Home and the Places In-Between

I thought that by now, I would have found myself in a new home, setting up my new Game Room by applying creative techniques to maximize the nooks and crannies of the room that I have chosen for such purpose. I still dreamed of the glorious days of Game Room 2.0 - It was the perfect amalgamation of all of my physical gaming items, embraced by a generous amount of room. The last two iterations have been a challenge for me with version 3.0 lacking any real open space while 4.0, where I am writing this from, being more of a temporary gaming station (if you want to call 2+ years temporary that is) which means that I couldn't customize it entirely to my liking. Things are not as simple as I would like them to be. Such is life. Situations evolve, things change, circumstances complicate. Now, I am not even sure moving is going to happen anymore.

Looking like a storage room than a gamer brothel.

Scariest Jumpscare Is a Title Screen

Looking for a nasty scare in your gaming life? 'Tis the season of everything horror after all. Well, at least for a lot of people. I had planned to do another horror-themed event this month, but I have buried that whole thing deep into the ground since it was just plain dead. There was zero interest in it apparently, and I made the mistake of selecting Resident Evil Village as the first game for me to play. It was too scary. I could barely move for the majority of the 3 broadcast sessions of the game and without any morale support - I even attempted to recruit local help but you know, I am the only gamer in the vicinity - the event was destined to fail. I was thinking about switching to a different game on my Gothtober 2022 list but decided to just switch it up and go back to my yearly Honor Month which preceded it. Usually in October, while everyone else and their great uncles are playing horror games and try to outspook each other, I would instead play anything I want and dedicate the month to those who honor themselves by paving their own paths in their lives, like not following what's trending but instead, always following their own hearts.

RIP Gothtober 2021 - 2022?

Speaking of everything scary and spooky though, I got an unexpected one from just getting to the title screen of a game! Spoiler warning: The actual title screen that scared me will be shown after the page break.

ME: Andromeda - Tale of Two Ryders

I am currently in the process of playing through Mass Effect: Andromeda on the Personal Computer, a game that I haven't touched ever since my first attempt of completing it back in 2017. In case you have forgotten, ME:A was generally hated by the fans of the series. I played around 20 hours of it before I got distracted, which is something that occurs often with me. The game had broken facial animations and I remember during the sequence when a new spaceship given under my command was supposed to land on the dock failed to actually load, resulting in a hilarious cutscene - all of these have been fixed since then. I never thought that the game was horrible outside of the aforementioned things and the sound mix in which some NPC conversations are quite difficult to hear. It was the case of Dragon Age II, in which it is another BioWare game that I personally enjoyed a lot but is misunderstood by many. There was just no way that a Mass Effect game that doesn't include Command Shepard and his lackeys are going to hit the same because that character's journey across 3 massive games were indeed legendary. I can always appreciate games that branch off into different narrative territories and I can see the creative approach behind Me:A to separate itself from the original trilogy. The only time this game gets any kind of positive public recognition is when Electronic Arts finally made Me:A available on Steam in 2021 because you know... Steamoroids.

ME:A was never a bad game. It just wasn't launched on Steam.

Loving Genshin, Loving Epic

You know that one of the reasons why I can justify having a PlayStation 5 in my Game Room is so that I can actually play Genshin Impact on the console... Well, you can now scape that off the list. I am not a fan of kernel level anti-cheat and Genshin has that. But I did more research and did some tests and I can say now that I am comfortable with having it installed on my Personal Computer... via the Epic Game Store that is. So why have I decided on this? The lag. The horrible, horrible lag. Genshin on the PlayStation 4 was a baffling experience because of the intentional 30fps performance - there is no reason why the PS4 cannot run the game at 60fps. On the PS5, I was then annoyed by the consistently horrible 200+ ping that causes the game to lag pretty darn often. Now on the PC, I get 80+ ping and I have never experienced a single instance of lag. So yeah! PS5, you can keep your Smite (no HiPatchService.exe for me), but Genshin belongs to the PC. Since I have been playing a lot of Genshin, the player experience surveys from Epic for this game has been popping up on me constantly too.

Player input without all the nonsense.

The X-Box Flipperoo & A Surprise Judgment

After I got my X-Box Series X unit last month, my curiosity had resulted into me actually getting a couple of more physical games for the system - well, more like for the X-Box One but I don't have that console because I skipped that cycle - just to confirm if Microsoft had indeed designed the game disc holders to stay on the left side of the game cases. Well, here's the result:

Lefties rejoice! Definitely an unexpected, unique twist to disc storage.