Greetings friends! Things look... different than I remember: so white, and strangely hostile. In a prior life you may have recognized me as SafRev, but I’m afraid that version of myself is no longer available. I hear whispers that those memories may be recoverable, or will be in some far-flung future. However, even…

A few weeks ago weren’t you folks saying that one of the cool things about the switch would be that no one currently commenting would have to wait for their comments/accounts (Sorry, I have no idea how Kinja works) to be un-grayed? How does that work for those of who only have legacy accounts? Because I’m not seeing…

I randomly picked Game Over up as a teenager because I had a few dollars in trade-in credit at a Gamestop (or maybe it was still a EB Games at that point), and I’ll be damned if I didn’t get more enjoyment out of that book than most games I bought back in those days. It’s probably one of the reasons I ended up so…

For some reason I was struck by the urge to finally play the Thief series (Deadly Shadows is the only one I'd played previously), so I'm currently making my way through Thief: Gold. I installed a handful of mods to make it work in widescreen and pretty it up a bit, but left the actual game alone, and you know what? It…

I'm currently playing Being Stuck at Home with Conjunctivitis because apparently I'm a five-year-old. Unless I make some kind of miraculous recovery by tomorrow we're going to have cancel plans with the same friend for the second weekend in a row, which is probably not a great look. But hey, I got eye drops yesterday,…

Yeah, the sections right after you finish a palace in P5 and can actually do what you want are my favorites. It occurs to me that I'd happily play a game that's just the social sim aspects of Persona without any of the JRPG.

I just started the fourth palace in Persona 5 last night. I like that it breaks from some of the established patterns from the first three palaces; not because the formula was getting stale, but it was starting to feel like, well, a formula. The plot is starting to stick for me, too. I've started thinking of it more…

That final decision was so, so cathartic in me. It was the perfect way to put a bow on a game that sucked up a lot of my time.

DOOM is more ambitious on a gameplay level, but Wolfenstein is more ambitious in the story department, and I think they're both equally successful. Wolfenstein basically took a look around at all the ludonarrative dissonance thinkpieces that popped up a few years ago, thought to itself, "Okay, but what if we embrace…

I'm looking forward to Bioshock: Infinite getting a critical reappraisal at some point in the future, so we can appreciate it for what it is and not as the follow-up to one of the most beloved games of last generation. The story is a lot of pulpy fun (especially the ending), and I'd much rather see a game try and fail…

I restarted XCOM 2, because my first campaign got off to too slow a start and it was starting to feel like I was scaling a sheer cliff face. This one's going better. I rushed research on better weapons and armor, but I think I'm still lagging behind in making contact with new regions and countering the Avatar project.…

I thought I was the only one excited for the Atlus RPGs. I started Radiant Historia back in the day but never got very far in it, and I've never touched the other two. As for Apocalypse, it's one of those games I'd probably love if I had more time. I sank about 120 hours into the original and loved it, but I just…

Persona 5! I'm working through the second palace and I don't have a whole lot to say other than that I love it. It's the perfect game to spend the summer chipping away at. It reminds me of the summer i spent playing Persona 3 FES as a teenager ('08 or '09) and barely left the house or talked to anyone because I was a…

Man, can I ever relate to this. I have a very anxious and obsessive personality (it almost always takes me twice as long to finish a game as everyone else) and certain games can bring out very unhealthy behavior in me. I think Fallout 3 and New Vegas were the worst for me, probably because they coincided with two…

Maybe the saddest part of all this is that I would love a Mass Effect game that played up the exploration angle of the original. That's literally the most interesting direction the franchise could go in.

I started Persona 5 yesterday. I've only had time to play about three hours in and most of that been spent reading and watching, so I can't say much yet. One thing that immediately stands out is how rich the world is - I haven't gotten a good sense any of the characters yet, but there's clearly a ton of social and…

I finally picked up Fallout 4 last week, so I'll be playing more of that. I held off for a long time because I'd heard some not so great things about it, and so far I have mixed feelings. I was happy to see that it's the first Bethesda game that let me make a female character who doesn't look like a melted Barbie doll…

I saw it and thought it was distinctly okay. You can tell Ridley Scott or the studio or someone took the criticisms of Prometheus to heart, though they ended up with a movie that's just as flawed but for different reasons. This one felt very perfunctory in parts, most of the characters were flat, and my favorite…

As much as I like Nina (and she's maybe my favorite queen from this season), I'm rooting for her to go home at this point. The show is not good for her and I don't know how she passed the mental health check to get on in the first place. She's clearly not in a place where she can present her best self.

I think they realized Nina vs. Alexis would have been a lower stakes lip-sync, so they tossed Valentina into the mix to add some drama, thinking she'd send Nina home easily. I doubt Ru or the producers seriously expected Valentina to fuck up this badly, which is why everyone was so shocked and angry during the…