Consoles

22 entries. 26,324 words.

November, 2013

• Side Note On New Consoles. 2013-11-16 1:27 PM.
  • Consoles
  
  This isn’t MMO related, but here’s a couple cents on the new consoles. I have a PS3 Slim so I don’t expect I’ll be getting a PS4 until developers stop making games for the PS3. However, since I’ve never owned an Xbox, I will probably get an Xbox One in the somewhat near future, possibly after Christmas, at which time I will also have to get a TV to connect it to. :) 73 words.

June, 2018

• E3 – Square Enix, Ubisoft, Sony. 2018-06-13 2:30 PM.
  • Consoles
  • Musings
  
  I watched the Square Enix showcase but it left little impression on me. Unlike seemingly everyone else, though, I liked that it was just a series of trailers and videos, and not one of those awkward live presentations in front of a confused audience. I just feel like in the year 2018, we should have evolved beyond the 90s-Steve Jobs-cult-of-personality-walking-around-on-stage phase of our lives. Although the guy from Bethesda talking about Fallout 76 actually was pretty entertaining. I’ll make one exception for him I guess, if I could remember his name. Everybody else sounded, though, like a corporate robot talking about PowerPoint slides, graphs, and charts, and sucked every bit of fun out of the games they were supposed to be excited about, because it’s so, so obvious that it’s just numbers on a spreadsheet to them. 1,499 words.

September, 2018

• Telltale and Last Of Us. 2018-09-22 9:30 PM.
  • Consoles
  • RPG
  • Single-Player
  
  So I guess I’ll write something about games this time. The eye continues to improve, and focusing on nearby things gets a little bit better each day. (Writing this post has been the easiest so far.) There’s still a slight bit of soreness there which crops up in unexpected ways. Sometimes it hurts when I yawn or squeeze my eye shut, and sometimes it feels like there’s something like a hair stuck in the eye. Usually some Tylenol fixes it. But it doesn’t interfere with my activity at all. Today I mowed and drove to the grocery store and back (I was cleared for driving the next day, actually). 642 words.

October, 2018

• Games Played – September 2018. 2018-10-01 2:30 PM.
  • Consoles
  • Progression Report
  • Roundup
  • RPG
  
  Even with a week and a half of down time from cataract surgery, I still managed to play a few games this past month. The Witcher (Enhanced Edition), 39 hours. This is what I spent most of my gaming time doing after World of Warcraft and before surgery, and a little bit afterward to finish up the story. This is the first time I’ve finished the whole game. It got kind of weird at the end. Dragon Age: Inquisition, 5 hours. I restarted this a number of times with different classes, trying to find something to play after WoW. But it didn’t stick (again). World of Warcraft, 5 hours. The last bit before I lost interest. I don’t think I logged in for the last week of my subscription time. See you in two years for the next expansion, WoW! One problem with console gaming is that I don’t know where to find statistical data showing how much I played on the PS4. But I would guess I played 6 or 7 hours of The Last of Us (Remastered) this month. 296 words.
• Not Dead Yet – The Inactivity Report. 2018-10-18 3:36 PM.
  • Consoles
  • Musings
  
  Horizon Zero Dawn, the only thing I’ve played in the last week. I was trying yet again to think of something interesting to write, when I saw Roger talking about Blaugust this morning, which led me to Gevlon talking about Blaugust, where I found out that I’m no longer an active blogger. I mean, sure, I haven’t posted in a week, whereas I normally try to post something once or twice a week. But man, talk about a tough room. 1,201 words.
• The Last Of Us, YouTube, and a Ripsaw. 2018-10-22 9:44 PM.
  • Consoles
  • Single-Player
  • Videos
  
  I just realized this image is pretty similar to the Horizon Zero Dawn image in my last post. I mentioned that I had abandoned The Last Of Us and gotten into Horizon Zero Dawn, so of course, right after that, I abandoned Horizon Zero Dawn and got back into The Last Of Us. 1,577 words.

November, 2018

• Games Played – October 2018. 2018-11-05 3:00 PM.
  • Consoles
  • MMORPG
  
  Very old GW2 shot from my media library because my back hurts too much to sit at my PC to find a new one, and this post has been sitting here for a week waiting to post and I’m tired of waiting. 304 words.

March, 2019

• Google Stadia Announcement. 2019-03-20 2:30 PM.
  • Consoles
  • Development
  • Musings
  
  Google announced a new gaming “platform” curiously named Stadia. It’s a lot of things, but in simple terms I’d call it a cloud gaming service, similar to that OnLive service that died a horrible death some time ago. But it’s more than that. On first glance, I’d say it has about as much chance of long-term success as OnLive did. It sounds like a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. But it does have a few things going for it. 497 words.

June, 2019

• Games Played – May 2019. 2019-06-03 11:43 AM.
  • Consoles
  • Roundup
  
  This should be a pretty short list. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, 53 hours. I finished my first playthrough and started NG+. I got bored about halfway through NG+ though. 7 Days To Die, 2 hours. I don’t remember why I played this. I think I might have been playing it while listening to Critical Role early in the month. I have thoughts about the newest version but I can’t remember what they are at the moment. I got bored in Sekiro NG+ because the only thing that’s different the second time around is the new satisfaction of roflstomping all the bosses now that you know what you’re doing. Even carrying the Bell Demon around, NG+ is laughably easy thanks to the previous 75 hours of training. 334 words.
• Bloodborne Impressions (PS4). 2019-06-28 2:12 PM.
  • Consoles
  • Reviews
  • RPG
  
  Bloodborne: It’s fantastic. I’m not even finished yet and it clearly deserves to go into my entirely fictional All-Time Hall of Fame Game Library. That’s it. That’s my impressions. If you like this kind of game, it’s a must-play. (If you don’t, then you probably won’t like it, because it is the quintessential version of this kind of game, the template from which all others of this kind of game are poorly copied.) 1,767 words.

July, 2019

• Finished Bloodborne, Resumed Demon’s Souls. 2019-07-23 2:45 PM.
  • Consoles
  • Musings
  • RPG
  
  It’s raining this morning, which is always a bummer of a way to start the day. Even my dog and cat don’t want to do anything on rainy mornings. I thought I would mention something about games on this gaming blog for a change. I don’t know if I ever mentioned that I finished playing Bloodborne on the PS4. I’m uploading the video series now. (I did a much better job with thumbnails and metadata than I did with Sekiro.) I was pleased to find that my thumb performed much better than I anticipated by the end. I could maintain playing on a controller for an hour or so every day without any significant loss in hand functionality for the rest of my non-gaming activities throughout the day. 809 words.

October, 2019

• The Last Of Us Remastered Completed (PS4). 2019-10-28 12:09 AM.
  • Consoles
  • Single-Player
  
  The last time I wrote about The Last Of Us, I said, “I think I’m about 3/4 finished. I’ll probably get through the rest of it this weekend.” That was over a year ago. Red Dead Infected I wasn’t planning to play it again. I mentioned that I just bought The Division 2 on the PS4 because it runs better on console than it does on my PC. I’ve been playing that now and then, trying to catch back up to where I left off in the PC free weekend. 749 words.

November, 2019

• Death Stranding Impressions (PS4). 2019-11-10 8:44 PM.
  • Consoles
  
  I’ve heard about Death Stranding for years, but I’ve never had any idea what kind of game it is. Shortly after the game begins. I tried to read some reviews, but I simply couldn’t stand to visit any of the major games journalism web sites to read them. Every game web site is completely obscured by ads that cover almost 75% of the screen, blinking at you, playing videos at you, whatever. The text is buried beneath an avalanche of constantly-shifting “reactive” crap. My laptop fan starts blowing full speed whenever I try to load these pages. It’s just godawful. 1,245 words.

December, 2019

• The Death Stranding Experience – Prologue. 2019-12-30 5:01 PM.
  • Consoles
  • Musings
  
  I finished the story of Death Stranding over the weekend. It took almost 80 hours over the course of two months. I left a large number of optional tasks unfinished, but I’m hoping to get back and do them at some point. It’s definitely the game of the year for me. These 80 hours have been quite an experience. I’m very thankful that I’ve been able to play a AAA game with so much originality, because frankly I didn’t think I would ever see one again in my lifetime. Major titles have become such homogenized reskins of previous successful games that I feel like I’ve been playing the same game over and over again throughout the 2010s. But that’s definitely not the case with Death Stranding. Love it or hate it (and there are good reasons for both), it’s impossible to deny it’s different. There have been ups and downs, good parts and bad parts, but it’s been a very unique ride. I’ve never played a game like it in my entire life, that I can remember. 2,943 words.

January, 2020

• The Death Stranding Experience – Episode 1. 2020-01-01 3:40 PM.
  • Consoles
  • Musings
  
  Previously on The Death Stranding Experience: The Prologue. As we roll into the second hour of the game, you may have noticed I haven’t talked about Death Stranding gameplay very much yet. That’s because, in the first couple of hours of Death Stranding, there isn’t very much gameplay. It’s extremely cut scene-heavy. (It becomes cut scene-heavy at the end as well.) It’s one of the game’s criticisms, though I personally found the cut scenes riveting so I didn’t mind at all. 2,747 words.
• The Death Stranding Experience – Episode 2. 2020-01-04 3:38 PM.
  • Consoles
  • Musings
  
  I had designs on writing at least something about all fifteen episodes of Death Stranding, but I’m getting tired of this already. The problem is that there is so much to go over, especially at the beginning and at the end. After the last post, I learned what “BT” stands for: Beached Things. That explains everything, right? Some of the terminology in this game feels like translation mistakes that they just stuck with and doubled down on. 1,975 words.
• The Death Stranding Experience – Episodes 3-8. 2020-01-12 11:39 PM.
  • Consoles
  • Musings
  
  Previously: Episode 2. As I’ve moved on to playing the next game in my list, which happens to be Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, a game whose story also requires a lot of processing, I’ve sort of lost interest in processing Death Stranding in writing. But I shall valiantly try to press on and remember some key points. This post covers Episodes 3 through 8, which represents the vast majority of the player’s time spent in the game. For me, getting through to the end of Episode 8 consumed about 70 out of the 80 hours I spent in the game. The final hours of the game is incredibly story-heavy, but I’ll get into that later. 2,027 words.

July, 2020

• The Last Of Us Part II (No Spoilers). 2020-07-01 1:41 AM.
  • Consoles
  
  Two things happened to derail my Assassin’s Creed franchise backlog playthrough: First, controversy surrounding the Ubisoft company (what else is new) which I assume is common knowledge by now. Though I personally do not have any difficulty distinguishing art from artists (or executives), I figured I should shut the hell up about Assassin’s Creed games for a while. Second, The Last Of Us Part II launched on the Playstation 4. 603 words.
• The Last Of Us Part II Anti-Criticisms (Spoilers). 2020-07-02 3:17 PM.
  • Consoles
  
  There are massive spoilers for the game below. Don’t read this unless you’ve finished the game through to the credits. Having finished the game, I’m only just now starting to see all the articles and videos containing let’s charitably call them “criticisms” about The Last Of Us Part II. There are plenty of things about the game to legitimately criticize and discuss (sadly I have no knowledge of where honest discussions of video games can occur with relative safety on the Internet anymore, or in real life for that matter), but I’m seeing a preponderance of what I’ll charitably call “shallow interpretations” of the game. So I feel like I have no choice but to try to push a little bit of what I’ll charitably call moderately reasonable or at least alternate viewpoints onto the Internet to balance the scales a little bit. 2,693 words.

October, 2020

• Horizon Zero Dawn (PS4). 2020-10-02 3:45 PM.
  • Consoles
  • RPG
  • Single-Player
  
  I would have sworn that I’d written a post about Horizon Zero Dawn at some point in the past two years, but apparently I haven’t. So here it is. In 2017, everyone lost their minds over Horizon Zero Dawn, a game which was a PS4 exclusive at the time. I thought it looked cool, but I couldn’t play it. In 2018, I bought a PS4 Pro on sale, and Horizon Zero Dawn was one of the exclusive titles that I intended to play on it (along with Bloodborne and a slew of Naughty Dog games). I got a “complete” edition of the game for some $20. 1,253 words.
• Resident Evil 3 Demo. 2020-10-19 10:43 PM.
  • Blog
  • Consoles
  • Videos
  
  I tried out the Resident Evil 3 remake demo on the PS4 the other day. It looks nice, but the gameplay is brutal. It takes three headshots to kill a zombie, and about a dozen non-headshots if your aim is as bad as mine, so you run out of bullets in about 10 seconds flat, and then have to either run away or use the knife. The knife is not a very effective weapon. 530 words.

January, 2021

• Endgame Viable 2020 Awards. 2021-01-11 8:00 AM.
  • Consoles
  • Roundup
  • Steam
  
  I only bought one new game in 2020 so it will be very easy to pick my own personal Game of the Year for 2020. But I also talk about a few other noteworthy games I played during the year. 560 words.