Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
We start with a topic we did not get to last week and talk about the modern Digimon Card game. From there we talk about Fallout 76 and Thalen beginning the game, along with the various improvements that have happened over the years. We talk very briefly and very spoiler free about how good She-Hulk was. Kodra talks a bit about Taiji and its more approachable and less pretentious version of The Witness. Bel talks a bit about the Torchlight Infinite Open Beta and how you can actually use keybinds now. Ash talks about the card game roguelike Roguebook, and while Richard Garfield was involved it is nothing like Magic. Tam talks about how good the Leagues of Votann are and then dives into a topic about finding his white whale and how dumb limited availability items are.
I am still very much in a holding pattern until the drop of the New World patch on the 18th, but I’ve also gotten rather invested in Cyberpunk 2077 again. I did not realize the amount of content that I had never seen on my original playthrough and subsequent jaunts back into the game. I am not sure what has changed but it seems to be much easier to find side missions as they are now showing up on my minimap. Maybe this was always a thing that existed and I just was too engaged in the story to notice it, but as I start to wind down the main story elements… the game seems to be presenting more and more side content to consume me.
Right now I am in this mode of farming down the blue exclamation points on the map, which represent gigs from fixers. As I complete a set, another set will show up… and I am guessing this is ultimately how you can reach those lofty numbers being tracked on each of the fixers. I never understood how you could run 22 missions for Wakako for example, because I never seemed to get that many. I must have simply missed doing enough side quests to “uncloak” the next set of missions. Last night for example I stumbled onto one where I helped my Aldecado buds on a deal gone south and through sheer intimidation kept it from ending up in bloodshed. I think at launch there were a lot of glitchy behaviors that I just took for granted as the game rolled out in an unpolished state, and maybe assumed those mission counters were bugged as well.
The single greatest change for me personally however remains the wardrobe. I cannot fully explain how much this improves my play experience to be running around the world as a cool-looking “V” rather than one that looks like a burning-crusade-era fury warrior. I shifted up my style last night as I had acquired a few new items and I am very on board with this. I love the jacket with the bumpy spikey bits. Last night I picked up Johnny’s pants which are sorta copper colored and go nicely with the blue accents on the jacket and the boots. One cool feature is there is a menu open when you go to a clothing vendor that will show you appearances that you have not collected yet.
I’ve dabbled with a few mods and I think I am at the point where I either need to stop using them or try and figure out how to make them work properly. Nexus Mods and Vortex are not quite ready for primetime when it comes to Cyberpunk 2077, and it does not do a good job of making sure you have prerequisites installed. It all started because I wanted to try using the flying cars mod showcased in the above video… and the failed state that the mod was installed in caused another quest involving stealing a car to completely bug out last night. After pulling my hair out and reloading past saves I finally disabled a slew of mods and realized those were the problem. Normally I am extremely pro-mods in games, but maybe wait until the vortex client does a reasonable job of sorting things out for you before dabbling in Cyberpunk modding.
All said I figure I will probably be playing Cyberpunk 2077 right up until the point that I do my reroll in New World. This game has rapidly joined a list of “favorite games” for screwing around in when nothing else quite sounds right. For years I have booted up Skyrim, Fallout New Vegas, or more recently Witcher 3 when I had a doldrum in gaming. Cyberpunk has the same sort of feel for me, of letting me roam aimlessly until something catches my eye… and they focus in on questing until I get distracted again. I really WANT Red Dead Redemption II to be that sort of game as well, and in theory, it should be… but the Rockstar brand of open-world questing just chafes me. It is too on rails and too focused on specific objectives, and doesn’t let me roam off the path easy enough. I need a game that lets me follow my whims, which reminds me the next time I go into the doldrums… I am probably going to revisit Dying Light 2.
Hopefully, you are all having a most excellent week out there. What games do you find yourself returning to over and over when you don’t have another game in mind? Drop me a line below in the comments.
Good Morning Friends! I hope you all had a most excellent weekend. This weekend was more dedicated to watching films than to playing much in the way of games. I kept up my daily Tower of Fantasy and New World activity and spent quite a bit more time in Night City but the key activities centered around three movies that I had been looking forward to watching. As a result, most of this post is going to be me trying to give my best spoiler-free impressions of each.
Hellraiser (2022) – Hulu
I have to admit that going into this movie I was deeply confused as to what it actually was. I thought it was a series and I thought it was intended to be a reboot of the franchise. In truth, it is neither of these things. Instead of a series, we are treated to a full-length movie, and honestly one of the better ones so far in the Hellraiser franchise. Essentially for me, the first three films in the original series are pretty good, with the third one being more a matter of taste than the first two. While I enjoyed Hellraiser Bloodlines because it felt like it book ended the story, it is also a deeply subjective thing and most people think it was the beginning of the end. Everything that came after was released directly to home video and can largely be skipped unless you are a glutton for punishment… but it might be more enjoyable to ACTUALLY summon the Cenobites than to watch those films.
This Hulu Hellraiser does a great job of walking a very narrow path between being completely new and unique… while still largely being complimentary to everything that came before it. Nothing in the movie outright contradicts the things that we already knew, and more than anything just fleshes out and expands the universe. The new designs for Pinhead and the other Cenobites are exquisite, and I am extremely obsessed with the one that is apparently being referred to as the Weeper. Jamie Clayton does an excellent job of playing Pinhead and they seem way more like “Dark Angels” than the original designs. If you were a big fan of the original, and especially the extended lore that surrounded them… then I think you will probably enjoy yourself as well.
Werewolf by Night (2022) – Disney Plus
I’ve been looking forward to this movie for so long and more than anything… the Werewolf by Night character joining the MCU. I think we are likely setting ourselves up for maybe a Dark Avengers at some point in the future. I loved these comics as a kid because like I talked about on Friday… the movie Lost Boys and my desire to find the comics in that film… led me down a rabbit hole of diving into all of the Marvel horror comics. The film itself is this delightful noir affair that harkens back to the “Universal Monsters” series of black-and-white films. It also has some pretty great comedic moments and introduces another of my favorite characters the monster that is being hunted.
I am really hesitant to go into much more detail because I don’t want to spoil anything, but I have a feeling that everyone is going to love Ted.
Day Shift (2022) – Netflix
To be completely honest, after the first two… Day Shift is a bit of a drop in quality. That is not to say it is not an extremely enjoyable movie, but it just hits differently. The Day Shift is essentially a buddy cop meets modern vampire hunter story. The positive is you get to see Snoop and Jamie Foxx as vampire hunters. The negative is the vampires themselves are not terribly interesting. There are elements of the film that feel like they have been borrowed from simply better stories. Again I am not bashing the film because I enjoyed it quite a bit, just trying to temper your expectations. The big takeaway from this film is that I really want to see Snoop in a Western as a gunslinger-type character. Jamie Foxx is a talented enough actor that he can make even the most milquetoast story entertaining to watch. Had this movie come out in the 90s, we would have loved it because it feels like a product of that cinematic generation.
Other than that I am winding my way down toward the end of this Cyberpunk playthrough. I am stalling out the main story so I can spend more time in each of the neighborhoods knocking out side quests. there is a ton of content that I never saw in my first playthrough, in part because I was hooked on the main narrative path and wanted to see it through to the conclusion. Now that I know the story and several of the alternate endings… I can take my time and spend more time just engaging with the streets and what they have to offer. There are quests that I have not found yet that I remember fondly, but cannot remember what triggered them. Essentially questing away in Night City has been a delightful diversion while waiting on the New World patch drop coming up on the 18th.
Featuring: Ammosart, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Thalen
We talk about the controversy burning through the Magic the Gathering community of Wizards selling random boosters of unplayable proxies for $250 a pop. We talk a bit about how this has triggered condemnation from players and the finance community. From there Grace talks a bit about the Halloween event going on in Ooblets and the costumes you can earn by playing. Kodra talks about how maybe Mario Odyssey is a bridge too far regarding control scheme complexity for speed run tactics. We finally have a date for the New World Brimstone Sands patch release and we talk a bit about our plans, and how Amazon is seemingly bungling things again by not having the “Fresh Start” servers ready until November. We talk a little bit about video game redemption stories and how the tales of FFXIV and No Man’s Sky are seemingly way more common than they used to be. Finally, we dive into a discussion about Horror Films brought on by Bel’s recent series of top ten lists by sub-genre.
