Gameplay trailer with a few frames of what might be gameplay and 99,99% bullshots.

 

It failed to keep my attention for the less then 3 minutes it lasts lol. Eyes just glazed over as I stopped caring and my mind went wandering.

 

Oh you tragic thing, I doubt you could even imagine it.

 

It looks like it'll be fun, but equally, it kind of just came across as 'Dark Souls with a horse' which is fine, but not exactly the greatest thing ever.

More generally, the Summer Fest stream didn't have much of interest at all, personally; Elden Ring was far and away the best bit of footage, other than the Death Stranding Director's Cut reveal, and that was mostly memorable for the wtf-ness of it.

 

I want Bloodborne to receive the Demon's souls treatment please.

 

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

*inhale*

BAHAHAHAHAHAHA YEAH RIGHT

 

Insert that meme with people tapping their credit card and saying take their money here.

I'm fine with it being just another souls game with horses, looks great. January 2022 isn't far off. As for 2021, D2 Res is probably the game I'm looking forward to most which is sad.

I'm excited for a lot of other games but nothing is really hyping me now until the eventual day Elder Scrolls 6 gets announced, but at least I know I will really enjoy Elden Ring even if there will be nothing new.

 

Okay I'll bite, doubt I could even imagine what?

 

That which commanded the stars, giving life its fullest brilliance.

 

The Elden Ring. Oh, Elden Ring! Shattered, by someone, or something.

 

Well, Fortuna smiled down on me today… I got advance warning and eventually the drop notification for a number of PS5 bundles during a break at work and went for it. I could choose a bundle from my wishlist and had a vendor location preselected. All in all, I had confirmation of my purchase probably within 45 seconds of opening the website.

It was almost ridiculously easy and, apparently, an outlier, reading the stories from others.

 

Man. I can't remember being less enthused after an E3 before...

I mean, we were warned, but still.

Even if Sony was there, they're apparently gearing up to show GoW in July for some reason, but I doubt seeing it will get me all that excited.

 

Honestly, a lot of big-name game studios seem to be kind of in a slump lately. It's been some of the indie games that have been the genuine surprises lately.

There's hardly been any MMO's worth being even vaguely excited over, the last I think was ArcheAge, but even then I never got into it. So many games that were hype'd up and came out a buggy mess, got yoinked by Epic, or just plain fell flat on it's face.

Plus every game has DLC now. Cosmetic DLC, Story DLC, etc. etc.

I miss Halo 3's launch man. That was the last one where I went to a midnight launch and it was worth it.

 

Yeah I didn't even bother with my usual E3 thread this year.

 

Played some games on the Switch recently.

The Darkside Detective and its sequel, The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark are modern point-and-click games with the premise that you're a detective and you're here to solve paranormal crimes. Really you just kind of get thrown into an intro screen, get given an objective like "stop paranormal stuff please" and get at it. It's a purely pixel art based game, for what it's worth, so no super fancy graphics.

They're very lighthearted romps. I was expecting it to be at least a dark comedy but nah, no one even gets murdered or anything. The worst actual crime that's committed ends up being kidnapping, and that's just in the first case where they were figuring out the tone. On one hand, no one gets murdered, hooray. On the other it can feel remarkably tensionless.

In terms of gameplay it's standard point & click stuff. Click on things to make your klepto protagonist steal items and shove them into your pockets, combine items or use them on people or things. It's usually fairly evident what you can take and what you can't, although being familiar with the point & click logic tends to help, I think. The games are fairly linear so at worst you'll go hunt through a few screens trying to find the item you need or the combination you need to clear a puzzle.

All in all, fun and occasionally charming, but not really worth the price they're asking for both games (~22 euros or something) given that both games together take like 7 hours to clear in total, and that's if you're taking it fairly leisurely. My advice: wait for a discount.

Another game: Dicey Dungeons, a dice-based roguelike (roguelite? Fucked if I know what the difference is) about a bunch of different D&D-style classes being made into unwilling and eternal participants in Lady Luck's dungeon-exploring gameshow.

Story is more or less nihil and the graphics are kept very simple, so let's focus on gameplay instead. I'll mostly be comparing it to Slay the Spire, which is my gold standard for roguelikes because it's the only other one I've actually played. The fixation on dice as a mechanic result in a somewhat more luck-based game than StS, as bad dice rolls can absolutely fuck you up. For most contestants you've got a far smaller range of options than StS to pick each round, but you can in theory freely switch around what those options actually are. This might be preferable to some but I do prefer StS's take on things.

There's a fairly broad variation in the contestants and playstyles and such, so I think it's a worthy addition to most Switch libraries.

Up next: I'll be playing Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. I've heard that somehow they made it play like XCOM which I'm rather curious about how the fuck that came to be.

 

I'm not really a big Kojima fan, but if this is real I'm gonna lose my fucking mind.

 

At this point, expecting anything even vaguely resembling quality from a Konami game is a mistake. Don't get your hopes too high with this thing.

 

Lol the game is basically irrelevant.

Either this is an incredible gag by Kojima or some indie studio made a... big mistake.

Either way, brilliant story.

 

While not strictly video games related, Chris Avellone has finally responded to the baseless accusations made against him last year and is pursuing this in court by suing for libel against the offending parties. More information can be found here:

https://chrisavellone.medium.com/ending-silence-c48e86f7c523

https://chrisavellone.medium.com/its-come-to-this-chris-avellone-2fe5db836746

I certainly hope he makes a return to writing video games after this.

 

Damn, unfortunately, the damage to his public image is already done.

Being accused of being a predator will follow him for a long while.