Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Well friends… I just realized this morning that I absolutely screwed up yesterday. Normally I upload the podcast and then create a post for it. While waiting on the video form of the podcast to finish I apparently just mentally buggered the hell off to the next task on my list. Yesterday was stressful for a whole lot of reasons, not the least of which was finding out my 80 something year old mother-in-law is Covid positive. So falling on my sword her and apologizing for just now getting this out there.
Tonight we had most of the crew and started off with a topic that had been bumped. We talk for a bit about Yakuza: Like a Dragon and how it is a bit of a fresh start for that series. From there we have a somewhat impromptu discussion about Watch Dogs Legion and the thoughts Tam and Bel had while playing it. From there we discuss Spider-Man: Miles Morales and some of the thoughts Tam had specifically about the integration of Puerto Rican culture into that game. From there we dive into another discussion about the PlayStation 5 since Tam finally got his last week. We wrap things up with some discussion about The Game Awards and the big Disney Investor call and all of the things that were announced in both.
Hey friends! Sorry for the quiet over the last few days but I have been dealing with some significant technical difficulties on the web host side. That however in theory should be resolved… so here is hoping that I can resume my regular schedule. Last night I got a box that I had been anxiously waiting for for awhile and I am super glad that it has finally arrived. Preordering through Sams Club was way more stressful than I would have wanted, and in truth it seems like Sams doesn’t exactly know what to do with the whole preorder experience. I managed to snag mine on September 17th… and then got zero updates at all about it until 11/9 when I was told that it would not be arriving until the 27th.
Not getting a PlayStation 5 on release day when I had managed to snag a pre-order was a bit of a bummer, but a late PS5 was better than NO PS5. On the 13th however I got an email telling me that my PlayStation 5 was on its way and would be there on the 17th. That eventually turned into the 16th which was even better. However even though FedEx claimed that the package was out for delivery by 6 pm it had not shown up. Around that time the status updated to “Pending” and “No Delivery Date Set” which caused more than a small amount of anxiety. We were dealing with the fact that the battery in my wife’s car had died and stranded her, so I didn’t have the spoons to freak out about it. By the time I got up yesterday morning it had been rescheduled and was once again flagged as “Out For Delivery”.
Given the on and off nature of this… I spent more than a small amount of the day watching the front door camera. Around 3:45 someone from FedEx and deposited this package on my doorstep, and within a few minutes I was whisking it away because it was absolutely NOT something I wanted a porch pirate to find. Around 4:30 I was unpacking and working on setting it up. This picture is it beside my Xbox One original model, PlayStation 4 original model, PlayStation 3 original model and now the PlayStation 5 disc model. Eventually I will probably move the PS4 elsewhere in the house since I can use it as a remote play unit for the PS5. I had seen comparisons before but I was not at all prepared for just how big this is. It legitimately looks like it is an Alienware Tower and not a gaming console.
I have to say this is probably the easiest console set up experience I have ever been through. Prior to receiving my console I went through the process of copying all of my saved game data off to a USB thumb drive. When setting up the console I was given the opportunity to set up through the PlayStation app. Inside the app there is an option for “Sign In PS5” and you essentially scan a QR Code that is presented on screen and then magic happens and your console authenticates and pulls in all of your information. I expected to have to go back through and set up my picture twitter account again, but nope all of that transferred across without issue. Within about ten minutes I was just left wit the eternal chore of downloading games.
As far as the controller goes, I think the Dual Sense is considerably more comfortable than the Dual Shock 4. Things feel a bit more spread out, which is good from the standpoint that my large hands feel considerably more comfortable using it. The negative however is that when your thumbs are on the sticks, reaching over to hit the DPad is a bit of a thing because I don’t quite have that muscle memory built yet. Not being an aficionado of rumble, I was not sure what I would think of this new fangled experience. The jury is honestly still out. It is better than standard rumble but it isn’t the earth shattering experience that I have been lead to believe.
Astro’s Playroom is built into the console and is essentially a test pad that shows off everything that the controller can do. The thing is that I legitimately think that this game could be a Mario quality experience if it spent more time trying to be a real game and less time just being a demo reel. There are moments that are genuinely phenomenal while playing the built in game. The rumble does add something to the experience but I am just wondering if my fingers are simply not sensitive enough or something because the way it had been described to me is not what I am experiencing. One of the early reviews indicated that the rumble felt differently depending upon which surface the character was walking on… and sure it does a little bit but it is a super subtle difference. I guess I just expected more.
I picked up Demon’s Soul because while I have never really gotten into the Soulsian experience, I keep hearing that this is one of the most next gen experiences on the console. The game is freaking gorgeous and honestly… I think I like it better than the other souls games I have played apart from Jedi Fallen Order. I’ve not made a ton of progress in this, but I do think I want to keep trying. Maybe this will be the time that it finally clicks for me.
I played a little bit of Bugsnax, but I have to admit that it did not grab me. It mostly felt like Muppet Skyrim for some reason, which wasn’t the most amazing experience. Maybe I would like it with a mouse and keyboard better? I will probably return to it at some point, but since it is the free game for the month through PlayStation Plus I wanted to at least give it a shot.
The game that I spent most of my evening playing was Ghost of Tsushima. I had paused my play through in part because I knew I would be getting a PlayStation 5 at some point. I am very happy to report that I was able to load my saved game from the PS4 without much issue. It did seem to have to go through some sort of a patch or conversion process. As soon as I booted the game up and attempted to load my saved game, a 30 minute download started. Once that finished however the game is working as expected. The load times are considerably more than everything else I have played with, so I am hoping that we get some sort of an optimization patch for the PS5.
All told, I am very happy to have my PS5. More than anything I am think I am happiest to not have to keep checking stock and following links in an attempt to snag one. I went through that with the Switch and I think in part why I was so adamant on trying to get a preorder is so that I wouldn’t have to go through it again with the PS5. Unfortunately I am still checking for those links in an attempt to help the friends that were not so lucky.
Hey friends, I am doing okay. Like barely okay at times but still mostly functional. The situation with my mom is significantly worse than I realized going into this, so I am going to be spending a lot of my mental and emotional energies there. My Dad however seems to have gone through surgery just fine and is recovering quickly. It is predicted that he is going to be released and I will be going over to the town he is in to pick him up. The challenge however is that I will not be returning him to the home I grew up in, but instead this other house that my family has used as swap space. My ancestral home is a bit of a death trap, and there simply isn’t enough time to get it prepared for someone that just had hip surgery.
So all of that is super fucking stressful and as a result my blog entries are going to be real sporadic for awhile. My folks live 40 minutes away and I am spending a lot of my time driving over there to check in on things. Today I am heading back because there are a whole slew of things that have to get done before 10 am… when I am apparently needed at my aunts house (the swap space) to accept delivery of one of those stand up chairs. Which means I need to get off the computer, pack up the dishes that I took home to wash and the laundry that I took home to wash and get on the road.
I hope you are all doing fine. I am also riddled with anxiety about the turn out of the election. I voted in person yesterday and that was its own nightmare fuel. Statistically I was sitting in a room with likely a dozen or so folks with Covid-19 and mask usage was non-compulsory and social distancing was nigh impossible. I am scared about now going and being around my aging folks… but they need help in a way that I cannot deliver remotely. Up until this point I have pretty much been in serious quarantine with every little interaction with the outside world. Here is hoping that I did in fact manage to make it through yesterday without exposure.
Keep me and my family in your thoughts because I have a feeling we will need it. I wanted to write something this morning since I really hate having missed yesterday. All that said… the blog is going to slip for awhile and for that I am sorry.
I remember when Uplay+ was first announced… I threw it some serious sideeye. Why would anyone pay for a subscription service to play games that regularly go on seriously deep discount sales? Now I stand on the precipice of partaking of it myself and have a slightly different perspective. At that point there really wasn’t much that I wanted to play from UbiSoft that I did not already own, or could not purchase easily. Now we are in a time of gold and ultimate edition games that double the price of entry if you so choose to partake, and also on the cusp of a banner sequence of game releases from the studio.
Over the coming months I want to play the following:
Watch Dogs Legion – Available Today – $120 for the Ultimate Edition
Asssassin’s Creed Valhalla – November 10th – $120 for the Ultimate Edition
Immortals Fenyx Rising – December 3rd – $100 for the Gold Edition
Farcry 6 – February 18th – $120 for the ultimate edition
My natural instinct tends to be to go for that ultimate edition so that I don’t have buyers remorse later when there is some shiny doodad or thingamabob that I don’t have access to. I know it is a bad habit and a first world problem but it is a thing for me at least. Were I to stack up all of those games in the highest version I would be dropping $460 over the course of the next several months… or to put that into perspective almost the cost of a RTX 3070 graphics card.
This morning I stared down the barrel of the Uplay page trying to decide what I wanted to do. I want to play Watch Dog Legions, but did I want to go ahead and just purchase it outright or pay $15 to start a Uplay+ subscription. Even if I went for the Vanilla versions of all four games I listed that adds up to $240 and an entire year of Uplay+ is $180. Yes I realize in the second scenario I don’t own any of the games but my current running theory is that I subscribe for a few months, get my enjoyment out of the titles and then if for some reason I actually care enough about one of the games to own it… I pick it up later when Ubisoft has their deep discount sales like they often do aligned with Steam sales.
What I have realized is that I don’t return to single player games that often. Sure I have played copious amounts of Fallout and Elder Scrolls games… but I think they might be the exception rather than the rule. I played Assassin’s Creed Origins hard and heavy for a good while and then walked away from it seemingly never to return. While I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Witcher 3, that game was intensive enough that I can’t see myself actually returning to it again. The modern open world game requires so much of you, that once the story is played out… I think it just becomes a challenge to really revisit it. Sure I loved my revisit of Horizon Zero Dawn recently, but that was a case of me experiencing the game through fresh eyes of playing with my chosen platform of Keyboard and Mouse.
I’ve been on the digital download bandwagon for a decade now, and I am starting to wonder if games are shifting around for me much like Movies and Music did. I no longer care about owning any music. What I care about is having access to music when I choose play it and as a result I pay for a streaming subscription. Similarly I don’t care about owning movies, because it is so rare that I will ever sit down and re-watch one. What I care instead is having access to them on the rare occasion that I want to… and for that I also have streaming services. Maybe I have evolved to a point of caring deeply about a small number of games, but wanting access to others just for the purpose of playing them and then dropping them by the wayside.
There we have it… Uplay+ got me and I am now downloading Watch Dog Legions off the subscription plan. I need to set myself a reminder to cancel the service in March, because I can’t really see this being something I want to keep going permanently. It isn’t so much that I cannot afford to buy these games piecemeal over the next several months… but more a case that I didn’t really want to. I didn’t want to shell out that much money in one lump sum. We will see how well this goes and what hidden pitfalls there might be, and I will of course report back how it is going. Anyone else suddenly find the subscription option for UbiSoft significantly more tantalizing with the sequence of releases on the horizon? Maybe I will actually sit down and play through some of the Anno games that I have never touched now that I have access to them all.
