I Found Myself Here, Again

It was 2 years ago when I had to move to a new place and in the midst of this pandemic, I will be moving to a new place again. There has been a lot I had to deal with over the past couple of months: a death in the family, a change in the way the world works that affects both me and my darling Yoshi, and some personal, persistence turbulence and stress. The pandemic in itself didn't impact me as much as others. I am used to spending most of my free time to myself but Yoshi definitely struggled with it in the beginning. I had to cut down on her walks and instead, spend more time playing with her at home. I think that's best for me and her. Better safe than sorry as the saying goes.

Into the boxes they go. I wish there was an easier way to transport these.

As with the previous move, packing all my physical games can take a lot of work. Like, a LOT of work. For one, I have way too many of them. Yes, I said too many. This is because I wish they would all magically transform into digital games. I have also added more physical games and collectibles since the last move, oh brother. It sure is fun to collect all these games but you never know that there is darker side to the hobby if you only lived in one spot. The good news here is that I will be moving to a larger place and my virtual reality setup will be much much better. The bad news is that I am moving to the countryside where the Internet connection may not be the best. I couldn't believe that the wiggly tentacles of Google Fiber haven't reached the place yet. Damn you, Google! I plan to finish moving by the end of June. Wish me luck, I really need it, and I look forward to showcase Game Room Ver. 4.0 soon after.

How PSO2 Became POS

I have been waiting for the release of Phantasy Star Online 2 on the Personal Computer forever. It took Sega so long to bring this game to North America (almost a decade actually) and it was so painful when they only released it on the X-Box One last month. I was an avid fan of the original PSO on the Dreamcast and the original X-Box so I was very excited to download the game yesterday, hating myself a bit for not downloading it sooner.

Some phantasies are just mere fantasies.

As if the wait for the game's release all these years wasn't horrible enough, the game came with a launcher and of course it had to download a huge mega patch before I could even play the game. Once that was done, I couldn't start the game because it kept nagging me about changing a privacy setting on my X-Box Live profile, something that no other X-Box Live game had ever asked me to do. I didn't even change anything, I merely went to check on my profile when the game actually allowed me to pass through the main menu. All this time, the game was running in windowed mode, a small one that is on top of my 4K resolution desktop so I hurriedly make a new character to get to the actual game so that I could access the game's settings only to discovered that the fullscreen toggle was actually in the launcher. So, I quit the game and changed the setting in the launcher but then when I started the game, it wouldn't load. The launcher just disappeared and nothing was happening on screen and no activities were showing in the task manager window. I restarted the computer and clicked the game from the Windows tile and nothing would happen except for a white line that was seemingly stuck forever in the game's tile. One time, I just sat there waiting until the launcher suddenly showed and the same thing would happen, when I started the game from the launcher, the game wouldn't boot up. I had enough at that point and I deleted the game.

I went to check the reviews from other PC users and apparently, it's a common thing. The game just wouldn't work for a majority of people. I also noticed one disturbing trend - the game would leave a huge chunk of file behind after it is uninstalled and when I checked the installation folder, after going through hoops just to change user permission for it because Microsoft thought it was so very necessary, the game left me with a 130+ GB of hot dung. It seemed like every time I tried booting up the game, the client was redownloading the patch or something. It's obvious that Sega didn't do the proper test runs for this launch. I cleaned up the mess and vowed to never touch the game ever again. Well, at least not until it gets a proper release on Steam or the Epic Games Store.

I Like Epic's Sale Better Than Steam's

Those who are uninformed and misguided, and maybe a smidgen stupid, hate the Epic Games Store. I personally enjoy the Epic Games Launcher thus far. The never ending free games, though most ended up being duplicates of my Steam and Twitch games, are reason enough to endear one to Epic's digital storefront. These games are mostly great titles too with a sprinkle of the ordinary thrown into the mix every so often. It's also great that Epic is offering a much larger cut of the profit to the developers/publishers from games sold compared to Steam. Everyone wants more money, you cannot blame them for signing a limited exclusivity deal with Epic. I am still baffled however that after all this time, improvements to the launcher have been incredibly slow. Does everyone who work at Epic only spend their every working hour collectively on Fortnite? I can't even customize my profile with an avatar, now that is just ridiculous in this day and age. Let's not talk about the lack of a shopping cart, it's pretty asinine.

The Epic Games launcher has more of my games than Origin and Uplay combined.

Epic is currently having an "Epic Mega Sale 2020" event that will last until June 11th and you know what? I am so in love with Epic right now. I know they did this same thing during their last sale event, but I wasn't sure if the "combo chain" (I will explain) was limited to just one title previously. You see, Epic is offering a $10 discount that can be used on eligible titles on the store priced $14.99 and above and by doing so during this promotion period, you then get another $10 discount and this can continue until... you emptied out your wallet? Has anything like this ever happened on Steam? Never. I had to grind tasks and pay money to earn measly cash discounts during the Steam sale events but no, not here. Since I have had my eyes on a number of games less than $20 with the sale discount that qualify for the $10 off, I am paying low, low prices to get these awesome games, like Journey to the Savage Planet, a game released early this year, that sees a price reduction from $29.99 to merely $7.99! This is quite generous. I quickly removed quite a number of games from my Steam wishlist today, hitting that "Played on Another Platform" ignore box to give Valve a message that hey, perhaps they need to be a bit more giving. Now please Epic, give us a shopping cart ASAP, as in roll it out in the next update?