Really? It was such a massive flop and was so entertainingly bad it became an instant meme, and ironically turned into one of the most memorable releases of the year - just for all the wrong reasons.

Damn I didn’t see this coming, hit unexpectedly hard. I just played through all the Ninja Gaiden games just recently as well as his Samurai Jack game and was so pumped for both his next project as well as NG4. He was a legendary character and whatever you think of him he was a colourful figure on the scene and will be missed for that if nothing else.

First person driving at night in Cyberpunk was one of my absolute favourite things. Especially in the rain! Such a vibe.

I’m finally playing Alan Wake 2 again this week, playing through the Final Draft before doing the DLCs for the first time. Sadly something seems to have gotten borked when I moved PCs and transferred my save manually - only some of the stuff that’s supposed to carry over to NG+ actually carried over. Very strange. I had looked forward to having Saga’s whole arsenal from the start but oh well.

Game is great. Having waited for so long to return to it has only made the experience better, absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that. Having a significantly better PC than last time also only makes the visual splendour more impressive, although I still can’t even come close to playing it maxed out. It’s a gorgeous game, beautiful HDR implementation and just perfect art direction.

I don’t have much to say as I’ve not only already played it, but also just love it. I guess the collectibles are a little unnecessary, grindy and annoying if you want to 100% it. Also the case board stuff is a little tedious on subsequent playthroughs as a lot of it is unskippable. That’s it for notes. Play it if you haven’t already, it’s wonderful. Try playing some previous Remedy games first if you can, the Remedyverse is cool.

I remember Game Makers Toolkit raving about some text-based interactions in the game The Shivah in an old video about detective games.

Another somewhat similar story is WolfeyVCG and Perish Song in competitive Pokémon.

The Witcher 3 is just an RPG minigame you can play between rounds of Gwent.

Thanks for the tip, En Garde looks like a lot of fun and I’ll definitely wishlist it for a future sale!

The games are available for free on NOLF revival if you want to play. Nobody knows who owns the IP so there is nobody enforcing the copyright.

The setting, theme and writing is really fun but the gameplay really hasn’t aged well.

I love Control, I think the gameplay and level design is amazing, the world building is phenomenal and some of the side characters are great. Jesse herself wasn’t really that memorable to me though. I get that she’s supposed to act like a foil for all the craziness that’s happening, but as a result she ended up feeling kind of bland and forgettable. I always thought this was intentional, as the main focus of the game was the world building and lore and the Oldest House. Having a protagonist with a super strong colorful personality would be too much and just end up distracting from that.

Great pick, she’s up there for me too. I also only played the first one but thought it was an amazing experience.

I agree. That scene on the island with Celes hit me like a ton of bricks the first time.

I love the concept. Not my genre and not my favourite art style, but the idea is really fun.

Viva New Vegas should be a stable base to work from in terms of mods, as already mentioned. Vanilla New Vegas is almost unplayable but with the latest slew of community patches and engine fixes and even engine rewrites plus 4GB patch and all that it should be quite stable.

I recommend trying again, I had a playthrough just two years ago I think with pretty much no stability issues. And New Vegas is an amazing game.

I did a ton of side content (basically all of it) so I probably was overpowered then in terms of levels/weapons/Pictos for the main story?

The balance of the game is all over the place, that much I agree on. Especially the final act, which is a mess quite frankly. If you do any side content at all the final boss is a complete joke you probably kill in one shot and miss a bunch of cool attacks and mid-fight cinematics.

I’m far from a parry god myself, so I simply built around it. Stacked HP and Defense on Maelle along with the First Strike Pictos and started every fight with her using Egide, which let her absorb damage for the team. Ran Lune with constant healing through Tsunami. Reasonable investment in HP and Defense on all my characters. The only times I ran into an issue of getting one-shot through the main game was when I deliberately went into a higher level zone - and at that point I felt like I had it coming. The optional superboss is a different story of course, but that’s a whole different issue and also kind of par for the course.

Also this was on Normal mode and not Expert so YMMV.

Do it like Remedy does for Alan Wake: Pattinson acts and reads out the lines in (presumably butchered) French, but then have a separate native French actor do the voice and dub over him.

Best of both worlds?

I’m still hoping for a “Definitive Edition” type update eventually. There are some parts that could definitely do with a retouching or restructure, the final act in particular.

I’m on a break from Cronos: The New Dawn and back into more patient gaming. Inspired by Remedy’s 30th Anniversary I decided it’s time to play the Alan Wake 2 DLCs, so now I’m doing some prep work.

I replayed the Alan Wake 1 DLCs, replayed Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, and I’m about to start a replay of the Control AWE DLC. Then into the Final Draft of AW2 again and finally the DLCs.

I actually quite like American Nightmare. It’s a low budget Xbox Live Marketplace game so you have to take it for what it is, but there are some interesting lore bits in there and I just love Ilkka Villi letting loose in the videos of Mr Scratch.

I never really got the feeling of reverence for the originals personally, down to the references made feeling like lip service created by someone browsing a wiki who has never played them in the first place.

Choosing to set the game a 100 years later (so that they wouldn’t have to incorporate much of the original cast or story) but still shoehorning in two fan favourite characters never sat right with me either.

Also who replaces ::: spoiler spoiler Viconia. Though the whole character assassination of Sarevok and Viconia in itself is a travesty. :::

Studios like Remedy and Sandfall have shown you can have mocap done by an actor other than the voice actor and still end up with a great product. Stuff like this is just one of the many little things that make me feel like Larian had very little regard for the original games, and only used the IP for brand recognition and marketing. Which makes me sad.

You’re telling me the invisible hand of the market isn’t giving everyone exactly what they deserve?!

That clip of Jim Cummings talking to a fan and telling them “please remind Larian that I exist” still breaks my heart. I guess Matt Mercer is a cheap PR move or something to boost sales but I wish Jim got to come back to do Minsc.

At this point I trust Fitgirl repacks more than some official publishers.

It’s only 30% off, but Esports Godfather should run on any remotely recent laptop and is great fun. I didn’t feel bad about paying full price for it, played over a hundred hours all told since release. Not quite a simulator/colony manager but it’s a deckbuilder/manager so close enough?

Not part of the Steam sale, but while Control at 90% off is a great deal I feel obliged to raise awareness of the current Remedy 30th Anniversary Humble Bundle, which has their whole catalogue minus Firebreak for about 30 bucks - which I think is an even better deal.

Control is awesome, amazing world building and lore packed inside a really tight third person shooter. There are some Alan Wake references in the lore, but for the most part you can play Control first I think. However, I definitely advise to hold off on playing the AWE DLC until after Alan Wake 1.

Mechanically Anomen with his grandmastery capability outshines Viconia imo, whether you go the Flail of Ages classic on him or even Slings and play him back row.

As a character however then yes, Viconia is probably my favourite character in the game and probably the most well written of the bunch.

I am also very fond of Haer’dalis though.

You can for sure do an all female party, Mazzy, Nalia, Jaheira, Viconia, Aerie are all available - it’ll be somewhat challenging though. You’d need to micromanage reputation to keep it neutral so neither Viconia nor the good characters leave (unless you modded that out), you also probably need to boost thief skills with potions and/or items regularly. Viconia also has some downsides to keep in mind, like the low Con, single classed Clerics being pretty mediocre and not getting Holy Smite due to alignment. She does have base 50% spell resistance though so there’s that, and can get to 100% with the right gear. There is also Neera and Hexxat, but I don’t enjoy the EE companions much.

I will say for a first playthrough I tend to recommend people bring Yoshimo, as he has some ties into the main quest and also various sidequests around Athkatla. Not a female though.

Player count seem stable enough at least. There’s always a spike in activity during summer though, which now has passed. Could be that?

Ooh, I absolutely adore BG2. Probably the most formative game of my youth, it’s both the game that got me hooked on RPGs and the game that introduced me to modding. I still hold it as the best Baldur’s Gate game, and Irenicus as one of the best video game villains of all time.

What’s your party composition?

I don’t think you were mislead, Alan Wake 2 is slated to be on PS+ starting Oct. 7th. It was announced during the recent State of Play.

Anyway, I still recommend going through all the games as they are amazing in their own right, and playing one will only heighten the appreciation of the next. Particularly if played in release order. Alan Wake 2 is definitely the crown jewel, so I understand wanting to get to it ASAP, but at the same time it will have a much more profound impact if saved for last.

EDIT: also I forgot but, thank you for the nice words. It’s still kind of weird that I’m being recognised by name around here from time to time but I guess I do comment a lot, and verbosely at that.

Yeah I agree. I never used Gamepass as I am not the target audience, but the value proposition made sense to me and I understood why some people paid for it.

This new pricing makes no sense at all, wouldn’t you rather just buy the games you want at that point? $360 a year gets you a lot of games, even accounting for a couple of AAA day one purchases every year.

Argo Tuulik along with Martin Luiga were players in Robert Kurvitz’s Elysium TTRPG sessions, perhaps less important than Robert in the creative process and world building but still definitely participating enough to be considered co-creators of the setting. Torson and Mcclane were characters created and played by Argo and Martin during the tabletop sessions, for example.

Argo Tuulik was also a writer for Disco Elysium who was hugely important to the game, and wrote several iconic parts of it like the Hardie Boys. His involvement in trusting the people who betrayed Robert is something he personally regrets, and has talked about in his extensive interviews with the 41st Precinct YouTube channel.

EDIT: Argo Tuulik’s interview series below. Be warned it’s like 20 hours of content. Interview part 1 Interview part 2 Interview part 3

ZA/UM - The Inside Story Part 1 ZA/UM - The Inside Story Part 2

Kind of. Mechanically Alan Wake 2 is so good that yes, it does stand on its own, and it’s such a great game that if you’re completely against playing the preceding games then it’s probably worth playing on its own.

However, Remedy are doing a Marvel-style connected universe, so in my opinion it’s a case of “the more you invest in it, the more rewarded you get”. The story of AW2 is a direct sequel to AW1, and also directly overlaps with Control. Control had a DLC called AWE that acts like a direct bridge between AW 1&2.

Furthermore, despite having to change the name to Alex Casey due to Rockstar owning the IP the character Alan Wake canonically wrote the stories about Max Payne, so they are also referenced. Quantum Break is only vaguely hinted at due to again, Microsoft owning the IP, so that one you can probably skip if you want.

Personally, I think Remedy have produced all bangers (though I haven’t played Firebreak), so playing them all never felt like a burden. There is also a timely Humble Bundle celebrating their 30th anniversary which has their entire catalogue minus Firebreak for like 30 bucks.

The plot of the whole thing is somewhat convoluted, so trying to absorb it all from a YouTube recap is kind of hard, but if that’s what you want here’s Sam Lake attempting to recap the story leading up to AW2 in 15 minutes. This is heavy spoilers for the preceding game obviously.

Well, you have to use root builder for MO2 to work properly with Cyberpunk which is sort of fiddly and also I suspect the reason Codeware stopped working.

Yeah I have it set up for 2.1 I think which makes me not feel super motivated to update the whole thing.

I still haven’t updated my modlist because I have it working as-is but sometime last year when Codeware changed its file structure it stopped working with MO2, and I never got around to sorting it out. I should really fix it one of these days so I can update the game.

FF XV is a broken and flawed game at best, and realistically probably closer to objectively bad. But the soundtrack is an absolute banger with some stellar leitmotif work. Dewdrops At Dawn at the very end picking up the line from Sunset Walz/Valse Di Fantastica is probably my favorite.

I’m kind of in between games, actually . I finished Enotria: The Last Song and even did a quick NG+ run for the secret/true ending achievement. I had a good time with it and would recommend it to Souls fans if you can tolerate AA/jank and can grab it on a deep sale. It’s not overly difficult and not too long that it outstays its welcome, which for me feels like a good thing at this point. Loved the setting and the Commedia Dell’Arte framing.

To follow I dipped my toes into playing a Soulslike Metroidvania with fantastic combat, interesting lore and a beautiful and visually distinct art style. I’m of course talking about Si- no actually it’s GRIME. It was on all-time low deep sale recently and I’ve had my eye on it for a while so I snapped it up. So far it’s been good but… I don’t know. It hasn’t really grabbed me yet. I think maybe coming off a Soulslike it was slightly too similar and that’s why I’m not hooked yet. I can tell it’s fantastic and it’s very unique, I think I should just have played something else in between.

So I also pirated Cronos: The New Dawn in a try-before-I-buy effort inspired by spooktober. I know it’s the wrong sub for a new release but what can you do. It’s been… alright so far. Haven’t played all that much, only like two hours or so. I like the story and the world building but it’s not really scaring me like I was hoping it would. It seems to be more about tough and gruelling combat encounters, which is not necessarily what I’m looking for right now.

I might just audible into replaying The Final Draft of Alan Wake 2 instead and finally getting into playing the DLCs, which I own but have been saving for a rainy day.

Isthereanydeal.com is such a good resource for knowing if a deal is actually a rare opportunity or it’s a game that comes up for deep sale constantly.