Mera'din

It took me a while before I realized the thing had a built in mic. All the stuff I read about it was purely about the haptic feedback and "3D" rumble stuff. Was examining it a few days ago and noticed the button and hit it and when it did a mic mute thing was like WUT. O_o Didn't realize it legit recorded for that stuff though. Jesus I can only imagine the hilarity that has already spawned from that, though the example you gave is starting it off strong.

Found a feature that is kind of a space hog if you aren't aware of it and is on by default. Whenever you pop a trophy in a game, it takes a screenshot just like on the PS4, but on the PS5 it ALSO takes a 14 sec. video of the time leading up to the trophy being awarded. This doesn't seem like much, but media can only be saved to the SSD even if you have an external drive hooked up, and considering that space is a premium commodity, I would recommend turning it off. It adds up fast. JUST from Spider-man trophies I've got so far, it had already eaten up almost 2gigs of space. It's a neat idea, but poorly implemented I think as you can't relegate them to an external drive, and the only customization to it is the length of the video. Wouldn't be so bad if you could designate trophy rarity for it or something at least.

23.) (PS5) Miles Morales: Spider-man This was tons of fun. Story was a little weaker than the first game, but it had its moments and wasn't entirely unexpected since it was a decent amount shorter. Combat was interesting with the addition of Miles' powers and though it felt harder than the original at first, I'm going through on New Game+ now to clean up trophies and being used to the new abilities is letting me absolutely tear through everything. Length wise, at a guess I'd say it a LITTLE longer than the length of the 3 DLC chapters but WITH all the side quests and collectible content of the original game which gives it a pretty decent length if you do everything. Probably could have benefited from a lengthier story ultimately, but I don't felt that it suffered much as is. Some of the costume options you can unlock were really cool too. Villain spoiler stuff:

Was playing Spider-man and ran across a side quest that literally amounted to finding this. I can only imagine the triggering that's going to happen considering how some people reacted to Kamala in Avengers.

We have this problem too. The website for our grocery store is missing a ton of stuff that we KNOW they have at the store and it's not like ours is some fancy super big grocery store either. We live in a town of 4k people. We have a tiny ass grocery store compared to most that doesn't carry a lot of what the bigger ones do.

Battery life seems pretty solid so far. I only got to play the day I got it (have been working every day since), but I had the controller on from the point I turned it on until about 1 or 2 in the morning and I don't think I got a low battery alert until near the end of that stretch so a good 12 hours minimum I think (though wasn't playing stuff the WHOLE time), and if it's anything like the PS4 controller battery alert, that means it would probably go for another hour or two at least before ACTUALLY dying. XD

The grocery store here gave up on the arrows a couple months ago? I would always get super annoyed when I'd see people ignoring them, but with what we know about the virus at this point, it's not something to really get bent out of shape over unless it's one of the old people that Anelle is talking about. It's definitely not just you. XD I'm the guy who if there's an old person inching along down the aisle, I'll wait at a distance until I can pass them with a decent amount of space, so when I have one that's riding my ass it gets to me pretty fast. If it keeps happening, I'll usually just zoom out of the aisle and circle back around if I still needed stuff from that aisle.

Honestly, the games were nearly as scarce as the system where I am. XD Went to 2 different stores (Best Buy and Walmart) and found a combined total of 3 games available for sale. I grabbed 'Spider-man: Miles Morales' personally and it's the game I wanted most, though was considering a couple others. I've never played Demon's Souls, Blood Borne or any of the Dark Souls games so was tempted to give the Demon's Souls remake a shot but still not sure if I want to bite that particular bullet. Was also considering Assassin's Creed: Valhalla but I absolutely refuse to give Ubisoft money, so if I decided to get it at some point it will be used. I've also been going back and forth on Godfall. It seems visually impressive but I don't know that I'm feeling the combat and Gearbox is kind of shady quality-wise outside of the Borderlands games, and will ultimately probably just wait for Outriders in February since that one looks a lot more impressive. It's nice that I can just switch my external harddrive from my PS4 to my PS5 at will too and play all of my PS4 games on it with some slight improvements.

The worst part is a lot of it is purely belligerence over some perceived attempt to steal their "freedoms" from under them. I've seen it first hand now as I had to go to South Dakota to pick up my PS5 and they have NO restrictions there and the governor their refuses to add them, but I saw more people wearing masks while I was in the state than I ever do at any given time here in Minnesota (at least locally. Bigger cities seem to be much less obnoxious about it). Not that SD is doing terribly well despite that. I'm sure their bars and shit are a fucking nightmare.

Sorry, yeah, that's what I meant. The game suspending thing doesn't work when you fully power it off. I know it happened for 2 different streamers specifically with the Spider-man remaster. Hadn't heard about it happening with anything else yet. The one thought it had something to do with him using an external drive initially, but ended up finding out that wasn't the case after some testing and talking with Sony. Not hooking my drive from my PS4 up to it yet anyway just to be safe. >_>

Yeah, the HDMI cable it came with was short as hell for what I needed. Had to completely rearrange like half of my entertainment center to put it in a spot I could actually get it attached to the TV. As such my PS4 and PS5 are on opposite sides now and the power cables on both are short enough that my surge protector is basically hovering like half an inch off the ground because of them. My next day off I'm going to have to lower the shelves a bit to take some tension off of the damn things. I honestly don't mind the way it looks. I have mine on its side and the only thing that really bothers me about it is the placement of the disk drive. Feels weird that it's towards the bottom of the system instead of the top (or just in the middle), and the design of the shell means there's a bit of a lip above the slot so when you eject a disk it's a little awkward taking it out. As a side note, if you got the remaster of the original Spider-man game, might want to take a pass on it for a while. It's apparently been nearly bricking systems. Seen a few reports of it now. Supposedly it only happens when you turn the system off without closing the game, but I'm not taking any chances. XD

We did that with out 2nd grader (can only imagine how hard it is to keep restrictions up with a school full of kids that young or younger), but sent both of the high schoolers back as they had a lot of trouble keeping up with their work at the end of the last year so I'm not looking forward to dealing with that again. XD Only downside is for us, the distance learning is not through the schools here. They hired a 3rd party online thing for it and it's absolute garbage. If my wife weren't home 24/7, he wouldn't be learning a damn thing. The course material is full of errors (both grammar based and material based), questions that weren't covered in the material, and a set of 4 lessons about researching/writing for a essay that is repeated across EVERY single class (including math,PE, Art and music). I honestly don't know how the school district thought this shit was a good idea. At this point, my son finished an entire semester's worth of work about halfway through the first quarter and the school principal had to force the company to give him the rest of the years work to keep him busy. XD

Okay, so this controller is pretty fucking nice I have to say. I am a fan. Also, apparently Bugsnax isn't as bad as it looks. My wife wanted to try out the controller but didn't want to play Spider-man so she tried that instead and actually enjoyed herself. Still not sure I want to play it. XD

Our high school is now going full stay at home. Enough staff got it that they don't have enough teachers to keep it going as is. Don't think the elementary school is far behind at this point since there have been like 4 confirmed staff cases at this point. Also have 5 confirmed cases at work that have all happened in the past week or so. Nobody on my shift luckily and all are people that we don't interact with so we'll probably be alright which is good. I've had to quarantine enough times for testing purposes that I've burned all of my "COVID PTO" and I'd really rather not have to burn my real PTO if I can avoid it. >_> Lo and behold, a few of them were part of an outbreak that happened via the local bar (in one case likely unavoidable as she WORKS at said bar, but still).

Just shy of 6ft.

I'm getting it. Have been enjoying myself again and the story is finally getting to the point where I wanted it to be at the beginning of D2 so I'm looking forward to it. Have almost completely caught up on everything I missed now too. Only one raid I haven't done but that one of the ones not going away so got the others taken care of first. Literally just finished my last one I needed for the moments of triumph thing just an hour or so ago.

22.) The Talos Principle Fun puzzle game. The "main" stuff was relatively straight forward, but the extra stuff for the "real" ending and bonus stuff for the extra ending got pretty hard in a few places. Nice balance overall it felt like. Relatively interesting premise as far as this sort of game goes though exceptionally typical for the genre as well (crank the "mystery" and philosophical themes up to 20 and let it ride). I still enjoyed it though and sought out the collectibles to find out more about the world. Finished the last ending earlier tonight and am playing through the DLC now since it came with it. MUCH harder puzzles and a lot stronger in the story/world building department so far. Still enjoying it, but I am starting to feel that edge of "That's about enough of this, thanks" so the DLC might have been a tad unnecessary overall.

Saw that and thought "Well at least they realized the only way they were going to get any significant number of people to play that game is to make it free". XD

21.) Werewolf the Apocalypse: Heart of the Forest This is more of what I was looking for from the above game. REALLY felt like playing a TTRPG. Some really cool art too here and there. A bit more abstract than this kind of game usually has, but it was nice and really fit the tone of the game. Also made use of music and sound effects really nicely. Choices felt like they mattered and you had a character sheet that was constantly being updated based on your choices which was interesting. Never been super into WtA, but I've always been interested in learning more about the other World of Darkness stuff outside of VtM so this was a nice introduction. There's a full on Werewolf the Apocalypse game coming out early next year so this was a nice primer. Only complaint is that it was pretty short. Got through it in like 4 hours, though there seems to be a pretty solid amount of replay value and I got it for like $10 since I owned the Vampire games that have come out recently so it still felt relatively worthwhile.

Been wanting to get it, but I've fallen behind on Supergiant's games so will probably wait for a sale. Still need to get Pyre and play that first. Bastion and Transistor were both incredibly fun and well put together. I've heard Hades is worth it for the music alone.

Finally running out of content on Destiny 2 and have mostly been getting on to see if I can get into the raids I have left to do to see those. Also slowing down on Avengers since I have all my characters leveled and their challenge cards done so just waiting until they throw some new content out. Has given me a chance to focus on some other stuff. Started playing 'Werewolf the Apocalypse: Heart of the Forest' THIS is the kind of thing I was hoping for with the Vampire games that came out recently. It's basically a visual novel style game, but runs a character sheet like a tabletop game that effects the kind of choices you can make and responses you can give based on your stats. My wife was watching me play after she had gone through it and she kept commenting on how responses I had to give were COMPLETELY different from the options she had and how different some of the story events were because of it. Think I'm most of the way through now so it's not terribly long but interested in going through it another time or two. Also have been playing the early access of Baldur's Gate 3. They did a really good job with this overall. It's very much early access though. Lots of bugs and wonky animations and other such issues, but this is going to be a hell of a game when its done. I'm already amazed at how open ended your options are. There is not set path to take it seems like. Even off the bat after the prologue I appear to have the option to opt out of helping the defacto "good guys" and just massacre an entire druid enclave and join a goblin horde. The visual dice rolls on making choices is interesting too. In games of this sort before I'd always push to get the 'right' answer but even the right answer can "fail" here and cause some wild shit to happen and you just kind of have to roll with it (lol). Makes for a more interesting and dynamic story already even if it can be infuriating at times too. Combat is pretty difficult for me thus far but not insurmountable. No difficulty options yet. Really interested in seeing where they take this game. Despite a lot of the bitching I see online, this definitely reminds me of the original Baldur's Gate in spirit. On the console side of things, I've been trying to catch up on some of my backlog and started playing 'The Talos Principal'. Interesting "puzzle game with mysterious and philosophically bent story" du jour. Puzzles have been mostly straight forward but a lot of the optional stuff can get pretty wild and interesting to figure out. Story is fun if a little blatant in its subject matter. Enjoying it overall.

Yeah, only way to know for sure is with the anti-body test, and apparently that isn't even necessarily going to be 100% at this point as I've seen some articles saying that a lot of people they tested that had it in Wuhan aren't showing anti-bodies (which also throws the whole 'LOL HERD IMMUNITY' argument I kept hearing for a while right out the fucking window, not that it was terribly intelligent to begin with). Hardest part is even if you're sick you can't fucking tell if it's that or not. There's so many damn potential symptoms and so much variance on how severely (or if at all) and how long people are affected that all you can really do is just keep being as careful as you can.

Mother in law is starting to recover. We had a bit of a scare when about a week in she informed my wife that she hadn't eaten since getting sick but is doing better now. Still has a nasty cough, but no fever and other symptoms she had are gone. Thought I had it for a bit. Started feeling off about a week after last contact with her but thought it was allergies at first, but woke up last Sunday having trouble breathing and had a number of other symptoms. Notified work and got tested Monday and was home until Thursday when the test came back negative. Guessing it was some kind of respiratory infection, or a nasty bout of the flu since that's been starting to rear its head again. Kicked my ass pretty good for a few days there. Getting tested was incredibly unpleasant as well. X_x