Mezmero

Finally got a PS5 last week, I didn't necessarily need one for any other reason than playing my PS4 library on a machine that isn't screaming in pain after 8 years of use.

I never bring it up because I mostly play out of habit at this point but I'm into the new season of Apex: Legends. The big difference is that I have finally migrated to the PS5 version which looks great. I've also been on fire in terms of play, it's almost as if better hardware performance means better gameplay performance. My second game on the console I had to kill everyone on the last 2 teams all by myself and pulled it off as Wattson (maybe my secondary-main to Gibraltar). I want Titanfall 3...

Finished up Sifu so I'm just pondering wrapping up the 13% of PS4 trophies I have left. I think ultimately I came around to really liking the game, though I think the devs should have done another pass on their implementation of iFrames. I think what I ended up disliking the most was having to avoid sweep attacks. I just don't think those attacks are telegraphed well enough to do intuitively and it makes it feel like you need to simply memorize attack patterns to a degree that I'm getting too old to do consistently.

The only exclusive I've played was Returnal. It's extremely up my alley in just about every way, but I expected that considering all the praise it was getting. It was only a matter of time before I could try it out in earnest and so far it's a big thumbs up for me and my taste.

Still playing runs of Curse of the Dead Gods on and off. The more I play this game the more I think they missed a trick by not having a Darkest Dungeon-esque narrator. As far as I know there's no mod that does that.

I started playing Rogue Legacy 2. I barely played the first game but this one is sucking me in with its rogue-liteness and the crisp looking art. I'm actually not very good at the game which makes the premise of this lineage of warriors fall apart. At a certain point I've been feeding so many heirs into the meat grinder that they might as well have been the freeze-dried prisoners from Void Bastards.

What I've been playing the most is Sifu. The theming and styyyyle of this game are absolutely phenomenal. It also runs shockingly well on a PS4. Playing it however is kind of a struggle. My chief beef with the game is just how tight the timing windows for parries/avoids are. I can't even count the number of times when I swear I timed my parry/dodge perfectly but still get hit! I'm using the tools in the game that the devs put there so I could avoid damage from the enemies they designed and the mechanics are proving to be unreliable. On top of that there are some times when the camera or character gets caught on the geometry in a way that really screw me. I'm so close to loving this otherwise amazing beat-em-up and will probably finish it but these are rough edges that are hard to ignore.

I'd like a PS5 before I even consider subscription tiers thank you very much. But yeah I'm already swamped with games.

@topcyclist: That reminds me I had the PSP collection at one point and was working my way through the unlocks. Unfortunately my PSP got stolen at work with Valkyrie Profile inside of it. It was my first time playing through VP as well and I was nearly at the end when it happened.

I accidentally saved over my Power Stone 2 VMU save, so ALL of my items got reset to beginning. If you know how painstaking it is to unlock items in that game you understand my pain.

Most recently a few years back I had finally made it to the end of the Dream Log in Pirate Warriors 3 and unlocked the final character. Because of the backwards way Bandai Namco games of that era handle saves/loads I accidentally over-wrote my save with a new file by trying to button through the opening file loading. I didn't even get to try Shanks, though his move set didn't seem all that special anyway. At first I was really upset but then it felt freeing as I now had an excuse to never play the game again.

You should be required to solve a captcha when you post like this...

I've been back on my Rogue-esque bullshit. Been playing some Binding of Issac for the first time on my Switch and I also bought it with Repentance if that makes a difference. It's really cool if extremely gross. Turns out I still have a strong stomach for some very grotesque imagery. I gotta say coming to this after having platinum'd Enter the Gungeon is bruuuuutal as far as quality of life stuff goes. Even something as simple as shooting diagonally becomes a premium in this game. The arenas are so much smaller on average that it's hard to dodge bullets that are moving a bit too fast at times. As far as I know there's no in-run Ammonomicon equivalent that tells you what items do and the listing you can go through on the main menu can be cryptic as heck with the descriptions. Despite this litany of issues I've had with it I still find myself coming back to it to unlock more stuff.

Kaycee's mod in Inscryption is a really great late edition to an already terrific game. It's insane how even when you scale back and balance Leshy's ruleset for rogue-like purposes there are still fun ways to break it. I had an immortal bullfrog who could build dams and since the dams were also immortal I could defend against as many attacks as I wanted. Currently on the 50 challenge point tier and have been hitting a wall with it. It's extremely demoralizing to be shown just how many 'misplays' I commit run-to-run.

Curse of the Dead Gods is probably the one I'm enjoying the most at the moment. It also has a bit of the problem that Issac has where compared to something as streamlined and fast-paced as Hades it does dull some of the impact of what is ultimately a great game. Blending the styles of eldritch horrors and old pagan gods is a winning combination artistically. I do wish the fiction was a bit more explicitly conveyed at my current point of progress because it feels like there would be a lot going through the head of this mutton-chopped adventurer.

The combos contain potassium benzoate...that's bad...

I would say another negative to this game is the story mode. It's admirable that they put a small season of anime made in-engine and honestly I enjoyed watching it on a technical level and marveling at the batshit narrative which I'm woefully uninformed about. However there are numerous points in the story where I thought, "You could put a canonical fight here, and here, and here." I guess it's already long for what it is so maybe they didn't want to draw it out even further by requiring wins from the player to proceed. Counter-point: why the heck not? Everybody else is doing it.

It's been amusing to be completely out of the loop on Elden Ring while I've been blasting through some fantastic bite-sized Souls-like and Souls-adjacent games.

Bowser's Fury - This is probably the biggest edge-case that I'll mention. If nothing else it feels like a realized version of what "world-tendency" is suppose to be. I only did the initial 50 Cat Shines but it's that typical Mario magic of fun platforming within the scope of a moderately-sized open world.

Death's Door - Such a charming good time with a really nice art style. It speaks to the accessibility of this game that I managed to beat it at the average completion time (like 9 hours) without ever upgrading health or magic. Even with that unintentional handicap these were some good boss fights.

Hyper Light Drifter - This game is just plain cool. I wasn't expecting the story to be quite as minimalistic as it is but it was a fun time to beat-feet through this crazy sci-fi world and defeat some cool looking bosses within the span of 9 hours. Playing this and Death's Door back to back is the perfect pairing of short Souls-likes currently on the indie scene.

Children of Morta - This is more squarely in the rouge-lite camp but this right here was the star of the show for recent games I've played. I tried like an hour of it a while back and felt kind of tepid on it but coming back to it in earnest it really captured my heart. I love this game. I found myself enraptured by the tale of this lovable family of badasses. It feels like Linda is the way to play but I often surprised myself by doing accidental clears with the others. The design of the Bergson house is fabulous and the family members' animations are rad as hell.