Author: Nimgimli

I Made Switchel

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Back in the middle of Blaugust when I was desperate for a topic that I could turn into a quick and easy post, I shared a few of my favorite YouTube channels. One of them was Townsends, a channel about life in 18th century North America. At lot of the Townsend videos focus on cooking and food preparation and while I find them interesting, most are not interesting enough for me to try to make them.

One exception was Switchel, which Jon Townsend calls “An 18th Century Energy Drink.” Here’s the video:

It’s a simple recipe:
1/4 cup of apple cider vinegar
1/2 cup of sulpher-free molasses
a heaping tablespoon of ground ginger
1/2 gallon of water

Mix and enjoy.

My first attempt was drinkable but not great. First, my ground ginger was ancient and not very potent and it was the end of a jar and I barely had a tablespoon. End result: not a lot of ginger flavor. Second…I think I don’t really like molasses enough for this recipe.

For attempt two I used local honey instead of molasses and I had a new jar of ground ginger. I started with warm-ish water to help dissolve everything. This time it was pretty good right after mixing, but still not quite sweet enough so I added an extra dollop (that’s a technical term) of honey. Shook it all like mad to get the honey to dissolve in the now cold water. That tasted better, but when it really got good was after a few days in the fridge when a lot of the ginger settled out leaving a very clear drink, about the color of apple juice.

I really enjoy it, though due to the vinegar in it I don’t guzzle gallons of it. There’s a bunch of info on the web about how apple cider vinegar is good for you, but I don’t know how much I believe of what I read. I do, however, enjoy the taste & fragrance of vinegar (properly diluted, of course, and really you notice the vinegar more in the smell than the taste) and I feel like it does help keep my gut happy. Maybe a little acid is good for all the bacteria living in there. Who knows?

And I really like having a cold drink where I know all the ingredients that go in it. Same could be said for home-brewed ice tea or lemonade, for sure, but beyond those drinks (and good old ice water) most of what I drink comes from a factory of some kind somewhere.

Since making this Switchel I’ve discovered there are a ton of recipes for it online. Some of them are fermented, many use fresh ginger, some swap the vinegar for lemon or lime juice. This one from Townsends is one of the simplest and while I may try others, there’s something to be said for spending 5 minutes to throw together half a gallon of refreshing beverage. Bonus points for it being pretty darned cheap to make, too.

[About the header image: I tried my best to get one of those ‘beads of sweat dripping down the side of the jug’ shots but all I managed in the time allotted was fogging that just makes it look like I’m drinking from a dirty jug. I now have great respect for food photographers.]

More About A Plague Tale: Innocence

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I mentioned my issues with A Plague Tale: Innocence in my weekend recap but wanted to expand on them in this post.

So first a bit about the game. Plague Tale takes place in an alternate history France in the 1300s. You mostly play as Amicia, a teen-aged (I’m guessing 15 or 16?) girl who is suddenly tasked with protecting her 5 year old brother Hugo. A plague (called ‘The Bite’) is ravaging the land, and the Inquisition is out in full force hunting for Hugo for reasons unknown.

The plague takes the form of demonic rats. There are LOTS of rats and they’re so very, very hungry. Thousands of ’em and they have but one weakness: they are afraid of light. Amicia is armed with a sling and over the course of the game she learns how to make special ammo for it: shots that ignite smoldering fires, shots that douse lights, and so on. As she travels through the game world she has to guide Hugo along by holding his hand. If he is left alone for too long he’ll start to panic, making noise and drawing enemies to the pair. At least that’s what we’re told. I was too good a big sister to ever let him get to that point.

OK so that’s the as-spoiler-free-as-possible setup.

The game is strongly narrative-driven and is not open world. Stripped of story, you are generally tasked with going from Point A to Point B in a level, though the animations of the characters, the excellent voice acting and the world building hide that exquisitely. The first half of the game is just *chef’s kiss* amazing.

In terms of mechanics, a lot of the game is essentially puzzle-based. You see a swarm of rats…how will you get past them? Can you light a fire by using your special ammo? Can you distract them by offering them a meal of some kind. Can you just avoid them? The further in you go the more complex the puzzles get, but the more tools you have to solve them. I found this all really fun. Fun, but really dark. Sometimes the meal for the rats is an enemy soldier. Actually a lot of times that’s the case. The various sling ammo types reminded me of Thief: The Dark Project, if you remember that game.

Amicia is a 15 year old girl with a sling and the beginning of the game leans into that. She has no interest in killing people and she’s not skilled enough to do it reliably anyway. But the farther you go, the more combat there is, and in the last chunk of game Amicia is like some kind of sling-wielding super-hero taking out enemies left and right. Not only did this kind of ‘cheapen’ the character for me, but the game’s mechanics (at least on console) just don’t offer a great combat system. As you wind up a sling shot your targeting reticle will ‘lock on’ to an enemy’s head, or the lantern they are carrying, or some other hotspot. Let fly and you hit. But sometimes it won’t lock on. Sometimes it ‘loses’ the lock just as you release. Sometimes it locks onto the wrong thing. This all makes combat less than satisfying so the more the game relies on it, the less gratifying the overall experience becomes.

This weapon wheel is from early in the game. By the end game it has choices all the way around.

You choose your ammo type from a weapon wheel (again, this is the UI on consoles). This feels sloppy, and you can’t re-arrange the ammo. So (again trying to stay as spoiler free as possible) there are times when I frequently wanted to use the item at 3 o’clock on the weapon wheel followed quickly by the item at 7 o’clock. I would have really liked to have been able to re-arrange these items so they were next to each other, but there was no way to do that. When the wheel is open (and obscuring your view) the game slows down a tiny bit, but not nearly enough. There isn’t an indication of what ammo type you have selected until you start your wind up to throw. I frequently died because I thought I had selected the right thing, but when I’d start Amicia’s wind up I’d realize my selection was wrong. By that time the enemy has closed the gap and boom! Dead. No time to change to the correct item, and you can’t effectively run/dodge while using the wheel (at least, I couldn’t). Amicia doesn’t have hit points. If an enemy strikes her, she dies.

Anyway, you get the idea. Putting so much emphasis on fighting at the end of a game where combat isn’t super polished or really the focus just totally busted the pacing for me. There was also a too-long pure stealth mission, and a mission where no matter what you did you would fail to some extent. Of course you, the player, doesn’t KNOW you’re expected to fail so I restarted that section so many times and got so frustrated trying to take out what I guess is an endless number of enemies.

Just in case I was missing something I checked around on places like Reddit and yeah, I wasn’t the only one cursing about the combat at the end. It may be that none of this is an issue on PC and that’s why it hasn’t been mentioned much. I just thought so much of the enjoyment of the game rested on the story, but the devs ruined the story by making the gameplay at the end of the game so cumbersome and frustrating that the pacing of the narrative was destroyed. I don’t know why they would do that.

There’s a sequel, A Plague Tail: Requiem, coming in 2022 and I hope they can keep the amazing storytelling of Innocence while addressing the flow of the end game. I’m willing to give them a second chance.

Blaugust 2021 – Fini

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Here it is, the last post of Blaugust 2021. I made it. Whew! While I originally didn’t plan to post every day and at the 1/3rd point I decided to cut back I never really did. For better or for worse. Technically I think I wrote 32 posts since if I remember right I double-posted once.

So what did I discover? Well most importantly I learned that I can still generate a blog post every day if I really want to. Unlike so many of my projects, I didn’t abandon this one. I also discovered some really nice blogs and really nice people and I intend to keep reading these people in the future.

There were some disappointments along the way. While I tried my best to amplify other Blaugust participants by retweeting stuff with the #blaugust2021 hashtag on Twitter, I found there were only a handful of us doing that. Seemed like a missed opportunity. (There were a few people who retweeted almost every post and I would like to thank them from the bottom of my heart!) In some cases I Followed Blaugust participants just so I’d be aware of their blog post announcements and could retweet them, but often they didn’t follow me back. Maybe other bloggers just don’t see Twitter as an important audience building tool? Or maybe they just thought it was more important to curate their timeline than to promote people they didn’t really know (which is fair, particularly if they’re trying to build a Following that they can monetize). Either way, that was a bit of a bummer. I mean, it isn’t like promoting each other is in the rules of Blaugust but it was still a little disappointing.

In the run-up to the event I was excited about joining the Discord community, but I only lasted a week or two in there. As with just about every Discord I join, it felt like a clique of people that I wasn’t a part of. (This is just where my brain goes in any kind of crowd, IRL or online, so not a knock on the community, just a hang-up I have about new groups of people.) I dutifully posted content in the “Share Your Content” for a while, but I saw almost no traffic from that and none of my posts seemed of interest to the other Discord users. There are certainly helpful people in the Discord and if you ask a question you will get answers. So it serves a function, but for socializing and talking about writing it was a bust for me. Additionally the most helpful people in the Discord seem equally helpful on their blogs or in Twitter, and since I’m already at those places, making a special trip to Discord seemed like a poor use of my time. (I should note that I am not a Discord user and the Blaugust Discord was the only Discord that I was using.)

In general the broader community aspect of Blaugust was pretty much a bust for me, but then I’ve always struggled to find my tribe. On the other hand, I feel like I’ve joined a micro-community of bloggers who I really resonate with, and that is a huge win.

All that said, I am ready to announce the Dragonchasers 2021 Blaugust Mentor of the Year Award as chosen by ME!:

Aywren from Spot of Mummery!
*confetti cannons go off*
Aywren posted a lot of great advice over the month and her advice was always clear without being simplistic. A marvelous gift.

Honourable Mentions:
Bhagpuss at Inventory Full
Naithin at Time To Loot

So, About The Future…

One of the reasons I did Blaugust was to decide if it was time to shut down the blog. I went something like 8 or 9 months without a post. Is it worth paying for the domain and hosting?

In terms of popularity, it clearly is not. My traffic doubled in August, which sounds great but again, I hadn’t posted in a long time so traffic was very very low. Doubling from 2 to 4 is a lot less impressive than doubling from 2 million to 4 million, after all. Specifically I had like 1000 page views for the entire month of August and 240 of those page views was for a post from last year. Basically 31 days of Blaugust posts barely caused a bump in traffic. Eliminate that article from last year and Blaugust added 250 page views over the entire month.

My take-away is that posting daily doesn’t help me generate traffic, and let’s be real, this blog is 19 years old. If it hasn’t found an audience yet, it never will. My choice of topics or my writing style doesn’t resonate with many. I remember a time when I thought Dragonchasers would become a side hustle. I was going to build it up and then get sponsors or ads or whatever. That dream was 99% dead already, but Blaugust drove the final nail into its coffin. I don’t have what it takes to write a blog that generates revenue. I’m just not focused enough.

And y’know what? That’s kind of a relief in a way. Last time my hosting plan came up for renewal I bought a 2-year plan and I still have a year or so left on it. So for now the blog will stay around but it’ll be MY blog and I’ll write for me and assume no one will ever read it. Maybe I’ll just share stories of my (completely ordinary) life or something. Who knows?

Blaugust is done. It’s not something I imagine I would do again. I’m glad I did it just because it got me back to writing, and getting people to blog is the whole point of Blaugust so it definitely worked. That said, if someone were to ask me about getting started or back into blogging, I’d say rather than waiting for Blaugust just pick a day and start writing. Make a schedule and try to stick to it, but avoid going for a daily post schedule. Give yourself at least one day off a week, and probably at least two. Maybe 3 or 4. Depends on how much free time you have. If you work full time and have a family, I feel like 3 posts/week is PLENTY. You need to reserve some time to do the things you’ll eventually blog about!

Weekend Recap for August 30th

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We are slowly, slowly creeping up on October and the start of cooler weather. I desperately miss living in a place where September means crisp Autumn days, but here in the middle of North Carolina the best you can ask of September is to please cool it (ha!) with the 90F+ temperatures. Sadly, September doesn’t always listen. This weekend the heat index was over 100F and today is supposed to be even hotter. Lola and I had a tough weekend with the heat just unbearable and her so torn between “I really want to go outside and explore” and “I am a dark colored dog melting in the blazing sunshine, help me cool off.”

With the obligatory griping finished, let’s get started.

Movie Night — This week we watched Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf, an animated Witcher movie on Netflix. This was a prequel of sorts that focused on Vesemir’s story before Geralt came into the picture. (Vesemir is Geralt’s older friend and mentor, in case you’re not up on all the lore.) I love the Witcher IP even if I’m not as thrilled with the games as most seem to be, and I really enjoyed Nightmare of the Wolf. I have questions but I won’t ask them here because spoilers (the movie just came out last week). I was worried @partpurple wouldn’t like it as much, but she enjoyed it quite a bit as well.

Family TV — We usually watch something during our lunch break and lately we’ve been doing a re-watch of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I don’t think either of us has ever gone back and watched the series in the order it aired. It’s been fun with lots of “Oh I’d forgotten about this!” moments. We just crossed into Season 2 which seems a lot better than Season 1, at least based on the first couple of episodes. Evening viewing has been Star Wars: The Clone Wars. I’d watched a couple of seasons of this solo, but @partpurple hadn’t see it at all. After we’d enjoyed The Bad Batch we decided to go back and catch up and we’ve been glad we did. We’re watching them in chronological order which is a bit of a hassle but makes the storylines much more cohesive than I remember them from my first viewing. Oh, and What If…? and Star Trek: The Lower Decks continue to delight every week.

Reading — I’ve started book 7 of The Saxon Stories, The Pagan Lord. Uhtred’s temper has gotten him into hot water with the King and the Christian church, so he is once again on the move. Uhtred is in his 50s in this book, and there are 13 books in the series and I’m really curious to see what kinds of exploits he gets into as he grows even older. I read somewhere that The Last Kingdom Netflix series (based on these books) is ending in part because they couldn’t figure out a good way to show Uhtred as an old man when the actor who plays him is, of course, still quite young.

Gaming — I mentioned yesterday that I’d started A Plague Tale: Innocence and I got HOOKED so that’s where I spent most of my gaming time this weekend; I finished it last night. It’s supposed to be a fairly short game but it still took me almost a week to play through it. I might do a post on it. It was one of those games with a strong narrative that gets kind of ruined by a difficulty spike at the end. I don’t know why game devs do this in story-based games. They get you hooked, you’re having fun playing and enjoying the story and then “Oh, you want to know how it all ends? Well we’ve got some trick final boss fights you have to figure out first.” I very nearly walked away from it, and I’m talking about the last 5% of the game. I went from “This is a 5 star game!” to “Would hesitate to recommend” based on the gameplay changes at the very end.

That irritation may fade with time. I loved the setting, loved the characters and the voice acting and thought the story was pretty good. There were some changes I’d make besides the ending. In particular on console at least, the game uses a ‘weapon wheel’ UI, and many of my deaths came when I was fumbling with the wheel and an enemy closed a gap and killed me. Your character basically only takes 1 hit to kill. In a game like this where combat isn’t really the main point, I think having things slow down while you use the weapon wheel would serve the audience better.

Also after the Great Controller Debate of ’21 I wanted to play a FPS on the Xbox to see if I could understand the complaints about that controller. Since I’ve been wanting to finish Far Cry New Dawn anyway, I went with that. Weirdly I’m still able to pull off long-range head shots using a cobbled together pistol even with the Xbox controller. Huh. 🙂 I can’t say I’d blanket recommend Far Cry New Dawn; the tone is borderline offensive (depending on what character you are hanging with) and the pacing is strange. It can be hard to get from Point A to Point B just because so many random/semi-random events are constantly spawning. Those encounters are FUN mind you, but after a while they get in the way of you progressing through the story. I once again hope that Far Cry 6 is a bit more serious in tone.

Influenced by Tipa and Bhagpuss, I installed DC Universe Online and woke up a long dormant character. I keep trying to play this game on the consoles and it just looks so incredibly bad I can’t stick with it. On PC though, while it certainly looks dated, it is much better. I didn’t play for too long but did have fun and I’ve left it installed to revisit as time permits.

As for the two MMOs I’m currently subscribed to (FFXIV and ESO on Playstation) I of course didn’t log into either all weekend. Typical me.

Next weekend is a holiday for many of us in the US. I get 3.5 days off. Office closes at 1 PM on Friday, then Monday off. I’m REALLY looking forward to the extra time off, but for now it’s time to slog through one more stupidly hot work week. We can do this!

Microsoft Rewards Points

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Today I want to talk about the meta-game I’ve been playing the longest: Microsoft Rewards Points (MRP). MRP are Microsoft’s way to try to incentivize you to use their products like Bing and Game Pass. You can learn about the program here.

I have three primary ways to earn MRP. The first is by visiting https://rewards.microsoft.com/ every morning while I have coffee. There I do the “Daily Set” which is some mix of clicking links and taking quizzes. A lot of these are ‘no-fail’ situations where you get points just by trying, but if you want to be sure you get max points you can check the MicrosoftRewards reddit. I find doing these Daily Sets kind of amusing just from the point of view of learning trivia-level facts and stuff.

The second way I earn MRP is via the Microsoft Rewards app on the Xbox. This is somewhat similar to the above system, and often asks you to “Check out this featured game” or something equally trivial. (Selecting these tasks takes you to the store, but you don’t have to buy the featured game in order to earn points. Just visiting the store page is enough.) Other times you’ll be tasked to do something like earn an Achievement in a specific game or selection of games. In fact there is a daily task for earning an Achievement that grants you 50 points. Overall this is another fairly mindless way to earn points.

The third and most interesting way I earn MRP is via Game Pass Quests. This is where things get fun. There are daily, weekly and monthly quests. The daily quests are boring and always that same: 1) log into the Game Pass app, and 2) play a Game Pass game. The weekly and monthly quests are more interesting. They task you with doing specific things in specific Game Pass games (at least some of them do). So “Drive 1 KM in Game X” or “Kill 10 enemies in Game Y” or “Play an online match in Game Z.” These are usually fairly quick to complete (though there are exceptions). What I enjoy about them is they prompt me to play games I usually wouldn’t play, and sometimes I find games I really enjoy. For instance this week one of the quests involved A Plague Tale: Innocence. I accomplished the quest objectives pretty quickly but by then I was hooked on the game. Now I’m going to finish it!

The point of all of this is to amass MRP so you can exchange them for various goodies. My preferred goodie is store credit. A $100 Xbox gift card can be redeemed for 91,000 MRP, which sounds like a huge number given some of the tasks reward 5 or 10 points, but they add up more quickly than you might expect (accumulation is helped by various “double points” events and other promotions). I’ve earned over 400,000 MRP since starting with the program. I don’t really track things but at least once a year I cash in for a $100 gift card.

It wouldn’t be worth it if earning the points was bothersome, but for me it has become a game in and of itself. I look forward to Tuesdays, which is when the weekly quests come out. What has made this even better/easier is Xcloud since a lot of the games can be played via streaming, meaning you don’t have to install them to complete the quest. The daily sets on the web are either inoffensive and quick, or they’re quizzes which are kind of fun for me to do because I enjoy trivia.

Anyone with a Microsoft account can sign up and start earning points, but it is when you’re a Game Pass member that the system gets really interesting. If you have Game Pass you might want to check it out!

Concerning Controllers

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Yesterday I got into a spirited conversation on Twitter about game controllers. Apparently people have opinions.

This honestly came as a surprise to me. I use game controllers all the time. I use Xbox controllers and Playstation controllers and Stadia controllers and Switch controllers and… I don’t really think about them very much. If you don’t use game controllers, a lot of the spirit of this post (that people have very different reactions to peripherals) could also apply to keyboards. There are people who are PASSIONATE about keyboards and spending $300 on a keyboard makes complete sense. Then there are people who’re completely fine with using the $10 keyboard that shipped with their PC. (I’m somewhere in the middle on that debate.)

But today is about controllers. The folks I was talking to HATE the Xbox controller. Like, it seemed as though their feelings were strong on this topic. It took a while to get them past generic gamer responses like “it sucks” to start to understand what they hated. One thing that came up was that the d-pad on the Xbox controller is too loud. That surprised me so much that I went and grabbed an Xbox controller and pushed the d-pad around. “Huh, what do you know, it does make a clicking sound.” I muttered. I had never noticed it. Of course now I’ll never not notice it so my friend owes me a beer or something.

The other issue that both friends had was that the sticks on the Xbox controller are too “loose.” I tried to understand this. I grabbed a Dual Sense and an Xbox Series X|S controller and wobbled the sticks on both and they felt the same to me. If anything, the Dual Sense felt looser but it was a really subtle difference. Then I was told that you only notice it while in-game and that FPS are hard to play on the Xbox. As someone who plays FPS on the Xbox this left me really confused.

Talking more, one friend who loved the Xbox 360 controller hated the Xbox One controller, and that same friend hated the PS3 controller but loves the PS4 controller. If only he could’ve seen my blank stare because I was like “Wait, they feel different?” Now remember, I play console games every damned day, and I switch between consoles frequently, sometimes several times a night. I just don’t notice these changes.

I don’t have any great revelation to share, I just thought it was really interesting. Maybe I’m just not a good enough gamer to care?

But as long as I’m on the topic, here is MY comparison of the PS5 Dual Sense controller and the Xbox Series X controller. These are the aspects that do matter to me:

Batteries:
The Xbox has removable batteries. I spent $20 to buy a charger and 8 batteries, which gave me enough batteries for both the controller and various TV remotes. I only need one controller and I always have a fresh pair of batteries sitting in the charger.

The PS5 controllers are rechargeable. My past experience with the PS4 is that over time they hold a charge for shorter and shorter periods. Because of this I felt I needed to purchase a second controller and a charging station for the PS5, total cost around $95. I make a point to rotate the controllers to try to ‘wear’ the batteries evenly. It’s a pain in the ass, but over the course of the PS4 generation I think I bought 4 controllers as batteries kept essentially failing (going from full charge to dead in 30-40 minutes).

Physical Comfort:
First, this category is SUPER personal. What is comfortable for me might not be comfortable for you.

The PS5 Dual Sense feels ‘harder’ to me. Like I feel like I’m holding a very rigid piece of plastic, and towards the end of a long gaming session the outer edge of the grips start to cause pain in my hands in the area between the base of the pinky and my wrist.

I find the Xbox controller very comfortable and I can hold it for more time than I ever have available to play games, and not have any pain.

Features:
The Dual Sense controller is kind of a marvel. The haptics can be almost startling. There are times when it feels like there’s a little creature inside the controller scratching to get out. I love the added immersion of (as an example) different guns having different trigger tensions. Another example is being able to feel the terrain your traversing via the slight vibration in the controller changing.

Now I don’t think haptics are for everyone. In a lot of cases they make games harder. Sometimes my trigger finger actually gets tired from having to work to pull the trigger due to increased tension. Fortunately you can turn all of this off, but I LOVE the added immersion.

The Dual Sense also has a speaker and a microphone. Some games make great use of the speaker to enhance your experience. I’m not sure I’ve seen the speaker used. I guess in a pinch you could use it for voice chat but I’m guessing the quality wouldn’t be great. Honestly haven’t tested it though.

The Xbox controller has none of these bells and whistles. With the Series X we finally got a share button. The Xbox controller (including last gen) has some “advanced” rumble features but honestly I’m not sure I’ve ever really noticed them, or I’ve been using the controller for so long that it’s become so normal that I just accept them. Remember the Xbox Series X supports Xbox One controllers so effectively this is a last gen controller, with the one addition of the Share button (which Playstation has, and had last gen).

And…that’s really where my comparison of the two controllers ends. As far as functionality I really don’t notice much difference between them. The Dual Sense haptics is huge, but if I’m playing a PS4 game that doesn’t support the new haptics…it’s just a controller. Like every other controller.

Am I broken? Does everyone else have strong feels of this vs that controller?

Game Trailers and Other Terminology

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After almost every big gaming press event there’s some discussion of the trailers that are shown. Among other topics, we question how much we actually learned about the game from the trailer. Scopique and I touched on this topic very briefly in the comments to yesterday’s post but I thought it might be fun to unpack things a bit.

In ye olden tymes, game trailers were, well, short videos that showed a game being played. Everyone understood what a game trailer was. Over time though, as graphics improved and budgets swelled, a lot of games started having elaborate CGI intros or cut-scenes. From there it was a short skip to showing CGI as the trailer. I get why devs did that; the CGI could be finished way before gameplay was complete and ready to show.

I get why they did it, but I (and other gamers) weren’t so thrilled. We watched trailers to see how a game played, and these CGI trailers told us nothing. I did (and do) find them enjoyable just as little micro-stories but they do absolutely nothing to inform me as to whether or not this is a game I’d like to play.

Rather than walk back from showing CGI trailers, the marketing teams just made up a new name. “Today we have the world reveal trailer for Game X!” the announcement will say. World reveal can mean anything. Sometimes they say “Tonight is the cinematic trailer for Game X!” This tells us that a CGI movie is coming up but no gameplay. At least with this term we know what to expect. But what we gamers are really listening for is “We have the GAMEPLAY trailer for Game X!” Ah, OK that’s the good stuff. That’s what I need to actually inform me about a game.

Thinking about this led me to chuckle to myself about another loaded word: Exclusive. Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo used to throw ‘exclusive’ around willy-nilly. Sometimes it meant actually exclusive to the platform making the announcement, but usually not. Eventually to protect themselves (consumers started calling them out), the marketing teams forked this one too.

So now when S/M/N says a game is Exclusive to P/X/S (Playstation/Xbox/Switch) it generally actually means it will only be out on that platform. True exclusives are pretty rare these days and mostly come from 1st part studios from S/M/N.

The first forked exclusive term is Timed Exclusive. This means a game is coming out on one console first, then it’ll follow on others and on PC after 6 months or a year (or some other period of time). I don’t think marketers love this term. I feel like if you were talking to them IRL they’d kind of say “Timed” under their breath and then shout the “Exclusive!” part.

A lot of games will come out both on PC and a console. These curiously get tagged as “Console Exclusives.” Microsoft has a lot of these because Microsoft is more interested in selling games than hardware, but Console Exclusives are fairly common on all three platforms. I realize this terms sounds like the opposite of what it means. Console Exclusives come out on PC? It sounds better when you stick the console name in front: Xbox Console Exclusive. The intent is to say “This game is exclusive to the Xbox Console and won’t be out on other consoles and we’re just going to ignore that the PC exists, OK?”

You could combine those too. Maybe you have a Timed Console Exclusive. This means the game comes out on one console and PC on Day 1, then on other consoles at some later date. But again, that “Timed” word is in there and we do not want!

Thus was born “Console Launch Exclusive” which really means pretty much the same thing as Timed Console Exclusive. It means a game will launch on one console before it launches on other consoles. And again, we’ll pretend PC gaming isn’t a thing.

Those are the terms I can think of, but if you have others drop them in the comments.

It all just seems so silly. Did I really have to spend 5 paragraphs defining ‘exclusive’? Also, maybe I’m projecting but do gamers really want exclusive games? I guess maybe some do. I see stories about fans getting all pissed off when Sony games launch on PC, for example. I don’t get it. I want every game to take full advantage of a platform’s abilities but beyond that, put your game out everywhere so everyone can enjoy it.

This is Where My Gamescom Opening Night Recap Should Be

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First I have to let you in on a little secret. I write most of my blog posts the night before I post them. I’m not a morning person at all so the idea of getting up and writing a blog post is just…horrid. So really I’m writing this Wednesday night. This is how the sausage is made!

Second, work was a hot mess of headaches on Wednesday. I was super busy troubleshooting and meeting all day. When I was done I was irritable and tired.

OK with that out of the way… Geoff Keighley’s Gamescom Opening Night was yesterday and I watched it, but you might have to as well if you want to know all that went down. It aired at 2 PM local time so I couldn’t watch it live. But y’know, how “live” was it anyway? Watching it after it streamed was good because I could fast forward through bits I didn’t care about (new Super Monkey Ball game, yet another Lego game).

I was taking notes at the start, then I opened a beer and put down my pencil. Honestly I didn’t miss too much because I felt like the show was really front-loaded in terms of announcements. They claim there were 40 games there, plus half a dozen or so during the pre-show. I didn’t count. I did, however, almost nod off a time or two.

I can’t honestly say if the show was bad or if I was just so angry at my work day that any sense of objectivity went out the window.

Here’re the few things that did catch my eye.

The show opened with a trailer for the new Saints Row game, called, as best I can figure, Saints Row. I’ve never really connected with Saints Row games because they all seem super dude-bro in tone, but this time out it seems like the devs have realized that the gaming audience is diverse and we don’t all like to play as human fist-bumps. (The image at the top of this post is your crew this time out.) The trailer was CGI, but at the very end of this segment is a few seconds of gameplay, which looks just as over-the-top as we expect from a Saint’s Row, but the vibe seems very different to me. In a good way.

The other new game that caught my attention was a new Marvel game, Midnight Suns. No gameplay (again) but it’s being done by Firaxis and they’re calling it a tactics RPG. Given the studio, I’m hoping for and expecting Xcom: Marvel Superhero edition. I remember seeing Wolverine, Dr. Strange and Ghost Rider in the trailer. We’re supposed to see actual gameplay on Sept. 1st. Here’s the CGI trailer though it doesn’t even HINT at what the gameplay will be like.

We got some release dates. Halo Infinite is coming December 8th, and Horizon Forbidden West is coming Feb. 18, 2022. Also Horizon Forbidden Dawn got a 60 FPS patch on PS5 so might be time for a replay.

The “creator of Lara Croft” has a game coming out called Dream Cycle that goes into Early Access on Steam on September 7th.

Jett: The Far Shore intrigues me even if I can’t quite figure out what is going on. At least we see some game play, and it’s coming October 7th so not long to wait.

And…that’s about all I have. Oh, they mentioned the next big update for Valheim is called Hearth & Home and then backed it up with an animated trailer that told us nothing. It’s coming September 16th though so we can try it then.

The last spot, the final big reveal slot, was devoted to the Director’s Edition of Death Stranding which seemed like a weird choice because while it has added some stuff and now will look better on PS5, it still is just a refinement of an existing game. Keighley loves Kojima though, so in a way this made the show feel like a Keighley production. Back to Death Stranding Director’s Cut: I’m not completely convinced the additions will make it better. Seems like more combat now, and gadgets like thrusters so you can just jump down a cliff. Hmph.

Again, maybe it’s because I’m tired and in a lousy mood, but I wasn’t too impressed with the show, quite honestly. But I’m not trustworthy! Don’t listen to me. Watch the whole thing for yourself!

Xbox at Gamescom 2021

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Gamescom 2021 starts today but Microsoft got a jump on the show by having their event yesterday. I watched it and thought it was pretty good, though not at that “you gotta watch this!” level of hype-ometer-busting excitement.

If you missed the show and don’t need some sorry old man recapping it for you, here is the full presentation:

Too busy to devote an hour+ to watching? Great, that’s my cue!

OK Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. If you tuned in for game announcements, you had to be disappointed. The only non-indie (?) title they showed that I’d not heard of was Stray Blade, a 3rd person action-rpg featuring melee combat in a fantasy world. It’s coming in 2022. Here’s the presentation, snipped from the above video.

Stray Blade looks in my wheelhouse with lots of exploration and the kind of combat I enjoy but it’s early days. I’ll keep an eye on it though. Oh, the image at the top of this post is from Stray Blade, courtesy of Microsoft.

The other new game announced was Into The Pit, an indie rogue-like. I’m kind of over rogue-likes right now so I almost forgot about it, but here’s the trailer for that one.

Everything else that was showed was stuff we knew was coming (though some titles, like The Gunk, we haven’t heard much about). The show started with Dying Light 2 (out this December) and ended with Forza Horizon 5 (out in November). Both are looking great so far. Halo Infinite was nowhere to be seen, which seemed odd.

Some news items that caught my interest:

Xcloud, Microsoft’s game streaming service, is coming to Xbox consoles this holiday for Game Pass Ultimate members. This seems like a no-brainer and I wonder why it has taken so long, but now Xbox One owners will be able to play Xbox Series X|S games on their console (at 1080P) via Xcloud. Also, given the limited drive space on the Series X|S I can certainly envision uninstalling some games and just playing them via Xcloud inorder to save space, or ‘sampling’ GamePass titles via Xcloud before deciding to download them. What I’m really curious about is whether I can hook up a mouse and keyboard to my Series X and play PC Xcloud titles on the console.

And speaking of PC games on console, Crusader King 3 is coming to console. What?! They are calling it an “adaptation” rather than a port, so it’ll be interesting to see how much they have to simplify things to make the game playable with a controller. I mean I assume that’s the challenge. I’ve never gotten very far in CK3 on PC because it makes my brain hurt.

Really, that’s all the big news. A bunch of Humble Games are coming to Game Pass, and MS Flight Simulator, Wastelands 3, Sea of Thieves and State of Decay 2 all have expansions coming soon. (I don’t mean to sound dismissive about these expansions. Learning about them had me hankering to play both Wasteland 3 and State of Decay 2.) There was a segment on Age of Empires IV (out this fall for PC) and Psychonauts 2 (out today!).

As for me personally, I’m excited for Forza Horizon 5 and Dying Light 2, but I was excited for them anyway. And I haven’t played an Age of Empires game in forever so I’ll give Age IV a go, I’m sure.

There’s another event today, “Opening Night at Gamescom” or something like that. Its being hosted by Geoff Keighley of The Game Awards fame, so it’s not sponsored by any one company. Hopefully we’ll see some new games revealed at that event.

FOMO and Pressuring Ourselves to Like Something

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Over the past few days I’ve seen two people take to Twitter to talk about how they were struggling to find the fun in games that are widely popular. I won’t out the people, but the games were Hades and Final Fantasy XIV. It’s really hard to tease nuance from a Tweet and it is super easy to mentally add a tone that isn’t there, but to me both people seemed to feel a little sheepish (or maybe frustrated?) about their reactions to these games.

Maybe that’s just me projecting because, OMG do I ever feel sheepish when I share feelings like this. And for me it happens a lot. I just don’t get what others see in some games (or even genres) and it makes me feel like an outsider. Everyone is happily chatting about Game X and I want to be a part of that conversation but then I play Game X and it’s just not fun for me. If I push through, then I just get annoyed with the game and myself.

I give great advice to others who feel this way (I don’t listen to it myself): “Games are for your enjoyment. Play what makes you happy. No one cares what you like or don’t like.” That last one always sounds way more harsh than I mean it to be. But it is mostly true, right? Unless you are an “influencer” who has enough followers to sway the chances of a game’s success or failure, your liking or not liking a game doesn’t really impact others in any significant way.

None of that advice really helps with that feeling of missing out and being outside of a conversation, though. I have no good advice to help with the FOMO, at least not in terms of wide-ranging social media “conversations.” If you have some quiet time with a small group of individuals you can ask them what they like about the game. Not in a “convince me” way but in a “share what you enjoy” way. There are times when you can draw great happiness just from other peoples’ enjoyment of a thing, even if that thing isn’t for you. For example @partpurple LOVES Animal Crossing in all its forms. I don’t care for it in terms of playing it, but it makes me so happy listening to her talk about all the fun she gets from the game. Her excitement and enthusiasm are infectious. So I second-hand love Animal Crossing even if I feel pretty “meh” about it first-hand.

Can we teach ourselves to like something? Certainly there will be times in our life when we encounter something that is an ‘acquired taste’ which — once you have acquired that taste — we may come to love, but I’m not sure it happens very often in video games. For sure I have ‘bounced off’ a game once or twice then come back later and loved it, that seems more about the particular headspace I’m in at a particular time, or even about a game that’s been improved via patches and upgrades. I don’t think that’s the same as making a deliberate attempt to ‘find the fun’ and convince yourself you love a game right here, right now. If someone has a trick to doing this, please share. To me, the video game heart wants what the video game heart wants.

So no huge revelations from me today. Just have fun when you’re playing games. If you’re not having fun, stop playing that game. If all your friends are talking about it, try to listen to their stories as stories, not as an enticement to go do what they are doing. Find your joy where it lives.