BabyChooChoo

Slowly but surely. The only real reason I keep Steam around is because it's still the only place you can get 99.9% of Japanese games, which make up the majority of what I play, on PC. They took forever to embrace the platform in general and I imagine it's gonna take at least another decade before they start embracing other services. Mostly because, and I'll readily admit it, no other service comes even remotely close to the install base of Steam so I can forgive companies (Japanese or not) for ignoring those services, but also I'm just gonna bet a lot of companies are still worried about piracy and GoG being completely DRM-free probably isn't a comforting thought to them.

Steam is for the most part a completely solid service. However, and goddammit I know I've said this half a trillion times on these forums this past year alone, I just don't like that they're you're only option for the vast majority of PC games. It's gotten so crazy that they've essentially become synonymous with the platform. Whn you think of PC gaming, chances are you think of Steam. Again, and yes I get it, they've earned it, I'm not arguing that. It's just for a platform that people like to brag is all about choice, it's amazing how little choice you actually have in some cases.

Also, I just find the front page and browsing the Steam store a terrible experience. There's too much shit in both senses of the word. There's a lot of games in general, but also just a lot of genuinely terrible games that have no business being sold. It took Valve forever to kinda sorta crack down on asset flips, but as far as I know, they're still a thing and it's really only the most heinous ones that see any action taken by Valve.

So I applaud other publishers waning off of Steam. That's great, we should all stop being so reliant on them lest we end up with another "Amazon" when Gabe and the rest of the old guard step down. Probably unlikely, but competition is good either way.

Bruh...this new Hero Academia arc is like just getting started and it's already fucking wild. It's not like it's some crazy out-of-left-field guess lol, but everyone is in agreement that it's all but guaranteed...

I wanna know more about the stealth though, like is there any reason not to run around guns blazing 24/7? Cause dude can clearly handle himself perfectly fine in a fight. Can you play the whole thing stealthy?

I've calmed down on this a bit since e3. This looks about what I expected in that I had a vague idea of what we were in for and so far, it hasn't deviated from that. Don't get me wrong, still looks great, but didn't really wow me in any one way.

Goddamn, DMC5 ain't fucking around. They are going all out and everything about it looks glorious.

Worst - So many games ship unfinished now. Destiny and FFXV are two of the biggest offenders as of late that come to mind. Then when they decide to add in meaningful additional content, they charge you for it. And you know the craziest part? People are happy to pay for it! They sold you an unfinished product, ask you for more money to finish it, and people are like "fuck yeah!" No Man's Sky and Sea of Thieves obviously deserve a mention but at least all their content updates are free?

Best - Seemingly niche games can be hugely successful doing their own thing. Monster Hunter and Yakuza have been churning away, essentially continuing to do what they've been doing since day 1 and I guess the stars just aligned because both series seem to have exploded in popularity recently. Warframe is another one that's just sorts been in it's own lane that seemed to breech mainstream news when more and more disgruntled Destiny players stumbled upon it. Crazy thing was, at least from what I can tell, it was already doing great, just nobody was talking about it.

Not a specific game, but every now and then I'll see a Collector's Edition of a new game on the horizon that I constantly go back and forth on because I don't want stock to run out and prices to skyrocket and blahblahblah. Here's my reason for telling myself not to buy it:

1. 90% of the time, prices will drop dramatically because they either print too much and/or people are just trying to offload their copies
2. I'll get over it. I can't think of one game off the top of my head where I'm still kicking myself for missing out on the Collector's Edition.
3. Most of that shit is junk anyway and not worth displaying or something I'd be too ashamed to display. There's a lot of games that came with boob mouse pads, trading cards, wallscrolls, and other dumb bullshit that I look back on and go "thank god I didn't/couldn't buy that stupid thing because all that bullshit would still be sitting in the box."

Yet, still one game will pop up every now and then that I really wanna pull the trigger on and I have to spend days or weeks trying to talk myself out of it, then I do, rinse and repeat, etc.

I know we got a few Etrian Odyssey fans around these parts and you'll be happy to know Atlus has finally announced the Western release date for the series' grand 3DS finale!

I believe the wait for V was something like a year after the Japanese release so it's nice we're getting this so much sooner. I can't wait! Who else is looking forward to this?

I don't know if I've said this before, but Murata might just be my favorite manga artist working today. Horikoshi (Hero Academia) is my favorite author no question, at least as far as ones who have been consistently working these past few years, but Murata is on some otherworldy shit. He draws the version of One Punch Man that most people are familiar with because it's the one they based the anime off of. The man is insane. He'll just drop 150+ pages for one chapter like it's nothing and it'll be some of the dopest shit to happen in the series so far. Like the chapter that just came out involved something like 50 characters throwing down and it's fucking sick. The whole thing is fucking sick. Who does that? Who can do that?

I'm terrible at them and I procrastinate every time a new one comes out saying "this is the one I'll get good at!" but I still love them. I think the genre has a handful of arguably serious problems many of the developers in this space have failed to address, but there's nothing quite like fighting games.

This is just something I noticed reading the discussion about Eureka Pagos over the weekend on the forums/reddit. And it partly summarizes my feelings in a weird way. With Eureka Anemos, players found a way to cheese the tedious content by just forming "trains" and spawning bosses nonstop. It didn't make it any more fun to play, just more bearable. Now, with Pagos, they've effectively killed trains and made everything more tedious because clearly they don't want want people to speed through the content even though the weapon you get isn't worth the fucking effort.

Fun fact: it's also the reason that every dungeon starting in some of the latter ARR patches and continuing still to this day have hard stops that prevent you from moving forward until you deal with the trash. If you go back and replay some of the earlier ARR dungeons, you'll notice they will let you pull everything from boss to boss. SE didn't want players to cheese dungeons, so they put in those stops to slow down players.

Now, compare that to something like Warframe. Players wanted to go through missions faster, so they started started cheesing builds and mechanics so they could book it through levels even though the traversal system was never intended to do that. The devs took notice and know what they did? They not only revamped the traversal system to make it easier for players to do that, they made it so it looks cool as shit. That right there, at least to me, says a lot about SE.

This isn't directed at anyone. If anything, it's just an addendum that I'm too lazy to find a good place to slide into my original post.