Mera'din

They did a protest here in MN too. Honestly expected better of the people here overall. I don't disagree with WHY they were protesting (overreach of power is an overreach of power regardless of circumstances and there have been repeated mixed messages about what exactly we're supposed to be doing and consequences therein) but the way they did it was fucking moronic. At least this wasn't one of the imbecilic places where they were trying to block ambulances and hospital entrances and shit. They all just stood around looking stupid at the governor's residence.

Yep. There's a general lack of places to send the stuff too due to the number of restaurants that have shut down and various other related issues. One of the hog farmers we sell feed to said they're looking at having to start slaughtering piglets soon because there's no room for them. Just had 30+ confirmed cases at the meat packing plant in a town close to where I live which doubled that county's cases overnight. Likely to see some here now because a fair number of people that work there live here or have spouses that work at the plant here.

I think most people did, other than his stuff. Everything else I've stumbled across from there is usually vapid pointless shit like "Lol I gave all the random NPCs backstories in FF7 Remake" (this is not a joke). His articles were always really good though. Looking forward to seeing where he is going.

Whelp. There goes basically the last person that kept Kotaku relevant.

I just hit Wall Market last night. Definitely noticed some differences, but they did a good job with it so far. There's enough familiarity in NPCs and events that I'm really happy with it. I like the new characters they added, and the increased presence of Johnny is actually kind of fun. The thing I found most impressive is the fact that I actually KNEW who some of the NPCs were supposed to be when I saw them. Things like the dress maker and his son, and the "mohawk punk" style npc they had that they used for the arena announcers were all specific styles of NPCs I remember from the original and I was impressed at how much effort they put into keeping them familiar to their original designs. As for soundtrack, I haven't minded the Wall Market music as much as some things. The redone music is a fairly mixed bag so far. Some of it is solid and holds to the original, and some of it just feels off. I honestly hate most of the "special" verisions of songs you get as collectibles in the game though. That jazz rendition of the Cosmo Canyon theme made me cringe. I sincerely hope they do a more traditional one when they get to that point in the story because that did not fit the feel of that place even a little. Beyond some of the music, the only real complaint I have so far is how restrictive they made some of the exploration. It's constantly redirecting you away from places it doesn't want you to explore, and not nearly as much stuff can be interacted with as I would have hoped considering the original. All the details are there, but none of the added touch. A recent example I can think of is finding the giant 'AVALANCHE' spraypainted across the wall in that secluded area and it was cool to see it but I would have expected some kind of interactivity or comment about it but there was nothing. Also, in Wall Market itself I remember being to do a lot of the 'leg work' for the dress stuff before even going to Corneo's place and you can't even pretend to find anything before hand now which was a little disappointing. At least the ability to interact with the vending machine in the inn and stuff to acknowledge that it has a purpose if nothing else. At least the one item machine still tries to shoot you when you mess with it so that was nice. Edit: Near the end of the Train Graveyard now. Overall feelings on Wall Market are mixed. They did some amazing things with that area, but I feel like some of it was almost... over indulgent and superfluous. I'm a bit disappointed with some of the things they took out/changed, but it's balanced pretty evenly with how much I enjoyed it regardless. It made for an enjoyable experience ultimately so I can't really fault them. Train Graveyard has been excellent though. Had a really well done creepy vibe that feels like what they probably WANTED to pull off with Ch. 13 of FFXV.

Yeah, there were weirdly few copies of it or something because the day after I got mine I was looking into something and was on Amazon and the only availability on it was from 3rd party sellers who had super inflated the price.

Aaaaand my whole company just got (at least) 10% sliced off their pay for (at minimum) the next 3 months, they removed the employer contributions on our 401k, and we're on lockdown from any overtime. Amounts to approx. a $2.25 per hour pay cut for me personally. I now make less than I did when I started this job 3 years ago. Attempting to mitigate the damage by increasing my withholding limit for Fed/State taxes (let them take more than necessary just to be safe normally), bottoming out my own 401k contribution (should add about 5% back on), and reducing my HSA contribution.

Ch. 8 with around 16 hours of play time. Specifically I'm in the Sector 5 slums doing side quests at the moment.

So I knew that they had replaced all the VAs, but hadn't actually looked at WHO was doing the voices. As such, Sephiroth is STILL voiced by someone known for playing Superman. Specifically, it's Tyler Hoechlin who plays Superman in Supergirl and the other DC TV shows on CW.

I believe it's a one year exclusive on Playstation and then it will come out on Xbox. There have also been insinuations of a PC port but nothing specific has been said. Completely forgot to mention the NPC conversations. I'm constantly stopping to listen to them, and they change regularly as you progress through the story. Of particular note to me was the random people you would run into in the slums that were from the plate but stuck down there because of what you did. Especially the Shinra employees. Does an excellent job of showing both sides of the conflict from the "little guy" perspective. Also liked how much more emphasis they put on the fact that Barret's AVALANCE cell wasn't the only on and was actually kicked out of the main organization. If I remember correctly, they only kind of insinuate that in the original (the separate cell part anyway, not sure if they use the rest) and it gets glossed over pretty heavily though they may have elaborated on it in some of the compilation stuff that I'm forgetting.

Game is fantastic so far. They DEFINITELY added a lot of shit onto the original stuff. I'm like 11 hours in and JUST got to Reactor 5. They really fleshed out some of the side characters too, Jessie especially. Some interesting new characters and story elements too and I'm looking forward to seeing how everything plays out. The level design is visually excellent too. Lots of little details and interesting things to look at throughout the areas I've seen. Though the layout is pretty "hallway" like a lot of the time (not faulting it for that since it was pretty much the same in the original while in Midgar), it's laid out organically enough that it doesn't feel stilted and awkward like FFXIII did. Combat gets a bit chaotic sometimes, and it can be hard to follow and properly dodge/block stuff a lot of the time. Each character feels unique to play as though, and switching between them feels rewarding in the right situations. As crazy as some fights can get though it at least isn't visually vomiting glow effects all over your screen every 2 seconds like KH3 tended to do. >_> Really impressed with the other game systems though. Materia works almost exactly like it did in the original, with some specific modifications where needed due to the altered gameplay (only 1 summon materia per character for example, and you can't just use them whenever you feel like it). They put a weapon upgrade system into as well so you're not relying on hunting down a new weapon to increase your damage and other stats. Each level you get unlocks SP for the weapon and you use that to unlock stat nodes on the weapon itself (not unlike a super simplified FFX-style sphere grid type of thing). Any weapons you acquire are have the same SP unlocked as what you currently have. Each weapon also has an ability tied to it that after extended use becomes permanent on your character regardless of weapon. Only other real complaint is I'm not a huge fan of some of the new voice actors. MOST of them are similar enough to the ones they've always used before that it's mostly negligible, but there's a couple that are just different enough to rub me the wrong way. Also not a fan of how Square handled this part of it either. From what I've read previously, most of the old VA's were completely blown off when it came to this (David Hayder style). Like most of the main characters literally didn't know they wouldn't be doing voices in the game until the first trailer came out that had the characters speaking and it wasn't them. I get it for a few who came off as pretty wooden most the time, but there are a couple that I'm really disappointed they don't have for it. Though I haven't seen the Turks in the game yet, I'm of the opinion that not using Quinton Flynn and Cripsin Freeman for Reno and Rude is downright stupid. Out of who I've actually heard so far though, I'm upset about George Newbern. Got really used to Sephiroth sounding like evil Superman over the last 15 years. XD

I never had much issue with battery life in mine initially. However, they did seem to start losing charge life a lot faster than others. All my PS3 controllers are still fine, but I've legitimately had to buy replacement batteries for 2 PS4 controllers at this point and switch them out which would be fine except you can only find cheap 3rd party replacements that don't work worth shit.

From what I've read, even a physical copy is going to be an hours worth of installing shit off the disk. Get your harddrive ready. XD

The only thing I can think of as a reason for the bulkier design is because of all the haptic response vibration shit they're supposed to be doing with it. Which hoenstly, as interesting as that sounds, I don't know that I care enough for them to alter the feel of the controller THAT much for it. Hopefully you can just synch a PS4 controller to the thing as an alternative if it feels too weird.

^ This. It looks like a modified design of what they originally said was going to be the PS3 controller (the weird batarang looking thing). This looks bulkier than I would want it to be, but maybe it'll be okay. Hard to tell how big it actually is without a comparison but it looks more like an XBox controller than a Playstation one as is.

The regional grocery chain here is starting to get a bit more serious. They have plastic guards in front of the cashiers, and direction lines in all the aisles turning everything into 'one way streets' so nobody crosses paths and you're not allowed to put anything on the conveyor at checkout until the person in front of you is done and the cashier has sanitized the whole thing. They also have someone standing at the doors doing nothing but sanitizing carts as they get put back most the times I've gone through there. Everyone that is working there is also getting a 10% pay increase while this is going on as "hazard pay" which is better than a lot of places I've seen.

Part of it is I was never a fan of the direction the MGS games started heading in the first place. The first is by far my favorite, and I've been slowly losing interest since 3. I played 4 for the sheer spectacle of it, and had completely lost interest after playing Portable Ops and seeing Peace Walker and didn't have much interest in Ground Zeroes in the first place. Everything I saw about what they were doing with 5 put me off even before Konami went full retard and catapulted Kojima. Ultimately there's a lot of little things that rubbed me the wrong way for long enough that I eventually became unable to reconcile it and gave up.

I tried playing it a few months ago and after about 30 min. I got mad and deleted the fucking thing. I was having absolutely no fun playing it at all and it just felt too different from what I remember enjoying from an MGS game that I couldn't get into it at all. Have no intention of playing 5 at this point either because of it.

In reference to web's satan one: Also this:

11.) Control: The Foundation First expansion came out for Control and I'm counting it because it had a pretty decent length and good amount of extra content and it did not disappoint. Some interesting hidden things too. Probably the most ridiculous being you can find these 8 hidden lucky cat statues throughout the expansion the require some puzzle solving to hunt down in a few cases, and as you find them they gather around another cat statue and unlock these massive stone slab doors that lead to a room: You get a pair of cat ears as a reward. XD The couple patches they've put out since I stopped playing seem to have really helped the performance too. The only stuttering I get now is coming out of the pause menu. The regular menus and map don't cause it anymore. Still some framerate loss when action gets really heavy, but not near as bad as it was at launch and better than I would expect it to for all the effects the game throws around. This is probably the first game I had played where I actually wish I had a PS4 Pro or an even better PC. Apparently the ray tracing and DLSS 2.0 support make it crazy good looking.

Fucking finally. Been waiting for this for what feels like forever. Will give me a good reason to finally make use of the switch. Kids are going to hate me in May. XD

10.) Baldur's Gate Interesting game. Not entire sure I "liked" it. D&D stuff usually doesn't do much for me. Something about the setting has always managed to put me off a little, but the game had some cool bits to it and in terms of depth there is SO much to it that many other RPGs should have taken note of, both in the past and now. Story eventually got me interested, but I never quite managed to enjoy the game play. One part of the story NEARLY elevated it for me too, but it was more of a psych-out moment that ended up not being nearly as crazy as I thought it was at first. Managed to get nearly 90% of the trophies in one go, but one of the ones I have left is beating it on the absolute highest difficulty and considering how much trouble I had with the game on Easy in places, I'm going to nope the fuck out of that right now.

They've extended our school closure at the very least it looks like. March 30th was originally going to be the last day and they didn't prep any schoolwork for anyone, but now they sent out a plan for 'distance learning' and we have to go pick up a packet tomorrow or Thurs. for my 7 year old. Rumors have been running about various people who work in the energy and agriculture businesses here in MN getting travel vouchers just in case we go into full lockdown. Our cases have been jumping pretty steadily (only like 5 or so nearby and none in our county yet though), but I'm hoping it doesn't hit that point outside of the twin cities.