Welcome to the really nasty months of summer. We actually had a pretty mild June here in NC; It’s only hit 90F+ in the last couple days. Compared to last year when by July 1st it’d already been brutally hot for more days than I felt I could handle, it has been a joy. Of course now I’m worried the pendulum will swing back and July-Sept will deliver record-breaking heat but that’s just me and my glass half empty attitude.

Anyway on to the recap, such that it is.

Last Month’s Games

I think only one game made it from last month, and that is Ghostwire Tokyo which I’m still playing, and still enjoying. Just to give you an idea of how much gaming I’m doing these days, How Long To Beat lists Ghostwire Tokyo as being 21 hours long for “Main & Extra” content and 38 hours for the Completionists. I’ve been playing it for several months and still haven’t finished. I think I’m at something like 23-24 hours.

I’m going to be super-lazy and respost a comment I made on Nerd Girl Thoughts in response to a post that mentioned Ghostwire:

I’m enjoying Ghostwire Tokyo quite a bit (playing on Xbox Game Pass). I love the creepy feeling of moving around an empty city. And the Visitor designs are awesome; some of them make my skin crawl. When the parade of ghost demons [see image at the top of this post] comes sauntering down an avenue I always stop to watch it, from a safe distance. Getting pulled into that thing is not good.

I don’t really like “horror” but I do really enjoy “creepy” and there’s not a lot of games that offer the latter without leaning into the former. Plus the side quests always make me feel good. In general helping all these spirits move on to a better place feels a lot better than the typical fetch quests with very little narrative support that you get in other games.

And then there is the lore, whether it be learning about Japanese junk food or about some truly weird demons from Japanese legends.

Agreed, though, that the combat isn’t super compelling, but it gets the job done.

New This Month

Early in the month the last Destiny 2 expansion went on sale, so I bought it and as is typical, started playing but focused on the old content I’ve never done, and got bored and drifted away before ever getting to the expansion I just bought. Not really complaining though… I had a good bit of fun while I was playing. It just never holds me for very long.

Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is what I’m playing most in Playstation VR, when I’m just playing a game. It’s been a lot of fun. The basic game loop is you take a boat to an area and have a fixed amount of time before darkness falls and the undead swarm (I guess…I’ve always fled before I see what bad stuff happens). During that time you can scavenge for junk that you can break down to craft with back at camp, or you can try to push a quest forward. I guess if you’re really good you can do both but I tend to run out of time if I don’t focus on one or the other. It’s the kind of game which would probably be too basic to keep me interested in ‘flat’ gaming but in VR is pretty compelling.

I’m dabbling in a lot of VR games but won’t list them here since I might mention them in a VR workouts post.

I also picked up Final Fantasy XVI based on really enjoying the demo though in all honesty I haven’t gotten very far in it. I like it well enough but I’m just not doing much gaming these days.

TV

The big hit with us this month is Silo (Apple TV) which is a dystopian sci-fi show about a community of people living in an underground silo. Something happened that erased all knowledge of the outside world; everyone knows it exists but they all believe leaving the Silo = instant death. Their technology & knowledge is limited in strange ways. They have rudimentary computers, but for instance there are no movies or video. They have a window or two into the outside world but they don’t understand what stars are. It’s really strange and fun. As this show is still airing I dunno what the truth is but I am loving it!

Very close behind that in my “OMG what great TV this month!” list is season two of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Paramount+). S1 felt like very traditional Star Trek but so far S2 seems to be stretching out to become it’s own thing and so far, I am on-board with that.

Yellowjackets (Showtime) is a show about a high school girl’s soccer team that gets lost in the mountains and isn’t rescued for 18 months. The show bounces back and forth between what happens in the wilderness as the girls struggle to survive (things get very dark), and their lives 20-ish years after rescue as someone is threatening to expose their secrets. This show seems quite well-loved but honestly I’m having trouble really getting into it. There’s enough there to keep us watching but we can also set it aside for a week and not miss it.

The Big Door Prize (Apple TV) is a strange show. As it stars Chris O’Dowd I expected it to be a comedy and it has funny moments but mostly it just felt uncomfortable and sad. The setting is a small town where a mysterious machine shows up in the local general store. This machine tells you your life potential and the adults of the town get really fixated on this, some of them changing careers or just flipping over the table that is their lives, while the teen-agers of the town just scratch their heads and try to figure out what the hell is going on. This one has been reviewed well but I just found it pretty depressing.

Loot (Apple TV) on the other hand, is pretty fun. It stars Maya Rudolph as a very rich, and recently divorced, individual who learns that she owns a charity foundation, and decides to get involved with it, much to the dismay of the person running the charity. Ron Funches shines as the lovable and optimistic IT dude and he steals every scene he is in. This (so far, we haven’t finished it) is a real ‘feel good’ show kind of in the vein of Ted Lasso.

Reading

As the temps climb I haven’t been reading that much since I do most of my reading while sitting outside with Lola. I’m still in the middle of The Expanse book 8 (I think?) Tiamat’s Wrath. Not finished so I can’t say what my final opinion will be, but generally I’m liking it less than the earlier books.

And that’s June wrapped up. Getting into doing more exercising has really impacted the cadence of my life. I spend a lot of time doing physical VR stuff and then being quite tired in the evenings. Tired enough that I often put on a soccer match or something rather than playing a game. It makes for short recaps but actually it all feels pretty good as I now play games when I really feel like playing them rather than just kind of out of habit, which I’d been doing for quite some time.