In typical fashion it's been some time since the last time I wrote a blog, and blah blah blah, you know the drill. I've played some games, and done some other stuff, including going to the hospital again. I had an appointment yesterday, and have several more in the coming weeks. You know, relating to that abscess I had to have drained. The drain was taken out a while ago, but now I've got such wonderful things like an MRI (which I just learned today has been scheduled for tomorrow) and, you guessed it, a colonoscopy. That's next week. Hopefully this is the last time I mention it on the internet.

Generally speaking, I'm feeling better than I was, but I've still got some pain in my abdomen that pops up several times during the day. Nothing too bad, but it's still pain. Well, hopefully with these things coming up they'll figure out what's wrong (they're thinking Crohn's disease, but won't commit to diagnosing it yet), and come up with some sort of treatment.

But enough about that, I've been playing games, and doing other things. Like Trine 2! I don't really have much to say about that game. It looks nice, and it's fun. I played the PS4 version, I should say. Uh...Yeah, I guess I could talk about how the puzzles aren't the best, but I kinda liked brute forcing my way through some of them by messing around with the physics. I wouldn't call that good game design, but it was fun.

But under the category of games that I liked quite a lot, I also played the Devil May Cry reboot that came out last year. It was free on PlayStation Plus, and I can't resist the price of free. Well, I can if it's something that I don't want at all, but that was not the case here. Full disclosure, when the redesigned Dante was revealed a couple years ago, I was one of the people voicing concern over the direction the series was taking. I word it that way because in the time since I've realized that those people were crazy, and obsessing about something really dumb, and would like to distance myself from them.

And even despite having close to a year of seeing things on the internet saying this game is good, I still went in with not high expectations. But then I ended up having all of my expectations completely blown away, and I really liked the game. Heck, I'd go so far as to say that I loved the game! I would say that it was one of the...six best games of last year. Or, rather, one of my six favorite games of last year. I enjoyed this game so much that I actually felt bad for not buying it with money, instead of getting it free on PS+. Oh well, too late now.

One of the reasons why I liked this game so much is that it, more than any other melee focused action game I've played, gives good reasons for actually switching up weapons and tactics during combat. In games like God of War, Bayonetta, REVENGEANCE, and even the past Devil May Cry games, I never really found many reasons to switch to other weapons. Not to say that I never did (DMC3 was all right about making weapon switching viable, if I remember correctly), I just mean that you could get through without much switching. But this new DMC features three different, polarities (for lack of a better word) of weapons. Neutral (sword and the guns), devil (axe and rock fists), and angel (scythe and ninja-star-boomerang-glaive-thingies). Most enemies can be felled by any of these weapons, but there are ones that can only be damaged by specific polarities. It's kinda Ikaruga-ish. Not quite, because that was a damage boost, not straight up doing no damage (so far as I remember). So I guess it's more like that platformer game that came out a few years ago that I can't remember the name of.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that you HAVE to switch weapons mid-combat in order to deal with these enemies. It makes for some good variety, especially because the weapons are pretty different from each other. The devil weapons are really slow and powerful, but the angel weapons are fast, have sweeping attacks, but are a lot weaker. And that can lead to things like using sweeping attack to deal with a lot of weaker enemies, and then switching to a devil weapon for a bigger, tough enemy. Contrast that with something like God of War, where you just use the chain blades all the time because you have good reach and decent power, or REVENGEANCE, where the sword is just straight up the best weapon in the game, cause the others are kinda lame.

The rest of the game outside the combat is fairly standard stuff, some light platforming, not much in the way of puzzles. The story stuff is pretty decent, I liked the voice acting, and the events of what happens are appropriately ridiculous. I don't think I got quite as much out of the much heralded "Raptor News Network Boss" as other people did, but I still enjoyed it. I still think I preferred REVENGEANCE's end boss, if we're talking boss fights in games that, well, you probably heard the discussion in Giant Bomb's GOTY podcasts, so I don't need to add more to that.

I think I might go and replay this game on a higher difficulty at some point. I was playing on normal, because it was the first "challenging" game that I played after "recovering" from having that drain in me, but it wasn't really that hard, and I was over-estimating how much my gaming skills had desegregated from spending a bunch of time not playing games.

Speaking of which, before I briefly talk about Don't Starve (well, all I really have to say is that it's neat and I like the art, so that's done), let me talk about my general thoughts on the PS4 now that I've had it for a couple months.

I still like it. But it still needs improvement. For one thing, I still think it needs folders to organize my games. I've been spending a lot of time watching Star Trek TNG, Arrested Development, and other assorted things on Netflix, and I think the Netflix app is mostly fine (though I'd prefer the system level keyboard for searching over the Netflix one). But I think the way the video apps are organized on the PS4 is a little not great if you only ever use one of them. They're all filed under a TV & Video thing, which means I need to move down a level and over a couple spots to get to Netflix. Granted, it's only a few extra button presses, but I'd prefer if I could just put Netflix on the central level with my games. I wouldn't mind this set-up if I was also using stuff like Hulu Plus, Amazon-what's-it, and some of the other things in there, but I don't. And I probably won't, because I think Netflix has me covered for the foreseeable future. I mean, I still have over two seasons of TNG left to watch, and then all of Deep Space Nine. And while I'm at it, I might as well watch Voyager too, right? I liked what I saw of Voyager repeats back when I was in middle school. Only ever seen one episode of Deep Space Nine, though.

Got off topic. Hm, what else about the PS4? Well, this is something that can't be changed with firmware, but I'm still disgruntled that my "500GB" PS4 only has about 407GB of usable space. I know, I know, this is how all hard drives in these things are, but I think that's kind of too big a gap between what's being advertised and what's actually usable. I'm just saying that these companies should be more honest in the future about hard drive space, even though I know that they won't.

I wish the Share stuff in the PS4 would let me just upload a bunch of screen shots at once to a thing somewhere, because I'd prefer that over doing it one at a time on Twitter. You know, if I ever need a bunch of screen shots for a game. Actually, maybe just let me copy all that stuff onto a USB drive or something. Well, for as much as I know, that might already be a feature. I could have tried that, but I didn't.

The last two things I think they should change before I stop this stream of complaining are that they really need to give us some sort of ETA on when Standby Mode will save my game in progress, and that Sony should patch in official support for the DualShock 4 onto the PS3. I really liked playing DMC with the DS4 (and a couple other games that I'm still in the early stages of, to be blogged about later), but it'd be nice to not be tethered. As it is, I have my PS3 on a little laptop table thingy as close as I can to the couch. I know I could just use a DS3, but I don't want to go back.

Here's something I don't understand. I got my 360 in 2006, and my PS3 in 2007. Before then, I had never owned a Sony system, and had only had very minor uses of Sony systems in the past. Yet, I somehow spent most of my video gaming of that generation on the PS3. At no point during that would I have claimed that the PS3 controller was better than the 360 one, yet I spent most of my time on that system, with no controller complaints.

I've had my PS4 for a couple months, and while I think it's a better controller than the 360 controller, I don't think it's a MUCH better controller. Yet, somehow, the DS4 has made me never want to hold a DS3 ever again. What I don't understand is why the 360 controller never did that. I don't see any logical reason behind it. Maybe it's just the console warrior in me that I thought I had killed years ago that was tricking me all this time into thinking the DS3 was worth using. I don't know, that's the best answer I can come up with.

That beard is my favorite thing about Don't Starve.

That's about everything I that I have to say. Still working on Space Cops 5000, hopefully that'll be done within the next month, month and a half-ish. I'm pretty sure I would have had it done by now if it wasn't for the health issues I've been having, but that's largely out of my control (at least I think so, Crohn's seems to be a hereditary/genetic thing), and what am I supposed to do when the hospital calls and says that I "urgently" need an MRI the next day? Oh well, I'm still feeling better overall, and hopefully that'll continue to be the case.

Either way, I'll do my best to keep you guys updated both on my health, and my novel writing "career." Maybe this next one will sell. I hope so.

So now I'll leave you with...Well, I don't know. I mean, I think I brought the Luigi thing about as far as I can, with that Luigi themed choose your own adventure game of the year Moosies thing. So what'll be the next thing? Well, I'm not going to force anything. I kinda want to do something involving my own screen shots from the PS4 share thing, but that obviously won't work for anything I play that isn't on the PS4. I dunno!

Is it time for the Year of Waluigi? If it was the opposite of the Year of Luigi, I'd be all for it.