Wow, I’m not really sure how to approach the recap this month. I’ve played a little bit of a lot of games; far too many to list them all here without being even more boring than usual. I seem to be following some kind of a zig-zag pattern where I’m either 100% focused on a game or two, or I’m just dipping my toe in everywhere and not making any progress anywhere. I’ve come to be more comfortable with the latter now that most of the stuff I play is either already in my backlog or is arriving via Game Pass or something. In ye olden times too often I’d spend $50 on a game and play it for 2 hours before drifting away, and that was not (fiscally) cool.
Anyway let’s dive in. Gonna break things up by platform this month.
Playing
Playstation
The Plucky Squire — Ideally you stop reading now and just go play this because I wish I’d known nothing about it going in. I’ll tell you that it is colorful and charming and mixes a bunch of game styles in a storybook & toy-filled world. You’ll do top-down (old school) Zelda style fighting, platforming, puzzle-solving and assorted mini-games. Haven’t finished it yet (I’m in Chapter 7 of 10 chapters) but it’s been really good so far. It IS pretty short though; HowLongToBeat says its about 10 hours long.
Xbox & Xbox Games on PC
Fallout 76 — Having finished up the last Season at level 200 or so, I stepped back for a while and gave Fallout 76 a bit of a rest, but towards the end of the month I started engaging again. Specifically when the new Caravan system dropped. A lot of weapons have been somewhat nerfed which has upset the community but honestly I’m finding I’m enjoying myself more now that things aren’t all dying from a single shot.
Red Dead Redemption 2 — My Xbox was running low on storage space so I sorted games by size and RDR2 was the biggest at 123 GB. I fired it up and found my last save was from 2019 (!) so I, of course, decided to start fresh. It’s kind of amazing how well this game holds up. It’s an Xbox One game but it really looks as good as most “new gen” games. That all said, I haven’t gotten very far and the game is so old and so popular that I don’t have much to say about it other than that I’m having fun.
Borderlands Game of the Year Edition — After bouncing off the PC version, I started playing on the Xbox where the experience is much better!
PC
Throne & Liberty — This is the new F2P MMO that launches on October 1st. I’m embarrassed to admit I bought early access “accidentally.” I’d played the beta earlier this summer and was thrilled by how pretty the game looked (I was pretty newly returned to PC gaming at the time) and “pre-ordered” the game in a fit of enthusiasm. At the time I didn’t even notice the game was going to be F2P and I was just buying an early access package! Once I realized my mistake I SHOULD have canceled but didn’t because… I dunno why honestly.
I have buyer’s remorse. The game really is pretty but it is also really intended for hardcore group/guild play, so I don’t expect I’ll play it for long; waiting for the normal launch and pumping 10 or 15 hours for free would have been the right move. Ah well, live and maybe learn. But I’m more interested in returning to New World when the Avernum re-launch (?) happens. But yeah, Throne & Liberty is VERY pretty and…um… is an MMO. I don’t really have much more to say about it!
Borderlands Game of the Year Edition — A game I booted up on a whim wound up ‘sticking’ for the first time. It took some fiddling to get it to run OK. It never really ran well, and I don’t think that had to do with the power of my machine or anything. I’m no game developer but I wonder if the engine just wasn’t build to handle the horsepower of today’s CPUs and GPUs. No matter what setting I tweaked, turning always felt a little rough even though the actual frame rate would hold steady; eventually it got to be too much so I dropped it. (But see above in the Xbox section.)
World of Warcraft — I made slow but steady progress for most of the month, but just this past weekend I finished the Dragonflight main campaign which unlocked a lot of new systems and made everything much more enjoyable for me. My new character is at level 55 now; 15 more levels until I can jump over to The War Within and that shouldn’t really take too long to achieve. Feeling much better about WoW since finishing that DF campaign.
Guild Wars 2 — Having trouble here. I’m still in Living World Season 1. My character is at max level so going through Living World isn’t really progressing me much so I’m just playing for the story. I should just move on but I’m stubborn.
Watching
Terminator Zero (Netflix) — This is an anime set in the Terminator universe that we all (OK maybe not ALL) know and love. I’d heard good things about it but the first couple of episodes were a bit of a disappointment as they felt so similar to the first couple of movies. Terminator is sent back to stop someone in the past. Resistant member is sent back to stop the Terminator. The only significant difference was that this one was set in Japan. But I stuck with it and starting about the 3rd episode it became its own thing and got really good. It has terminator fighting action, questions about time travel and paradoxes and such, and even examines how different people react to robots, with some more than willing to anthropomorphize them and others seeing them as just things. It’s short, like every other new show on streaming services, and has an actual conclusion while leaving plenty of threads to follow for a second season, which I hope we get. Recommended, but do be prepared to give it 3 or 4 episodes to start to gel.
A Discovery of Witches (Netflix) — I think I mentioned this one last month, but we finished it up (there are 3 seasons) and it came to a pretty good conclusion. This is still not really my wheelhouse but urban fantasy fan @partpurple liked it a lot. One of the odd things is that there are 3 “Creature” species in the show: vampires, witches and demons. But we NEVER find out what makes a demon a demon. We never see any of them do anything supernatural-ish. I’m sure the books do a better job and I’m kind of trying to get PartPurple to read them so she can fill me in. Also if there is a downside to being a vampire in this world, they never showed it. LOL but here I am complaining after saying we watched it all and it was OK. But it was OK!
Rings of Power (Amazon) — We went back and re-watched Season 1 before moving on to Season 2. I actually liked Season 1 quite a bit more in a second viewing but we’ve JUST started Season 2 so don’t have much to say about it yet.
Station Eleven (Max) — This is a post-apocalypse show that posits a plague with a 99% fatality rate and what happens in the aftermath. I’d never heard of it and it maybe hit a little too close to home when it came out in 2021! So far it’s been really good though. There is (again, so far) nothing fantastical happening here. No zombies or anything. Just the collapse of civilization with a heavy “theater kids” angle. Yes, it’s a little weird. But good so far (I’m about half-way through.)
Reading
Still plodding through The Tower of Swallows, which is I think the 4th Witcher book? This is going to be the end for me though; as much as I love The Witcher games and The Witcher Netflix shows, the books are just not grabbing me. Y’know what they feel like? Imagine The Lord of the Rings if all the appendix info was in the body of the books. There’s just so much world-building going on, but not much plot. I can see why CD Projekt Red picked the world to set a game in as there is a TON of lore but it’s all shared in giant lumps of text while our characters sit around a fire toasting marshmallows for chapters at a time. I’m going to finish this one and there is I believe one more in the series but I don’t think I can take another novel full of fictional history.
So that’s September. Plan for October is New World Avernum, more World of Warcraft and… who knows what else? I’ll probably continue to flit about and not make much progress anywhere. But as long as I’m having fun, right? Hope you all have a great month!