#I guess I should have known it could happen. I was showing some friends berseria a few days ago.

[xiomeebo]

Luke just used his mystic and it scared the shit out of me hddvjdkj

[aurimeanswind]

Funky Town—Sunday Chats (2-19-17)

Bleh.

I’m in a Funk.

Funk-Junk-Dunk

I don’t know what’s going on exactly but I’ve found myself in a total funk this week. I have been known to see some gaming ruts before where games just don’t bring me that much joy anymore. This is the opposite of that. I’m playing so many goddamn video games you guys. You have no idea. I played like, 45 hours of Tales of Berseria this week. It was crazy. And unhealthy.

But creatively I’ve been falling behind. Maybe it’s the stress of planning stuff that’s coming. To give you an idea, we just finally got everything booked for PAX East. Flights, hotel rooms: everything is booked and ready. Also, there is a new site launch coming from Irrational Passions. Redesigning the site, which has been a long time coming, for sure. I think our current Wordpress theme is totally fine, but it’s a bit outdated at this point. But hey, that’s fine, it’s definitely gotten the job done. As a simple blog with mainly written articles and podcast posts, it’s been a great theme for us. But it’s a bit restricted, and it doesn’t give us too much room to highlight big, sweeping articles across the site, like guest columns and features.

In conjunction with that, we have a new logo coming, which I’m proud to give you all a preview of today. A massive thank you to Roger Pokorny for doing the base design for this.

This is not final, not yet, but it’s gonna be real close to this, so I’m happy to share it out.

But I have been falling behind on all my creative ventures. I’ve been writing everyday, of course, but I have this Alex Talks I have been sitting on for weeks and weeks now, and I still haven’t edited it. I just can’t get myself to bring it together. On top of that, I need to really start figuring out how I am going to frame this new version of Alex Talks, Case Study, but I haven’t built the digital set or logo for that yet either.

Ugh.

I’m sorry to everyone who follows me. I’ve been off playing games and planning for PAX, but since I left school I’ve been in a weird emotional place. I need to get to work and get stuff done, I just haven’t been in the right place to do that yet. I’m sorry for that, and I promise new, cool stuff is coming soon.

PAX East 2017

Happy to remind everyone that we’re gonna be at PAX East. Everyone everywhere should be excited for this, because we are going to take PAX East by STORM. I will be there, alongside Tony Horvath, Danny Juarez, Logan Wilkinson, and Jarrett Green, all representing IrrationalPassions.com. You should be excited for the content we’ll be posting there, because it’s gonna be killer.

A new design is coming to IrrationalPassions.com to coincide with that, so look forward to that sometime in early March, please god hopefully.

What’s on Tap

Nioh

I’ve been playing a good chunk more of Nioh, and I continue to dig it.

There seem to be a lot more situations where you just get caught in an enemy or boss’ too-long-combo that kills you instantly without fail. That sucks? Like, is that fun? I personally don’t think so. It happens a lot in this game.

Otherwise, I’ve found the built-in loot sorting systems and they work super great. Very happy to finally have that under my belt.

Game good.

Tales of Berseria

THIS GAME IS SO GOOD.

I’ve run into at least some problems with it, which is probably a good thing.

It has some pacing issues. I think the payoff for why they have these longer, drawn out parts is more than worth it, but there are some heavy combat sections in the second act of the game, with some really slow story parts, that are intentionally slow to kind of bring some real dark topics out of the woodwork.

Like I said, they are totally worth it for the payoffs, but it just felt a bit wonky when they were going on. For the most part, the entire first two thirds of the game are paced really well as far as story-to-combat-ratio is concerned.

The side quests are pretty back-loaded on the game, but they are kind of like mini stories that are told throughout the game as the world progresses, and they’re very good.

I fucking adore this game. So happy Tales has hit a big one out of the park again.

Questions

Y’all better tune into Episode 21 of The BrOC where Harold Price joins us to discuss such topics as:

Teens fucking adults

Adults fucking teens

Teens fucking other teens

Pregnancy Scares

Probably some super racist shit that Tyler will say and Jon will edit out

This is cute. Adorable.

Are Robot Dinosaurs cars? I think so. Equal in metal-count, so they count, right?

Wow Joey.

You have time to send me tweets asking me what I’ll miss, but you don’t have time to figure out how to go to PAX East with us?

How about the fact that you’re hanging out in Universal Studios today, having fun at Harry Potter world and fuck-all and whatever, which could probably definitely for sure inmyhumbleopinion paid for a trip to Boston.

Huh.

HUH.

But for real like everything and wine. That’s what I’ll miss.

I’ve been on record as stating I am a proud-as-fuck Ravenclaw. Wit beyond measure is man’s greatest treasure.

But I think all the houses are great. People give shit to Gryffindors but like, why? Because your insecure in your shit you assholes? 

I was always hesitant about Slytherin but one of my best friends, Jazz Foster, is a total Slytherin, and she’s great. So like, everyone chill.

But Ravenclaw for sure.

I’m not a piece of meat. No one calls “dibs” on my “booty” for “PAX East”.

But seriously, I’ve gotten three separate private messages from all the men staying in my room at PAX East saying they were going to 

(1) sleep in the same bed with me,

(2) fuck my ass

(3) “claim” me, whatever the hell that means?

Jesus Christ guys.

Jesus Christ.

I honestly don’t see it changing too much. Last year, and the multiple years leading up to it, I discussed on IrrationalPod the need for E3 to be more relevant, because really it hasn’t been as relevant as it used to be. Now, it’s still a massively important show and the show of most developer’s choice to reveal or announce their games, but there are so many other shows for that now. With E3 going public, they can reinvigorate that and speak directly to the public again, instead of this kind of press only, kind of not event that everyone who cared about games paid attention to anyway.

Now, with consumers actually attending the event, I think it’ll encourage the big companies to still participate in E3, because they can really sell their things there again. Before the PAXes and the PSXes, there was no way for consumers to come and preview games early. Now E3 has to open up to the idea of that too. 

This doesn’t necessarily mean E3 will be that, nor does it mean everyone will be able to attend the pressers and whatnot, but it makes things a bit more interesting again. That’s a big plus for an event that’s been struggling for quite a bit now.

Dude, Persona. For sure.

Just directly spew that anime right into my body. I need it.

That or Zelda, because no matter what you think of any given Zelda game, it’s good vibes. It’s an adventure game that is at its worst comfort food.

This is a tricky question. There are usually redeeming qualities in all the games I play, or sink any amount of time into, and I think I’ve gotten pretty good at knowing when a thing isn’t for me, so I’d just avoid it.

I think Tales of Graces f was a rough one for me. The end of Tales of Zestiria couldn’t come fast enough when I was playing it. But for the most part I enjoyed that game.

Omega Quintet is garbage but I was playing that for a Let’s Play with Tony so I guess that was *kind of* worth it.

I was not into Battlefield 1 when I played it. I know, I know, I have to legitimately sit down and play it, not tired out of my mind in the middle of ExtraLife. 

Past that, it’d probably be some free PS+ game that just didn’t jive with me. Lords of the Fallen was free with Gold and I wasn’t very into it when I gave it a shot.

Shoutouts

I wanna give a shout out to Dustin Furman and Brandon Duncan for inviting me on their show Adventure Mode. Was listening to it on my lunch break earlier today, and you should definitely check it out if you haven’t already. We were originally going to record tonight but it sounds like we’ll be doing that on Tuesday instead, but those guys put on a good show and you should check them out.

http://www.handsomephantom.com

Alright, I have to go watch two episodes of the OC and then probably go to bed early because it was someone’s bright idea to have me on a podcast at 11 in the fucking morning on my day off. I’m not very happy about it, but the creative wheel never stops turning.

Until next Sunday: keep it real...