January 2025

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!

December 2024

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!

November 2024

November is gone already!? I have to say having US Thanksgiving fall so late in the month has really thrown me off. For the past couple of years we’ve had nearly a week between Thanksgiving and the end of the month, but that won’t happen again for a while. Anyway point is the end of the month caught me completely unprepared, AND I haven’t been taking any notes to speak of. Good thing I don’t have much to report.

Playing

My Time At Portia — I mentioned last month that I had started playing this on PS5 and this month I really leaned into it. Last time I checked I had 120 hours played on PS5. Just this weekend I got the Trophy for finishing the “main story” but the game just keeps rolling on with more story-quests. That said, I think I may be done for a few reasons. First is that this game is terribly optimized for console. On Playstation (and from what I’ve read, on Xbox) it’s just terribly laggy, particularly in combat. I mean the frame rate drops into probably single digits when you start fighting in a dungeon. For most of the game fighting is pretty limited so it wasn’t a big deal, but now there is some dungeon I’m supposed to work through which is all combat and that’s not something I’m looking forward to. Second is that My Time At Sandrock exists and everyone says it’s a better game so I just feel like if I want more “My Time At..” action I should move on to that.

Also I’m sort of out of new things. My workshop (that’s it at the top of the post) has fully upgraded buildings, a factory, a farm with automated irrigation and it’s been a long while since I got new plans to build. So now it all kind of feels repetitive. I could buy more land and there are still house upgrades I could get, but the house decorating is pretty bad. (For instance you can place a table but you can’t put anything on the table.) I never got into the romance aspects because ‘dates’ are not much fun and involve a lot of running around. Plus I had stuff to build!

And y’know, I have SO many other games waiting in the wings, including a replay of Dragon Age Inquisition I was toying with, before jumping into Veilguard. But that’s another 100 hour game so not sure I’m up for it.

Also it’s delightfully ironic that I bought a PS5 Pro and then spent the month playing a low-poly, poorly optimized PS4 game on it!

But really Portia is the only thing I spent much time on. I logged into World of Warcraft a few times then my sub ran out and it seemed silly to renew it given how rarely I play right now. I may circle back at some time. I never even got to The War Within after buying it!

Watching

Interview With The Vampire (Netflix) — We watched the movie, then the series. The movie was kind of bad in my opinion, but the series was actually pretty good. I’ve never read the books so can’t compare them but it all just felt darker to me.

Silo (Apple+) — With the new season here we decided to go back and re-watch S1 before jumping into the new stuff and I’m glad we did. There was a lot of texture to the show I’d kind of forgotten, plus it somewhat rewards a 2nd viewing because you catch foreshadowing details once you know where the story is going.

Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai (Crunchyroll) — Weird title, but a rather sweet anime. There is something called “Puberty Syndrome” impacting students where they feel so unseen that they start to vanish, among other strange things. The title comes from an early scene when protagonist Sakuta, the titular Rascal, notices an attractive young woman in a bunny suit cavorting around in a library. This is Mai, the other main character, and she is trying to get a reaction out of anyone. Turns out no one can see her other than Sakuta. Thus a friendship is born. From there the story goes all over the place as Sakuta and Mai become a couple and try to help out others with Puberty Syndrome.

Reading

Kahayatle by Elle Casey — This was in our Kindle library; I guess PartPurple bought it at some point. It’s kind of “Lord of the Flies” on a grand scale. A plague has killed off all the young children and adults, leaving the world nothing but teenagers, and you can imagine how well that goes. For reasons never made clear a bunch of them decide to become cannibals rather than scavenging for food or hunting animals. The protagonist is a young woman who solves all her problems by beating the shit out of people, after which they become her friends for some reason. I started reading this before Halloween and thought it was poorly written but it suited the season. That said it has over 4 stars at Goodreads so maybe I’m just a grump.

Warpaint by Elle Casey — The next book in the same series as Kayayatle. Now the protagonist is living in the Everglades with some Native American kids, bludgeoning her way to leadership. When I realized there were 4 books in this series and it just felt like the same thing happening over and over, I bailed on it. Maybe I’ll come back to it next year in Spooky Season but for now, this is a Did Not Finish title.

Running With The Demon by Terry Brooks — I learned recently that Brooks has written something like 30 books in the Shannara series; I had no idea. Then I saw that this was the first one chronologically and it is urban fantasy that takes place in our world. I was fascinated by that. I assume, but do not know for sure (don’t spoil me!) that the world of Shannara is actually some far future earth. Or maybe there’s a portal or some kind of inter-dimensional thing going on? Who knows? But I mean to find out!

So far this is about a small town in the midwest where a demon, in the guise of a human, is sowing discontent while a young girl who can see magical creatures, both good and evil, tries to stop him. I don’t want to go too far into it because I don’t want to spoil things too much, but there’ve been some fun twists and turns and the writing is generally pretty good. I’m enjoying this one so far but 30 books is a daunting task to read. I can’t imagine having written that many. The first Shannara book was published in 1977 so I guess it HAS taken him almost 50 years. Terry Brooks is 80 now but apparently still writing!

And that’s November, such that it was. Overall it was a mixed month. Early on we were still dealing with COVID fatigue and work was an absolute horror show. But there was feasting the Thanksgiving, the weather finally turned cool and dry, I got a new console and I did a LOT of gaming, even if it was mostly just one game. And I’m starting December with a week off, so that’s nice! Maybe I’ll manage to write a blog post or two this month, you never know!

October 2024

The end of this month has really snuck up on me; it’s been a weird one. October 2024 was the month that COVID finally caught up to me and it really threw things into disarray. Ironically, I’m about 90% certain that I caught it by going to a local drugstore for a vaccine. I’m basically a recluse and it is rare that I go into a building with other people, and in this case there was a clearly sick 20-something young woman sharing the waiting nook and and ‘get the shot’ room with me. She was wheezing and sneezing and clearly ill. Stupid me hadn’t thought to bring a mask and she wasn’t wearing one, of course. A few days later the symptoms started showing. A few days after that, @partpurple started showing symptoms

Anyway the good news is I didn’t wind up in the hospital or anything, but it really disrupted my gaming for the month. I had been doing a lot of PC gaming but COVID sent me retreating to the couch and the consoles. I mostly worked and slept for a good two weeks but in the short times I was awake and free I worked my way through the Diablo IV expansion, and then I was looking for something cozy to play. I tried a number of games but knew what I really wanted and that was My Time at Portia, a game I’d played in the past but had never finished. I owned it on PC but not on console.

That prompted me to finally get my Steam Deck working again. It had been busted since last winter. I finally hooked it up to an external monitor and it was sitting at some kind of boot menu. I got past that and everything started working EXCEPT the screen. As long as it was hooked to an external monitor it worked great, but that kind of misses the point.

They say that one of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome, but that is what I did, looking up various combos of button presses to cause the Steam Deck to reset itself or something. And eventually it worked but there’s no way I could ever repeat the steps because I just lost track of how many times I held 2 or 3 buttons for 10 or 15 or 30 seconds, but suddenly the screen lit up and things have been fine since.

I started playing My Time At Portia on the Steam Deck but soon realized my COVID-tearing eyes weren’t up to the task. Then I tried using Steam Link to play on the TV and that worked, sort of. I think my issue is that my PC has a 1440P ultra widescreen monitor and the TV is a 4K. I didn’t spend a lot of time on it but the result was the game showed up on the TV with letterboxing bars all around. It worked but didn’t look great. Finally I broke down and just bought My Time At Portia on the PS5 and started enjoying that.

Then work blew up and the last two weeks has seen plenty of 12 (or more) hours days, just putting the final touches on an overall pretty crappy month. Also it is Halloween and 80F so.. man, October has sucked!

Playing

The only game I spent any significant amount of time with was :

The Plucky Squire — I mentioned this one last month, but I finished it early this month (before COVID). I really enjoyed it until the very end. For most of the time I spent playing it was this charming and chill experience. Exploring, puzzle solving and some mini-games that weren’t that hard. But then at the very end of the game the mini-games all returned in a much harder variation. One in particular, a rhythm game (which I suck at) really frustrated me. I got through it all and enjoyed the ending credits but it really dampened any enthusiasm to replay it or trophy hunt. In the end it took me 18 hours to get through, of which like 17 were just amazingly fun and charming, and then an hour of frustration at the very end!

Watching

We’ve been watching a bunch of supernatural stuff that originated on AMC but are now on Netflix. We finished A Discovery of Witches, which was fine. Then The Mayfair Witches which was a little more creepy/spooky and I liked that one better. Now we’re onto Interview with the Vampire which so far I’m liking more than the old Brad Pitt/Tom Cruise movie, which @partpurple insisted I watch before we started the series.

I also finished Station Eleven which I’d started last month, and which I enjoyed. It felt like a different kind of post apocalypse story, I guess.

And that’s pretty much all I remember. I watched a LOT of YouTube and specifically Critical Role sessions because they are so long. I tended to just sleep/doze through them. For real I was sleeping like 20 hours a day on weekends when I could get away with it, and I’m STILL sleeping a lot more than 2 weeks since I first showed symptoms.

Reading

I finally finished The Tower of Swallows, one of the Witcher novels. There are two more in the series that have been translated. Not sure if there are more or if the author is still writing them. But I finally accepted the fact that I just don’t enjoy them very much. Love the games, loved the Netflix show, but the books just don’t hit right with me. There’s a TON of world building but the actual plot moves so very slowly that I just kind of lose track of it.

Now I’m reading Kahayatle by Elle Casey. I found it in our Kindle library and imagine @partpurple bought it at some point. It is terrible. The writer isn’t very good; I think she self-published these. The premise is some disease killed off all the adults and young children so we now have a world-wide Lord of the Flies situation and for some reason most of the population seems to have turned into cannibals, or “Canners” as they call them for some weird reason. I keep telling myself I have to stop reading it because it is written so badly, but at the same time it is so ‘lite’ that the pages fly by. I think it is part of a trilogy and I assume we own all the books so we’ll see how long it takes me to give up on them.

I’m not a writer so I don’t feel qualified to critique Elle Casey but there is just a vibe I get from new writers where they haven’t learned the art of ‘sketching’ with words, so they tend to over explain small details, almost like they’re writing a movie script or something. So every time a character sticks their tongue out or makes a ‘raspberry’ at another character… I know the author is trying to convey that here is a kind of light-hearted moment in the midst of all this awful, but it just feels over-written and over-detailed and comes off feeling fake. I’m not good at describing this feeling because, again, not a writer, but I can sure feel it when I’m reading and it snaps me out of the world.

Melville was able to write super detailed accounts of how things work in the middle of his novels, but in my experience he’s about the only author I know who has mastered this. So when your characters decide to remove a flag from a bicycle, you can just say they removed the flag. You don’t have to show us how they went to find a wrench and how the nut was a little rusted but with some elbow grease it finally came free and it got unscrewed and the flag was removed. We don’t need all those details; our imaginations can fill in all of that.

On the other hand when a character is pinned under a bigger adversary so that one of her arms is trapped under her body, and she gets free by biting her adversary in the crotch, that makes me stop and puzzle out what their position was and how that worked. Like I dunno, you have to pick your details battles, I guess?

Anyway she wrote a bunch of novels and I didn’t so I should just shut up. But I can’t really recommend Kahayatle even though I’m still reading it. 🙂

And that’s October, the month of COVID & couches and too much work and not much else. Here’s to a better November!

 

September 2024

Wow, I’m not really sure how to approach the recap this month. I’ve played a little bit of a lot of games; far too many to list them all here without being even more boring than usual. I seem to be following some kind of a zig-zag pattern where I’m either 100% focused on a game or two, or I’m just dipping my toe in everywhere and not making any progress anywhere. I’ve come to be more comfortable with the latter now that most of the stuff I play is either already in my backlog or is arriving via Game Pass or something. In ye olden times too often I’d spend $50 on a game and play it for 2 hours before drifting away, and that was not (fiscally) cool.

Anyway let’s dive in. Gonna break things up by platform this month.

Playing

Playstation

The Plucky Squire — Ideally you stop reading now and just go play this because I wish I’d known nothing about it going in. I’ll tell you that it is colorful and charming and mixes a bunch of game styles in a storybook & toy-filled world. You’ll do top-down (old school) Zelda style fighting, platforming, puzzle-solving and assorted mini-games. Haven’t finished it yet (I’m in Chapter 7 of 10 chapters) but it’s been really good so far. It IS pretty short though; HowLongToBeat says its about 10 hours long.

Screenshot from The Plucky Squire show the character in the surface of some kind of cannister
At one point in our journey there’s a Defender clone mini-game that takes part on the surface of this cannister, and it’s a damned fine Defender clone, too!

Xbox & Xbox Games on PC

Fallout 76 — Having finished up the last Season at level 200 or so, I stepped back for a while and gave Fallout 76 a bit of a rest, but towards the end of the month I started engaging again. Specifically when the new Caravan system dropped. A lot of weapons have been somewhat nerfed which has upset the community but honestly I’m finding I’m enjoying myself more now that things aren’t all dying from a single shot.

Red Dead Redemption 2 — My Xbox was running low on storage space so I sorted games by size and RDR2 was the biggest at 123 GB. I fired it up and found my last save was from 2019 (!) so I, of course, decided to start fresh. It’s kind of amazing how well this game holds up. It’s an Xbox One game but it really looks as good as most “new gen” games. That all said, I haven’t gotten very far and the game is so old and so popular that I don’t have much to say about it other than that I’m having fun.

Borderlands Game of the Year Edition — After bouncing off the PC version, I started playing on the Xbox where the experience is much better!

PC

Throne & Liberty — This is the new F2P MMO that launches on October 1st. I’m embarrassed to admit I bought early access “accidentally.” I’d played the beta earlier this summer and was thrilled by how pretty the game looked (I was pretty newly returned to PC gaming at the time) and “pre-ordered” the game in a fit of enthusiasm. At the time I didn’t even notice the game was going to be F2P and I was just buying an early access package! Once I realized my mistake I SHOULD have canceled but didn’t because… I dunno why honestly.

I have buyer’s remorse. The game really is pretty but it is also really intended for hardcore group/guild play, so I don’t expect I’ll play it for long; waiting for the normal launch and pumping 10 or 15 hours for free would have been the right move. Ah well, live and maybe learn. But I’m more interested in returning to New World when the Avernum re-launch (?) happens. But yeah, Throne & Liberty is VERY pretty and…um… is an MMO. I don’t really have much more to say about it!

Borderlands Game of the Year Edition — A game I booted up on a whim wound up ‘sticking’ for the first time. It took some fiddling to get it to run OK. It never really ran well, and I don’t think that had to do with the power of my machine or anything. I’m no game developer but I wonder if the engine just wasn’t build to handle the horsepower of today’s CPUs and GPUs. No matter what setting I tweaked, turning always felt a little rough even though the actual frame rate would hold steady; eventually it got to be too much so I dropped it. (But see above in the Xbox section.)

World of Warcraft — I made slow but steady progress for most of the month, but just this past weekend I finished the Dragonflight main campaign which unlocked a lot of new systems and made everything much more enjoyable for me. My new character is at level 55 now; 15 more levels until I can jump over to The War Within and that shouldn’t really take too long to achieve. Feeling much better about WoW since finishing that DF campaign.

World of Warcraft cut scene screenshot showing dragons opening a portal

Guild Wars 2 — Having trouble here. I’m still in Living World Season 1. My character is at max level so going through Living World isn’t really progressing me much so I’m just playing for the story. I should just move on but I’m stubborn.

Watching

Terminator Zero (Netflix) — This is an anime set in the Terminator universe that we all (OK maybe not ALL) know and love. I’d heard good things about it but the first couple of episodes were a bit of a disappointment as they felt so similar to the first couple of movies. Terminator is sent back to stop someone in the past. Resistant member is sent back to stop the Terminator. The only significant difference was that this one was set in Japan. But I stuck with it and starting about the 3rd episode it became its own thing and got really good. It has terminator fighting action, questions about time travel and paradoxes and such, and even examines how different people react to robots, with some more than willing to anthropomorphize them and others seeing them as just things. It’s short, like every other new show on streaming services, and has an actual conclusion while leaving plenty of threads to follow for a second season, which I hope we get. Recommended, but do be prepared to give it 3 or 4 episodes to start to gel.

A Discovery of Witches (Netflix) — I think I mentioned this one last month, but we finished it up (there are 3 seasons) and it came to a pretty good conclusion. This is still not really my wheelhouse but urban fantasy fan @partpurple liked it a lot. One of the odd things is that there are 3 “Creature” species in the show: vampires, witches and demons. But we NEVER find out what makes a demon a demon. We never see any of them do anything supernatural-ish. I’m sure the books do a better job and I’m kind of trying to get PartPurple to read them so she can fill me in. Also if there is a downside to being a vampire in this world, they never showed it. LOL but here I am complaining after saying we watched it all and it was OK. But it was OK!

Rings of Power (Amazon) — We went back and re-watched Season 1 before moving on to Season 2. I actually liked Season 1 quite a bit more in a second viewing but we’ve JUST started Season 2 so don’t have much to say about it yet.

Station Eleven (Max) — This is a post-apocalypse show that posits a plague with a 99% fatality rate and what happens in the aftermath. I’d never heard of it and it maybe hit a little too close to home when it came out in 2021! So far it’s been really good though. There is (again, so far) nothing fantastical happening here. No zombies or anything. Just the collapse of civilization with a heavy “theater kids” angle. Yes, it’s a little weird. But good so far (I’m about half-way through.)

Reading

Still plodding through The Tower of Swallows, which is I think the 4th Witcher book? This is going to be the end for me though; as much as I love The Witcher games and The Witcher Netflix shows, the books are just not grabbing me. Y’know what they feel like? Imagine The Lord of the Rings if all the appendix info was in the body of the books. There’s just so much world-building going on, but not much plot. I can see why CD Projekt Red picked the world to set a game in as there is a TON of lore but it’s all shared in giant lumps of text while our characters sit around a fire toasting marshmallows for chapters at a time. I’m going to finish this one and there is I believe one more in the series but I don’t think I can take another novel full of fictional history.

So that’s September. Plan for October is New World Avernum, more World of Warcraft and… who knows what else? I’ll probably continue to flit about and not make much progress anywhere. But as long as I’m having fun, right? Hope you all have a great month!

August 2024

It seems a little odd to do a monthly recap this month. Traditionally I’ve been doing those mostly as a reminder to future me as to what I was playing when. This month it’s all there in the posts I’ve already written. Also, ironically enough, I didn’t do as much gaming as I generally do because I spent so much time writing posts! I’m a pretty quick ‘rough draft’ writer but I make a ton of typos and errors and tend to spend a lot of time re-reading & re-writing, plus cropping and resizing screenshots, doing the SEO work and all that. And I STILL always find several mistakes after posting!!

So having blogged every day this month, will I continue? No, not daily. It’s just a bit too much for me. But my “whenever I feel like it” approach isn’t working either. I have gotten faster over the course of the month and the amount of mental effort it takes to write a post is much lower now than it was on August 1st, just demonstrating once again that the brain is a muscle. Writing a lot makes writing faster and easier…what a revelation! 🙂 I think I want to commit to a minimum of two posts a week and kind of hope for at least 3. But two seems like an easily achievable goal that won’t stress me out.

The reason I did Naaagust rather than Blaugust is because I generally HATE commitments. The running joke that I wasn’t in fact doing Blaugust but just happened to be posting every day gave me a mental escape hatch where I could stop any time I wanted to without feeling like I’d failed. Yes my brain is easily tricked, even when it is me doing the tricking.

Anyway, on to the traditional recap.

Playing

Fallout 76 — I’ve once again ‘broken’ a game for myself and this time it is Fallout 76. I so hyper-focused on advancing the Seasons that it became one more chore to do every day, like feeding the dog. I did it, but I did it as quickly as possible then shut the game down. I dabbled a bit with playing on PC which was fun for a few nights but then I started to think about duplicating the hundreds (over 500 in fact) of hours I’d devoted to the Xbox version and decided that life is too short to do all that over again. So Fallout 76 is kind of in a holding pattern until then next update drops (and the next season starts) in a few days. Sadly the big new feature for this update is delayed a bit, but we’ll get the new Legendary Crafting system which should be interesting. Just a matter of if it is “good interesting” or “bad interesting.” 🙂 I SHOULD hit level 200 in the current season before it ends, but I will NOT be stressing over the seasons stuff the next time around. I want the game to be fun again!

Oh I almost forgot, just this past Thursday I encountered a Legendary Treasure Hunter; a mob I’ve never seen before. I guess it must be from some event. It was on my private server so wasn’t something triggered by another player. I’ll have to do some research. [Fallout 76 is just not a game that screenshots well, sorry!]

In game snapshot of a Legendary Treasure Hunter in Fallout 76. I'd never encountered one of these before!
These mole-miner Legendary Treasure Hunter was a new find for me this past week.

Diablo IV — This is a weird one. Every time I play my seasonal character I enjoy myself, and on the new PC I’m pretty dumbfounded by the spectacle of it all, particularly when I’m wearing headphones and it is at night and dark and no one else is around. It’s great! But… I just don’t boot it up very often and I am not sure why. Maybe it is as simple as having too many different gaming irons in the playtime fire and preferring to play games that friends are playing. I don’t play WITH friends but just talking on the socials about playing the same game as them is enjoyable.

Guild Wars 2 — This journey has been pretty well-documented this month, and I don’t plan to stop any time soon. This is probably the most fun I’ve ever had playing Guild Wars 2. I don’t think it is that the game has changed so much as that I have changed. I don’t question it too much, I just enjoy the ride.

Guild Wars 2 character showing off her green cloak with a dragon on it
Been taking my first steps into the Guild Wars 2 fashion scene, which of course is the true endgame! 🙂

World of Warcraft — I STILL can’t believe I’m back in WoW, but so far, at least, I’m having fun, but I’m not like ‘over the moon’ having fun. It helps that I skipped so many expansions so that in a lot of ways it feels like a new game. I think I need to stop doing every quest I see and get the story moving. My new character is something like level 21 now. We’ll see if it still gets listed in the September recap!

I guess that’s it then. You know me, always playing the newest games! LOL

Watching

Time Bandits (Apple TV) — We thought this was really cute. I guess folks were mad because it wasn’t a sequel to the original movie or something? I wasn’t really paying attention when it came out. But THIS Time Bandits is about a little kid, Kevin, who is a complete history nerd that falls in with a group of misfits who call themselves bandits but rarely manage to steal anything. Wherever in time they go, Kevin tends to be the smartest one in the room but he manages NOT to be obnoxious. We thought it was often funny and often sweet.

A Discovery of Witches (Netflix) — This is an urban fantasy series in the ‘sexy vampires’ genre. PartPurple loves this stuff and I usually only tolerate it, but for some reason this one is grabbing me. Maybe I’m just getting sappy in my old age. I’m not sure I would actually recommend it, though. This time out we have witches, vampires and demons living among us and they all hate each other. But our beautiful young witch main character falls in love with a 1500 year old vampire, upsetting all the other various creatures. We’re not too far into it but it’s OK so far. This one originally aired on AMC in the US.

Rent-A-Girlfriend (Crunchyroll) — I reviewed this one. Spoiler: I really enjoyed it!

Recovery of an MMO Junkie (Crunchyroll) — I reviewed this one too! Spoiler again: I really enjoyed it, too. Enough so that I’ve watched it twice now.

I KNOW we watched some other stuff but whatever it was left such a light impression on my brain that I’ve forgotten what it was!

Reading

Still nothing, really. Every so often I pick up The Tower of Swallows, book 4 in The Witcher series but you know, I’ve resisted admitting this to myself but I’m just not actually liking these books that much. I enjoy The Witcher games and The Witcher Netflix series but something about the pacing or the manner of storytelling in the novels isn’t super satisfying to me. There’s just one more after this so I’ll probably push through, but these are books that I WANT to like more than I ACTUALLY like. So make of that what you will.

And that’s Naaagust in the can! One more month of hellish summer and then maybe things will start to cool a bit. We did have a freakishly cool week this month which was just enough to get us all hopefully, then the brutal heat rolled back in. That’s just life in eastern North Carolina, I guess.

Now let’s see if I can post at least twice a week during the next month!

More MMO RP (?) Nostalgia

I found another bit of scribbling from the olden days of MMOing. This one is based on WoW and looks like it was written in 2012.

I have NO idea where I was going with this. Once again, unedited and unfiltered and un-good, here’s a story about Traellan who I guess was a paladin?


Traellan never knew what hit him. One moment he was strolling along through the canal district, the next something darted from an alleyway and knocked him flat on his back. Instinct took over and he rolled to his feet, reaching for the power of the Light with his mind, and for a dagger with his hand. Turning to his assailant, he was startled to find it was a young boy, his eyes wide with terror. Seeing the armor, the boy flew to Traellan, grabbed his weaponless hand and started tugging at it, making a sound like “Muh muh muh…”

“Calm down, lad! What’s the problem?” Traellan didn’t let go of his power. Clearly this boy was frightened out of his wits. “Take a deep breath lad and tell me what’s wrong.”

The boy bobbed his head, and finally got his lungs full of air, then blurted “A MONSTER!”

“Monster? Where?” Trae hadn’t heard any alarm from the guards.

“It came from the canals….it was the canal monster I think!”

The canal monster. Traellan had heard tales of this beast. A huge crocolisk that inhabited the canals. Some said it was an escaped pet that had grown fat on the detritus thrown into the canals by the residents of Stormwind. Others tell a more sinister tale: that it was intentionally bred by the Forsaken to be large and vicious, and loosed in the canals to feed on innocent flesh. Harmless pet or feral beast? Trae couldn’t take any chances.

“Show me!” he barked at the boy, who nodded. He seemed to take some comfort in the hammer that Trae now held at the ready. On the way back to the place where he’d spotted the monster, he recovered a fishing pole, a pouch of various baubles and flies, and an empty bucket.

“Dropped these.” he said, blushing. “Was fishin when I saw it. Here’s the spot.”

The dock was quiet now, but indeed there was a wet trail leading from the canals and up the road in a direction opposite the one the boy had taken.

“Well it didn’t chase you, lad. That’s a good sign I guess. You better head home until we know what’s lurking about.” Trae said, patting the boy on his head and giving him a gentle push to get him moving.

Once he was satisfied the boy wasn’t going to follow him, Traellan started following the wet trail. The streets were deserted, either due to good fortune or panic, but he hadn’t heard much in the way of shouting, so he hoped it was the former. He frowned when he saw the trail lead into the Pig & Whistle, thinking of how much torment the creature might cause in a closed in area. No time for stealth! Traellan broke into a lumbering run, his hammer held two-fisted in front of him. He burst into the ‘Whistle, bellowing a war cry and…and there was Zyneth. In an instance Traellan took in her bedraggled state and the fact that she was wounded. She must’ve been fighting the creature in the canals!

He ran to her side, standing in front of her protectively in spite of the fact that he knew she could squash him like a bug if she wanted to. He scanned the Whistle, his eyes growing accustomed to the gloom. A few patrons, leaning on the bar, looked at him and rolled their eyes, then went back to their ale.

Confused, he turned back toward Zyneth. “Where is it!?” he demanded, battle rage filling him with adrenaline.

Traellan continued to spin back and forth, searching for the Canal Monster. Then Zyneth said something about the horde attacking Stormwind again.

“The Horde!? The Horde AND the Canal Monster both attacking at once! This cannot be a coincidence!”

But Zyneth, being wiser than he, revealed her cunning plan. She meant to turn the Horde into crocolisk food. In other words, her plan was to turn their two foes against each other. Brilliant!

He turned to face her. “How are we going to do this?”

For the first time he noticed the fishhook in her eyebrow. He winced in sympathy, then before Zyneth could react he reached out and gave it a tug, meaning to pull the shaft through the wound in the same way one would remove an arrow.

“Ouch!” The unexpected sting caught Zyneth off-guard, and she pushed Traellan away. It wasn’t a particularly hard push for Zyneth, but she was much stronger than Trae, and he stumbled backwards. One boot hit a bit of slimy canal kelp on the floor, and his foot slipped out from under him. He pinwheeled his arms trying to maintain his balance, which unfortunately meant he was pinwheeling his great hammer as well. Losing his battle with equilibrium, he fell backwards across a table. Each of its legs gave way in a different direction as the table collapsed, sending chairs skittering across the floor. The table top hit the floor, then Trae’s armored back hit the table top, shattering place settings and flattening forks.

At the same time, the heavy head of the hammer came down on the next table over. Two of its legs gave out, and the table tipped to one side. All the contents of the table slid off and on to Trae’s chest. This included several small bowls of spices and a rather large pottery jar filled with a tomato sauce that was a popular topping for the chopped coyote steak sandwiches that the Pig & Whistle was famous for. The jar cracked open, covering the front of Trae’s armor with the sauce.

Without pause Trae leapt back to his feet, then let go with a tremendous sneeze from the spices he’d inhaled. He whirled, looking for the horde, looking for the canal monster, but finding only a sea of surprised and angry faces turned towards him from the direction of the bar.

“Of course they’re angry! They have every right to be, having their day disturbed by both the horde and the canal monster.” he thought to himself. Heedless of the red rivulets of sauce running down his chest, he approached the bar, leaving yet another trail across the tavern floor.


And that is where it just stops. If I remember correctly there is, or was, a giant crocodile MOB that spawned infrequently in the canals of Stormwind. Does anyone else remember that?

A Bit of Nostalgia From the Early Days of MMOs

I bought a new PC this week, so I’m cleaning out the hard drive of my old system, figuring out what I want to archive, what needs to be moved to the new machine, and what can just be deleted. I found a file called sig.txt and assumed it was going to be a signature file for email or something.

But nope, it was a character introduction I’d written in the way back times. The timestamp on the file says 2014 but since it appears to be an intro for my Dark Age of Camelot character I’m guessing it was written somewhere around the launch window of that game, which was 2001.

It isn’t good by any stretch, but dang I had kind of forgotten that I used to goof around trying to write fiction, if you can call a character into fiction.

Anyway before I lose it to a hard drive failure or something, I figured I’d archive it to the blog. So here it is, completely un-edited. I don’t even know what it was for… some role playing guild intro post or something, probably.

Sadly, I no longer seem to have any of my old screenshots from those days and it feels cruddy to ‘borrow’ one so… just imagine low res polygonal vikings and you’ll have the right mental image!

——————————

Was it an innate sense of duty that lead me to take up sword in defense of our realm? Sadly I say nay. T’was fish guts that made me do it.

How so? Ma and da were hard working fisherfolk and mind, fishing be honorable work. When’s the last time ye fought a battle with an empty belly? A hard task, no? We all need to eat.

But me, I just couldn’t warm to that life. I tried but oh, how I hated
it. I’d run off to watch the guards in town as they strode about . Soon enough they got to know me, and they’d show me a trick or two, me with a stick that served as me sword then. I’d come home and my da would holler at me “Where ya been Sig? There be a catch needs attending to.” And I’d cry out “Da, I don’t want ta clean fish, I want ta slay a dragon!”

As I grew taller, I spent more and more time hanging about the guards, and even grow brave enough to approach the Dreng who came and went. One day, a soldier gave me a cast-off sword. It was a weapon worthy of slaughtering chickens, perhaps, but it were mine! And I learnt quick from them guards how ta wield it. And I liked the feel of the sword in me palm. Oh yes, very much.

Da says, “Sig, there’s nets to be mended, put down that pig sticker and get up yer needle and twine.” Uppity lad, I says “Da, I got no time for mending. Somewhere there be a dragon needs slayin! I need ta go and find it!”

Finally, on the day I first realized that the itching on me chin were due to the fact I was startin ta grow whiskers, my da took me aside and he says, “Sigrund, I like the life of a fisherman. But that don’t mean you need to like it as well. I’ve seen you hanging about with the Dreng and those are the times ye look happiest. When you be gutting fish, tis like your heart has gone missing. Go and chase your dragons, son. Go and make your ma and me proud.”

And so I went. I trained with the town guard a bit but fact is, Vasudheim was feeling mighty small, especially when I’d overhear some freemen coming in from Auditlen or Hagerfel, or even as far off as Huginfel. I heard rumors of a place called Askheim overtaken by evil beings. Inside, a spark had taken hold, and the Dreng and the stories fed it, and I knew it were time for me to go out in the world and make my way. Talk of battles with elves and Arthur’s clan riled my blood, while right there at home in Vasudheim purses started to go missing and doors started being bolted at night.

At times it seemed all of Midgard was being torn assunder and needed mending.

So now, my sword be my needle, and honor be my twine, and I’m doing my best to mend our beloved realm. Valhalla awaits at the end of this road, I know. But that’s not for a while. There be much work to do first. I am proud to be a Warrior of Midgard.

May 2024

Well this will for-sure be the shortest recap post I’ve ever had. Why? Because I almost literally played 1 game for the entire month. Aside from popping in to a few others for 5-10 minutes here and there to get a daily achievement or something, it was a monogamous month.

Playing

Fallout 76 — Like so many others, I really enjoyed the Fallout TV show and caught Fallout Fever from it. I decided to give Fallout 76 another chance and boy howdy did it ever stick. I created a new character, one that is now level 125 or thereabouts. I completed the Season Pass. I’m nearly done with the main story quest lines in spite of trying to savor them over time. I’ve learned about builds and gear and mutations and the world and the more I learn, the more fun I have. It really deserves its own post or series of posts, so I’ll leave off for now. But yeah, the only game I played for any length of time this month was Fallout 76.

Fallout 76 character paying respects to a child's grave
Fallout 76 can be both silly as heck, as shown in the picture at the top of this post, and very sad, as when you find this grave of a child behind an NPC’s camp.

Watching

Renegade Nell (Disney+) was pretty enjoyable. Not a must-watch but it was OK. It was a lot darker than I expected it to be. Basically it’s about a highwaywoman who has on again, off again superpowers due to a sprite or pixie or something. Swords and flintlocks and girl power. What’s not to like?

The Dead Boy Detectives (Netflix) was quite good. It is based on, I believe, a Neil Gaimon graphic novel series and (guessing even harder) I think it takes place in the Sandman universe. A couple of British ghosts wind up in Washington State (?) helping other ghosts move on while fighting a witch and dodging the afterlife bureaucracy that is hunting them to send them back to where THEY belong. They are accompanied by a few living friends who can see them. I LOVED Brianna Cuoco (sister of Kaley, of Big Bang Theory fame) as the resident adult and goth butcher shop owner who rents them all rooms.

Star Trek Discovery (Paramount+) continues to underwhelm me. In fact we kind of drifted away and need to make a point to go back and finish it as some point.

Reading

The summer heat is back and that means less time lounging outside reading. I’m in the midst of Baptism of Fire, the next Witcher novel, but haven’t finished it yet.

And that’s it! Short May recap but I am doing a TON of gaming, it’s just all been in Fallout 76!

April 2024

Farwell, April! Hello, summer hellscape!

I almost didn’t do a recap this month. I’m just not feeling it; it’s a little crazy that writing 1 post/month is starting to feel like a chore, but that’s my brain for you. Back in the day I used to write a post a day for IT World and still had words left over to write here! Getting old…I tell you, I don’t recommend it. Though as the old saying goes, it is better than the alternative.

Playing

Diablo IV — I went into D4 with a weird mix of low expectations due to everyone I know having not stuck with the game for very long, while on the other hand having personally been waiting so long to play it. (Knowing that Microsoft was trying to buy Activision inspired my inner cheapskate to hold out for it to hit Game Pass.) When it arrived, I found I liked it in small doses. Weird thing about subscription services is, for me at least, it kind of colors my reaction to things. If I’d spent $60 or $70 on Diablo IV I might’ve been a bit sour on it too. But getting it for “free” (obviously not truly free since I pay for Game Pass) makes me feel pretty forgiving.

Horizon Forbidden West — I’ve pretty much drifted away without finishing. I do want to go back at some point. Poor Alloy.

Dungeon Encounters — This is a pure dungeon crawler with turn-based combat that is on the PS5. I’ve been playing it on the Playstation Portal before bed as it’s an ideal handheld game. It feels kind of mindless; fun for 15-20 minutes before I turn the light out but back when I first played it on the big screen it couldn’t really hold my attention for too long. On the Portal it’s ideal.

Immortals of Avernum — This hit the PS Plus Extra and it was a game I’d always wanted to check out. I was really enjoying it, and feeling a little guilty about not buying it, given that the developer has all but gone out of business based on the lack of sales. This is another one I want to get back to, though. It’s kind of a magic-shooter, almost.

Fallout 76 — And this was the Great Disruptor this month. Like so many others, I enjoyed the Fallout TV series quite a bit. And like so many others, it put me in the mood to play a Fallout game, and this is the one I chose. I’ve picked up Fallout 76 a few times in the past, on a few different platforms, but never got very far. I think my highest level character was 22 or so. This time I started fresh (of course) and this time it stuck. As of the end of the month my new character is level 35, and I’m around level 40 on the Season Scoreboard, earning tickets to buy things to make my camps (I have 2) shinier. I bought the Fallout 1st subscription because it was 50% off, so only $6 & change, and I’ve been bouncing between a Private server and Public servers. I generally go Private to do my daily Season Scoreboard quests so I’m not competing for resources, and Public for everything else. I’m really enjoying it this time around and I think it all has to do with sticking with it long enough to get a decent weapon. I found a “Handmade” at about level 20 and suddenly I felt powerful, at least for a while. (The game scales everything to your level.) Anyway, I have half a mind to write a whole post about it, though I know Fallout 76 is a game that brings out the worst in a lot of people who DON’T play it, so not sure I will. But I’m having fun. It just pulled me away from all the other games I’d wanted to play!

Vault Dweller kneels in front of the statue at Vault Tech University

 

Watching

Fallout (Amazon Prime) — We loved this and we’re excited season 2 was greenlit. I found it interesting that @partpurple enjoyed it as much as I did even though she isn’t really familiar with the games.

Sweet Tooth (Netflix) — With the 3rd and final season coming in June, we decided to re-watch Season 1, and watch Season 2. Season 1 is kind of an origin store and road-trip show. Season 2 was more about how the world came to be and classic good vs evil stuff. It looks like season 3 might go back to road-tripping. If you’re unaware of the show, it’s a post-apocalypse world where most of humanity has been wiped out by a plague, while at the same time half-human/half-animal hybrids are being born. The titular Sweet Tooth is a half-deer boy around 10 or 12, and he’s being hunted by bad guys!

Star Trek Discovery (Paramount+) — We’re a little late starting this last season. I feel compelled to watch it as a lifelong Star Trek fan but I can’t honestly say I enjoy it very much. Kind of glad this is the last season. I have to say of all the Star Trek series, this is my least favorite.

Reading

Finished Blood of Elves & Time of Contempt, the Witcher series books three & four. Lola is slowing down and our walks are as much laying in the grass as they are walks, which means I’ve been getting a lot more reading time. What surprises me most about these books is that they’re really about Ciri and not Geralt. Who knew?

And that’s April in a nutshell!