We beat act 3 on cruel today (PoE2). Cruel mode was a lot easier than normal apart from a few stumbling blocks. Never in the whole of cruel mode did better weapons for us drop though, hardly any equipment upgrades at all. We ended with 1.3 million in gold lol and a stash full of upgrade materials.

Now on to the endgame or random map mode. We did 5 random maps so far, not much different from the normal game apart from you can't resurrect :/ If one of us dies it's game over, higher stakes. While we can fight on our own, once you start a co-op map it's geared for two and our builds are complimenting each other's strengths. So while one of us can finish the fight, finishing the map alone would be very slow (lot of dodging and retreating) and boring, restart.

I did finally find a much better quarterstaff in the shop in the endgame encampment, got lucky with upgrading it, 25% speed modifier, 1.88 attacks per second before the additional speed modifiers. It doubled my dps from my previous staff. My monk blinks across the screen quickly freezing most mobs while my wife leap slams and sunders them into pieces :) Lot of fun.

I caved in and just started buying random boots until something good came up, to get my wife new shoes. Better stuff is finally dropping but boots and bracers seem to always be crap.

It looks like there's still plenty to do, no idea how far the tiers go or how this new skill tree works (just saw there was a new refund mode for a new tree). Also no clue what the explosives were about in one of the maps. It set to open the bind menu to assign a key to explosives. We couldn't figure out how. We were glad enough to get the map device working (had to log out, log back in, zone around and back and it started working) No clue either what the way stone modifiers are good for, they just seem to make it harder for no benefit...

Level 70 now, still fun to blast some baddies together.


Looks like we just go to the end game in time for lots of incoming improvements :)

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is the Indy game I always dreamed of!

Playthrough Update as of January 12th 2025.

Shin Megami Tensei V (NS) - Reached Lv 99 and clocked in at 26 hours - reached Fairy Village and got one of my favorite Persona/Demons in the form of Titania. Story is pretty simple - been building up my characters.

Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade (Steam/PC) - made it to Chapter 8. I'm really enjoying the story and combat. The boss battles are awesome, love the multiple phases. Also the flashbacks hinting

, I'm loving it.

I hit the God of war level on Astrobot, I'm taking this game very sliw cause I just can't digest a lot at once but I can't decide if all this playstation integration is good or tacky...I'm lending toward tacky. Great for a free game installed on the console but I paid full price for this, I don't want it to be a fucking playstation advert. This game has nothing on Astrobot rescue mission which is the best platformer of all time cause it's so condensed with meaningful gameplay and an evolution of the genre and it's not even close to something like Mario Galaxy which would be a 10/10 platformer... so far. I'd be surprised if it breaks outta the 8/10 mark for me. Can't see the hype but I've four worlds to go, perhaps it'll hook me deeply one of these sessions but since I'm at 100 bots I guess that's one third of the game and it still hasn't.

Did you not play Astro's Playroom? Cause that game was pretty much what you just said in this post.

I dont see an issue with it, Astro Boy is kind of like Sony's mascot right now and go to for repping Playstation as a whole, at least from Playroom's view. Havent played the new one but I'm assuming its just an extension of that.

Astro Bot is a celebration of PlayStation, what was you expecting? lol 

I was expecting Astrobot Recue Mission, which was its own IP. A few bots here and there as cameos is cool but to make the whole game about it, it's tacky and cheap as fuck. It just feels the opposite of premium. Plus Rescue Mission had longer more involved levels and this is all short, gimmicky stuff. It's fun but it's no Astrobot Redcue Mission which was more condensed to so much more premium, like Nintendo top teir platformers. Game needs to be at that 40 euro at full price point too, this didn't have a budget that justifies this price point and it's a game that seems like it would fit that price point, or at least 50. 70 euro is a rip. The advert (or as you say "celebration") thing works in the Playroom thing cause it's free but it's not cool when it's a full price game. 

I'm not saying the game isn't well made and it's most certainly fun in short digestible chunks but it's definitely over rated in my opinion. Strange that it got GOTY. There are three games I can think of more deserving than this and I had severe issues with two of them, Stellar Blade, FF7 R and Metaphor. 

A dabbled in it. I didn't think they would take it this far. I was Expecting Astro bot Rescue Missions (which I played very thourally and just short of the platinum by two or three bots) level of quality and leaning more on it's own IP side with the odd nod here and there, not making 50% of the game a homage to playstation. 

20hrs into this replay of HZDR and 2 things I wish the developers did and didn’t do (on the PS5 version at least). Firstly add an option to disable full screen effects, full screen flashbang effects shouldn’t be allowed period. Secondly … add an option to disable lense flare, HZDR cranks its lense flare to the max, one thing I’ll always disable given the choice.

Hmm PoE2 endgame is hit and miss. Not fond of losing xp when you die, not being able to resurrect your partner, nor running out of way stones to retry with still the same problem as in the rest of the game, one hit deaths.

I'm not sure how long my wife will still like playing this, the endgame stresses her out :/ Hopefully the upcoming patch makes it a bit more casual friendly as it's nice to have a change of scenery at least. (Don't want to trudge through the whole game a third time)

We also have no clue what all this endgame stuff is about, can't we just keep leveling and having fun instead of feeling like we need to go back to gaming school. This is what the endgame stuff feels like atm...


It feels more and more like the game is pushing you to the trade website to be able to keep up :(