poobumbutt

Maybe if I was like Andrew Reiner and could just watch a game for a few minutes on someone's stream and decide "yeah, that's worth $70 of my rather low amount of income" then maybe... but as someone who has a select few game streamers I watch, it's not always a guarantee something I want to buy will have coverage from one of those few. Then of course there's the part where I have trouble maintaining interest in game I *like* a lot of the time. A game that looks cool from a couple hours of streaming might drop the ball or become rote in the gameplay later on. A review might remove some of your ability to judge for yourself in real time, but it also typically encompasses a lot more of the experience, even if it's filtered through someone else's lens.

Plus, I also just genuinely like reading them. There's always a special feeling I get seeing a written review from someone I hear talk all the time, because everyone has a distinct voice in written form, that you can eventually identify as easily as their spoken voice. For example, I always loved reading Dan Ryckert's reviews because the way he spoke of games in writing - while tonally similar - was so different from how he verbalized it. Contrarily, I found it interesting that Brad and Jeff's reviews sounded so much like they were speaking that I could basically imagine them narrating the review themselves. Always found this stuff super fun.

I think it was Dan who recently said nearly all the reading he did as a youth was by way of game reviews. I feel like that's true of me now, as an adult lol. I like listening to audiobooks given the choice anyway.

After watching almost but not quite half of Waypoint's X-Com 2 playthrough so far, I've come to the conclusion that X-Com 2 is the game with the highest ratio of "love to watch:don't like to play" of any game I know.

The "don't like" isn't quite as high since I have played about 10 hours or so, and rather enjoyed it (on average) and then stopped. But this also allows "love to watch" to increase in turn, since I understand the broad mechanics and nuances of the game so it's easier to enjoy while watching.

Usually, watching someone play a video game invariably makes me want to play it, too; but thankfully for my own sake, Austin's LP has moments sprinkled conveniently throughout - such as moving to a completely unmarked space during stealth mode, before being spotted by someone you TOTALLY had sight on - that remind me "Oh, right. My mental health can't handle stuff like that." The moments that in actual play would elicit unhealthy frustration, are gut-wrenching moments of empathy while watching an LP.

To be clear: X-Com 2 (and especially WOTC, which Austin and Rob are playing) rules. I'm not joking when I say I'm enjoying the LP as much as Better Call Saul, which I'm also working my way through. X-Com, ever since the *old* days, has always had a thing it was unapologetically going for; even if that "thing" has changed slightly since the shift to the modern games, I appreciate what it is and what it wants to deliver. That "thing" makes playing it all the more enjoyable... if you're into it. It's just that if this was a relationship between me and X-Com, it would be a classic case of "I love you... but we're toxic together. We both deserve someone better. I deserve someone that doesn't make me worried about the condition of my controller after we have an argument. You deserve someone who can laugh along with you when they miss a 92% shot chance."

As many others have said, I ran into a bug - if a quick Google search is any indication, a common one - on the main mission Mutual Dependencies. First, the game doesn't change objectives when you arrive at the location specified. Second, even though I know that my mission is to kill 4 "Full Chrome" enemies, only 3 spawn. I've done it multiple times to double and triple-check, there's no 4th one anywhere. Furthermore, some people claim to have killed 4 of them, but presumably because the game is still stuck on the "travel to x location" objective, it doesn't recognize that you've completed the next one. I deleted my save file and am currently waiting for a patch or two to hopefully solve these issues. I've done this part so many times, I'd be overlevelled for almost all future sidequests for the next few hours. No thanks, I'll bite the bullet and start over. If nothing else, I'm glad this pretty significant bug happened so early; allowed me to eject without feeling like I lost too much, but also not SO early that I didn't get a good taste of the game. Still, a shame.

But other than that progress-halting super annoyance, I like the game quite a lot.

A genuine sense that someone thought out this world and how it functions, and how the people within it function in turn? Check.

Optional dialogue to flesh out the lore and characters? Yes, please.

Actual reasons/mini-stories from NPCs to carry out their sidequests, not just "go get 5 lizard tails" with no explanation? Mm-hmm.

Brutal combat that feels like some combination of Hotline Miami and Smash T.V.? Pass the salt.

About the only thing I don't think is there that I'd like in a cyber-esque game is a "hacker space", or some sort of mini-game when you need to crack a lock or attack an enemy with something other than brute force. It's just "need to hack a door or an enemy? Get the right deck level and boom, door's open/enemy's weakened." Also, in a cyberpunk game where plenty of enemies rush you with melee weapons, it's weird that you don't get a katana to attack them in kind, with perhaps an ability to block bullets for a second or two. I was super early when I stalled out, so *maybe* these are still deeper in the game, but I'm not holding my breath; your upgrade skills do not mention anything about melee combat, so... :(

I really want to get back to this game, it's kind of all anyone's talking about - that or Death's Door, which I don't fancy very much - and I'd like to get into the real meat of it soon.

I spent all of RE7 lamenting how lame and one-note Ethan was, and I was worried that RE8 would just be more of him being Save Family Man, the most specific superhero. So, I was happy that RE8's bonkers-ass direction complemented the "normal-ness" of Ethan really well. He actually feels like a good example of a flat character, who's defined entirely by the other characters he plays off of. Plus his intentionally bad (they're intentionally bad, right? They have to be) one-liners are pretty charming in a weird way. "You-- You're the one who's cursed!" Wow got her, Ethan.

As for what actually happens at the end, I thought the scene with Eveline was actually really affecting and sad. I think the VA for Eveline is really good; her and the music made that scene for me. I appreciated the nod to 7, the surprisingly aware reasoning of "yeah... why WOULDN'T Jack have just killed him and covered him in mould? That's the obvious choice", and the justification for why Ethan can get so fucked up constantly. So I voted "good" because I liked it, not because I'm glad he's dead or something.

Also, if I had to put money on it, I'd say it's unlikely Ethan comes back, at least as the primary playable character, considering the confident "the father's story is now done" message. If 7, 8, and 9 are a trilogy, then I hope we play as Rose, and get to do some crazy stuff with her powers. Instead of a Leon roundhouse from RE4, I hope we have tentacle attacks/throws, or stuff like Wesker's super punch from RE4 Mercenaries. I'll be a little disappointed if her powers are all plot-trapped, and don't affect gameplay. If we could get some other RE mainstay characters to matter in this trilogy, that'd be cool too. Leon? Claire? Jill? Barry? ...Rebecca? Now there's a longshot. What about the Outbreak crew? 7 made them 100% canon. Let's go, Alyssa Ashcroft! Never been the biggest Chris fan. Ada got cut from the game early on, so they were clearly thinking about it.

Thank you for the heads-up. I haven't checked GP lately and I probably wouldn't have found this for a good while. Good lookin' out.

I absolutely started the Bloody Palace in DMCV with the intention of grinding my way through eventually. But I discovered that despite what the main game would have me believe, I was not very good at DMCV. There's something about the flow of combat, knowing when it's safe to attack, when I should be on guard, and when I should expect the enemy to flinch or be knocked down so I know when to just lay into them that my brain just couldn't grasp. Not fully. Couple that with BP's increasing difficulty and giving you devilish pairings of hard-but-not-that-tough-to-read-when-you-know-how monsters with easy-in-theory-but-annoying-as-hell-in-practice monsters and I was destined to never make it past floor 40 or so.

But HOO BOY if you want someone who can be decent to sometimes above average in the main story on Demon Hunter difficulty? I'm your guy!

I feel like I just got run over by a car, but also like I got dunked in ice water? Boy, THIS is gonna take a minute to process.

I guess this is the price I pay for waiting until Saturday to listen to the Bombcast at work: I find stuff like this out by way of the title of the podcast. To this day, Patrick is the only member's leaving I heard about "naturally" from their own mouth. Everyone else was from social media or while browsing the site, and it feels weird every time.

Anyway, now feels like a good a time as any to say that discovering Giant Bomb - specifically Spookin' With Scoops, Breaking Brad, and the myriad Unprofessional Fridays that were on the site by that point - helped pull me out of a depression rut during college. Obviously, that means Patrick, Brad, Alex, and Vinny were all huge parts of that. Thanks a Hell of a lot guys. Good luck in whatever you do next, and happy trails!

@dasakamov: This. I'm the "download a bunch of videos once a week" type, so I'm probably missing some content every once in a while, but I'm still perfectly happy with premium as is.

That sucks if it isn't to your liking OP, but... the if/than statement here seems pretty simple, if you ask me.

@topcyclist: Perfectly understandable. Usually I'm not the type of person who likes replaying levels to "scrape" all the content out, so I get where you're coming from.

For me, the thing I like about Hitman is also the thing that sometimes intimidates me into not playing it and doing something else. Starting a new mission and seeing 400 objectives, some as big and interesting as "kill target with their favourite vape" and some as small as "put on the janitor costume" is always so overwhelming every single time. It's honestly hard for me to start a new Hitman level.

...However, once I do, the impeccable design turns that negative into a positive. It's why I love mission stories; not just the fact that they exist, but specifically that they have that "hand-holdy mission tracking" option for them. Doing a mission story is like a tour of a small section of the level. Typically, the very good stories will show you one key part of the level each. So, if you have a target who never seems to leave his house and one of your objectives is "kill target by dropping piano on him from roof", that seems like a huge mystery that needs to be solved. But odds are, one of the mission stories will show you - while tracking a story to kill a different target sometimes - that if you do something that stresses them out, they need a smoke and head outside. Kill opportunity. Obviously, this is 100% possible with the "hand-hold" feature turned off, but it simply removes a barrier that would make the game just a little less welcoming for me at the outset.

This is the bread and butter of Hitman to me. Investigating a level, sometimes by way of a mission story and sometimes just by your own exploration and learning the triggers that make the different cogs move. The strange pocket universe that Hitman seems to exist in where every one follows a script helps this a lot, actually. Even after killing the lead actor of a movie shoot, eventually everyone just returns to their jobs like nothing ever happened. It feels like the universe itself wants these people dead, and 47 is just the agent of its will. When thinking like this, Hitman GO makes a lot more sense to me, metanarratively. Anyway, where this meets up with the game design is this makes you feel like every attempt, successful or not, on a target's life is just information gathering, and then you reset the loop and go again, armed with more knowledge.

Maybe it's a little juvenile thinking of it in this abstract way, but it really does help me conceptualize how this game world works. The mission stories give you a hint of some areas where it might be a good idea to poke around a little, see what you can uncover. Maybe you just waltz into an easy way to pull off some unique kill, reload, use that knowledge to do something else, and so on and before you know it, you're nearly at 20/20 mastery. I start every Hitman level uneasy and feeling out of place, but this gameplay loop always carefully eases me into a comfortable mindset. Sometimes, I don't realize that I've nearly learned everything about a level until I go back to the level select and see my progress.

Then, of course, there's stuff like David Bateson's great performance as 47 and the great ambient dialogue. I mean, who could forget "somebody's doing something they shouldn't"?

I'm actually really happy Hitman has come back and gotten the success it has. Considering the fact that Hitman is such a rules-oriented game, and in some respects is very strict about the way it enforces those rules, I would have guessed more people would be like you and find it's just "not for them". Yet, as you've said, so many people love this series, and for a multitude of reasons; I couldn't be happier for it.