It has to be terribly jarring to read this blog for any length of time. I end up hyper-fixating on a game for a number of days, weeks or months and then toss it aside to embrace whatever my new thing is. When a new Diablo or Destiny season starts… you are probably going to be reading a lot about those games. When I am playing a narrative adventure, you are going to get nothing but that until I either tire of it or finish the story. In theory you probably should have seen more posts about Horizon Zero Dawn but I had other things that I wanted to talk about apparently during the days I was actively playing it.
Right now I am hyper-fixated on Ghosts of Tsushima, and pretty much spending every available gaming moment playing it. I don’t love playing with a controller, but I can manage and I am happy that I did find the very comfortable Nacon Revolution controller. I am not terribly certain exactly which model I have, given that I purchased mine from Ebay. Mine is the one without interchangeable thumbsticks and with a BNC style connection on the cable. Mostly the big benefit is that it is large hand friendly and my pinky doesn’t fall asleep when I am gripping it in quite the same way that it does with a base PS4 since I am having to contort my hand slightly to get them all to fit comfortably on the grip. I’ve never gotten used to a “pinky out” grip, which probably would solve that particular problem.
There are a bunch of elements in this game that are just charming. Firstly there are no doggos to pet that I have found, but you can in fact pet a good number of the foxes to tell them how good they are for leading you to another shrine. The map of the world seems smallish to me, but in practice the world itself seems very large because of the density. You don’t move around for very long without encountering something to draw your attention away and pull you off your mission. It might be a scream on the wind that leads you to intercept a patrol of Mongols that are just about to kill some civilians, or it might be a golden bird trying to lead you to something important.
While I talked yesterday about not really using the horse, I think it is important to show off what Pete was talking about. After you finish a story mission, you are often times presented with a little vignette of you and your very good horse bonding. You are given the choice of three names for your horse.. Nobu (Trust), Kaze (Wind) and Kage (Shadow). I named mine Nobu and went with the deluxe appearance for him. One of the weirdest aspects I have experienced is that if you accidentally mount another horse… it will start responding to your call instead of your official special Samurai horse. This got real annoying last night and I had to get a sufficient distance away from the camp in question before Nobu would respond. I personally internalized this as him having a spat with me for trying to mount another horse.
It is such a beautiful game, but anytime I am presented with a scene like this… it is admittedly a little bittersweet. It would have looked so much better on my PC or if I had a PS4 Pro. While you are in the flow of the game you don’t notice the softness to the detail, but when you stop and take a still frame it is there. I am not sure what it is about the Straw hat, but as soon as I was able to buy one I adopted that as part of my official appearance. I also am not terribly fond of the look of the masks in practice so I have decided to go around without one. The other thing that I have noticed and find interesting, is how little I find myself sneaking around now that I have become more accustomed to the controls. I pretty much begin every fight now by storming into the camp and imitating a showdown.
There are just so many things that Ghosts of Tsushima does well, and considering I am not even close to finishing the first little area of the game… I expect to have it in rotation for awhile. That is at least until some new shiny object distracts me and makes me forget about it for a bit. Another thing that I am really wanting to do at some point is restart Jedi Fallen Order with a Keyboard and Mouse. I opted for a controller because the game strongly insinuate that is how you should be playing. That said the little bit that I have played with KbM, it felt completely natural and fluid. My thought is restarting from the beginning would allow me to learn the abilities organically rather than trying to play catch up. Additionally there is the problem that I am in the middle of Kashyyyk and have no clue at all what I was doing when I was last playing.