FOMO Got Me: Dune: Awakening

As I’ve gotten older, and my backlog has gotten bigger, and my wallet has gotten thinner, I’ve developed a decent amount of resistance to FOMO, but sometimes even I slip.

In the case of Dune: Awakening I’m going to blame Scopique and Tipa, as well as the fact that we watched the Dune Prophecy TV series not too long ago, and the Dune movies over the past two weekends. Basically Dune is everywhere and the game looked like it was something I’d enjoy. I was going to wait for a sale or whatever, but Scopique rented a private server and told me I’d be welcome so I figured this was a case where getting in early when others were psyched made pretty good sense.

So far, no regrets. I’m having a really good time. My biggest source of concern is, where should I play?

I started on Scopique’s server which has been great, but quiet. There’s a dozen or so of us, I guess, but so far I’ve seen 1 other player and they flew in and out of my field of view so fast that I didn’t even see who it was. The pros are that there’re plenty of spots for base building, friendly-if-mostly-unseen neighbors who’re constantly offering help to others (so far I haven’t needed it, but that time is probably coming) and absolutely zero drama. The only real con is that it feels mostly like a single player game so far, but I’m not even sure if that is a con (there is no actual single player mode in Dune: Awakening). Also that might change if/when I catch up to where everyone else is hanging out. For now I see giant bases but no players.

Just for comparison sake, after I’d gotten myself established on the private server I rolled a character on a Medium-busy public server. And guess what? I haven’t seen another player there, either, but I do ‘hear’ them talking about end game stuff which I’ve enjoyed. And I’ve found abandoned bases that I could claim for my own. It’s kind of interesting to see what others started building before they drifted away to sandier pastures. In theory if I ever wanted to get into the PvP stuff, that happens on the Public servers, though normally that isn’t really my thing. The big con on the public servers is that Funcom is in an arms race against hackers and I guess every time they patch an exploit another one is discovered, to the point where people are having their bases robbed in PvE zones. Hasn’t happened to me but frankly I don’t own anything worth stealing yet. But that is, for now, a pretty huge Con if ever there was one. The other con is that I don’t know anyone on this server so if/when I get to areas that I can’t solo, I’ll be dead in my tracks unless I PUG which is generally a source of great anxiety to me.

So I’ll probably stick to Scopique’s private server to take advantage of this nice little pocket of friendly players; I’m sure at some unplanned but inevitable future time after I’ve moved on to some other game and decide to circle back to Dune, long after the Private server has been retired, I can try life on a Public server. Or maybe Funcom will have introduced a single player local server by then.

As to the gameplay itself, if you’ve played Conan Exiles you’ll have a pretty good idea of what you are getting into. There’s combat of course, and as you level up you earn points you use to unlock recipes for crafting things. There are also skill trees grouped into various classes that you can unlock as you play. The world is, well, Arrakis: lots of sand dunes interspersed with rocky outcroppings where some sparce plant life clings to existence. They call these ‘islands’ and traveling between them is dangerous due to sand storms and sand worms. If a sand worm eats you, that is it. I mean you respawn but apparently you respawn naked and with an empty backpack. Combat deaths are not nearly as unforgiving; you drop something, though I’m not sure what. I’ve only died once and never got back to see what I’d dropped. Early days!

The big hook, of course, is water. Early on, at least, water is a constant concern. You get most of it by draining the blood of your fallen enemies and processing it back at basecamp to turn it into potable water. Yeah, it’s gruesome and this is a violent world. Few NPCs want to talk and I’ve yet to meet one who is willing to back down from a fight.

So far I’m built several bases (and abandoned one), built a sand bike — basically a snowmobile only with 2 treads where the ski would be, and 1 tread in the back [see image at the top of this post] — and am working my way up the tech tree. It is still a thrill when I’m making my way across the dunes and a sandworm is coming for me, and there is just a TON out there for me to explore.

So yeah, FOMO got me, and I’m glad as heck that it did. Been loving Dune: Awakening so much that Death Stranding 2 has fallen by the wayside for now!

June 2025

The fact that adverts always depict summertime as a time to get outside and do lots of fun things is proof that the big advertising firms are all located in mild or cold climates. Summer has arrived and it is downright unhealthy to leave the house due to the ridiculous heat. Here in the US pretty much everyone on the East Coast got a taste of North Carolina summertime in the last week of the month as it was 100F/38C almost everywhere with high heat indexes. It hit a heat index of 110F/43C here and not MUCH cooler anywhere else from what I could tell.

So nothing to do but stay inside and play video games, I guess. I was kind of treading water for a lot of the month waiting for Death Stranding 2 to launch. I had pre-ordered it before Lola got sick and we became buried under vet bills, and Sony is awful about refunds so I just rode with it. Might be my last new game for quite a while until I get those bills paid off. Only 35 payments to go! Of course I’d pay 3 times that if we could get our little puppy-daughter back. Missing her as much now as ever. It has to get easier eventually. right?

Enough of the depressing stuff, let’s talk video games.

Playing

Planet of Lana [Xbox Game Pass] got finished. I’d written about it a while ago and most of what I wrote stands. Towards the end some of the puzzles got a little bit more finicky in terms of reaction times and so forth, but nothing too bad. It was a great little game. Kind of sweet, kind of scary, all environmental story-telling. Highly recommended. Took me 5.5 hours to play through. I could do a replay to chase Achievements and what not, and I don’t rule out that possibility at some point in the future.

Screenshot from Planet of Lana showing Lana squatting down to give Mui a pat
Lana giving Mui pets for a job well done.

Alan Wake Remastered: This is one of those well-loved (by the general gaming community) games that I’ve always meant to play but have never gotten around to. The Remastered version was on PS+ Extra and was short enough I figured I could finish it before my sub ran out, and sure enough I did. Took me 20 hours in total and… I honestly didn’t like it much. The story was fantastic and if they ever make a movie version (I keep hearing chatter about them doing that) I would be down to watch it, 100%. But the actual gameplay hasn’t aged very well. I found it vacillated between frustrating (clunky, slow controls) and tedious (the battles all feel kind of the same). I’m still glad I played it for the, I dunno, historical perspective, and now if Alan Wake 2 is ever on a deep discount somewhere I will probably pick it up, because the IDEA was fun, just the excecution wasn’t. It was probably fine back when it launched but, y’know, our expectations of how games should play change over time.

Ratchet & Clank (2015 version): I was just going through games that had been installed on the Playstation since forever and here this one was. I decided to play it a bit before uninstalling and ended up finishing it. It isn’t super long (12 hours for me) and the first 3/4 or so aren’t particularly tough. When I did finally start to feel a bit frustrated I just set the difficulty down to Easy and that made things REALLY easy but I was about ready for it to be over anyway. Overall it holds up really well for a 10 year old game, and the mechanic of everything busting into a ton of nuts and bolts that then get hovered up into Ratchet’s satchel is oddly satisfying. Kind of like hoovering up the bricks ins a Lego game. Overall, it was a good time!

A shot from near the end of Ratchet and Clank looking down into a giant machine

Wuthering Waves is back in rotation after I heard yet again about how great the story is. Of course I couldn’t remember how to play, and you can’t start fresh, so I created ANOTHER account to start clean. That’s account #4 so far! I have made it further than I ever have and who knows? Maybe I’ll stick with it to get to some of the good story stuff this time.

Tales of Arise is another re-visit. I got it way back at launch but got distracted. Once again I started fresh. I am really struggling with the combat. I just don’t vibe with it. It’s an action-RPG system but it does not reward button mashing and I, I have to admit, am a natural button masher. I’ve gone so far as to watch long YouTube videos about the combat system. Worse comes to worse I’ll put it down to Easy or Story Mode or something because I really enjoy the look and feel of the game, the world seems fun to explore, the characters’ constantly bickering leads me to believe a romance is budding, and I’d really like to experience all that eventually. We’ll see.

Death Stranding 2 is the game I’ve been waiting for and so far it has not disappointed. It is similar enough to the original that it felt really comfortable jumping in, but there’s new stuff too. I haven’t gotten very far as it just came out; but I expect it’ll be my “main game” for quite some time. I’m in no rush to get through it and immediately got caught up in placing structures to help other players out and becoming friends with all the folks in shelters in the first area. The story will be there when I’m ready for it, right?! Loved the first game and so far I’m loving the second as well!

A wide shot of desert scrub. Sam's trike is parked next to a generator. It is night and the generator casts a circle of light
It gets noticeably dark now, Generators have lights on them that you can see from some distance off. I don’t remember that being the case in the 1st game but maybe I’ve forgotten. That’s Sam’s trike parked next to it.

Watching

Shadow & Bone (Netflix) — We’d watched Season 1 of this a few years back I guess, but at some point they released a 2nd season and then canceled the show. Which is a shame because it was awfully good. Honestly we thought S1 was OK the first time we watched but for some reason felt it was way better on the re-watch. It’s a complex world and maybe it took a 2nd viewing to grok it all. Basically we have a world where some folks can wield magic of various sorts. In our world terms I would put it somewhere around 1880-1900 maybe? Technology is advancing to where magic isn’t quite the weapon it once was, we non-magic users fighting with swords and bolt action rifles. There are gatling guns but still at the hand-cranked level of tech.

Anyway this country is divided by “The Fold” which was created by the Black Heretic hundreds of years ago. This is a giant black cloud filled with monsters that divides the country in two, and passage through it is quite perilous. Into this mix comes a couple, life-long friends and both orphans. He is a tracker in the army, she is a cartographer, and the two of them get caught up in some world-changing events. There are other pockets of characters too, including a gang of n’er-do-wells always looking for a new job to pull off. It’s a great show we personal stories, geo-political issues, magic, war, forbidden love, monsters… I’m really sad that it was canceled, but it is based on a series (?) of books that I’m going to make a point to read.

Severance (Apple TV+) — I’d heard good things about this but it took us a long time to get around to trying it and… it is in fact really good. The premise is that these people work for some big tech firm on some super secret project. In order to do so they become “severed” so that when they are at work they can’t remember their outside life, and vice versa. The result is that the at-work entities know of nothing other than the office they work in. These “innies” as they call themselves, are the main focus of the show. The work they do is also very mysterious — it almost looks like they’re playing some kind of game. The company they work for is more or less a cult, just adding to the oddness of it all. It’s pretty creepy, sometimes darkly funny, and generally a good mystery. We haven’t finished the 2nd season yet but we’ve been really enjoying it.

Reading

Another month has come and gone and I’ve done very little reading, aside from constantly reading the news and feeling depressed about that. I need to figure out how to work reading back into my schedule!

And that’s that for June 2025. Aside from the continuing sadness/depression over the loss of Lola it has overall been a decent month, I guess. I am now officially a senior citizen, having turned 65. In the US that means signing up for Medicare which was oddly stressful because you get swarmed with junk mail and offers from companies that want to be your Medicare Supplemental provider. But as I still work full time and get insurance via the job I just did the minimum “Plan A” signup for now, which once I figured out that was what I had to do, was pretty easy. But yeah, I am now a literal [Medicare] card carrying “senior.” Ugh.

My PlayStation Plus Sub is Expiring and I Couldn’t Be Happier

So I’ve mentioned a few times that we’re needing to tighten our belts here at chez Dragonchasers. Lots of vet bills and just that generally the cost of living is going up way faster than my salary is means the years of easy living are behind us, at least for now.

So when I noticed my PlayStation Plus Premium membership was coming up for renewal in July, I had a moment of panic. The Premium tier is roughly $160/year, the Extra tier $135 and the Essential tier is $80.

I’m currently on the Premium tier and would not renew it. The difference between Extra and Premium is that the latter offers some game trials, access to old-ass PS1 and PS2 games, and game streaming. I’ve never used any of these perks.

The Extra tier has a Game Pass-like library of games you can play for free while you are subscribed. I do use this quite a bit. While Sony isn’t nearly as good as Microsoft when it comes to putting their own games in the library (and particularly not on Day 1), there are still a lot of good games in the there.

The Essential tier is in fact essential if you want to play games with other people. It is basically the “old” PS+: you get a couple of ‘free’ games every month, cloud saves, and the ability to play games online with other people.

I was looking at $135 for the Extra tier, which is a lot right now, and to add salt to that wound Sony is currently running a 30% discount on subscriptions…but only to people who aren’t subscribed. That just feels bad.

So I initially resigned myself to scraping up $80 for Essential but then I thought about the last time I’d played anything online with anyone and… couldn’t remember when that was. Cloud Saves are nice but I can live without them. And the ‘free’ games that give out these days are generally either very old or not great. The good stuff they save for the Extra tier.

In the end I decided to cancel and see how it felt to be an ‘offline’ PlayStation gamer. First thing I did was go through all the games I had installed and started deleting PS+ Extra titles that I knew I’d have no time to play between now and mid-July. A few of them that I hadn’t tried, I dipped into to see if they were worth adding to my Wishlist in case they ever went on a deep discount.

What was strange about this process was that with every game I deleted, I felt a little bit ‘lighter’. I didn’t realize how much I was feeling “obligated” to take advantage of the PS+ Extra library in order to get my money’s worth. I mean I was vaguely aware of the fact that I have a lot of games on PlayStation that I own but never get around to because I wanted to play the PS+ Extra games first. Thing is, there’s always new PS+ Extra games landing so I can never get ahead of that.

So now, once PS+ Extra is gone, I can go back and play all the games that I was interested enough in to open my wallet for. And I’m actually looking forward to that and I have enough games to keep me busy for a year, easily. Maybe more. You know how slow I am and the PS shares time with the Xbox and PC.

Come November and Black Friday, if they offer another big discount to ‘new’ subs I might go back; I’ll see if I am missing the service by then. I kind of doubt it.

It probably helps that I also have Xbox Game Pass so I get new/random games to play there, too. I don’t feel the same sense of obligation on Xbox. I’m guessing this is partially because I am paid up through 2027, partially because I mostly pay for it via Microsoft Rewards points, and partially because I don’t own a ton of Xbox games that I never get the time to play.

So yeah, I guess that’s it. I went from feeling bad about losing this service to feeling better. I’ve kind of felt a little bit of the same feeling as I’ve canceled streaming services, too. Too much of a good thing, I guess. Having fewer choices is actually making me a little bit happier (and a little bit less broke).

[AI generated shot of a dump truck emptying games into a vatImage at the top of the post generated by a couple of AI tools. Sora was used initially with the prompt “Can you create a playful illustration of a dump truck labeled “PS +” dumping a bunch of games into an overflowing vat labeled “Backlog”? Please create it in a landscape orientation.” That resulted in the image to the left: Sora does not like making landscape images, apparently. So I fed the original image into Google’s AI Studio and asked it to expand the picture with the prompt “Can you take this image and remake it in a 16:9 ratio? I need it to be wider than it is tall, but otherwise I really like this image.”]

 

May 2025

Right after last month’s recap, our beloved dog Lola died, and that definitely cast a pall over the month. After spending 15 years taking several walks per day with her, plus feeding her and various playtimes over the course of the day, we found ourselves kind of adrift and WAY out of sorts (and, of course, extremely sad). That led to a dip in doing things in the early part of the month, but then a spike later when I found that immersing myself in a game or something would take my mind off of missing her.

If you think that surely a month is enough time to get over the loss of a pet, I’m here to tell you that you are wrong, if it is a pet that you have a special bond with. Lola was our “heart dog” and the closest thing to a child we’ll ever have. We still shed tears most days when we’re reminded of her and the fact that she is gone.

Transitioning away from THAT sad topic… I don’t have much of a recap this month mostly because I’ve actually posted a few times about what I’ve been playing. But let’s dive in. Basically I’m in a quasi-holding pattern waiting for Death Stranding 2 to come out. Every year my brother sends me a check for my birthday and I used that to pre-order DS 2. With the massive bills we incurred at the vet, [the GoFundMe is still up if anyone with an excess of cash laying around happens to read this] buying new games is off the table for a while, but I figured birthday money was fair game.

Anyway point is, I’ve been sifting through offerings on Game Pass and PS Plus Extra (both of which were paid for last year) and picking games that are either short, or were generally disliked and/or didn’t sell well. The latter just because I’m always curious about why a game becomes widely disliked. My PS+ Extra sub ends in July and I can’t really justify renewing it so I’m mostly focused on that service. Game Pass gets paid for via Microsoft Reward Points, and anyway is paid up for like 2 more years still so I’m good there.

Playing

Dragon Age: Veilguard [PS+ Extra] finished after around 105 hours and wrote a post about it. It was OK but overly long, in my opinion.

Clair Obscura: Expedition 33 [Xbox Game Pass] is one of those games everyone loves but that I’m struggling with. (By the way I was playing this because it hit Game Pass on Day 1, NOT because it falls into that category of being disliked or not selling well; it’s well reviewed and seems to be selling great.) I enjoy the combat and find the world’s mystery intriguing, but the lack of a map and the fact that so many zones are so dark I can’t even navigate by sight has me playing it for very short periods of time before frustration sets in. Right now I’m trying to find 3 crystals for a friendly mob and the only way I can figure to do this is by constantly re-spawning enemies and hoping a crystal drops. So I’ve been fighting the same mobs for almost a week now. So far I have 1 crystal.

Screenshot from inside a dark dungeon. You can't see much
This is how I’ve been playing and I’ve been finding it pretty frustrating

So shortly after I wrote this, I had a super obvious A-HA! moment and logged back in and pushed up the brightness and gamma settings and voila! I could see what I was doing again. And I realized that I could get the crystals I was looking for just by smashing some; they didn’t have to come as drops from mobs. With that out of the way I finished Act I, finally. I still dislike not having a map. For instance at the end of Act 1 I was at a fork in the road. I started going one way but it seems like a long route and there were Save Points, so I figured this was the main path. So I backtracked and went the other way and nope, THAT was the main path and it ended in a boss fight and then me being whisked away to another part of the world and I can’t seem to fast travel back to see what I’m missed on the other path. That’s gonna bug me now.

Example of the turn-based combat screen
The turn-based combat is really satisfying

Inside [Xbox Game Pass] finished and I wrote about it. It was great! And delightfully short.

Planet of Lana [Xbox Game Pass] is a side-scroller that I’m still enjoying. It’s supposed to be short so I expect to finish soon. I wrote about it, too. [A shot from Planet of Lana is at the top of this post.]

Immortals of Aveum [PS+ Extra] I bailed on, and wrote about why. After I gave up playing I watched a YouTube video of all the cut scenes so I know what happens and don’t regret setting it aside at all.

Forspoken [PS+ Extra] is another game that got pretty blasted at launch, and I remember playing the demo and thinking “nope” but here I am playing it and honestly, it is growing on me. Frey is unpleasant and her companion (a magical bracelet) is grating, but a) there’s a setting where you can turn their banter off, thankfully, and b) Frey actually seems to be growing as a person and I love to watch characters better themselves. It seems like a huge open world game with WAY too much stuff to do, so I doubt I’ll finish it, but so far I’m enjoying myself. One last side note: I remember when this was called Project Athias and was used to show off how amazing Unreal Engine can look. That wasn’t THAT long ago, and already Forspoken looks a bit data. It’s astounding how fast graphics are improving.

Screenshot of the fingernail paint screen.
Whatever game do you know of that has magical fingernail polish!?

Saints Row [PS+ Extra] is another game that everyone seemed to hate, but that I’m enjoying. It’s pretty mindless and very ridiculous but it’s that kind of dumb fun that comes with mowing down enemies and creating good looking explosions and doing nutty stunts like jumping onto the back of a jet to get at the pilot. Again, not sure I’ll finish but I’m finding it entertaining for now.

Gliding over the city in a wing suit
You get a wing suit from the very start of the game, which doesn’t suck

That’s a lot of gaming without opening my wallet! And I guess it wasn’t all that short after all!

Watching

We subscribed to Max for The Last of Us S2 and while we had it, figured we’d binge on Max offerings this month.

The Last of Us Season 2 was way too short. I enjoyed it but they’re saying they’ll need 2 more seasons to finish the story and that sounds right to me. I felt like this season barely got into the meat of the game, though maybe I’m remembering wrong. With Max being so pricey we might skip Season 3 and re-subscribe when Season 4 is out and get it all in a 2-month sub.

The White Lotus Seasons 1-3 was.. a lot. I think I would have enjoyed these more if I’d put some time between seasons. I loved Season 1 (Hawaii). Season 2 (Italy) was mostly about watching the lovely Simona Tabasco as Lucia, if I’m being honest. Season 3 (Thailand) was pretty good mostly due to Walton Goggins & Aimee Lou Wood and their relationship. I’m the one person in the world who isn’t the hugest fan of Jennifer Coolidge — I like her characters (and she always seems to play the wacky character) in small doses but after a while I get tired of her — so her not being in S3 helped get me back into it. Oh and in case you’re not familiar, ‘White Lotus’ is a chain of luxury resorts and each season focuses on a group of generally entitled and obnoxious characters being pampered and acting terrible in front of the local staff. And usually there is murder mixed in… it’s dark comedy.

Dune Prophecy was one of those shows where I wanted to love it, but didn’t, and I can’t put my finger on why. It reminded us a lot of Foundation on Apple TV+ and of the Wheel of Time (the sisterhood in DP reminded us a lot of the Aes Sedai in WOT). I mean it was OK, but just OK.

Reading

Back to doing no reading since I used to do a lot of my reading while sitting outside with Lola. No Lola means no sitting outside, so far. I need to find a new reading time because I do miss it. It also seems like it has been raining the entire month which has prevented us from getting into the habit of getting out of the house.

So that’s May, overall one of the saddest months I’ve ever lived through. Hoping that June is a bit more upbeat!

Immortals of Aveum DNF

I remember looking forward to Ascendant Studios’ Immortals of Aveum when it came out, though I have to admit I didn’t buy it at launch. (I buy very few games at launch since almost every game that comes out gets patched post-launch, and of course quickly comes down in price). When it hit Playstation Plus a year or so ago I jumped in and played for maybe 5 hours before I got distracted. I can’t in all honesty say exactly why I quit playing back then.

But recently I decided to give it another go. This time I played about a dozen hours before bouncing off it, and this time I deleted it from my hard drive. It’s the only way I’ve found to give myself ‘closure’ on a game I’m not enjoying. If it is still installed I’ll constantly go back to give it ‘1 more try’ and then wind up frustrated/disappointed again.

Lately I’ve been struggling with forcing myself to finish games I’m not enjoying all that much, just to say I’ve finished them. Frankly, life is too damned short, and the supply of good games too plentiful, for that kind of behavior. So this is me trying to be better about making gaming enjoyable for myself.

I doubt I’ll ever go back to Immortals of Aveum even though I am kind of interested in how the story eneded. My reasons for stopping break down into two broad categories: Me problems, and Game problems.

First the Me problems. Immortals of Aveum is basically a first person shooter, only with magic spells rather than guns and bullets. I’ve kind of lost my love for FPS in general, though honestly for a while the game was interesting enough to overcome that. What I really liked were the game’s environments which felt organic and fully realized, at least as fully realized as a world fractured by magic can be. But the wilderness felt like wilderness and cities and towns felt like real places that people actually lived in. The game rewards exploration too as there are crates and puzzles to find all over the place. Combat was actually pretty fun though they do throw a lot of techniques at you. If you play the game straight through it’ll be fine as they give you a tool, give you some time to use it and get used to it, then give you your next tool. But coming back to it after a year away? I was totally lost and had to start over. But these days run and gun FPS start giving me headaches after I play for a while, and this one was no exception (oddly I can play something like Skyrim and not have any issues… I think it is the speed of your typical FPS that causes me issues, and this was never a problem when I was younger).

A landscape; the view is from inside a cave, looking out into a lush world.
The environment is the real star of Immortals of Aveum to me. I’d love to know who did the world building and what they are working on next

The second Me problem was the protagonist, Jak (pictured at the top of this post). He was a sarcastic, wise-cracking kid who went from street thief to a major player in a war due to his sudden manifestation of magical powers (the world of Aveum is divided into folks who can use magic and folk who can’t. Jak goes from “no magic” to “I can use ALL the magic” which makes him special). The character doesn’t have a shred of humility and arrogance always rubs me the wrong way, so I really did not like the character I was playing. When you meet a woman who is philosophically opposed to your way of life and she says something like “Too bad you’re on the wrong side; you’re kind of hot.” I was just done with this game. This asshole does NOT need to have his ego fed! This is obviously 100% subjective, and you might really like Jak.

Now on to the Game problems.

I was playing on PlayStation with a controller and I just could not get the controls tweaked to a point where they felt good. Early on you can mostly spray and pray and there’re even spells that have ‘homing shots’ to make this even more viable. But as you get further in there are puzzles that require precise aiming at different targets with a very short time window to hit them all, and constantly missing because the controls feel either too touchy or too sluggish just felt frustrating. If you decide to play this on PC with mouse and keyboard, this may not be an issue for you (and there’s a demo on Steam if you want to test that out). I thought I could acclimate but when I hadn’t after 12 hours, I figured I never would.

Worse than that, after about 10 hours into my game I started getting errors popping up on screen when I’d changed zones. I could fix these by leaving the game, doing a force quit, and re-loading, but each time it happened I’d stress out that my save had become corrupted or something. In the end I decided I didn’t like the game enough to keep putting up with these errors, and since Ascendant Studios is all but gone, if it isn’t completely gone, there’s very little hope that this issue will ever get patched. When I had this issue like 3 times in one play session I decided the universe was sending me a message and that it was time to move on to something I’d enjoy without a bunch of caveats.

So that was it for Immortals of Aveum, for me. Time is too precious to spend too much of it on games that are “OK except for…”. When I find myself with nothing else to play I’ll go back and re-visit some of these “OK” games, though I honestly doubt I’ll ever get to that point because new really good games are coming out all the time. I am glad I tried it, and if you’re at all interested I’d again point you at the demo on Steam to see if it is more up your alley. I know I’m not the only one who had error issues on PlayStation but I’m not sure how widespread they are, but I would caution folks against buying on PS. I’m not sure how well the Xbox version performs.

Anyway, on to the next game. I’m going to give another somewhat maligned game, Saints Row (the most recent one) a go next. [It’s another PlayStation Plus Extra game that has been on the service for a while so I would expect it to be pulled soon.] We’ll see how that goes. Basically I’m killing time waiting for Death Stranding 2 to come out in about a month, so I don’t want to get involved in anything epic right now!

[Little update on this. I found a great YouTube channel called Gamer’s Little Playground. This channel takes games and boils them down into movies, basically. They have a video for Immortals of Aveum that’s 4.5 hours long and it includes all the dialog and cut scenes but none of the travel and very little of the combat. I’ve been watching it (well, the 2nd half of it as I was about half-way through the game when I quit) and while I’m still not done, I’m pretty content with no having continued playing as Jak continues to be a huge jerk IMO. Anyway it’s a great way to soothe my curiosity without having to slog through the 2nd half of the game. Huzzah!]

Planet of Lana Surprised Me

Once again super late to the party, but Planet of Lana is really good. And I say that as someone who generally doesn’t play side scrollers.

Every day I do a bunch of things for Microsoft Rewards points, which I then use to pay for Game Pass. One particular task is to play a game on PC, the catch being it only ‘counts’ if it is something you run from the Xbox app. Because of this I’m always looking for games that seem easy to get into and that don’t take a huge amount of disk space. A while back I downloaded Planet of Lana, not because I expected to like it, but because it was small and seemed simple.

The fact that I find myself really enjoying the game probably gives some merit to Microsoft nudging us towards playing games every day.

Here’s the thing: I’m really not a big fan of side scrollers. To me they’re ‘retro’ and I’m pretty retro-averse since I lived through the retro days and generally have no interest in going back to those times. But Planet of Lana is a different kind of side-scroller. There’s no combat and so far at least, there are no sections that require fast reflexes and perfect timing. As a senior citizen anything that requires precise timing is kind of beyond me. My brain and fingers aren’t as well acquainted as they once were, you see.

Instead Planet of Lana is mostly a puzzle game. You play a little girl named Lana whose planet has been invaded and you’re looking for your people, or something? I dunno, the narrative is all pretty vague. You’re accompanied by a little vaguely cat-like critter (I think of cats because of the way it twitches its tail before making a big jump) who you can give basic orders to. Go here, follow me, stay put, activate that thing. The little critter can jump higher than you and can crawl through spaces you cannot and you need to use these abilities to make your way across levels.

Lana stops to figure out how to get past a baddie
Here’s a typical puzzle. The black spider-looking thing is an enemy and if it spots Lana or her pal (barely visible in the grass behind her) it’ll zap them. So how to safely cross this screen?

Lana doesn’t speak any recognizable language but after a while you start to identify certain words like follow/stay etc. Not that it really matters but if just lends a little layer of satisfaction to the overall gameplay.

The puzzles are along the lines of moving crates, climbing ropes, turning on/off contraptions and so forth. Sometimes you need to solve these to get past physical obstacles and other times to get past aliens that’ll kill you. There’s a decent amount of playing around with lights, as some creatures are light-averse, and other times you’ll be moving through levels that are completely dark until you find a light and a way to turn it on and keep it on (usually by getting your companion critter to sit on a switch).

There’s no leveling or skills or anything like that; it’s a pretty pure game in respect.

It’s also quite a lovely game. The graphics are fairly simple but really pleasing, with most of the levels I’ve gone through having you pass through forests and small villages.

All in all, this was a just a pleasant surprise and I’d recommend it to anyone who doesn’t demand hardcore difficulty from their platforming games. My only caution is that (according to the Internet… I haven’t finished it yet) it’s a fairly short game and is currently $20 on Steam, so this might be one to add to the old Wishlist and wait for a sale. I played it on PC Game Pass so cost didn’t really figure into things for me. If you happen to have Game Pass I’d recommend it even more strongly!

 

Thoughts on Dragon Age: The Veilguard

After over 100 hours of stomping around in Thedas, I finally finished Dragon Age:The Veilguard last night. Going in, I knew that this title had been in the center of some controversy about being too ‘woke’ and because of that it got a lot of hate from certain parts of the gaming public. Professional reviewers placed it somewhere around an 80/100, (based on Open Critic and Meta Critic) which seems pretty decent to me. I was curious to learn how much of the negativity around it being “woke” was justified, and to see if some of the hate was because of the actual gameplay.

What I ended up finding was a decent game that was marred, in my personal opinion, just by being too long. My completionist playthrough clocked in at a hefty 105-110 hours, with all quests finished, my main character hitting the level cap, and my companions achieving Champion status (though not all reached their maximum Companion level). Basically I did everything except track down every hidden chest or secret. Perhaps part of it being too long was self-inflicted, but I did have this sense that the difficulty of the ending was going to be predicated on the strength of your companions and their associated factions. I was right about that, and that led to the final boss battle being challenging but not frustratingly so.

Difficulty was “Just Right”

Overall the difficulty was just about right for me, and the action combat was fun though often felt a little sloppy. In particular my character (a Mage) had an ‘ultimate’ that had such a long wind-up that enemies would often have wandered out of the target area by the time she cast it. I also had some lock-on issues and in general the combat didn’t feel quite as crisp as it should have. Then again, this wasn’t a souls-like and the challenge level wasn’t huge on Normal difficulty, so the combat issues weren’t game breaking.

In addition to yourself you can bring two of your Companions with you. They’ll fight on their own or you can give them basic directions like “Attack my Target” or “Use Spell/Skill X now.” Some skills are what are called “Primers” and others are “Detonators”. If you pair these you can do big damage to the baddies, but they generally won’t happen unless you direct your companions to use the right skills.

The story was OK, though honestly some of the companion storylines were more interesting to me than the main one. My overall problem with the narrative was that the main storyline was apocalyptic: we’re trying to save the world from a pair of rampaging evil gods. So, y’know, somewhat urgent.

But then before we go and take that on, we need to sit around and discuss our feelings and every character has to take care of their unfinished business so their head can be in the game. It just felt like a pretty low-effort way to weave in the Companion storylines. It’d be like, I dunno, during the London Blitz if the RAF pilots said “We have to get up there and defend the civilian population from the German bombers… but first let’s work through our daddy issues so our head is in the game.”

I mean this is often an issue in games, right? The narrative is all “GO GO GO world is ending!” but the gameplay is “Oh but first let’s figure out how to get past this puzzle to see what’s in that chest tucked away in a secret room. And while we’re at it, there’s some crafting materials that might come in handy later; we’d better collect those. The bad guys will wait!”

Thedas isn’t very big

The game isn’t open world; instead there are 7 or 8 zones of various sizes, and you’ll revisit these again and again as you play. I got kind of sick of them and found myself really missing the sprawling world of Dragon Age Inquisition. In particular the more urban zones feel very game-y with you having to constantly climb up or down ladders or use ziplines to cross gaps. How do the people who live in these cities get their groceries home if they have to use a zip line to get there?

Each zone has a faction associated with it. For example one is where the Grey Wardens hang out. By doing quests in their area, as well as shopping at their merchants, you can increase the strength of that faction. In certain big battles these factions may come to aid you and the stronger they are, the easier the game will be for you.

Phat Loot

The loot/gear system is kind of interesting. Gear has both a rarity and a level. For example a common staff that is +2, or a legendary helmet that is +5. Finding/buying a duplicate piece of gear ranks up its rarity (it uses the typical color scheme, green to blue to purple to gold, etc). To increase its ‘plus’ level you have to find items that level up what is essentially a crafting station in your headquarters, and then you can spend resources to increase the level of your items. Later you can also add enchantments which also get unlocked as you level up the crafting station.

This system rewards exploration to find both the materials you’ll need and the gee-gaws that level up the crafting station. You’ll also be rewarded for visting vendors to see what they have on offer, and they too can be leveled up by buying/selling with them. Right up until the end of the game I was swapping out gear as older stuff got a better rarity or something.

There are also skill points to spend, and these can be refunded for free at any time, so you can play around with different builds to your heart’s content, which was nice. No more anxiety about ‘gimping’ your character by spending points wrong.

Morrigan looking stern
Claudia Black is back voicing Morrigan, who has never looked better!

Was it too Woke?

As to the complaints about the game being too woke, I’m surprised to find myself saying that yeah, I think it was a little bit too woke. Let me explain before you get out the torches and pitchforks.

There is one character who is non-binary and part of their story is coming to grips with that. My beef is that this is a fantasy game with fantasy-dialog except for this one character constantly talking about being non-binary. I can’t think of a better term to use, but it’s such a modern phrase that I found it jarring. I had no problem with the character coming to grips with who they are, it was more the words they used to discuss it that kind of broke the immersion for me.

This was the one Companion who had an issue that couldn’t be solved through combat missions. Instead this character had a 2nd plotline to work through that gave them a quest line they could solve via combat, while the non-binary topic was relegated to dialog choices and cut-scenes. The character also was born into one culture and raised in another, and had to deal with their mother disapproving that the character wasn’t being true to their cultural roots (an issue aside from the gender one). On top of all that, they had a physical property that set them apart from others of their race. So they had PLENTY going on even without the non-binary issue. In the end it just felt like the non-binary aspect was bolted on late in development, almost as a marketing strategy, and it didn’t have anything to do with this particular character’s race or culture. It could’ve been anyone.

So to me, it just felt a little contrived and a little immersion breaking. All that said, it wasn’t a big deal and if someone out there felt like they were represented due to this characters’ issues, then it’s a good thing that they put it in there. Just for me personally, their dialog felt a little out of place and dealing with their many issues felt like it took a lot of time and slowed the pace of the game down.

So in Summary…

A few last odds and ends.

Your character is named Rook but beyond the name you can customize them. There’s even a magic mirror where you can change their appearance. I played a female elf mage and spent some time customizing her and yet I still met a few other characters that looked VERY similar to her, which was disconcerting. In fact a lot of the characters feel oddly generic. Even body type feels a bit unisex, almost? It’s the armor that gives that characters most of their definition.

What else… OK so there’re romance options but they are pretty darned bare bones. You pick the “heart” choice in dialog trees and suddenly, bing! you’re a couple and some of the other characters mention it here and there but I don’t think much else changes. Hard to say without a second play through and no way I’m doing that.

There were a few returning characters from the earlier games including Morrigan, still voiced by Claudia Black and any game that includes her gets a free pass anyway.

All in all, I’m glad I finished it. There was literally nothing to do when I was done unless it would’ve been to go hunt for chests, but I had no quests or major enemies to fight. I got the ‘good’ ending and no deaths due to my choices. [Spoiler: One of your team will die and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it from happening.] So I’m done. The only thing I could do would be to play through it again and it was definitely NOT good enough to devote another 100 hours to a second playthrough.

I got the game via PlayStation Plus Extra so it was “free” and at that price, I’d suggest giving it a go. Or if you find it on sale for $20 or something and you like fantasy action-RPGs. Had I bought it at $60 or $70 when it first came out, I think I would’ve been disappointed.

 

An eclipse hovering over some old ruins
You can pretty much tell this isn’t going to be a great day…

Inside is a Trip

For random reasons I won’t bore you with, I started Playdead’s 2016 game Inside last night. Tonight I finished it. Yeah, it’s a short game.

But holy smokes is it ever good. Since the game is almost 10 years old I won’t worry too much about spoilers, but first a bit of spoiler-free setup. I’ll warn you before I start on the specifics.

So at its most basic Inside is a combat-free side scroller. You play a young boy who is running (generally) left to right across the screen, avoiding being detected by enemies and solving some environmental puzzles to proceed. The puzzles were perfect for me (I am NOT a puzzle person). Difficult enough to make me feel satisfied at figuring them out, but not so difficult that I got frustrated.

As far as the story goes, not much is explained. There are men and dogs hunting for this boy though you’re never told why. But these same men are rounding up other people and turning them into mindless automatons, again for unknown reasons. Although there is no out-going combat (ie, you have no weapons or combat moves) your pursuers will kill you viciously. It can be quite disturbing when you get caught; seeing this little boy getting torn up by dogs, choked to death by men, or just getting blown into little bits. It’s a lot.

You start in the woods but soon enter some kind of complex where they seem to be doing experiments on the people they’ve rounded up.

OK let’s start getting into spoiler territory but I kind of rather you stop reading and go play it if you haven’t. It only takes 3-4 hours to play through.

Assuming that’s not your thing, let’s continue.

So I was having fun figuring out how to sneak past spotlights and fool guard dogs. Then something attacked me in the water; something not-natural. This aquatic humanoid thing. It was tough to get away from that thing. Then I found a ‘cap’ that would let me control these mindless human drones, assuming I could set them free. Basically they copy whatever you do. So maybe there’s a door too heavy to life until you have a few zombie friends who will help. You can also trick them into walking off a high ledge, and then you can jump down on them using them as an organic cushion to break your fall. Or get them to throw you over gaps you can’t jump across.

That’s how things sat for a while. Weird but, y’know, manageable. You’re climbing, swimming through water, jumping, throwing switches, dragging crates etc. At the top of the post is you near the start of the game. Walk in the woods. Totally normal.

And then you come into areas where water flows across the ceiling rather than across the floor and sometimes you have to climb up and jump up into the water and swim over obstacles. OK, I can adapt to that, but it’s pretty out there. And then you get to the heart of the experiment which seems to be some plan to merge people into a ball of biomass, maybe to power something? Again it isn’t clear. You try to shut this down, but you get sucked into this mass, and for the last part of the game you’re this large flesh bubble with legs and arms sticking out all over the place. And that, my friends, was a trip. That was some WEIRD shit as first thing I had to do was learn how to move all over again. (You kind of roll-walk and you can squeeze through small opening, or just use your bulk to smash through some obstacles.)

I mean it was cool and fun, but also gross and just so damned weird…

A blob of flesh with too many arms and legs carries a large crate
Here “we” are carrying a crate across a level.

My only real complaint is the ending, because there kind of isn’t one. You finally escape, as a big bag of flesh, and roll down a mountainside, coming to rest near a body of water. And you can’t move for a few minutes. Then the credits roll. I guess we’re meant to interpret this in our own way. But aside from that, as someone who SUCKs at side-scrollers, I’d still recommend this. 9 years after launch. Me with my finger on the pulse of modern gaming!

[Not sure why my images came out so grainy… these are both taken on the Xbox in HDR mode. For some reason the Xbox wouldn’t sync to my OneDrive so I uploaded them to Google Photos from my phone. But then they were super dark. So I let google “adjust” them and I guess that’s where the grain comes from. The actual game is very clear. Simply graphics, but effective, and the character animations are top notch.]

Mental Compartmentalization and Grief

I know not everyone holds dogs or pets in as high esteem as we do, and plenty of people probably think it is crazy that we are this upset about losing a dog. But we are. Lola was such an integral part of our life that things seem very hollow and drab without her there to frequently make us smile, or even to just get us out of our chairs and doing things.

PartPurple and I process grief very differently, I think. She hasn’t experienced a lot of death. Her parents are both still alive, as are all her siblings. She’s lost grandparents and that can be hard, but they’re not typically someone you see EVERY day. I, on the other hand, lost both parents, a step-father and a step-brother. My dad when I was about 12, the step-brother when I was 14 and he was 17. Back in those days we didn’t have grief counselors or anything; we just dealt with it. When my dad died I remembered him speaking to one of his friends back when his mother died. “We all have to go some time.” he’d said, very stoically. I tried the same when he died, and had kids at school mocking me for “not caring that my father died.” Which led to some playground fights.

Anyway, along the way I learned my own technique for handling grief and it is pretty insular. I don’t want to talk to people, I try to find something to lose myself in, and just not think about things too much.

Since Lola was nearly always at my side, this isn’t working as well as it has in the past. But here is what is working, sort of. In my head, Lola (for some time now, in a way) has been two things. Lola, this beautiful joyous soul that is nearly always at my side, and Lola, the dog that I have to take care of and who mandates my schedule.

There is no bright side whatsoever when it comes to Lola-the-Soul being gone, but there are some upsides to not having a dog to take care of. I slept in this morning for the first time in almost 15 years. I have a lot more free time now that I’m not going for long walks with her. We’re going to save money on her medical bills, food and such (once we pay off the vet bills which will take years but let’s set that aside for now). Maybe I’ll get into multiplayer gaming, now that I don’t have to pause every 20 minutes to take care of something she needs.

So those are the things I’m focusing on, and it is helping. I still get blind-sided with sadness frequently but I’m trying to focus on the freedom that comes with not having any pets. Lola didn’t travel well at all, so we didn’t travel at all. And I don’t mean flying to Paris.. I mean something as simple as going for a drive out into the country as a day trip. So we can start doing things like that, eventually.

I think this is working because I’ve been ‘practicing’ it for some time. As she got older and older, and I knew she had to go soon, I would think about things like how awful our dog park smells in the heat of summer (trash cans full of stinky poop bags baking in the heat) and how once I didn’t have a dog I wouldn’t ever have to go there again. Things like that: the lack of a dog, with dog being an abstract concept, had some up-sides. So now I’m embracing those.

Though at the same time I worry how this will impact my health. I need to find some other form of casual exercise or I’ll just sit at my PC or on the couch until I can no longer walk. Both my mother and grandmother did this once they stopped working and both went downhill fast once they stopped moving. So I need to be sure I do something. Maybe I’ll start hiking or something. Capture birds on my Merlin app or something.

Anyway, just kind of thinking out loud here. Today’s plan: Lola has a hole out on the woods that she loved to dig in, and since it was in the woods I let her dig in it. At the same time a random maple seed at some point landed in a flower pot out behind our building. The plant in the pot died long ago but the tree is a few feet tall now. I’m going to go plant it in Lola’s hole as a tribute to her

Close up of Lola intently staring at something off camera

Farewell, Lola-Girl, You Will Always Be in our Hearts

Last night we lost Lola. She would’ve been 15 had she made it to next month. That’s really old for a dog, and I kept telling myself I was prepared. I wasn’t prepared.

She got pretty sick last week and spent about 48 hours at an emergency vet hospital. If you want the whole horrible story, PartPurple set up a GoFundMe page that goes into ALL the details. Maybe I’ll copy what she wrote down at some point to save it but I don’t have it in me right now.

Puppy Lola in a cage
Oct 2010, When we first laid eyes on her at the rescue

Anyway she came home last Friday, and Friday and Saturday were tough. Sunday she was a bit better, better still on Monday, and Tuesday she had a great day, being her old smiling happy self. She saw a lot of her friends and got attention from so many people in the complex that know her.  I remember thinking “Thanks goodness she is back to normal.”

Wednesday started normally, then she started really hyperventilating. Then she fell and couldn’t get up. We scooped her up and rushed her back to the hospital where they found she had an extremely high fever, to the point where they starting bathing her in cool water to try to bring it down. We took her to veg.com which I have nothing but praise for. They do most of their work out in the open so the whole time they were working on her, PartPurple and I were giving her pets and talking to her and even helping to give her oxygen.

Lola the dog looking serious
July 2013, she’s growing up and getting sophisticated

Eventually they put her in in oxygen tank (like a big aquarium where they can oxygenate the air and temperature control things…rather than try to put an oxygen mask on a dog) and an in-depth ultrasound was scheduled for this morning. We left her in the care of the doctors and nurses, and came home; by then it was 5:30 PM or so. At about 10:30 the vet called and told us, basically, that she wasn’t going to make it. So we rushed back over and said our goodbyes. She was pretty out of it and I’m not sure if she knew we were there. Then she went peacefully with a bit of chemical assistance.

And now we have no dog. No morale officer. She was in many ways my best friend, and in some ways I have never loved an entity as much as I loved her. She was my companion pretty much 24/7 since I started working from home 12 years ago. She was the kind of dog that when you moved, she’d come move to just to be near you. She was always with us. In the nearly 15 years of her life I think we boarded her twice to go somewhere. She was almost never alone.

Lola the dog covered in dirt
March 2016, clearly the sophisticated phase has ended

Of course we loved her, but so many people in our rental complex loved her too. We’d go for a walk and folks would holler “Hey, Lola!” and she had this particular bark that meant “Hey, I see you, how are you?” that she would offer to folks she knew. She was a complete character and made folks smile where ever she went.

She was our heart dog. We will miss her forever.

Lola the dog looking thooughtful
Jan 2020, thinking about puppy stuff
Lola the dog propped up on an ottoman
August 2022, trying to convince me to take her for a walk
Lola enjoying a day in the grass and sun
May 2024, about a year ago and age is catching up to her
Lola resting in the grass, smiling
April 2025 This was just before she got sick. She seemed happy as a clam