Author: Nimgimli

What I Don’t Like About Atomfall

Posted on by Nimgimli

I don’t usually do posts about games I don’t like, but I figured I’d make an exception in this case since I happened to buy the Digital Upgrade for Atomfall and got early access, so have been playing the past few nights. If the things that bug me about the game save someone from spending their money on normal release day tomorrow, I’ll feel like I helped.

I should also hasten to add that I don’t think Atomfall is a bad game; it’s just a bad game for me and my personal preferences. In fact I think it’s a pretty good game for the right gamer, and even then there’s a lot I do like about it: the setting and the exploration are both top notch, and the voice acting is very good, though the cast is small enough that a lot of characters have the same voice. Also worth noting that it is launching at $50 and is on Game Pass at launch.

Finally, I’ve only played 4-5 hours so far so things could change. On the other hand I’m told it’s about a 20 hour game so in theory I’m a quarter of the way through.

OK enough with the pre-ambling. Here’re some of the things I don’t like about Atomfall.

Character Progression

I have to admit I’m a shallow person who likes seeing numbers go up. The industry’s RPG-ification of virtually every genre is something I embrace. Atomfall doesn’t have a lot of character progression. There’re no levels, there’s no experience points. The only character progression is via a skill tree. To get a skill you have to do two things. First you have to find/buy a Skill Manual. Reading one of these essentially puts the set of skills in that manual into your skill tree, but it doesn’t actually give you the skill. In order to unlock the skill you have to use some serum things that, again, you find or buy. It’s an interesting system but I do miss “leveling up” and getting skill points. Essentially the serums are your skill points, and how many there are in the world is anyone’s guess.

Gearing

The only gear in Atomfall are weapons. Weapon stats are not numerical but like “High damage, slow reload times.” Weapons come in 3 tiers: rusty, normal and pristine. You can combine 4 rusty weapons of the same type (along with some gun oil) to create a normal weapon, and I believe 2 normal weapons to create a pristine. Guns are fairly rare and so is ammo, so you’ll probably use melee weapons a lot of the time. Weapons don’t seem to degrade but of course ammo runs out which again nudges you towards melee. I kind of miss having more stuff to search for like armor or trinkets or something, but this just isn’t a looter-shooter (nor does it claim to be).

Combat and Expendables

There’s no real point to combat in Atomfall unless removing the person(s) you’re fighting is required to complete a task. The only upside to killing someone is searching their body and they don’t often carry all that much. Your health is replenished by bandages that you craft or find, and there are various potions (again, craftable once you find the recipe) that’ll buff you. But the game seems to really be pushing you towards avoiding combat as much as possible. The resources you need to craft things like bandages or Molotov cocktails don’t respawn, but the enemies do. This means you have to really weigh the pros and cons of each fight. Are you going to use more resources in winning the fight than you get back from looting the body? If so, probably best to sneak on by if possible. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this system but I’m more a guns blazing kind of player and I get bored with sneaking around pretty quickly. I also get a weird low-level anxiety about running out of materials in the world.

So those are my biggest issues, and none of them are flaws with the game; not in the least. They’re just systems that don’t really fit my particular playstyle, and if you think these things might bother you too, might be worth waiting for a sale or something (and of course if you have Game Pass you might as well try it). It is, in my opinion, an amazing setting and an amazing set-up and I really, REALLY want to love this game, but I’m just too impatient and too shallow for it to really hook me. I’ll still finish it and all, but buying the upgrade to get early access was a dumb move for me. Maybe this post will help someone else.

Borderlands 2 Done

Posted on by Nimgimli

This weekend I completed the main campaign of Borderlands 2. There’s not a lot I can say about a game that is this old and that was this popular; everyone who is interested in looter-shooters is probably familiar with the Borderlands series already.

But I still wanted to share what was the good, the bad and the ugly in it for me.

The Good

Well generally it was pretty good. I like playing shooters but not ones that are too realistic. Borderlands fits perfectly in my groove as far as that goes. It’s sharp looking but I never feel like I’m shooting real people. I spent about 35 hours on the character I finished with, and probably a dozen or so more on trying other classes, and I didn’t feel ‘relieved’ to be done with it, like I am with many games. In other words it didn’t feel drawn out to me, and even deep into the game I found little things that surprised and delighted me. I was level 31 when I went into the final boss level and at level 29 or so I got a gun that talked. At first I had no idea where the voice was coming from! I mean, not a big deal but there were lots of similar things that cropped up.

I also LOVED the “Badass” system. This is a series of many, many tasks that you’ll complete just by playing. Each one levels up your ‘badass rating’ and every so often you get a point to spend that will give you some small increase to stat: things like gun damage, or more health, or shield recharge rates. The clever thing here is that these perks apply to ALL your characters meaning if you play through again with a 2nd character it’ll already have a lot of perks waiting. I thought this was a nice feature for someone who wants to get deeply into the game.

Moxxie the very curvy barkeep standing at her post
Did you know Moxxie is the mother of Scooter and Ellie? Or that she was once married to Handsome Jack?!

And I have really come to like these characters. Briefly, in Borderlands 1 you could play as 1 of 4 characters, and they show up in Borderlands 2 as NPCs (three of them are in the image at the top of this post: Mordecai, Lillith and Brick). They are all bigger than life in various ways. When I did a quest for Moxxi and she pulled a long gun out of her cleavage, my inner 14 year old couldn’t help but giggle, though once upon a time I was kind of offended by a lot of these characters; once I got to ‘know’ them that dissipated.

The Bad

This is going to sound strange to a lot of people, but I was playing for the story and the design of the game is pretty bad for that. You frequently have voice-overs from one of the characters and that’s a lot of how the story is told, but you can rarely actually hear them since enemies constantly scream, your own character is “barking” frequently, and of course guns and explosions. If you miss what is said, you’re out of luck. There’s no log or anything, at least that I found. That was one of my biggest issues. I WANTED to hear what the characters had to say!!

The Ugly

One of my issues with Borderlands has always been the tone. Just the crass humor. I mitigated this somewhat by playing Gaige the Mechromancer.  She is a young girl so her voice isn’t grating and her barks are generally not too bad, though for a while she did yell “God! It smells like piss and tacos!” way too often. But mostly she talks about what a good robot pal she has. The only time I got REALLY annoyed was when I was fighting a faction called Tunnel Rats or something like that, and they just SCREAM constantly. They scream when they attack, they scream when they die, they scream all the time in between. The game ALMOST lost me in that section.

The other part that was ‘ugly’ to me were all the containers. I get that this is a looter shooter but why do they feel the need to put 4 crates next to each other instead of one crate with a lot of stuff in it. And why do I have to hold down a button to collect the ammo in these crates if I’m playing solo. I am never not going to take ammo if I have room for it. Guns and gear I can see, but ammo should just jump into my inventory.

And really, that’s about all I have to say. I can’t believe it has taken me this long to get into Borderlands. Atomfall is up next but I do plan to come back to the Borderlands series. I’m debating on if I should play the Pre-Sequel or just move on to Borderlands 3. The vague goal is to be finished with 3 by the time Borderlands 4 comes out in the fall.

February 2025

Posted on by Nimgimli

In last month’s recap I was bummed because I hadn’t finished any games in spite of my best efforts. Better news this month as I finished a few! Huzzah! With the deck cleared I was ready to decide what came next, and decided to try to do better about making use of Playstation Plus Extra, and to a lesser extent, Game Pass (I already play a fair number of Game Pass titles, actually). Also, I need to get more selective about what I get hooked on. There are SO many really really good games out there; arguably more than I have time to play. Mixing in “OK” games that I stick with out of stubbornness is starting to seem silly. It wasn’t too many years ago that I never finished ANY games and I made a concentrated effort to get better about that, and I think maybe I’ve swung too far the other way. Time to work on a happy medium and if I get to 15 or 20 hours in a game and I know I have a LONG way to go and the game is just “OK” it’s time to cut my losses and move on to something I enjoy more.

Final note: I was extra special bad about remembering to take screenshots this month. Sorry for the wall of text!

Playing

Finished Horizon Forbidden West, including the DLC, but didn’t go for the Platinum trophy or anything like that. There were even still areas of the map that I’d never visited, but by the time the DLC was over, I had had more than my fill of the world. Mind you I’ll definitely play Horizon #3, whenever it comes, but I do think Forbidden West was a bit too much of a good thing.

Finished Atlas Fallen and even wrote about it. This is a great example of what I was talking about in the intro. It was an OK game but I was pretty sick of it by the end and it’s not like I walked away bursting with fond memories of playing it or anything like that. I should have walked away earlier. The feather in my cap of saying “I finished” isn’t so fancy as to be worth the time I spent playing.

Finished The Gunk. I remember when The Gunk came out it was kind of a poster child for Xbox Game Pass, because it was a smaller game that, MS argued, might not do so well selling as a stand alone title but people would play it on Game Pass. Or something? Does anyone else remember that or am I inventing it? Anyway The Gunk has you exploring an alien world, using your vacuum cleaner arm to hoover up this gloppy substance called The Gunk. Early on it has the same satisfying feeling as playing Power Wash Simulator, only as you explore there are environmental puzzles to solve, most of them based on sucking things up and then throwing them. I didn’t track my time but How Long to Beat says 4-6 hours, and yet I still felt like it overstayed its welcome. The game got buggier the farther in I got, and they introduce some combat which always felt awkward as heck. The puzzles themselves were near perfect for me though. I never had to look anything up, but I was stumped for a bit a few times. So for me, perfect level of difficulty. But it just started feeling repetitive towards the end. Maybe if I’d spent a long Saturday session playing through I’d feel differently. I started this one in 2022 or something and finished earlier this week. 🙂

Main character stands on the edge of a platform vacuuming up 'gunk' in The Gunk
Just doing a bit of cleaning in The Gunk

Finished Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition and that was a surprise. It’s the first time I’ve ever finished a Borderlands game. It was only 1 class and once the story was done, so was I, but still…this was the month I finally ‘got’ Borderlands. So much so that…

Started playing Borderlands 2 and I’m so far enjoying it quite a bit. I played almost all the classes until level 10 or so and then decided on the Technomancer (??). The little girl with the robot buddy. She does feel like Easy Mode but she makes me chuckle and isn’t as annoying as some of the player characters are. It’s been fun meeting characters I know of from a general awareness of Borderlands and overall, it’s just a fun game to churn through.

Warhammer Chaosbane was the first game I applied my new philosophy too. I have it via PS Plus and have had it installed forever. Figured I’d better play it in case it leaves (I can never remember which games are in the rotating collection and which are “permanent as long as you have PS+” collection). I did so, and spent about 14-15 hours and got to level 35 and the 3rd major area and it was… fine. But it really felt like going through the motions. It’s an ARPG so it’s probably more fun with friends, but in some ways it felt half finished, too. For instance you pick up gold from enemies and are awarded gold for quest completions but I never found a single thing to SPEND gold on. When you enter a new area you’ll be told “We have merchants and shrines if you need them” but neither is anywhere to be found. Anyway, point is I thought “This just feels like killing time.” so I stopped playing and deleted it to free up some space.

Death Stranding is another game I really want to finish, and I want to do so before Death Stranding 2 comes out later this year. This is my 3rd attempt to finish this game. What’s strange is that I REALLY like it but it takes a certain amount of inertia to get me to boot it up. It always feels like a game that is going to be kind of exhausting to play, though it really isn’t so I’m not sure why I feel that way towards it. Anyway if you aren’t familiar, Death Stranding has a strong asymmetrical multiplayer aspect where you can build things in the game world that other players can take advantage of, and vice versa. This far after launch the world isn’t quite as busy as it was when I first played when the game initially released, so when DS2 comes out I want to be ready to jump right in and run with the invisible-but-definitely-there crowd.

(The header image of this post is from Death Stranding, with Sam checking out a giant hologram/chirogram of a Tallneck from Horizon Zero Dawn/Forbidden West.)

Watching

Arcane (Netflix) I’d watched the first season of this when it came out, but now I’ve got PartPurple hooked too. We’re watching the whole series and damn is it ever well done!!

Mythic Quest (Apple TV+) I’ve loved this show since episode 1 and so far my opinion hasn’t changed. I’d love to know what non-gamers think about it.

Reading

Finished Angel Fire East, book 3 in Terry Brook’s “Word & Void” series. I liked it better than book #2. Each of the 3 books in this series takes part over a holiday weekend and about ten years apart. Book 1 was 4th of July and the events took place in a large park in a small town, where the townsfolk played softball, picnicked and watched fireworks, all of which was quite relatable to me. Book 2 took place around Halloween in Seattle and the holiday didn’t really factor into it much, nor did Seattle feel as fully formed as the park in book #1. In book 3 we’re back to the park and small town only now it is Christmas and a snow storm and while there was a bit too many words spent on how many clothes our characters needed to put on before they went outside, it once again felt like a place I could see in my mind’s eye. As far as these being “Pre-Shannara” there was really nothing here to link the two worlds as far as I’m aware. Still, overall as a series I’d give these a thumbs up, but just a basic thumbs up, not a super enthusiastic thumbs up. They were enjoyable but ultimately kind of forgettable.

Armageddon’s Children is the next book in the Shannara series. We’re still in our world, though it is on its last legs. The year is around 2100 and the Earth has been ravaged by war, polution and disease. I was about a third of the way through it when I read a scene that I’m almost CERTAIN I have read before, so I’m thinking maybe I read this series back in the day. On the other hand it isn’t THAT old (published in 2006) and I’d like to think I can remember back that far. So we’ll see. Maybe I read an excerpt or something.

One of the only good things about getting old is that you can re-read or re-watch things from like 40 years ago and it’s like you’re experiencing them for the first time all over again!! LOL

So yup, that’s February. The world is a dumpster fire, but at least I had a pretty good month of gaming. Hey I take the wins where I can get them!!

Atlas Fallen: Reign Of Sand Completed

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Thanks to a 3-day weekend, I was finally able to finish Atlas Fallen: Reign of Sand today. Total time was about 20 hours though I spread that out over quite a while. “How Long to Beat” says the main story should take about 11 hours which tracks for me since I always take like twice as long as HLTB says a game takes.

In Atlas Fallen you play an ‘unnamed’ — the lowest class of this society — who finds a magical gauntlet. Once you put it on you start conversing with an entity name Nyaal who acts as your ‘guy in the chair’ and guides you around the world. The gauntlet gives you various skills and as the game progresses you’ll uncover items that expand its range of powers considerably. Your primary opponent are “wraiths” which seem like monsters made of sand. Due to the nature of the enemies there’s no blood or gore which was kind of a welcome change. When you defeat an enemy it just dissolves into sand.

Combat is action based with a lot of air-dashing, parrying and dodging. This is not a milieu I’m very comfortable with so I eventually turned the difficulty down to easy and that was plenty difficult for me (at almost 65 my reflexes are not what they one were).

Overall Atlas Fallen was, for me, the quintessential “AA” game. Some of it I really liked, other parts left me pretty cold. Here’s a quick run down of both.

The Good Stuff

The Setting

I loved the world itself. This is a world in ruin, mostly desert though there are still small bits of green here and there. The world is littered with truly huge ruins to explore that make you feel tiny at times. You spend a lot of time unearthing things from beneath the sand using a magical power. The wraiths that you fight can get pretty weird and fairly big; you can often make your way to the top of a ruin and see the larger beasties prowling the world and know you can go and fight them if you want to.

A valley with a large flying enemy circling in the distance. It's so far away it is hardly more than a blog of pixels
In this shot I’ve circled a distant large enemy flying around in circles

Traversal

I just had a lot of fun moving around the world. By the time you finish playing you’ll have a double jump and a triple air dash and between those you can (and will have to) cross over pretty wide gaps and chasms and doing so feels really good. You can control your fall nicely so landing on a tiny pillar or something is pretty easy. When on the ground there is this ‘sand surfing’ mechanic that feels like a really decent snowboarding game, though you can surf uphill as well as down. I spent probably too much time just manually traversing the game rather than using Fast Travel. Honestly it was the traversal that kept me playing the game; it was SUPER fun.

Graphics and Sound

The game looks pretty good. Character models are decent for a game with this kind of budget (I mean, I don’t know exactly what the budget was but I think it is safe to say it didn’t have the budget of a blockbuster from one of the really big studios.) Voice acting was solid too, though Nyaal was the exception as something about his tone always kind of bugged me. Personal preference there, though.

The OK Stuff

Combat

This is really subjective, but for me the combat was just OK. Your gauntlet has 3 tiers of power, each with an active and a few passive skills. As you fight you built up “momentum” which powers up the gauntlet giving you access to these skills. When I fight ends your gauntlet quickly powers down so this is a process that happens in every fight. A lot of enemies are bigger than you, or are flying, which means either relying on ranged skills, or jumping and air dashing to get you high enough to hit them. I did the latter and in so doing I may have been my own worst enemy. But it is the kind of game where you can stay in the air seemingly indefinitely by air dashing and hitting enemies, as each hit seems to reset that ‘3 air dash’ limit. But there were times where I’d just lose track of what was going on in all the chaos, and later in the game you’ll encounter enemies that drain “momentum” and I found those fights much less enjoyable.

A chaotic image showing an obscrured enemy and the only really clear thing is a health bar
Combat can be pretty hard to read at times
A still shot taken with photo mode. We are in the bottom left and the vaguely crab-like sand-wraith takes up the rest of the screen
A still shot taken with photo mode. We are in the bottom left and the vaguely crab-like sand-wraith takes up the rest of the screen

Character Building

While you do have levels (and I was only level 10 when I finished) what really matters is the skills in your gauntlet. You add skills via Essence Stones which you find, craft or buy, and these can then be upgraded a few times each. Armor can also be upgraded, though armor comes as a complete set so you upgrade “armor” and not, y’know, your chest, your helmet, your gloves and so on. While this system was OK I had leveled up the skills I wanted to use pretty early. I think the game wants you to constantly be switching your skills around (you can set up 3 sets of gauntlet skills and switch between them via hotkey) but I couldn’t be bothered, which is maybe why combat was so hard for me. I think that if you were really into the game and playing on a harder difficulty and needing specific loadouts for specific enemies, the character building would be more interesting.

The Bad Stuff

Story

The story wasn’t bad per se, it just felt a bit mundane given how cool the world was. Basically there’s a god you have to take down but first you have to level up the gauntlet and that’s really it. There’s a bunch of side characters that seem like they could have neat stories but they’re not really explored that much. But my biggest issue with the story was how often Nyaal would “sense” that we had to do something rather than there being some bit of narrative leading to doing that thing. It felt like the writers ran out of time or ideas or something. He would always be “I sense we need to head to the top of that mountain” when the next quest objective was up there. It just felt a little lazy.

So for me, Atlas Fallen: Reign of Sand was an OK game. If I was letter grading I’d give it a B. On a 1-5 number scale more like a 3.5. Put it this way: I finished it but left side quests and a lot of activities unfinished and had no desire to go back and do more. Happy to have played, happy to have finished but 20 hours was plenty. On the other hand if you’re into this kind of combat (and since it isn’t my thing I can’t think of other examples though I know they are out there: Devil May Cry maybe?) you might like it a lot more than I did.

As of this writing it is available on both Game Pass and one of the Playstation Plus tiers. I played it on PC Game Pass using an Xbox Controller and using Xbox Game Bar’s “Auto HDR” feature.

It’s Hard to Say Goodbye (to an Open World)

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Last night, the day after posting a monthly recap in which I lamented the fact that I hadn’t finished any games in January, I “finished” Horizon Forbidden West.

But what does “finished” even mean with an open world game? With more linear games, you complete the story, maybe see a literal “The End” screen, the credits roll and then you are returned to the title screen. Not here and not with a lot of open world games. Instead you complete the last quest, the credits roll, and then you bounce back into the game with your character standing there with a “Now what?” expression on their face.

Generally speaking this is a good thing. Now you have all the toys and skills and the world becomes your playground. But for me at least, it makes putting the game aside a bit of a struggle. I was looking forward to finishing HFW because I have so many other games I want to play but now that I’m done, I’m finding it tough to say goodbye to Aloy and the world.

Specifically here is what I’ve completed:

Trophies

All in all I earned 58 of 80 trophies.
I missed 9 in the main game
I missed 10 in the DLC
I missed 3 in the New Game+ section (one of which is finish New Game+ at Ultra Hard difficulty…yeah no thanks)

The World

Finished the main quest of the main game
Finished the main quest of the DLC
Finished every Side Quest that I found
I did NOT uncover all of the world. There are still parts of the map covered in ‘fog’

Character Development

I’m well beyond the level cap
I’ve earned every skill I’m interested in, though there are some that could be upgraded a bit more
I have good gear, but not the best gear, and not all of it is upgraded fully (but it was up to the challenge of the final boss)

Activities

I did not complete the fighting rings
I did not complete the hunting grounds
I did not complete the machine races
I did not play the in-game board game, Machine Strike
I didn’t even ‘solve’ all the cauldrons

The first 3 of these Activities are all time based and I HATE time pressure so I just opted to ignore them. Machine Strike just didn’t appeal to me (I never find games inside other games to be too compelling) and the cauldrons, I just didn’t get around to doing.

Next Steps

So what’s next?

1) I could just not play anymore and be done for now
2) I could chase Trophies though several of them are based on the activities I didn’t do because I didn’t like them
3) I could explore the parts of the map I missed just to see what is there
4) I could start a New Game+

So which will I choose? I’m still not sure. Currently Aloy is back at her base, safe and warm. I always tend to take characters “home” when I’m done with an open world game. It’s weird, I know. I am pretty confident I am NOT up for New Game+ right now but the rest… well we’ll see. I have 112 hours on my current save and more in total since I re-started a couple of times. Seems like it should be enough. On the other hand it has been FOUR years since I earned a Platinum Trophy and doing so here seems plausible.

But…all those other games are waiting to be played.

Just not sure what I’ll do yet. Breaking up with an open world is hard to do. Am I the only one that has this problem?

[Image above is Seyka, not Aloy. Seyka is one of the main characters you meet in the Burning Shores DLC. I liked her a lot.]

 

January 2025

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And there goes January, drifting off into the past. I was REALLY hoping to be able to talk about the games I’d finished in this recap, but in the end I didn’t finish any. Once again. I’m maybe destined to play the same games forever! Well at least I’m having fun. I just need a couple of clones so I have time to play all the games I want to get to!

Playing

Horizon Forbidden West is one of the games I really thought I’d get finished. And to be fair I DID finish the main game, but now I’m working through the DLC. Horizon Zero Dawn was one of my all time favorite games, but I haven’t found Horizon Forbidden West quite as compelling. It took me quite a while to put my finger on why that is but I think it finally clicked. The newer game has a more complex combat system that rewards using the right kind of arrow on the right enemy part to cause elemental explosions. It also puts an emphasis on shooting off specific parts that you can then use to upgrade your gear. On paper this sounds great but I find myself just plinking away with regular arrows most of the time since I found the ‘right way’ to be too fiddly. Because of that battles tend to take a long time, which in turn slows down the pace of the game. I was at around 100 hours when I finished the main campaign and most of the side quests. How Long To Beat has that content taking an average of 60 hours. So yeah.

They clearly plan for a 3rd game and I kind of hope they walk back the complexity of the combat. I love shooting off parts of machines and stuff but my weapon wheel is so cluttered and the machines turn so quickly it is just rare that I get the right arrow drawn at a time I have a visual on the appropriate elemental weak point. Plus I’ve never been one to use traps and stuff. I just want to let fly with a ton of arrows! This is for sure a “me” issue more than an issue with the game itself. Anyway hopefully I’ll have the DLC wrapped up in February!

Borderlands Game of the Year Edition is another title I thought I might finish in January but it is still rolling on. My character is level 30 now and since that triggered an Achievement I thought it might be cap and I might be nearly done, but it seems not. It isn’t a game I play every day, either, so I’ll keep plodding along. I’m determined to finish…for some reason.

Over in the MMO world, I started the month playing both Warframe and Elder Scrolls Online, but drifted away from both of them for no reason other than distraction and wanting to finish some finish-able games.

Our hero looks out over the remains of a buried town
Our hero looks out over the remains of a buried town

Atlas Fallen is a game I bounced off of, but then came back to. It has somehow become my after work palette cleanse. I never play it for long… 20-30 minutes/session. But I find the traversal systems really fun, between double jumping and air-dashing, and the snowboarding like sand-surfing mechanic. I find the world pretty compelling too. It’s post-apocalypse, but not of Earth as we know it. But there are ruins of HUGE ancient structures half-buried in the sand and the sense of scale is great. This is aided by an incredibly long rendering distance meaning you can climb up on some tall structure and see huge lumbering beasties way off in the distance. It’s pretty cool. The story and the characters I find less interesting and the combat was frustrating to me until I stopped being stubborn and turned down the difficulty. Now I can mostly button-mash my way through the combat, which is fine with me.

Screenshot of "The Herta" gacha character from Honkai Star Rail

Early in January Wuthering Waves came to Playstation and I’d read so many positive posts about it from Bhagpuss at Inventory Full that I knew I wanted to try it. What I found is a game remarkably similar to Genshin Impact, which led me to firing up Genshin again. Meanwhile Dusty at I’m Still Playing was talking about Zenless Zone Zero so I wanted to give THAT another go, and as long as I was gacha crazy I fired up Honkai Star Rail, too. I knew there was no way I could play all these games but I figured I’d settle on just one. In the end I kind of just burned out on gacha and the daily tasks they all ask you to do. If I ever decide to focus on one, I’ll talk more about it.

A group of characters from Eternal Strands showing a variety of species

Eternal Strands is the newest game in the recap; it just came out last Tuesday. It’s from Mike Laidlaw’s Yellow Brick Games. Laidlaw was Creative Director for Dragon Age over at Bioware back in the good old days of Bioware, so I was anxious to check this game out. It’s very early days but so far I’m enjoying it. You play a ‘weaver’ (a mage) who uses various elemental spells to fight and solve puzzles. (Though there is melee and bow combat as well.) It has an interesting cast of characters and a world that feels ripe for exploration. Part of the reason is that the game’s map is more of a sketch than a detailed map, and the first zone, at least, is pretty dense and complex. I found myself learning landmarks to help me find my way around, which is the kind of thing I enjoy. The compass is off by default, but you can toggle one on in the options, and there’s a “wisp” feature if you’re not the exploring type… you can follow the wisp to your next quest goal. But by ignoring those features and finding my way, I’m just having fun exploring so far. But again, very early days…at the time of this writing I just have a few hours into it.

Watching:

Nobody Wants This (Netflix) stars Kristen Bell so of course it was great. She plays a podcaster who, along with her sister, talks a lot about sex. She falls for a rabbi. His family is appalled because she is not Jewish and because of the tone of her podcast. Hilarity ensues, for the most part. It’s irreverent, sometimes heart-warming, often funny, often quite dirty. We really loved it.

Silo (Apple TV) – Season 2 had its lulls but overall it continues to intrigue us and we can’t wait for Season 3, which, along with a Season 4, is already greenlit. The show is based on a trilogy of books, I’m told. S1 & S2 covered book 1 and S2 and S3 will cover books 2 & 3 respectively. I hope things don’t feel too rushed. But overall, great show!

The Gentleman (Netflix) – When an army captain finds he has inherited his father’s estate and title, he learns there’s an underground marijuana farm that is helping to keep the estate afloat. His father had just kind of looked the other way but our new duke gets involved in an attempt to get the criminal element off the grounds. He pals up with the daughter of the drug kingpin who owns the farm. She gives off “criminal Emma Peel” vibes to me and I loved the character. Meanwhile the new duke’s brother, who is a hot mess, keeps causing trouble. I’ve never watched Breaking Bad but I’ve heard this described as “Breaking Bad meets Downton Abbey”. We enjoyed it, but since there’s a bunch of organized crime baddies running around, it can get pretty violent.

Reading:

A Knight of the Word and Angel Fire East – I’m continuing with my read-through of the Terry Brook’s “Pre-Shannara” series. So far they are just OK. I liked A Knight of the Word well enough to keep going, but it’s not like I can’t wait to get my work done so I can get back to reading. I’m just still curious about how he’s going to tie all of this into the Shannara series, because we’re still solidly in modern America urban-fantasy land. A Knight of the Word took place in Seattle at Halloween and Angel Fire East has us back in the main character’s mid-west small town around Christmas. Nest, the main character, is now 29 and spends a LOT of time putting on cold winter clothes and making cookies and hot chocolate for house guests, which isn’t really what I’m tuned in for. In all three of these books (book 1 was Running With the Demon) Brooks spends a little too much time showing off how well he knows these areas, constantly describing the buildings and roads our characters travel on even though they’re all pretty mundane. But again, I keep reading so there must be something here!

And that’s January in the bag. I don’t really do goals but I REALLY hope to be done with Horizon Forbidden West by the end of next month, and I’m looking forward to more Eternal Strands. Stay warm, everyone!

Microsoft Changes How We Earn Rewards Points via Gaming

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m a fan of Microsoft’s Rewards program. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a program where you can earn points for doing things like answering quizes, using Bing to search, or more interestingly to me, playing Xbox Game Pass games. A point is worth a tiny amount; I tend to wait until I have 95,000 points to redeem them for a $100 gift card, meaning a single point is worth about a tenth of a cent. Seems not worth the bother, right? But they do add up and about twice a year I’m able to cash in a $100 card, plus I find the gamification of the system kind of mindless fun.

In terms of Game Pass rewards, most recently there were Daily, Weekly and Monthly tasks to complete. The Daily tasks were always “Play a Game Pass Game” and “Earn an Achievement in a Game Pass Game.” The first was trivial (it popped as soon as you opened a Game Pass title), the second was variable depending on what you were playing. The Weekly tasks were things like “Play 3 different Game Pass games” and “Complete 3 Daily tasks.” The Monthly tasks were where the big rewards were and they were basically an accumulation of the Daily and Weeklies, with the highest one rewarding 1000 points for doing 8 Weekly tasks and X Daily tasks, where X was a number around 45. This meant that you HAD to earn an Achievement in a Game Pass game once a day for about half the days of the month.

What this led to, at least in OCD folks like me, was “hoarding” Achievements. If I was playing a Game Pass game and I earned an Achievement I’d IMMEDIATELY stop playing the game for the day so I didn’t unlock another Achievement which ‘wouldn’t count’ for anything. I appreciate and admit this was entirely a “me” issue but based on conversations in the Microsoft Rewards reddit, I wasn’t the only one who did this.

Today all that ends. All the details are on Xbox Wire but the gist of it is, rewards based on Achievements are gone; all tasks will be based on just playing games. Good news for me. That said, you now have to spend 15 minutes in a game for it to count, so no more hitting the title screen and quitting, though I guess you could sit at the title screen for 15 minutes and that would work. There also seems to be a big focus on ‘streaks’ of playing 5 days a week, each week. Lastly there is a monthly “Game Pass 4 Pack” and “Game Pass 8 Pack” task which rewards us for playing 4 or 8 different Game Pass games, respectively.

And then the big news is, there are now equivalent rewards for PC gamers. Same rules seem to apply only now you’ll be playing on PC rather than on console.

As of today I am seeing these tasks on the Xbox app on my phone:

Play a PC game -> 10 points
Weekly PC bonus -> 150 points if you play for 5 days
Play a game on console -> 10 points
Weekly console bonus -> 150 points if you play for 5 days

In the name of science I snuck off from work and played Borderlands Game of the Year edition on the Xbox for 20 minutes. This is NOT a Game Pass game but it counted for “Play a game on console” so it seems these do not have to be Game Pass titles. (Though I imagine in the case of PC it’ll have to be a game played via the Xbox app which for most of us means a Game Pass title.)

As a Game Pass Ultimate member I also have:

Play a Game Pass Game -> 10 points

Game Pass Monthly 4-pack -> 50 points
Game Pass Monthly 8-pack -> 350 points

Then there are streak bonuses.

Days 1-4 -> no bonus
Day 5 -> +40 point
Day 6 -> +20 points
Day 7 -> +40 points

These last numbers increase as you maintain your streak from week to week.

Week 2 -> x2 bonus
Week 3 -> x3 bonus
Week 4 & beyond -> x4 bonus

OK now the caveat is, this is a brand new system and I haven’t actually tested any of it yet. I’ll update the post if I find I’ve made any mistakes or if I’ve missed anything.

I haven’t done the math but I’m guessing there are fewer points to earn over the old system since Microsoft continues to decrease Rewards points over time, but for me personally I am super happy to see the end of tasks based on earning achievements. But we’ll see how it goes!

Are AAA Console Games an Endangered Species?

Posted on by Nimgimli

The other day I was browsing YouTube and came upon this rather depressing video about the death of console exclusives from Eurogamer:

The gist of it is that AAA games are getting too expensive and anyway young people don’t care about consoles; they play games on mobile or their PC. “They” say that young people don’t even have TVs but instead watch everything on their laptops. Based on my own circle of social media folks that I follow, I’m not sure that is limited to young people. I think more and more people in general just skip the giant TV in the living room and instead use their computer monitor.

Even though the video is about the end of console exclusivity, it also goes into a predicted decline of AAA games in general, just because they’re getting so expensive to make and the economy we live in is all about making maximum $$ for shareholders & CEOs with minimum investment in the developers and artists who actually make games. We’ve seen so many job losses in the industry over the past few years. (According to Wikipedia, there were around 25,000 job cuts in the gaming industry between 2023 and 2024.)

I don’t actually do a lot of PC gaming so I’m unsure of how many AAA games come out on PC exclusively but I’m guessing the number is pretty small and would be limited to titles from Valve or maybe Epic, just because these companies are invested in a storefront that can help them recoup the costs. If I’m wrong about this please correct me but it seems like the giant AAA games are generally console oriented, at least initially. I also guess there is some wiggle room in what we mean when we say AAA, too.

Assuming any of this is correct I do wonder what the future of gaming will look like. I too am someone who enjoys big blockbuster games played on a 65″ 4K TV, and I’d hate to see this experience fade. But what can we, as game consumers, do about it?

Realistically, not much. But I guess we can try to pay more attention to “AA” games, which is a tier that seems to be vanishing but maybe there will be room for it to come back when the AAA monsters stop sucking up all the development money. The Indie space seems healthy at least in terms of numbers of games coming out, though we’ve seen a fair number of indie developers close shop too. In that case it feels more along the lines of “We made a game and it didn’t make us enough $$ for us to stay solvent” vs “Our shareholders need more return on their investment so we’re axing a bunch of people.” Mind you how an Indie game gathers eyeballs when platforms like Steam are adding 19,000 games a year, I just don’t know, but that feels like a different issue so we’ll set it aside for now.

Not really sure where I’m going with this post. To a large extent I just wanted to surface that video but since I watched it I’ve been rolling this stuff around in my brain trying to make sense of it. The gaming scene I love is changing/dying off, I guess. But then so am I. I kid that my backlog is big enough that it would probably last me to my end of days, but it is legitimately true I think, assuming I keep playing at the rate I play and that I have another 15 years or so to spend on this ball of mud (15 years from now I’ll be 80). But I do feel like future generations will be missing out on something kind of wonderful if these big budget games go away.

Header image: A screenshot of the night sky in Horizon Forbidden West, exactly the kind of AAA game that I LOVE to play on the biggest screen possible!

Tweaking Sengi for Mastodon

Posted on by Nimgimli

Yesterday the superb Scopique shared a 3rd party Mastodon app called Sengi. I’ve been testing it out and generally like it but for me personally the column widths were a bit narrow (320px) and there is no in-app way to customize this (yet at least).

Sengi comes in both a web-app and a stand-alone app version. There was nothing I could do to address the issue in the stand-alone app, short of recompiling it I guess. But that seemed like actual effort and the web app seems to work just as well as the stand-alone. I figured I could use Style Bot to fix things up, but the web app window is stripped down and doesn’t offer access to browser extensions.

This was pretty simple to work around. Open a regular browser tab and go to https://sengi.nicolas-constant.com/, then open Style Bot. I bumped the column width to 500px using these rules:


.main-display__stream-column {
width: calc(500px + 7px);
}

.stream-column,
.stream-column__stream-header,
.stream-statuses {
width: 500px;
}

Once Style Bot is set for the domain, you can go back to using the cleaner web app and your new styles will be applied. Or if you want a standard browser window, just keep using that.

I was initially going to share this on Mastodon but it seemed a little long, ergo the blog post.

December 2024

Posted on by Nimgimli

Since it’s the last recap of the year, I guess we need to look back on the highlights of my year in blogging:
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OK now that that’s done, we can go on with the regular recap. I really had no highlights to speak of and I am once again asking myself why I even bother with this blog given how infrequently I post to it. I keep promising myself I’ll write more but time these days feels so precious and I never have enough to do all the things I want to do. Since blogging doesn’t frequently make it to the top of the list I guess I need to accept that it isn’t that important to me. But, y’know, inertia. I’ve been writing it for over 20 years.

Bah, that’s not a very upbeat way to start the final recap of 2024! I’m also stalling because I took no notes this month and can’t really remember what I played. [dramatic pause while I try to remember] OK I think I got it, let’s go!

Playing

At the end of last month I’d finished playing My Time At Portia and I almost immediately rolled into My Time At Sandrock but didn’t stick with it very long, just because I was dealing with a bit of “My Time at…” fatigue. I definitely plan to go back to it at some point after giving the series a bit of a rest. My immediate thoughts were along the same lines of everything I’ve read about Sandrock: it is like Portia, only better.

December was also the month I got back into MMOs, plural. Talk about not having enough time, right? I finally got into World of Warcraft‘s “The War Within” just about the time my sub ran out. I thought about resubscribing but when I compared the $15/month cost to the 4 or 5 hours/month I was playing, it just seemed silly. I’d just left the Isle of Dorn, which I very much enjoyed. Maybe at some point I’ll re-sub and just play through the story content. My general issue with MMOs is they never end so I can never ‘finish’ them and move on to one of the hundreds of single player games I really want to play.

I also got back into The Elder Scrolls Online, not that I remember exactly how that happened at this point. I think it was a super sale on the last expansion and all the expansions before it. I brought my Playstation account up to date then got sucked into the Golden Pursuits event they were running. When I got the free mount (pictured at the top of this post) it made me wonder why I’d bothered. That thing is hideous!!! But the event did push me out of my comfort zone. I did a PUG dungeon and 5 rounds of PvP Battlegrounds, just to advance the Golden Pursuits. Both were the type of content I generally avoid like the plague but in the end, they both went well. The Dungeon was even, dare I say it? Fun! Anyway I’m still playing ESO, casually. I paid for a month of ESO+ but don’t expect to continue that; ESO is a game you can play without the subscription if you just want to dabble. [Technically you never have to pay but when I’m playing seriously I find I really miss the ESO+ perks.]

And Warframe, which I actually wrote a post about. I’m still having a lot of fun there. There are so many types of content hidden away (hidden to those looking at the game from the outside, I mean) in this game. The other day I was running hoverboard races and pulling off tricks and stuff. Who knew?

Aloy stands in front of 2 giant vanquished machines
I realize this doesn’t look like much, but here Aloy is standing in front of 2 machines she had to defeat at the same time: a thunderjaw and a tremortusk. It was quite an intense fight!

Aside from MMOs I’ve been bouncing around various single player games, trying to finish something, somewhere, and completely failing. I REALLY want to finally finish Horizon Forbidden West and Death Stranding. I started Like a Dragon: Ishin and was having a great time but just drifted away. Oh and after watching the Borderlands movie I found myself back to playing Borderlands (the OG Borderlands). At least I finally tore myself free of being a slave to Fallout 76‘s Season Pass which kind of led to me finally stop playing.

I am noticing a bad pattern with me and Season Passes where I start to obsess over them which quickly leads to me playing a game not for fun but to try to advance the season pass. Doesn’t take long for that behavior to turn the game into just another daily chore to get through. This in turn leads to developing negative associations with a game that I initially was enjoying. Anyway I need to work on that aspect of my gaming personality. I don’t think ‘swearing off’ Season Passes completely is the answer; I need to find some kind of middle ground.

A screenshot from Borderlands, looking through the scope of a rifle at charging enemies
Back to making slow but steady progress in Borderlands 1

Watching

Again, didn’t take notes so…

Star Trek: The Lower Decks (Paramount+) final season was wonderful. I’m really going to miss this show but I expect I will re-watch it often over the coming years, as I do most Trek shows.

Silo (Apple TV+): We’re in the midst of Season 2 and man waiting a week for each new episode is killing me! We love this show! We went back and re-watched Season 1 which felt worth doing, just as a refresher and because we picked up some foreshadowing we missed the first time through. I’ve never read the books but Part Purple has, and we both enjoy it so make of that what you will.

Man on the Inside (Netflix): Ted Danson plays an elderly engineering professor who goes undercover in a retirement community even though he knows nothing about being a detective. I would like to say hilarity ensues, but it’s more like amusing warm feelings ensue. And some melancholy. It was a wonderful show, though also a bit frightening if you’re someone of my age!

Nobody Wants This (Netflix): Once we were done with Man on the Inside we headed over to another The Good Place alum, Kristen Bell and her new(ish) sitcom. We’re enjoying this one too but be warned it’s a bit on the raunchy side, but it has its share of romance too. We’re still in the middle of it but since it’s a sitcom I don’t anticipate any big wrenches being thrown into the works. Good fun so far.

Yellowstone (Peacock): I’m finally watching the 5th season of Yellowstone, mostly so I can cancel Peacock. I had Peacock for Premiere League Football but I rarely watch any more and I’m trying to cut some streaming costs here and there. If you haven’t seen Yellowstone somehow, the best way I can think to describe it is The Sopranos in Montana, only with more lawyers. I find it compelling even though almost every character is pretty awful.

Dr Stone (Crunchyroll): This has been my anime of choice this month. I liken this one to a survivalbox game in anime form. Something turned all humans to stone for 3700 years until one science geek ‘wakes up’ and figures out how to wake up others, while at the same time he tries to jumpstart technology using all his knowledge. It’s pretty fun so far (I’m still in Season 1).

Reading

A Christmas Carol gets read every year, and this year was no different.

Also finished Running With The Demon by Terry Brooks and rolled right into the sequel, A Knight of the Word. These are his “pre-Shannara” books and are basically urban fantasy. UF is not generally one of my favorite genres but this time out it is working for me.

And that’s about it for December. Next thing I’m looking forward to is Wuthering Waves coming to Playstation on Jan 2nd. I’ve heard so much good about this game that I’m really looking forward to playing!