex (sadly haha, I played dex the whole first playthrough and that's legitimately hard mode).

And yeah there's a few secret areas. Some you might need extra traversal upgrades for.

That's so rad! I just hit level 109 and still haven't beat the game lol. I use the Chitin Obelisk sword a lot as my main, two-handed (although I can 1-hand it for torch moments) and trade that off with dual-wielding the big Scissor sword and a Dragoon pistol.

I love heavy weapons/light armor. I've just recently found the boatmans gear and I've been wearing it. Upgraded each piece to VI. Fort-on-the-Mire leads to an underground area that was CRAZY for farming Salt. I know this isn't necessary I'm just a monster.

I'm currently struggling with Pitchwoods. Those fucking deer from Annihilation bleed my shit out as soon as they gore me. And the other way (underground) leads to a Skeleton Man asking about a brand I don't have yet.

There are a ton of secret areas and the level design is ridiculous. The way things connect on multiple levels and loop around is so Souls it hurts.

Coconut: You playing on PS4? I would love to mess around, maybe run some friendly 2v2s. Always fun to hook up my mic. PSN: Muhaffa. I'm psyched that you dig it! I never played Smash Bros back in the day but I think I understand the addiction now.

Any legends grab you as a possible "main"? I couldn't handle not having them all so I bought the founders pack. Gnash seems to be my boy, but Hattori is also ridiculously fun. I'm a spear-player for sure. Oh and Yumiko is hella fun if you want to play defensive/passive. I single-handedly won a 2v1 earlier when my teammate disconnected by literally kiting both of them with her Dsig into Nsig bow combo.

Oh and if you have the kinda job that allows it: there's some really entertaining Brawlhalla YT channels. Shwerpy and MicroPlanet are both children who make me laugh whole being "good"

The fast-paced nature allows a lot of room for hilarious shit-talk and also for it to backfire immediately in true karmic retribution. I love tossing down a landmine and then immediately getting smacked into it. God damn.

Edit: fuck those deer I demolished them. Finally found my way into the damned Temple.

The Coveted was a weird/fun boss. Wish I had found a Sanctuary first but I'm overleveled so I made it lol.

Hahahh that's exactly what was happening. No biggie they're dead now. Along with the Witch. Her machine gun spells were rad and initially a problem. I love this game so much it's stupid.