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Mass Effect: Andromeda (PS4) by jp (May 7th, 2024 at 18:25:53)

I know this game was reviewed quite poorly. I only remember stuff about the characters (art) and animations not being very good. I'd guess there was other stuff too, but that's all I recall as I type this.

So, I'm fully expecting to play a bit of the game, get tired/bored/frustrated, and then I'll move on. BUT, I'll be able to say - "yes, I have played one of the Mass Effect games for a few hours" and I'll have a better sense of the series even if it is coming from the least respected main-line entry.

I'm only a few hours in at this point - more hours than it should be due to technical issues with the disc: it didn't work while installing on the PS4, so I installed in PS5 instead, and then I had issues....and, anyways. I think it's all solved now... but - I've made it to the point where you gain access to a ship and I'm expecting to start flying around and doing missions and enjoying a bit more freedom than I have so far. BUT, so far it's been pretty fun and I'm genuinely curious and interested to continue playing...so we'll see!

The game's early intro is interesting - for an RPG in my view - because it leads with all-action stuff! There's moving around and jumping and shooting... Sure, there was some story and cut-scenes and what not. But the gameplay was all on-planet action based! I was like "woah, this is not the RPG I was expecting". And then there's an important story moment (my father dies! I'm now the pathfinder, so much responsibility), and the entire next section of the game is sort of the introduction to what'll probably be the main cast of other characters - namely everyone else on the ship we're on as part of a big "lets colonize other galaxies" effort. I walked around, talked to people, accepted missions/tasks, solved a case of someone sabotaging something in the ship and got a big info dump on "what is generally going on here".

So, in these few hours I feel like I've just had the intro stuff and that now the game will "open up" into the rest of the game!

I'm pretty excited to be honest and yes, the characters don't look "great" and I saw the AI do some weird stuff...but, it's all good.

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Cuphead (Switch) by jp (May 7th, 2024 at 13:25:08)

I've been playing this with my son and yes, it is as hard as I'd heard. And no, we probably won't be able to finish it. But, we'll see how far we get and how much fun we're still having. We've just (almost) cleared the first island (only missing one of the run-n-gun missions).

What stands out so far?

a. Levels are a lot shorter than I expected - in a good way. I was sort of kind of dreading having to play these really long levels. But no, they're pretty short which is nice.

b. I like the variety! Not just in the enemies and their attacks and whatnot. But, so far there are run and gun (typical Contra-style running, platforming, and shooting), flying levels (only one so far, like 2D shooters of yore), and boss fights (multi-stage single screen battles). It's nice to mix things up and I've enjoyed that part of the game.

c. I did not remember their being an upgrade system wherein you could purchase different weapons, boons, and variations on your super attack. I'm not a fan of the "this upgrade also has a drawback" (e.g. get one extra heart, but do less damage in your attacks). But still, I like the variety overall.

d. Many of the boss fights have SOME randomization which is interesting (to me, not saying it's a huge novelty in the genre) - for example the boss might change into one of three different enemies (I'm thinking of the first flying level where you either get a bull, dancing twins, or an archer). The slot machine level was fun for this - even if the different attack patterns (even if one of them, the golden platforms was significantly harder for me).

e. In this game it never makes sense to not shoot all the time - I wish there was just an autofire toggle or something.

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Battlefield 4 (PS4) by jp (May 7th, 2024 at 13:04:49)

So, something strange happened - and it turned out the problem is the kind of thing that makes me really angry because it shows how stupid some decisions are..

Ok, so I load up the game and from the splash menu (press X to start) I get taken to a screen that says "Please reset your password", there's QR code, some instructions and the options to "Close" and "X Select". None of the buttons work. I have no idea what this is about, but ok - I'll reset my password. No idea why, or what password. The QR code takes me to a webpage, I reset my password. And nothing happens in the game. Ok, lets close the game, open it up again..see what happens. No luck. I reset my password (for an EA account) again, still no luck. Then I think, maybe I have two EA accounts? So, I try another email - still no luck. I close the game, change the password on the second account again, and still no luck. Why is this happening? I have no idea. AFAIK, I've never even linked my PSN account to an EA account.

I start googling, no luck. But plenty of people complaining (from years ago). All the online help, EA customer support pages included mention stuff you do from your EA account. I try it all. From both accounts, just in case. In both accounts I actually can see that I have not linked my PSN account.

This is stupid. I cannot play a game on my Playstation, lawfully purchased and all the rest, because EA wants me to update a password - which I have. And I don't know why.

I spend about an hour searching around trying to get someone on customer support at EA. Their webpage seems designed to make this impossible. Maybe they don't even have that anymore? Eventually I do find a chat interface. I don't know where or now. I wait for 15 minutes before someone comes on. They're helpful. I tell them what's going on...

I give them the emails I've tried (for the EA account) and my PSN account. They then tell me that none of those are the account. AND that my EA account (one I have no idea about) has been deleted because it hasn't been used in too long.

No, bear in mind I was playing BF4 a week earlier and supposedly this involved it checking my account and whatnot. So, I don't know how that works.

The EA chat rep won't tell me what email was used - it's probably (maybe?) the one I had over 15 years ago when I was a PhD student... BUT, they tell me they can unlink it. I say sure. Go for it. Account I don't know about, that has been deleted, is now unlinked. AND, I can now - from my computer - link one of my other EA accounts to my PSN account and it all works.

Geez, is it really necessary to have all these accounts linked up? No.
Can't they tell that the account is still "used" because I'm playing on Playstation? Isn't that what they wanted to know in the first place?
Why was the account deleted in the first place?

ALL of this is stupid. And none of it is necesarry. Sigh.

This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on May 7th, 2024 at 13:16:20.

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Resident Evil 2 (2019) (PC) by dkirschner (May 5th, 2024 at 14:19:33)

This one blew me away. Utterly engrossing and intense survival horror. I am sure I played RE2 way back in the day (I remember the police station), but this is the one I'll remember in the future. I was a little worried that the remake's excellent reviews were biased for nostalgia, but that's not the case. It's incredible in all respects.

One thing I was thinking about while playing was how effective it is at making me tense. Other good horror games do some of these things too, but this one ties all these tricks into one package. When you kill a zombie, it might not actually be dead. By "kill," I mean shoot it until it falls down and appears dead. I learned that these zombies will sometimes begin groaning again and get back up, sometimes as you walk past, and other times they'll be reanimated when you return to an area. If its head explodes (by shooting it in the head with a shotgun or occasionally with the pistol), then it's really dead, but if its head doesn't explode, I was always anxious that it would come back. And you can't just go around blowing up all the zombies' heads with the shotgun because, as a survival horror game, ammo is a scarce and valuable resource. Later in the game, there are these plant zombies that will always come back unless you kill them with a flamethrower.

Another thing that constantly had me nervous were the corpses. Enter a room, see a corpse, and you have no idea if it's one that will animate or not. You have to go about your business always watching and listening in case it gets up. This uncertainly about enemy states is really nerve-wracking! Another type of enemy, the "licker," is blind. If you make noise (run, slam open a door, fire a gun), it attacks you. If you are quiet, you can walk around it. But if you get too close, it will become alert, although it won't *know* that you're there. When it becomes alert, it will start moving around, which means it might run into you, since you're trying to quietly creep by. Those things were scary.

And THEN, as if I wasn't already holding my breath half the time, there is this hulking enemy called Tyrant (that you can't kill) who, at several points in the game, appears to stalk you through an area. Tyrant is attracted to noise. If you're running, slamming doors, you'll hear his footsteps getting closer and closer. When he finds you, he relentlessly pursues you until you can get far enough away from him so that he goes somewhere else. So, whenever Tyrant was around, I was being quiet. Being quiet for Tyrant and the lickers is hard given that there are zombies around, who may or may not reanimate!

And you're constantly under pressure to conserve ammo, manage your inventory, and navigate these labyrinthine areas with maps and various keys and puzzles. In the police station, you do a lot of backtracking and criss-crossing as you gain access to new areas. One room was a darkroom where you can develop rolls of film. Every time you find film, you want to go to the darkroom. But, getting back to the darkroom meant going back through this terrifying hallway where there was a licker lurking and a few zombies strolling about. So, just finding a roll of film made me scared in anticipation of what I was going to have to do!

Oh yeah, one other thing to note, which made me feel kind of dumb, is that you'll find gun upgrades in the earlier part of the game. I had three upgrade parts in my inventory for some named gun, and had assumed they were for a gun that I didn't have because I didn't notice that my gun had a name. Then I found a shotgun upgrade, and I had a shotgun, so I figured it was for that. Then I thought, "that's weird that they'd give me all these upgrades for guns I don't have and then give me a shotgun upgrade for a gun I do have. Did I miss a gun?! Is the pistol I've been using really weak?! Is this why I'm always out of ammo?!" Turns out that yes, yes my pistol was weaker and I was always out of ammo because it should have been upgraded three times already. Oops!

The RE2 remake is a 100% score for sure. I have RE 8 queued up to play at some point. Super excited.

This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on May 5th, 2024 at 14:25:45.

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Battlefield 4 (PS4) by jp (May 2nd, 2024 at 21:05:51)

In my default imaginary for (recent-ish) games in the Battlefield series, I don't like Battlefield games because their gunfeel is different from Destiny and CoD in ways I can't really articulate, but don't like. I'm pretty sure I played Battlefield 3 for 20 minutes or so, didn't like it and turned it off and never wrote a GameLog about it. I did play Battlefield 1 though and I do recall liking it, though I'd have to read my old GameLog (I hope I wrote one!) to see if there was more to it than that.

4, the one I started playing now, was getting off on the wrong foot, but I decided to stick it out a bit...and I think I'm getting used to it? I think I'm 3 or 4 missions in at this point and the story is crazy, overly hoo-rah melodramatic, but still kind of fun and interesting. There are some strange things I haven't figured out - on one early mission I boarded a truck and was driving it around and stuff...but I could not for the life of me figure out how to leave/exit the truck! So, I stuck with driving around and running over enemies until...I got killed. This was both a little bit funny, but also frustrating! (I still don't know how to exit a vehicle...so I now never board one unless I have to for the story...which, so far, has only been twice - gun boats both times).

I was also unsure what the general practice is for weapons - what I've gathered so far is that you start with few weapons available to you and you're supposed to find new ones - sometimes it's just the ones enemies are using (the chinese weapons I picked up are so much better than the ones I started with by default! I'm really surprised by this tbh, it seems counter to the setting - elite US military force would drop their equipment for that of the enemy, no?). And every now and then you run into a little crate from which you can change your weapon loadout. I'm not super convinced I like this - it seems that the idea is that you'd replay missions with better weapons to get a better score to unlock more stuff?

Anyways, my plan is to play the campaign - I don't think it's too long, and I've been having enough fun with that so far even though some of the missions are pretty dumb in annoying ways (I'm thinking of one where I had to destroy a tank with tank mines - which worked - but I had to sort of lay two in a row to actually destroy it? I had to redo this part a few times because the tanks kept on not getting destroyed, once it never even noticed me, and other weird behavior).

It's also strange (to me) that the chinese are the enemy - a rogue general has taken control, and there's chaos in the streets. Stuff like that.

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GameLog hopes to be a site where gamers such as yourself keep track of the games that they are currently playing. A GameLog is basically a record of a game you started playing. If it's open, you still consider yourself to be playing the game. If it's closed, you finished playing the game. (it doesn't matter if you got bored, frustrated,etc.) You can also attach short comments to each of your games or even maintain a diary (with more detailed entries) for that game. Call it a weblog of game playing activity if you will.

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