Welcome to the BigNerdSam Media Thread for 2024, mirrored from my Twitter and BlueSky pages. Unlike the two platforms, the statements here will be as in-depth as I can manage against massive time gaps and the differences between tweeting on the phone and blogging on a keyboard.
Incidentally 2024 is now the introduction of me using the 1992 Gamepro Scoring System instead of a single 10-point scale. None of these ratings have the facade or implication of professionalism, this is all in good fun.
Please enjoy my mid taste.
Too sick and tired to use the full Gamepro PSD for the ratings so take my comfort game rating of 🙂👍 from an Image search.
There's not a lot of combat mechanics and picking things up is too high-risk for me, so this is just a comfort game for me. END TWEET
Yeah I wrote that... three days before writing this now and I am now on the last recovery from one hell of a flu. The first sentence is invalid now since I made the proper Gamepro card, so it gets the strikethroughs.
I got the platinum trophy in this because, after years of talking about how good the original PS Vita version of Gravity Rush was, I felt obligated to get the platinum in the PS4 version. It was a really fun time, my only real problem with the game is that, as much as it wanted to have combat, the combat itself is simple and braindead to the point of giving me the feeling of wishing I could just one-hit-kill smaller enemies instead of engaging with them.
I've heard so much about this game and never thought to look right at it, and now that I've played it I strongly suggest playing it.
The worst it got was that I needed a guide to figure out what I needed to do to do damage to the final boss. END TWEET
I started the game up and fully expected to play like a late Mana or a proto-Kingdom Hearts, instead I got a Goemon game where I had to consider what time it was before doing the next step in the questline or if it was the day of the week where the Pawn Shop was closed. I really enjoyed this game and I'm standing by what I wrote in the Gamepro Card: Square-Enix is criminals until they put this game out on literally any modern platform. I'm just stuck seething until either Playstation puts out a PS1 port of the game or Square-Enix does a straight upscale port like Chrono Cross or Final Fantasy VIII.
You'd think that they would be more mindful about the message, but no just put the Suicide Hotline number on the boot screen and post the LTG clip. END TWEET
I'm no expert on discussing suicide, I still laugh at the Filthy Frank clip about it, but I'm pretty sure that there are more appropriate messages than what this game and The Medium try to share using this very sensitive topic. Like yeah, Silent Hill 2 has a suicide ending, but it handles driving a whole car into a lake with more grace than fetishizing artists dying young.
Prior to this my only experience with Ghost in the Shell was Stand Alone Complex.
That was a really nice watch, though I guess I'm immune to the scale of the story's existential, transhumanist navel-gazing at this point. Cool cyber-gore though. END TWEET
I changed up the Gamepro Card to be used for movies. I might change some if I read share a manga on here. Anyways: Ghost in the Shell was a fun watch for when it's past midnight and you can't sleep because of a combined Gout flare and congested head cold while all of your devices are out of battery. I don't have a whole lot else to say that can't be gleamed from what everyone has ever said about Ghost in the Shell.
Watching some RPG streamers made me want to play this game again, except I know better than to engage with FF2 honestly: I farmed for Toad and ground that spell until everyone had Genji Gear and dual Masamunes.
Also finally beat Soul of Rebirth. END TWEET
Final Fantasy II's leveling system was designed similarly to how leveling works in a Bethesda game: the more Firion uses swords the more hits he will be able to do with them. The reason I find you do not do purely scale spells and attacks like this is because I spent most of my time with FF2 holding down fast forward and using Cursor Memory to cast attack, healing, and debuff spells on my party over and over again until they were capped out and their stats were too high to fear anything less than the final boss, which was still a problem even with my game breaking.
So when I watch a travel doc/glorified vlog, I kind of expect there to be a little bit more travel than driving to a retro shop and buying a bunch of games.
Instead just look at a collection, get some shallow trivia, and dread the fate of that dog. END TWEET
I hate this thing that insultingly insinuates that it is a film. You should watch it. This is not a travel vlog like the tweets claimed, this guy doesn't even travel. He tried to get a guy in Florida to send a game to him. Dread the fate of that dog with me.
Nintendo Quest is a biopic of a toy collector who's only understanding of value is the average value of an item's ebay listing. I want to trap him in an evil version of Game Center CX where he needs to beat every game he collected in this sham of a quest. This hate is ascending into a level where I need to stop thinking about this and get into Tekken.
A friend is in a Tekken hole and I was stunned to learn that this was on a 3DS Tekken game with full 3D.
Who crammed Tekken into someone trying to recall Project A-Ko on Ambien? Someone clearly had a script that got hastily rewritten in one night. END TWEET
So this is more of a film than Nintendo Quest was. There is a plot and characters.
Don't watch it. It was a waste of time and a waste of a Project A-Ko Fanfic. The movie starts with a Tekken story scene, then it goes off the rails into a Project A-Ko/Sukeban Deca story, then it falls into an anime highschool romcom before remembering that it's a Tekken story, then it becomes a Highschool Anime again, then it rushes a Tekken ending like the final is due in half an hour.
Why was Nina Williams even there????
I needed to keep the Vanillaware itch fed after that 5 hour Unicorn Overlord demo.
A beautiful game that I played on the Hard Mode, meaning I had to fight very aggressive and evasive enemies that could dizzy you from off-screen.
Great game. END TWEET
To my understanding the PS4 version defaults to a modern game mode where enemies and bosses have more health, but normal attacks do not consume POW and you can combo through the game, while the Classic mode reverts to the original PS2 gameplay and health meters. Personally, I really like the feeling of comboing an enemy into the air and keeping it in the air until I get tired and wiff an input.
Also I had to know: I comboed a bear until the meter maxed out on 999 hits.
Anyways, Odin Sphere is a very beautiful game and it is greatly enhanced by knowing what Der Ring des Nibelungen is alongside the general premise of Ragnarok. To my knowledge the Pooka are not in the Wagner's play and I cannot watch a 16 hour long performance to check.
I've heard that audio of the Riddler yelling so much that, when I finally heard it, I just broke.
Really nice to have the movie transition of Batman the Vigilante into Batman the Hero. It would be really cool if we had this creative understanding on Superman. END TWEET
Again, this is a really good film as it plays up Batman going from straight-unhinged vigilante billionaire into Batman as a heroic figure managing to save people after getting played by the Riddler for a few hours. Also the contrast between decently modern computers to Gotham's archaic architecture, infrastructure, and tools is just really nice to see from an artistic standpoint.
The only things that didn't age well are some parts of Midgar arbitrarily deciding which way is up and the game wasting time while battles stream in.
Giving Barret Cover and Counter Attack materia is the funniest build I've seen, it kills entire bosses. END TWEET
So from here I realized that I have not updated the media thread in months, I've had a myriad of tasks I had to do and a depressive episode to conquer, but now I"m back with some writings.
I first played Final Fantasy VII's old, old, old PC version, barely remembered anytrhing, and only got back into it during all of the promotional leadup to Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. I have no intention of playing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, I just realized that I only remembered the events of Disc 1, the ending half of Disc 2, and Wutai. Incidentally I first tried to play the Nintendo Switch rerelease, but the UI uses such an ugly pixel smear to try and modernize the interface that I switched to emulating the PS1 original, someone on a Discord wanted to know if I was playing the retranslation and no I will defend the Woolsey Translations until we're speaking Al Bhed.
The original FF7 aged pretty well after Midgar, when I imagine the design team realized that they shouldn't tilt the cardinal directions of the D-Pad to fit whatever orientation the room is in. After that it was a long playthrough of "Oh, this was that event" and "wait isn't the Huge Materia questline just the Triforce Quest?" Incidentally i also used this playthrough to clear Fort Condor, what in the hell allowed them to put those flags when they did?
Since online for the 3DS is officially shut down (save for updates and Pokemon transfer apps) I went through some old games I just never beat and played through Fairune.
I kind of expected bump combat and not crash-through and kill while solving a cool puzzle. END TWEET
So Fairune kind of has bump combat, the way it works according to my doodle memory is that you collide with an enemy and depending on your level the enemy will take damage and you will lose health if its level is equal to or greater than yours. In reality Fairune is a top-down adventure game where you solve item puzzles until the game ends in a shmup boss like DMC 1. It's very charming and I've been meaning to pick up its proper rerelease.
I managed to beat Fairune 1 without looking up a guide, but I needed a guide for Fairune 2 because the maps are just so big and I struggled to find the two puzzle tiles I missed the environmental hints to.
I'm gonna need to pick up more Skipmore games though. END TWEET
Fairune 2 has more zones and bigger maps, meaning it became much easier to just get lost in it while also appreciating some art design features like how the linear paths of the water world still look like the shallow ruins of a temple or the monster shrines almost looking like ancient shrines and temples celebrating what I think I remember being called a "maramo". It's a really nice game and I can recommend it and possibly the other games Skipmore has put out: it's simple but charming.
I bumbled into this expecting 3DS launch slop and got one of the last good racing games.
There are some portable game problems: the lead car in late races will wind up 1/2 the track ahead and everyone spreads out super-wide because of 3DS rendering limits. END TWEET
I still turn this game on months later just to have a casual race and drift around. Ridge Racer 3D is really great, we need Ridge Racer to come back, Ridge Racer 8 may be the video game that saves the industry or condemns mankind to a great extinction event.
"Hey Sam, we need to test this controller setup."
"Oh, okay, what do we have?"
"Well Strider 2 is right there."
"Is Strider 2 two-player?"
"Who cares, it's Strider 2." [statement was complimentary]END TWEET
So I couldn't get into Strider 2 at first because it just felt much looser than I expected from an arcade platformer, but playing it beside a friend made me realize that the ideal way to play Strider 2 is to just rush through it while mashing attack to slice apart every single enemy I come across. Honestly my least favorite enemy to deal with was the gravity orb because it changed which way was up and down on the D-pad, I sure hope that thing doesn't show up in another Strider game, I say updating this page after playing Strider 2014.
Watching a retro streamer play DS games when I see this banger.
Half the missions are completed by launching my car in the air, launch the other cars so high in the air they explode, or by bowling with a bulldozer.
We need to go back. END TWEET
You need to understand, this game is supreme jank and it rocks it simply from what is obviously a programmer messing up the physics and being told "no this saves the project" and keeping it in. This game did not do well because it was a racing game on the Nintendo DS and the cars steer either not at all or so tight it can be a tourniquet, drifting in faster cars often resulting in the car turning into a tumble dryer. This game gets a maxed out fun ranking because the sheer chaos of the broken physics is fed by the cars violently exploding so hard it sends various props in the level flying into outerspace.
Incidentally this game has an inconsistent crash on the Mountain map if you're loading from an SD card: do not ask how I know that, you know how I know that.
Hey man I like being able to take my time and enjoy Tuliyollal until the Catastrophies occur. Lemme Chill in Brazil.
Also Viper just clicks in my brain and Pictomancer's gonna need a chart.
AL BHED: E ruba Zalrd'c eh YnlyteuhEND TWEET
Since FFXIV is an MMO, I've been playing this game for days since its soft launch in late June and official release in July. I have some more things to say about the current state of the game.
First off: Wuk Lamat is a good character, she has a nice arc, she interacts with the player character and the rest of the cast pretty well even if the story pushes them back into effectively being commentators. I'm glad that when they talked about criticisms about FFXIV Dawntrail Creative Unit III's big takeaway was "people did not like that the scions had such a passive role and we understand." Personally I wish we got more Erenville content and more Estinien being a tourist.
Design-wise I like how much more active some of the fights are though I keep dying to the Level 95 Duty's first boss when I do a melee DPS burst because I forget that it has a danmaku attack. Taking my time leveling all of the other jobs I feel like a lot of jobs are lacking tangible progression before their Level 100 actions like Paladin, Red Mage, White mage, and Scholar. Dungeonwise I kinda wish that they were more willing to play with more unique and potentially annoying dungeon mechanics, I recently ran the updated Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak and not having to do the keys and explosive pots down the poison hallway really took away from the duty's atmosphere as a dungeon. Now the most unique thing about some dungeons is that the level 99 duty's very start has a 80% deathrate from either a tank forgetting their cooldowns or the healer making a mistake.
I was expecting a shooter with some FMV, I was not expecting the FMVs to be entirely voiced in English and Gamera to be an assist.
Kinda jank and its ending conditions are messed up, but it's a masterpiece.
I'm Gamera-pilled now. END TWEET
I wrote that and as of December 25th 2024, I still haven't taken the time to watch any Gamera films. I kind of tried while Dog Sitting that August but I was kinda deep in some 3DS RPGs. That said, this game is really fun to play but it has some minor jank: there's a level on a bike that you have to understand that you have to move in, but the range the bike can move in makes it unclear that you can dodge attacks with it. Also the ending conditions are based on game performance and you're definitely not getting the good ending unless you get really good at it, which is cool but I have things I really want to play.
You ever realize that you don't entirely understand a director you'ae spent hours listening to a video game director yeld about?
Yeah I honestly haven't watched Miike before this film so I wasn't ready for Ultra-Violence into Style into Film. END TWEET
You can imagine how big my smile was when I saw the Project Century trailer on The Game Awards and saw the crowbars and the sheer size and redness of the blood effects. I learned about this movie just because I saw it a few times on Shout Factory's Sonny Chiba marathon and they had to blur out several scenes of extreme violence and explicit sex. I can only hope that Project Century protagonist is just a composite of the Korean-Japanese character from this film.
Played with a friend.
This game got realny close to what I wanted it to be, but then someone said that it needed all of the graphics technologies and I just wanted it to run at 60.
Also it keeps going on and on it the silliest way it could. END TWEET
So you know how in Nioh 1 the Kusarigama is the weapon that wins fights because it was so overpowered without the game's durability systems stopping you from spamming it: because that's how Jedi Survivor's Blaster Stance feels. I guess that's the consequence of having so many strong stances and you can't shuffle between all of them like Dante from the Devil May Cry Series.
Also the twist into the finale is so obviously a last minute rewrite done to either stretch out the game or to clean up a character that got written out. I am not accepting Cal's excuses for what happened.
I had this sitting in my PlayStation for so long that I never realized that I own it and didn't just download it on PS+.
It's interesting, I don't like a Metroid-style Strider as much as a Linear Strider, but it has some juice.
EXCEPT FOR THE GRAVITY MECHANICS END TWEET
I understand putting movement on the analog stick because you had to go and set the four elemental powers to the D-pad, what I refuse to accept is making Strider Hiryu's movement on the Gravity Orbs camera-relative instead of character-relative made those fights a bigger pain than I would like and I still do not understand how I got the Speedrun trophy.
I was showing my friend the Castlevania Dominus Collection when he wanted to see Haunted Castle Revisited.
It's really fun and really pretty to look at.
If a child saw this at the arcade they would get Thrillhoused into The Next Dimension. END TWEET
So I wasn't all that big on arcade platformers, and I only intended to play this game with Keets for a bit and wound up playing the whole thing because I forgot that Haunted Castle was kidna short. There are pixel art things that takes the relatively plain look Haunted Castle has now and makes it a real treat to look at in 2024: especially the redone Dracula fight at the end.
As a fan of Aria that was not pleased with the change in art style I wrote off Dawn and was going to ignore it, but I needed to play it to understand it.
Dawn's fun, it just focuses on enemy skills too hard and leaves weapons behind. END TWEET
Dawn of Sorrow is very much a game where they anticipate you to play as a wizard instead of playing as a swordsman, going by my recollection the weapons were just not as good as the enemy skills or the magic you pick up as Soma in this one.
Also they really made a boss with fire attacks that laughs so frequently that he keeps clipping over himself like Flame Hyenard. How does this keep happening?
Literally picked this up because I saw a retro streamer play this and thought that it looked like a good game to pick up.
Honestly I'm stunned that there's no score attack mode, just versus mode.
... unless Versus Mode IS Score Attack... END BSKY-EET
Yeah I think I stopped posting to Twitter around here. I'm not checking, the website takes forever to load and eats like a fifth of my phone battery when I open it.
So the Punchuin is one of those really simple but fun games you would play on the library computers before the kid you beat to death with rocks gets Newgrounds blacklisted on the library computers for going to the 18+ pages. Now it's a fairly cheap indie game you pick up on Switch or PS5 and it still pretty nice but I can't not remember when this was a free flash game before Adobe became the enemy of humankind and I am going on a tangent let me switch over to the next game.
Man I really missed out when I just didn't pick these games up when they were new.
But also that enemy damage hike is genuinely insane, they go from minimal damage to 20% on bosses. I guess it's balanced against Charlotte's spell power. END BSKY-EET
I don't know what to tell you, I was just a Pokemon on DS kinda guy. Also Charlotte was my main for most of the game because, much like Quest 64, one of the best spells in the game is to drop a bunch of rocks on the enemies. Also I don't know how the Nintendo DS D-pad was for directional inputs, but Jonathan killing Dracula with the Flying Knee is great: all vampire killers should use martial arts.
I've been trying to play this for years because Shanoa is a cool design and the opening FMV is beautiful.
Turns out the whole game looks really good and the Dominus Collection rendering sprite rotation at hi-res makes it look incredible. END BSKY-EET
This is the game that the Castlevania Dominus Collection was made for: it is beautiful, the high resolution the Dominus Collection runs these games at makes the sprite rotations and polygons look excellent, and you can play it entirely on gamepad without needing to use the touch controls. I hope Konami calls up Artplay to have IGA's crew finally make Castlevania 1999, I need some more Castlevania and Inti Creates' Bloodstained Curse of the Moon games aren't what I want.
I took my time with this one, and by take my time I mean I spent several hours grinding for souls that I wound up not using.
Except Kicker Skeleton.
Kicker Skeleton is integral for all playthroughs of Aria of Sorrow, get that soul. END BSKY-EET
Aria of Sorrow is my favorite even though returning to pre-loadout switching and only two action buttons was weird. It's kind of funny to see one pushable box in the whole castle like that's going to be a mechanic and then you find several whole abilities that are just better upward movement. I don't have a whole lot to really say outside of how much I love Soma's animations and how they should have kept Ayami Kojima's art style for Dawn of Sorrow.
Man the art on characters and enemies along with the flip phone-core chiptunes did not give me a good impression.
Then I fell in a loop for several hours and realized "Oh this is actually a really cool and breakable action RPG." END BSKY-EET
So my first impression was shocked laughter that this is what came right before the enemy pixel art in Aria of Sorrow: the enemies and music all look and sound like they're being played on the Razr Flip Phone my sister had in the Xbox Original Years. It's still a really good game though, the environmental art really shines and outside of needing a guide to figure out where I was supposed to use all of the keys I found the combat system to be really fun. I just wish the Advance system was made for a higher resolution so that the rotating sprites looked better.
Not a great metroidvania, all the things and locations are arranged linearly with little reason to backtrack or cross through a previous location.
Still has some really fun fights and mechanics, except the knives have wall collision in Frozen Time. END BSKY-EET
I like bullet hells and they had some fun ideas for how to do platforming puzzles around Sakuya's time powers. Still, if you're looking for a Castlevania where you run back and forth between rooms scraping for secrets and trying new powers in old places that looked suspicious this isn't that: it's more of a classic-style Castlevania pretending to be a Metroidvania.
I need to get a Sakuya Fumo.
Man, they tried to interconnect things the best they could without fully understanding how/why Castlevania connected its zones.
Still fun to play another game that casts spells as strong as Charlotte in Portrait of Ruin. END BSKY-EET
Much like Portrait of Ruin I found myself only using weapons to pad out the cooldowns between my spells: this is a game for spell casting. This also suffers some of the same problem as Luna Nights where the map is very linear and built more around you navigating the stages in a set order rather than backtracking to find the new rooms, though it maintained a fun "use your abilities to best navigate this room" design.
I should watch Record of Lodoss War, I remember someone linking me some videos of the first episode, but this was years ago back when we had to use Real Player to watch blocky 244p video that took whole minutes to buffer from the local hard drive. Now where is my walker?
Wanted to play through it again just close enough to the HD-2D release so I can point at stuff and go wow.
Also have been meaning to play through the Super Famicom version since my last playthroughs were on mobile and Game Boy Color. END BSKY-EET
So some thoughts on the Super Famicom release of Dragon Quest III: The sprites are cool but Pachisi and Monster Arena weren't as nice as I thought they would be. Also this is where I finally put together that I could give my non-magic user the weapons that cast spells and use them as a secondary caster for enemy groups. Unfortunately this is also before I realized that the Sleepstick worked on bosses, but I'll talk about that when I get to the HD-2D Remake.
It was on sale so I finally grabbed it. Then I started trophy hunting on it and I hope that they make a sequel or expansion because it's near-peak Jet Set Radio vibes, just needs DJ Professor K telling me to burn the house down. END BSKY-EET
So you pick up this game and go "Oh it's going to be wacky gang wars with some cyborgs running around and all that" and then as early as the first open map you're being shown the most cyberpunk forms of existential horror, and then you get more of that Jet Set Radio attitude and vibes and this is Game of the Year for Last Year, shut up about Elden Ring.
As mentioned in a previous post I picked up the trilogy because they were on sale.
I don't know what I was expecting with a PS2 Launch game that's small enough to be packed onto a 700 MB Compact Disc, but I can say that I was expecting a good time.
Graphics get a 5 for glass. END BSKY-EET
I don't know if this was just how it was set up for the PS5 release, but I was honestly expecting jank tank controls and instead got fairly modern dual-analog controls with that really cool auto-aim where the gun moves towards the target closest to the reticle. Also I thought that TimeSplitters 1 would have a story, but instead it was an arcade "Pick up the Intelligence" type of shooter and the TimeSplitters in this one were laser zombies. I really enjoyed this one.
So I shot some barrels because there was a mission to shoot barrels and they leaked bootleg whiskey up until where I shot it, so I shot it again closer to the bottom and more whiskey came out. It was cool.
Difficulty ADV because that last level was timed to the last seconds. END BSKY-EET
So it's in this game where we're finally pointed at a TimeSplitter and told that they're langoliers with noodle limbs and somehow enough intelligence to use guns and build a time machine to time invade Earth. Also we have a story where Cortez jumps through the Time Vortex and Quantum Leaps into the bodies of the actual player characters with whole mission lists and cool things to do. I really enjoyed this one even though TimeSplitters 3 was more of the narrative experience I was expecting.
Also as I rambled in the Bskyeet, you shoot a barrel full of whiskey to drain it and it drains to the level it was last shot, and that's way cooler technology than whatever the think they're doing with raytracing, temporal anti-aliasing, and raytracing.
I did not mean to just chug the whole game in 4 hours, but I did.
Honestly the game was delightful and we can never be forgiven for what happened to Free Radical Design.
Also as someone that only just binged the games in 2024, TimeSplitters 2 is my favorite. END BSKY-EET
Yeah I turned this game on right after beating TimeSplitters 2 just to check out how it starts and it was so fun I just played the whole game. It's pretty short and sweet, but in a good way where you can tell that they weren't spinning their wheels and were trying to give you a good time before you hooked up your PS2 to your broadband internet.
Humankind can never be forgiven for what happened to TimeSplitters.
Combat is a whole lot less cooked than Judgment and the story events were driving me insane with spinning its wheels on "Go to the Castle, take a nap at Akame's, go to the Castle."
I'd rather get LAD Gaiden: Sky Finance or Dead Souls Kiwami. END BSKY-EET
SPEAKING OF GAMES THAT SPUN THEIR WHEELS: this whole game's story could have just been a few cutscenes. The combat system got funny though, when I leveled up the Agent Style and it just became smoking cigarettes and dropping bombs until I realize I may have been a contributing factor to Kiryu's cancer diagnosis. To try and disrespect the story I tried to go to the final boss with Kiryu wearing a T-Shirt and jeans with flipflops, but the game forces you into a suit for that cutscene in Yakuza 7.
and then Keets and I played the Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth Demo and got mad that it was really good and we both have to play it now.
This was a replay from its launch... five years ago.
Five years and the only kickstarter goals missing are the honestly unnecessary multiplayer modes.
It's still a great game, I kept forgetting I had skills because I really like the weapon skill inputs. END BSKY-EET
So I tried playing this earlier, like right after Harmony of Dissonance, but that patch that added the Classic Mode 2: Dominique's Curse campaign messed up the game so much that I just couldn't go back until the 1.06 patch fixed it.
And then they still had the audacity to nerf Bunnymorphosis like the monsters they are.
Still a really good game and I would call it complete, Ben Judd should be punished by The Lord for letting them promise all of those Kickstarter goals.
Fun remake, the areas that would be nightmares because of anti-magic fields are hilarious now thanks to the addition of non-magical abilities like Sleepy Slap, Multifist, and the Monster Wrangler calling the whole gang to stop a hole into the final boss. END BSKY-EET
I didn't know that Microsoft just put out an Xbox documentary on YouTube for free. Like yeah it's obviously a promotional piece but it's fun to actually hear some of the old Xbox people reminisce.
And then Microsoft had to go and ruin everything in the 2010s. END BSKY-EET
So the most interested I've ever been in Xbox was during the original Xbox, when they had a bunch of weird and interesting games. I was kind of jealous when the 360 launched, but I still opted for the PS3 because I'm a cheap bastard and Sony wasn't yet charging money for online multiplayer on PlayStation. I was excited for the Xbox One and thought "maybe I can justify picking one up when Scalebound comes out" you know, ignoring the always online console DRM thing. Fast forward to present day and now I'm just rubbign my temples as Xbox drifts closer and closer to just being a Microsoft Service I only ever interact with because Mom didn't use the Good Windows 11 Install.
I played this once before on original hardware and between that and the version of PS5 I can say that the PS5 version holds up. This is also the first time I did all of the time trials and those are pretty tight on a casual playthrough. END BSKY-EET
Picked up the PS5 Release and do my part for the release of the entire Sly Cooper Trilogy on PS4 and PS5. This game is still really good and easier than I remember, I actually 100% all of the maps just to see that Making Of video they hid behind the Speedrun Timers.
The PS5 version is just as good as the PS2 release of Sly Cooper, do not get the HD Edition for PS3.
I had this Bluray sitting on my shelf for a few years now and finally had the want to watch it while I worked on a project.
There's a scene where Santa drinks a glass of milk that has a quarter cup of fentanyl in it to intimidate a child trying to poison his elderly parent, watch it. END BSKY-EET
Heard about this because of a movie review podcast that was looking for overall cursed movies to watch and they wound up unearthing a banger of a film. There are scenes that are stressful because I'm not sure if the Assassin is going to kill half of the characters he interacts with or not.
Also it somehow maintains some holiday cheer despite half the story being about a child version of Ben Shapiro hiring an assassin to kill Santa Claus and a quarter of the plot being Santa taking a military contract to help pay his bills.