I opened both Maleus Rocket and Dreaudnough a couple of days from each other. Both aren’t very useful, as you can’t deploy them in campaigns, only Arena or Guild Raids.
But from Guild Raids I got my 3rd mandatory Chaos character, Archimatos. So now the Fall of Cadia campaign is open.
This is good, because campaigns are the best way to open new characters.
It is quite rare that I get to compare hardware. After all, usually I spend a lot of time investigating what platform to buy, but then once you buy everything, you kind of stuck with it for the next 2-4 years.
But because my CPU started to act wierdly and I managed to RMA it, I decided to buy a new CPU for the same socket instead of waiting a couple of weeks without PC at all.
This is quite amazing, really. A supposedly weaker CPU providing 10% performance right of the bat. the 3D is a gamechanger, literally.
Video card offers a much greater boost, of course. But despite 40% performance boost, I’m actually slightly disappointed, as this is 1440p resolution and not even maxed out settings we’re talking about.
Regarding RMA. I shipped the faulty CPU on the 9th, got approval on the 13th and received a new one back on 18th. So less than two weeks turnaround, which is nice.
As a bonus, because they don’t produce 5900X anymore, I got the slightly upgraded 5900XT 😄
The best part of Persona 4 was the characters and anime cutscens, and it’s true about many Atlus games. So it’s no wonder anime based on Persona 4 is actually very good. I think they also used same voice actors as the English translation of the game.
I’m not sure it’s watchable if you haven’t played the game. But if you did, the way it treats the original art, music and characters is brillaint.
First, as I read somewhere already, the protagonist now has a name, Yu Narukami, and a character, while it the game, he had none. And the way they fleshed out some character arcs is fantastic as well: mainly Yukiko and her story about a caged bird.
Also, let’s admit, the fights in Persona are nothing special, personas are basically a bag of spells with a shaby animation. Here, Izanagi, Yu’s persona, has some cool fight scenes.
I have a bunch of old HDDs from my previous PCs. One of them had a couple of pins broken, probably when I tried to put it into a badly designed cradle. So I came up with a DYI project. Bought another 80GB IBM HDD for 8GBP, and replanted the board, which is held by just 4 screws, to the new one. And it worked!
There was nothing valuable on it. I just like messing with hardware sometimes.
Finished Ripley.
You can appreciate art without enjoying it. I appreciate the irony that Ripley is not some kind of genius, it’s just that the world around him is very incompetent. And the last episode reenacting Caravaggio’s crime is brilliant.
Completed Persona 4. For good, this time.
Getting True Ending is not as much pain-in-the-ass, as it’s not obvious at all. On the last day you need to visit a few locations without any good reason or hints in a particular order.
The final plot twists is good, though, I admit. Speaking of “playing the long game”. The real villain is the guy at the fuel station, the one you meet on your first minute of the game and shake hands with. By shaking hands he grants you the power to enter TVs. Only that’s not a “he”, but a “she”, death goddess Izumi. Yeah, the same death goddess you’ve been told about somewhere mid-game during a school trip to the school from Persona 3.
The final fight resembles Persona 3 a lot. Same grotesque female shape, same theme of unbeatable foe that falls to the Power of Friendship. I liked how the music themes are mixed to sound more epic.
I don’t like the Fusion mechanics much, but I still fused Belzebub for the final battle, one of the Personas that require 6 personas to fuse, and it’s epic:
As a visual novel, the plot has to many holes. As a dating sim, the sudden time skips are annoying and prevent enjoying it without a guide. And as a dungeon crawler, the fights are too tedious, with some enemies having no weaknesses or constantly healing, and the boss battles too unpredictable, and beatable only if you died multiple times and have memorized the phases.
But with all those flaws, it’s still a great game. Kind of what it tries to teach you: that you need to bridge the gaps to build something great.
Paywall hits on Mission 70 of the first campaign and Mission 12 of the First Mirror Campaign. Enemies that previously wouldn’t do much start one-shoting your characters suddenly. And all you can do is grind. The game turns into a “clicker”. To level up your characters you need 6 pieces of equipment for each. Some of those pieces are also broken into separate subpieces, spread across different missions. You can just roll for the equipment if you completed the mission at least once, 10 rolls per day. You roll, then you roll some more.
A week at that pace, and I’ve opened my second Chaos character and second Eldar character:
Now I have just Makotep from the Indominus campaign to beat:
I also started working towards first support character, either the Maleus Rocket Launcher or Dreadnought.
Finished listening to Shadow of the Gods. It’s an easy read overall, with some well set plot twists: death of the elder of the fishermen brothers, betrayal of the Battlegrim.
One topic the author has troubles with, though, is the scale of the monsters.
Is the dragon as big as two meadhalls or small enough to bite a human’s head off? You can’t have both.
I usually have troubles with character names, and here it’s even more pronounced than usual. Breka is the timid son of Orca, and Dreka is the guy that killed Orca’s husband and kidnapped Breka?
Bjorn is Elvar’s lover and betrayer, and Bjarn is the kid that Elvar set to rescue, and there’s also Bjarn’s father with a similar name 😫
I’ve played Persona 2 Eternal Punishment, which uses the same engine and shares some of the characters, but not the original, probably because PSX version wasn’t officially translated. Luckily the PSP version is.
I decided to compare both versions, and it’s interesting that in order to accomodate PSP wider screen they distanced the camera a little. No 4:3 black borders, but the character sprites look a bit muddier, because the scale is not as precise.
One of my constant disappointments with Bose is how their earpads live for about 1 year. I couldn’t believe it, I thought I had them for at least 2 years now for that to happen.
Luckily there are replacement pads that are sold for cheap. But it’s still annoying for a rather expensive headset.
Completed Snatcher.
Don’t assume that all the combat episodes are as easy as the first few. The one in the air duct gets quite brutal.
Guess it’s MSX heritage, but the game can get quite… sugestive at times.
Third chapter starts with a lot of revelations. Gillian and Jamie were found in cryosleep chamber. Harry, the technician that gets killed in the end of 2nd Act, is actually their son, now older than his parents by 20 years. Yeah, that plot twist from Fallout 4? Kojima thought about it 25 years before.
Snatchers kidnap Jamie. There are two more excruciating shooting sequences. Then a 20 minutes long monologue of creator of the Snatchers.
First, Soviet Union has develop a virus called Lucipher Alpha that could wipe an entire city. Then, they developed androids, that would replace the now dead population, adopting their looks. Both Gillian and Jamie were researches on that team, but Gillian was also CIA agent. The head of research was Professor Modnar, and he had a son, Elijah, who became envious of Gillian and Jamie.
So when Soviet Union collapsed, Elijah releases the virus and puts himself, Gillian and Jamie into cryosleep, while his father and Harry, Gillian’s son, manage to escape.
Ten years later, Elijah wakes up from his sleep and resumes the Snatcher program, developing kind of a god complex. When he starts his operation, his father in turn develops an android that would hunt other androids: Random Hajile, being Elijah Modnar in reverse, looking the way Elijah looked when he put himself to sleep. While snatchers are imperfect, unable to withstand ultraviolet for long, Random is perfect, and doesn’t know he’s an android. Now Elijah recoverd Random’s body and plans to make his snatchers perfect as well.
But Random is not dead yet. He grabs his original by the neck, allowing Gillian and Jamie to escape while the facility is blown from space, proving that he’s more human than human.
The game ends with Gillian and Jamie promising to reunite, and Gillian departing to Moscow to destroy the original snatcher factory.
Overall, I’m very impressed with this game. It’s a solid cyberpunk adventure that is still playable 30 years later, without a guide. The only complaint I have are the final figth sequences. I don’t know if the original game was running at a lower frame rate, but I found them to be ridiculuously hard. Other than that, even shameless plagiarism of Kojima can now be viewed as “subtle references”, I guess.
In a way, W40K is ideal for mobile games. You already have some fabulous character designs that are distinct and easily recognizable. And they all speak in cliche phrases anyway, so nobody will notice your lack of writing skills. Speaking of which, your story can be “space marines are fighting xenos because crashed and artifact”, and everyone would be perfectly happy.
The gameplay is rather solid: hexes, different terraint types, one move one action per turn, one unique skill per character that can be used once per battle. Where it all breaks, of course, is the monetisation and the “numbers game”. No matter how good a tactian you are, you won’t be able to progress if your units are damaging enemies for 1HP. To level them, you need not only EXP, but also coins, which you get by completing missions. And to do missions there is another resource, which I don’t even care what it’s called, that recovers with real time, but also can be bought with very real money. Then the new characters are farmes through a gacha system.
A year later, and Playstation 4 can be jailbroken up to version 11. If I sat on my PS4 Pro for a year, I could jailbreak it now, but I didn’t, opting to play Diablo 4 on it instead. I regret nothing.
I praised the Vault City Barley Wine highly, but was a bit apprehensive of this beer. I like my beers strong and sweet, but is there such a thing as too strong and too sweet?
Turns out, there isn’t. If beer is a liquid bread, this beer is a liquid brioche with some dolce de leche on top. Very smooth, very sweet, with notes of vanilla and brioche.
I tried to continue to play on Nintendo Switch. First hang, on Factory, I managed to circumvent by copying save file from PC to Switch and loading from it. The second, after the bathroom scene at the end of Act I, I solved by ejecting and loading image again in the emulator.
The game uses an interesting progression method of number of actions spend instead of the only correct path that many other adventures use. What that means is that at some points you’re expected to do X actions, no matter which, in order for a new even to occur and move the story forward. You can just look around 8 times, and something will happen.
There is a lot of manual work to be done in this game. A lot of story progression is based around video calls. The first time, you need to remember the number that someone tells you, and only when you deal it it will be saved. Even then, you need to input the number manually every time. Same with informant. Despite having infinite cash, you need to handle him cash multiple times during the dialog to advance it.
After comparing the versions, I decided to go with SegaCD, as this is the only official English translation, and I didn’t particularly like the style of PSX/Saturn.
It is impressive how shamelessly Kojima steals Blade Runner and Terminator visuals.
It’s also funny how Kojima references his Metal Gear series by introducing a tiny companion robot called Metal Gear.
There are fighting sequences, but luckily those aren’t very though. More like a wack’a’mole, there enemies appear in one of 9 sections.
I started the game with RetroArch on Switch, but it would go into endless animation during the factory transition, something that should happen only to ISO+MP3 version, not the BIN+CUE one. This didn’t reproduce on the same core with RetroArch on PC. So I’ll continue the playthrough with this setup.
Today I received new motherboard. Spent 1.5 hours to installing it. And the symptoms are still there.
Also, this is a reminder why you should never buy Asus Prime boards, and only Asus ROG. The quality is atrocious, from the almost non existing heat sinks to the fact that you need to install back panel yourself.
If not motherboard, then what? I read some more. Seems some 5900X CPUs are faulty.
The problem? For RMA you need S/N, which is on the box, but I don’t keep boxes for CPUs, only for motherboard. So I had to remove cooler again to get S/N. And since I already started doing it, I replaced ROG motherboard back. Now it only took me 45 minutes. Improvement.
I disabled C-State. It helped, for now.
I feel like every time I turn off or restart my PC, I’m sorry I did that.
This time I put it to sleep, and discovered that it restarted to install some updates. Only it would hang while doing so, and would even hang when you try to open the recovery menu.
I went through the entire process: removing RAM, removing video card (onboard HDMI is useless now, BTW, as AMD doesn’t come with any video chip, it’s just for show).
Ended up removing all SSDs, and trying to boot from USB only. Updated BIOS. Nothing.
Then, after two days, it started working again.
Of course now I’m afraid to restart it.
In any case, I ordered a new motherboard. They don’t make X570 anymore, but B550 is essentially the same, and you can’t go above that, because above is AM5 chipset, and not AM4.
I was eyeing Vault City beers for some time now, because their Imperial Stouts sounded like something right down my alley. I wasn’t mistaken. I went with the safer choice of Barleywine, without the additions. It’s fantastic: smooth, sweet, full-bodied, and with very little gas. Yes, it will make you sleepy, but in a good way.
Completed Terra Nova.
There are a few visual effects that I was particularly impressed with. First is the Thermal Disruptor weapon, which projects a kind of heatwave, something that would require years for a fully 3D-engine to manage.
And second, is the water reflections. Those are real time.
Also, it’s a nice touch that they designed how the pirate suit looks like from the inside, just for that single mission where you impose as a pirate.
Completing M29, where you need to protect both trucks and landing pad was no small feat. Not because there are particularly many enemies, but because you can’t be at two places at once, and your teammates are pretty useless at defending anything.
Also, the enemy gets mechs at that point, proper bipedal mechs, not the suits that you usually encounter. And tanks. Those aren’t particularly difficult, but worth noting that they are 3D models, not sprites like the suits.
The last mission is on the easier side, I’d say. Your squad is even given a superweapon, which is just a supercharged mortar, really. You blow Hegemonie’s fuel tank, together with the base, and apparently the evil Ambassador himself, although I missed how it happened.
For a game that is 30 years old, being still playable is already quite something. And despite slight jankiness, it is still a surprisingly well thought and executed game.