CYBERPUNK 2077 Review Script 75% Finished!

Hello! And welcome back to my Patreon page. It's me, Tim Rogers. I'm posting to let you know that I have, as of a few minutes ago, finished writing the three most substantial, difficult segments of my upcoming review of CYBERPUNK 2077.

As you perhaps know from my mentioning it too many times in the past, writing the script signifies the Home Stretch of the Action Button Reviews process. The bulk of the work behind one of my reviews occurs during the "Play The Game While Having Thoughts" and the "Analyze and Log Footage" phase. The logging of footage for my Tokimeki Memorial review took two *months* at approximately 4 hours of work per day (concurrent with other projects (The Last Of Us, Doom)). Meanwhile, the script for Tokimeki Memorial took nine twelve-hour days to write, one fourteen-hour day to shoot, and seventeen 20-hour days to edit and finalize.

I estimate I will finish writing my Cyberpunk 2077 review script one week from today. I've finished the hardest segments, so now it's time to write the fun parts. I won't dare spoil any of the contents of the review, because I think it has a couple interesting hooks in it, though I will say that for this one I decided to return to the "seven shorter stories" format I used in the Final Fantasy VII Remake review. This felt appropriate, given that the name of the game is Cyberpunk 2077, that I played it on a 77-inch television, and that my game footage came up to exactly 177 hours! One more seven makes seven sevens!

Also, my notes just naturally fell into seven story categories.

Now that the fun news is out of the way, I'll address the not-fun news: I am not well. This lack of perfect wellness is in fact, in my own opinion, beginning to affect the quality of the work I do here with these reviews.

Now, don't get me wrong: I haven't felt "good" in about four years. I haven't felt "good" since before, I reckon, most of you came to know my work via Kotaku Dot Com. I spent my entire three years at Kotaku Dot Com feeling terrible all the time! That's why I started working there: to get the health insurance necessary to figure out what is wrong with me, and if I can do anything about it. In other words, most of the work of mine that most of you have ever liked was in fact created entirely while I felt "sick."

It's just, lately, I'm starting to feel it a little bit more--for reasons I sincerely hope are temporary. Of course, in the name of evicting "hope" from the equation, I have in fact applied for and received Real Genuine American Health Insurance, and have even visited my new primary care doctor exactly once already--within less than twenty-four hours of activating the health insurance, no less! I'm seeing a neurologist (about my migraines) in two weeks and a gastroenterologist (long story) next Wednesday. I flat-out asked my doctor "What's all the things a guy like me could get cancer of?" and she replied with a list of phone numbers. I don't think I have cancer, though Famous People Literally My Exact Age (42 in three months, so I'm rounding up) are out there dying of it, so I might as well get everything looked at. The wheels are in motion, Jerry!

Though buddy . . . motion kinda hurts.

Most recently, I am suffering from pericarditis, which literally means the sac(k) surrounding my heart is inflamed to a point where it's sticking to my heart muscle, causing severe stabbing chest pain, numbness and tingling of my left arm, hand, leg, and foot, dizziness and vertigo, occasional difficulty swallowing, and a mild fever. I thought at first I was having a heart attack, and I worked through it anyway, because I'm an idiot--and because the last time I went to an emergency room without insurance, it took me literally seven years to pay it off.

Days later, my health insurance finally activated. The pain had persisted, so I went to a CityMD urgent care facility, where a doctor yelled at me about not going directly to an emergency room. So I paid them $70 and then went to an emergency room, where they gave me a nice little private suite for about six hours and charged me exactly $50 for the knowledge that I have pericarditis, which requires a lot of ibuprofen, absolute minimal exertion, and a referral to a cardiologist. Turns out that $900 a month is gonna pay for itself any day now.

They gave me a COVID-19 test as well, and they voice-mailed me about collecting my results eighteen hours later. However at this exact moment their website reports "We are experiencing very high demand right now. Please check back in a bit." It's been like this since Tuesday morning.

I'm about as sure I don't have COVID-19 as I am sure that this pericarditis is the result of the COVID-19 that almost killed me last March. It's been a year, so I feel comfortable using that phrase: it almost killed me. I woke up barely breathing a dozen or more times per night. I could barely make it from my bed to the bathroom to see if my lips were blue yet--and I live in New York City, so you know that ain't more than a couple medium-sized-dog-lengths of walking distance. I got better by overnourishing myself with macaroni and cheese, guzzling full-sugar Gatorade, and eating one large peanut butter and jelly sandwich per night before bed after a dose of NyQuil capsules. I did this for four weeks, though only in the first four days did I watch one episode of Netflix's "THE WITCHER" starring Henry Cavill as Geralt of Rivia while waiting for the NyQuil to delete me. By night five, the illness had swollen to a mortifying gravity out from under which I could scarcely enjoy even the most for-me entertainment possible, so we started inexplicably watching AMC's The Walking Dead starring Norman Reedus. Also, Mimsy was falling-asleep-repeatedly bored with The Witcher and kept recommending that we watch Literally Anything Else. I was *dying*, Mimsy!!! And people SAY it Gets "Good" on the fifth episode!! (I found it quite excellent from minute one of episode one, though also: virus.)

I actually think somewhat fondly back to those days: every night alongside my own human-man-sized peanut butter and jelly sandwich (on some real dark, seed-y WholeFoodsian white-like bread), I broke a small fragment from what I in virus delirium internal-monologously termed my "Whittlin' Slice", with which to make a tiny peanut-butter-only open-face sandwich for my Beast Friend. Those nights I called him My Peanut Butter Sandwich Buddy. You *can* feed a dog bread (and sometimes you *should*, for digestive reasons) and this particular bread was so visibly  wholesome I figured it'd do my child more good than some other treats did. So I made him a little peanut butter sandwich and he sat next to me gentle on the sofa, silent-judge-gavel thumping his front paws on my thigh and softly hurfing every time I asked him (obviously rhetorically) if he was My Peanut Butter Sandwich Buddy. He sat and ate his tiny peanut butter sandwich and I ate my huge two-pound man-sandwich, and Mimsy fell asleep, and Henry Cavill was Geralt of Rivia, and then one night it wasn't fun anymore and I started thinking maybe I was going to literally die. One year later I'm sick again with a scary chest-involving problem, and once again Henry Cavill is asking to soon be on my TV, as Superman this time, and once again I'm presuming Mimsy will fall asleep.

Pericarditis, it seems, will diminish in scariness soon, granted I follow the physicians' protocols, though it will (I learn from anecdotes) remain obnoxious for quite some longer time. I might have to take a particular pill daily for as long as a year. I'll know when I talk to the cardiologist--whenever they call me back--though I'm not excited, as a human person who grew up as immersed in popular culture as anyone else, to possibly soon have "Heart Pills" of my own to which to conversationally refer. I know what kind of person "Heart Pills" are for, and I suppose this means I may soon join that particular category in a medically official capacity. I don't like it.

So as per the physicians' suggestions I have been Taking It Easy this week, whatever "it" is (pericard, apparently). I have poured twenty hours somehow into Bravely Default 2 on my Nintendo Switch. I'd intended to play the game exclusively in the bathroom (too many too-strong memories of great PSP RPGs, etc), though given the gruesome effect posture incline affects on my heart palpitations, and also given my professional inclination to capture video footage of every video game I play, I've ended up playing more on the television than anywhere else. (I have, yes, taken the game into the bathroom three times so far.)

No, I will not "review" Bravely Default 2: that would be monstrously boring. When you see my upcoming review of a brand-new-ish game (Cyberpunk 2077, in case you've forgotten) you'll perhaps see once and for all what generally my thoughts are when it comes to reviewing a newer, more modern game than (for example) Doom, Pac-Man, or Tokimeki Memorial. 

I'm only capturing so much footage of Bravely Default 2 because I now have over 100 terabytes of storage space in my home office server. I figure, why not build a library of footage of every game I play? Who knows what I'll be able to use it for?

(In fact, I can already think of a game I'm going to review in Action Button Season Two that would benefit from having a little Bravely Default 2 footage in it somewhere . . . I'm sure you'd MUCH rather see a review of THAT game than of Bravely Default 2 . . .)

Likewise, I've captured just about complete playthroughs of several other peripheral games in the past few months. I've got a Premiere project dedicated to logging footage of various games for extraction of data that might be relevant in future reviews. In other words, I'm running The Action Button Method on a wide variety of games, because who knows when that sort of data might be crucially valuable? Heck, maybe it'll even be valuable for the Cyberpunk 2077 review . . .

Just please . . . no, I'm not going to review literally everything I play. I have received about 50 Twitter DMs in the past four days asking if I'm going to review Bravely Default 2. People are asking, apparently, just because I have publicly confirmed I'm *playing* it. I need to find a nice diplomatic way to publicly inform people that these videos take genuinely statistically significant fractions of my LIFE-time to make. I can't just go reviewing everything. If nothing else, my recent brushes with serious unwellness have helped me finish contemplating the specific relationship between my human mortality and the schedule of the next twenty video games I plan to review.

To that glorious end, I've been stocking up on equipment, over here. I've secured an Analogue Super NT, an Analogue Mega SG, several Classified Games, and have a PS1 Digital and XStation-modded PlayStation One coming to me soon from Bob at RetroRGB. I ordered a MiSTer! I'm consulting regularly with the likes of My Life In Gaming and Digital Foundry (and a few other people I won't mention in fear of giving away too many clues) as I lock down the beautiful plans for Season Two of Action Button.

I'm doing all this planning work because, well, in my mind, despite the script for the finale's only being 75% finished, even though we haven't filmed it yet, even though I *definitely* haven't started editing it yet, and even though you ABSOLUTELY haven't *watched* that finale yet, season one is "over". It was "over" the second I started the final mission of Cyberpunk 2077 for the first of its many endings. As with the Final Fantasy VII Remake, I strove to transform Cyberpunk 2077 from a long-yearned-for piece of entertainment into A Video Game I Have Played, and I reckon I've done that. I've shattered the hype barrier. I've made the game real. Making a video about it amounts to an effortless afterthought in comparison. 

And, yeah, I'll finish that video . . . though I'm going to need to Take It Easy for a little bit while I do so. Maybe I'll restrict myself to 60-hour work weeks. 

Though certainly I need to reduce the amount of time I spend sitting at this desk. I certainly will have to avoid streaming--I guested on a My Life In Gaming stream the other day and the experience was excruciating, health-wise. I could barely speak a complete sentence without my chest aching. I had to cut Action Button's weekly TRUCK HECK Development Meeting (aka "TALK HECK") short at about 45 minutes (versus the usual two hours!) this last week. I really wanted to stream Bravely Default 2 tomorrow, though I am just going to go ahead and say no, I absolutely can't: This pericarditis sucks!

The perhaps most troubling consideration is that I don't know if I'll feel well enough to fly to South Bend, Indiana to film in front of the Precious Hobbit Cameras. I might have to film here at home, unfortunately. Which *would* constitute a true full-circular return to the style of the Final Fantasy VII Remake review, *and* allow me to shoot with a more relaxed schedule (ie over several days instead of all at once). Though I really *do* love those Hobbit Cameras, Jerry . . .

Speaking of Travel Plans, my doctor tells me I can receive the COVID-19 vaccine as early as next week, by the way. Apparently I occupy a category on the vaccine priority list. Unfortunately it's not a glamorous category. If in the near future I tweet about having received the vaccine, know that I'm doing so merely as a sign of support that people get vaccinated when they can. Please don't try to own me as being a worthless "inessential" citizen, the way I've seen others in the "entertainment" industry owned. I promise I'm only receiving the vaccine for a reason I'd *vastly* rather not qualify for.

Once I have that vaccine, and once everyone else does, too, I look forward to traveling, and filming some huge wild segments in far-away locales using some of this fancy equipment I'm in the process of acquiring. Season Three is going to be ridiculous.

And maybe, when we've all had the vaccine, we can all hang out somewhere. Maybe I'll rent an auditorium at the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn, if they're still alive, so we can watch--I don't know, Speed Racer, or Castle of Cagliostro. Something excellent. That's the sort of thing I think about every day, over here.

And oh, secret: there's another T-shirt by the one and only Dan "The T-Shirt King" Dussault coming soon to Shop Dot Action Button Dot Net.

Anyway, yeah, Season Two is just going to be me at home again. Though I promise I've picked six games of absolutely ridiculous interest to me, voluminously ripe for my research methods.

At any rate, it now approaches four-thirty PM, which I suppose to an ill man might as well be Five O'Clock Enough. I have a pericarditis fever and I can't tell if I feel like I'm spinning or the room is spinning. Maybe it's time to roll away from Sublime Text and my Cyberpunk scripts and return to Bravely Default 2 and my peppermint tea.

In closing, I recently (yesterday) removed salt and cholesterol from my diet at a doctor's recommendation. I have a friend who avoids salt for hereditary heart-related reasons, and I know this friend to be a proponent of the Mrs. Dash brand of salt-free seasoning, so just the other day (yesterday) I stepped breathlessly (pericarditis) into the supermarket downstairs and strode to the seasoning aisle to inquire of the Mrs. It turns out that, at some point perhaps-recently, they went and de-gendered Mrs. Dash! It's just "Dash" now! I feel more than one way about that. It's an interesting brand-happening to witness. For one thing, "Mrs. Dash" is fun to say. For another, it implies that cooking is for women. On another hand, "Dash" as a brand-name feels too sparse. It feels like something a Silicon Valley rich kid would purposely misspell for venture capital reasons. However, it tastes good enough and it turns out that maybe, all these years, I didn't really know what salt was for, because I was using far too much of it when, it turns out, none at all was plenty enough.

Well, thanks for reading my blog!