Category: Gaming

Microsoft Changes the Game Pass Game

Posted on by Nimgimli

Microsoft just changed the price of Game Pass fairly substantially and as far as I can tell, with no warning. Prices jumped as much as 50%, with Ultimate going to $30/month, which feels pretty darned steep to me.

But that’s not all they’ve done. A lot of us frugal types tend to stack-up game pass subscriptions via Microsoft Rewards points, particularly during sales. Microsoft seems to be making that harder. You can no longer spend Rewards points directly on Game Pass. Instead you have to trade in points for Gift Cards and then spend that money on Game Pass. Why does this matter? Because as far as I can tell (someone please correct me if I’m wrong) you can’t extend your membership using cash, unless of course it has expired or is coming due.

From a pop-up on https://rewards.bing.com/

[Important update] Changes to Rewards Catalog
Starting October 1st, you will no longer be able to directly redeem your Rewards points for Xbox Game Pass subscriptions. To continue enjoying Xbox Game Pass using your Rewards points, you will need to first redeem your Rewards points for an Xbox gift card and then redeem your Xbox gift card for your desired Game Pass subscription, as follows:
Step 1: Visit the Microsoft Rewards catalog.
Step 2: Redeem your Rewards points for an Xbox gift card[TD1] in a denomination that is sufficient to cover the cost of your desired Game Pass subscription. If you do not have enough Rewards points for the desired Xbox gift card denomination, you may use an alternative payment method to cover the rest.
Step 3: Use your Microsoft Account balance from your redeemed Xbox gift card to purchase your desired Game Pass subscription. If your Microsoft Account balance is insufficient to cover your desired Game Pass subscription, you may use an alternative payment method to cover the rest.
When your Game Pass subscription expires, you can buy another Game Pass subscription by either (i) repeating Steps 1-3, above; or (ii) using an alternative payment method to purchase a Game Pass subscription.

As of right now you can stil purchase Game Pass gift cards from retailers like Amazon, so you can spend rewards points on an Amazon gift card, use that money to buy a Game Pass gift card, and then apply that to your Game Pass account, but we’ll see how long that lasts.

Or maybe this is temporary and once the pricing settles they’ll bring back direct redemption for Game Pass.

Another big change I don’t see talked about is that Microsoft is now capping Rewards Points at $100/year. Or at least that’s how I’m reading this:

Ultimate subscribers can now earn up to $100 per year (100k points globally) in the Store just by playing games.

I’ve never stopped to do the math, so before I get out my pitchfork and torch I should do that. I feel like I earn more than $100 worth of points per year, though. But it could be that $100 is the mathematical cap if you do all the quests they offer.

In any case it looks like the golden age of Xbox Game Pass is coming to an end. And PSA: You can still buy 3-Month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate gift card for $60 on Amazon so if you want to stock up, now is the time to do so.

September 2025

Posted on by Nimgimli

September is such a cruel month here in North Carolina. All the advertising and marketing people start their campaigns about “Now that the weather is getting cooler…” and showing folks in sweaters taking comfortable walks in brisk Autumn weather, and here it’s still in the 90s, at least some of the time. The nights are cooler, so that’s something. But damn do I miss a proper Autumn walk!

Anyway I actually played a few games this month!

Playing

The Outer Worlds — A few months ago I decided I should finally play through this, what with the sequel coming soon and all. And I did, finishing it just a few days ago. Honestly, I did not like it very much, but I think that was because I played on console. The combat was fun, and the humor was OK, but Quality of Life issues on console frustrated me. Inventory management was a nightmare between huge pop-ups (needed since we’re reading from across the room) that would obscure most of the inventory, and having no way to sort or filter what you had in order to figure what was worth keeping and what was junk. There was also too much of it, with every location you went to filled with containers holding a few coins, or one of a zillion foods/drinks, many of which did the same thing and most of which I never needed to use. It’s funny how I used to think RPGs with tons of containers to rifle through [looking at you, Elder Scrolls games] were pretty cool, but now it just feels like needless busy work. I’m hoping the sequel is easier to play in terms of console user interface, because the actual GAMEPLAY was pretty good.

Vampire Survivors — Late to the party on this one but now I get it. If you’ve never played this game it’s basically an auto-battler where you control the character. You just steer it around, the character attacks automatically, and when it levels up you pick what skill you want to improve. And that’s it, but the game throws SO many enemies at you once it gets going that it’s like a constant dopamine drip since everything you kill drops an experience gem. Hard to describe, and it’s really slow to start, but once you’ve done some runs and earned some gold to buy perks you’ll start going farther and farther and the gameplay gets more and more insane. Fun stuff when you want something that’s basically casual but still satisfying.

Wuthering Waves — This is where I spent the bulk of my gaming time this month, logging in every day to get my goodies and do dailies. My intent was just to beeline my way through the main story quests but wouldn’t ya know it? I got hooked. Now I’m actually following a guide of sorts (<– link to a google doc made by someone else; I think I found it on reddit) so I can play through the Companion, Exploration and Side Quests in some kind of logical order to maximize story enjoyment. In the meantime I’m making a real go at completing the battle pass thingie. If my math is correct I’m going to make it. Woohoo! At the rate I’m going I’m not sure I’ll catch up on content before I inevitably get distracted, but we’ll see.

Watching

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Paramount+) — I guess maybe some folks didn’t like this season as much, but I still did. Sad it’s over but on the other hand now I’m not giving CBS any money, so that’s good.

Invasion (Apple TV+) — The end of Season 2 of this series was a gigantic cliff-hanger, then it took 2 years for Season 3 to arrive and it is…. weird. Instead of picking up at the end of S2 it jumps ahead 2 years. A lot of characters are just gone and (so far at least) we don’t even know exactly what happened after the cliff-hanger. It almost feels like a kind of reboot? The season isn’t done yet so maybe they’ll find a way to wrap it all up and have it make sense but I’m not hopeful. Also all the kid actors are growing like weeds of course so look nothing like they did when the show started. Maybe that’s why they did the time skip? We’re going to finish it, but sadly I’m not sure I can really recommend it.

Warehouse 13 (Amazon Prime) — We always watch some older, comfy show during lunch. Something we’ve already seen since often work interupts and we don’t finish an episode. This month we picked Warehouse 13, and it turns out that we never finished the series when it was initially on, so that was a delight. Finding new episodes we hadn’t watched, I mean. I have to say, I REALLY love this show. Maybe more now than when it first came out. Just the chemistry between the characters feels so genuinely warm and family-like. The last season is short and I didn’t realize it was and when the final episode ended and I realized the show was over, I was genuinely sad, and I don’t say that too often. If for some reason you’ve never watched it, it’s currently on Amazon Prime Video in the US. Check it out. It’s a weird, silly concept with a great cast. [After it ended we moved on to Haven so maybe I’ll have something to say about that re-watch next month.]

 

And that’s September. If things work out right, we might be moving in early December, which means we’re going to start packing pretty soon. That might impact October some, but it’ll probably be November before things get chaotic. But if I fall off the face of the earth it’s probably just because I’m too involved in moving headaches to post stuff.

[The Header image is a partial screenshot from Wuthering Waves. I used Flash 2.5, aka “Nano Banana”, to strip some UI elements out of the image. Ergo the Gemini watermark in the bottom right.]

Is Ananta an Anime GTA?

Posted on by Nimgimli

This is going to be really short, but Ananta is one of these upcoming anime titles I’ve been interested in. However I thought it was a social, slice-of-life kind of title with some casual action. Then I saw this long video about it and now I’m seeing all kinds of fun influences: Grant Theft Auto, Yakuza and Watch Dogs, right off the top of my head.

Take a look:

I’m now SUPER excited for this game. I just need a release date, dammit!

That’s all I got. I just wanted to share this video for folks who aren’t aware of this title.

Checking in on My Wuthering Waves Progress

Posted on by Nimgimli

In the last few posts here I’ve talked about being in a gaming-slump where I just wasn’t interested in playing games. I said then that I knew it was going to be a temporary thing, and it was. I’m back to gaming regularly, but I’ve been staying pretty focused on Wuthering Waves. Playstation says I’m at about 90 hours total, and I sometimes play on PC too so I figure I’m around 100 hours all told.

At first my plan was to ‘catch up’ with the story, mostly so I could watch Dusty Monk’s videos talking about it without being spoiled. I pushed hard for that but then realized I was WAY more behind than I thought I was. (I was equating in-game Chapters and Acts with game versions, so when people talked about version 2.4 I thought they meant Chapter 2, Act 4 but noo… not even close.)

Anyway contrary to my usual self-defeating behavior, I decided to give up on that plan and just play the game however I wanted. Crazy idea, right? I’ve been pushing the “Pioneer Podcast” (think battle pass) pretty hard, being sure to spend my Waveplates, do Daily Quests, and things of that nature. I have 4 characters at my current cap (80) but they all need more work in various areas. My Union Level isn’t high enough to push them to 90 yet but we’re getting there.

What keeps me coming back, besides the aesthetics which I just adore, is actually getting better. I don’t mean just progressing characters, though that is part of it. Having to farm materials for these characters means going up against the same bosses over and over, and as I do this I’m getting more skilled at playing. Again, this isn’t radical stuff, except it kind of is for me. I’m usually a button masher but now I’m learning timing and combos. When I go against a boss that I used to barely scrape by on, and now can almost take down without switching out characters due to being better at parries, dodges and pulling off combos, it feels really good.

Which I guess is what folks love those Souls-like games, eh? A boss that smushes you flat the first time eventually becomes trivial as you get better. I can finally see the appeal.

But this got me thinking about why I love Gacha games and this is what I came up with: they’re not that hard. They can BE hard if you want because there are always a variety of ‘tiers’ of enemies to take on. But the developers definitely don’t want you getting frustrated and quitting; it’s in their best interest to keep you logging in all the time. So they always seem to offer some path forward, whether it be leveling up characters to get stronger, choosing an easier world tier, or just getting more skilled as a player. And I love that. Again, no world-shaking revelations. Just me taking a moment to think about why I like the things I like.

Anyway, that’s about it for today, but before I go I wanted to share some un-related news.

I have had a 2nd blog since 2017 and it has mostly been collecting virtual dust. I’ve now starting using it to “learn in public” in order to keep myself motivated. It’s probably not going to be very interesting to 99.9% of the people who stumble on it, but here is the link to the first post in my new Learning Journey, in case anyone wants to keep me honest.

I might start posting my AI stuff over there too, since I know that’s kind of niche.

August 2025

Posted on by Nimgimli

The end of the month really snuck up on me this time around. It’s been a pretty good month for us. Unusually cool, which for here just means I don’t think it hit 100F at all in August, or if it did it was early in the month. Today we have the doors and windows open, at least for the morning. Fresh air… what a treat.

I don’t have much to report this month but for the sake of completeness, here we go.

Playing

Wuthering Waves is the only game I’ve been playing regularly, and even that not very much. I’ve been so fascinated with various AI related projects that gaming just wasn’t very interesting to me, though in the last week or so that itch is coming back (and I welcome that itch). I was pretty sure it would and I’m glad I didn’t try to ‘force it.’ Anyway that isn’t relevant to Wuthering Waves, so back to that. I still don’t have any characters to level cap and I just arrived in the second big area, the name of which I completely forgot. It’s a religious place where they treat their sentinel as a god.

I really have to do some research on team building, but I’d really prefer to learn how to put together a good team vs just looking one up. So that entails a bit of work and concentration on my part.

Right now I’m rocking Havoc Rover, Senhuan (???) (the character you get early for logging in for 5 days or something). She’s some kind of guard and is ice-based. And Baizhi (?? these names trip me up so bad) as my healer. So all very early game characters. I’ve been working on getting their skills and weapons up to par before leveling any of them more since the game seems to ramp up difficulty whenever you level someone up. I have done a decent amount of pulling and have better (presumably) 5-star characters but I haven’t gotten far enough in the story to farm their mats and I refuse to skip ahead! So we’ll see where I end up by the end of September.

AI Gaming is another thing I’ve been looking into, and first I guess I have to explain what I mean by that. Basically my attention has drifted from AI generated art to AI generated words, riffing off the various chat bots to see if there is something a bit more robust out there. I mentioned Silly Tavern in a previous post and I’m still messing around with that, but I keep tinkering with it rather than using it, trying different engines and stuff. In the interim I’ve found another option called AI Dungeon which has apparently been around since 2019! It’s a tool for something that falls somewhere in between collaborative writing and text-based roleplaying. I was really impressed when I used the Quick Start option and then picked “Fantasy” as genre and “Thief” as character type. I assumed I would start in a pub with my friends the elf mage, the dwarf fighter and a human cleric or something. Instead this is the plot summary/starter I got:

You’re Trae, a skilled thief, master of disguise and con artist of the Field of Miracles crime syndicate in the Triflumina Republic, a city-state in the Fioran League within the world of Larion. The trouble all started when you pulled off what you thought was the heist of a lifetime, stealing a precious magical seed intended for the enchanted gardens of Donna Veronica. Then someone stole the seed from you, and it all went downhill from there. It doesn’t help that your guappa (kingpin), Donna Bianca, was already on poor terms with rival guappa and deadly alchemist Donna Veronica, still fuming over how Donna Bianca stole Capitan Rinaldo’s… “heart” from her.
The Fioran League is a collection of city-states known for their merchant princes, mercenary armies, alchemical innovations, and cut-throat politics. Triflumina, city on the Sea of Serpents famed for its Water Arena battles, masquerades and corruption, is caught in a power struggle between various factions, including the criminal syndicates of the various guappi, alchemists’ covens, and the blind Doge Crepido, who doesn’t need eyes to know everything that anyone says or does.
Your fellow thieves – Spinetta, Taddeo, and Sanno – are both potential allies and rivals. In a city as corrupt as Triflumina, friendship is sacred and betrayal is paid for in blood.

I’ve never played real D&D or any other table top RPG, but that seemed pretty intriguing to me and I jumped in. It took a few minutes to get the hang of things but before I knew it I was caught in a web of intrigue. Now out of the box it isn’t really a game.. there are no stats or anything. But apparently you can add scripts to make things more game like. I really JUST discovered this yesterday so I am still learning, but I think it has potential.

Things I like:
1) There’s a MATURE toggle so you can filter out all the sext-bot stuff that is so prevalent in this space. In fact that stuff is off by default.
2) If you decide to turn on the MATURE stuff, it seems a little bit… classier?? than other stuff I’ve seen. More bodice-ripper and less Penthouse Letters, if that means anything to anyone.
3) The writing feels pretty good for what it is, and if the AI takes a turn you just don’t want to follow it down, you can easily re-write what it suggested and guide the story in another direction.

Things I don’t like:
1) The free version gives you a really dumb model that loses track of details really quickly. I wouldn’t waste too much time on the free version, but you can get 100 free “actions” on their low-tier paid model each day. Using those free moves gives you a much better experience, but that means if you want to get into this heavily you’ll need to pay.
2) Their paid plan is tiered, from $10/month up to $50(!)/month. 4 paid tiers in all. Better tiers get you better models and more tokens, but as a noob it’s really hard to decide what’s right for you. The more tokens you have the more of the story your AI partner can keep tabs on, but how much is enough? I have no clue.

I’m still up in the air on whether I want to try a $10 or $15/month sub just to see the difference. I think I’ll worry about that if I ever run out of the free tokens.

But overall I’m kind of impressed by this service. And I LOVE that it has me quasi-writing fiction and storytelling again. Feels good. I’d still like to see how close I can get to it in Silly Tavern, though if I need a $2000 video card with 24 GB of VRAM to get there…maybe paying isn’t so bad!!!

Watching

No real surprises here:

Star Trek Strange New Worlds (Paramount+): SNW has taken the #1 spot in my Star Trek heart. I just love this show so much. And I love how well they can swing between the silly episodes and the serious ones. If I could change one thing about SNW… I don’t think I’d change anything. Except maybe the cancelation date.

Wednesday (Netflix): Season 2 isn’t grabbing me quite the same way season 1 did. Part of it is that so many of the actors have changed so much; the danger of using young actors and letting several years pass between seasons, I guess. And bringing in the whole Addams family makes it feel like an Addams Family reboot rather than a “Wednesday and her Frenemies” show. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate it or anything, I just don’t love it as much as I loved season 1.

Invasion (Apple TV): We needed something to fill the gaps between eps of SNW and waiting for the 2nd half of Wednesday and a new season of this show dropped. We decided to do a complete re-watch which maybe wasn’t the best idea. The show is good but maybe not THAT good.

Reading

Bearers of the Black Staff: Legends of Shannara — I’m still working through my complete Shannara read-through. We’ve jumped forward another 400-500 years and the characters from the last book have become the stuff of legends. But there are still parts of the old world (aka our world) kicking about. I’m only about 1/4 through so not real thoughts yet. I’m not reading too much these days.

And that’s August come and gone. We’re trying to find a new place to live, targeting December as our move date, and now that it’s a bit cooler we’re going to need to get busy, so the next few months are going to get pretty hectic. We’ll see what impact that has on my various projects, but I’m looking forward to living somewhere new without quite so many reminders of Lola everywhere. Yes, months later we’re still grieving over that silly little dog. 🙁

ChatGPT as Gaming Buddy

Posted on by Nimgimli

This weekend I discovered yet another fun use of AI chatbots: as gaming buddy/helper/mentor.

The setup: For reasons I don’t understand, my brain decided it was time to catch up on Genshin Impact. A couple years back I was HEAVY into Genshin (for me at least) and dumped something like 300 hours into it. Then I drifted away. I’ve tried to go back a few times but each time immediately got lost. I even created new accounts to try to re-familiarize myself with the game, but Genishin 3 hours in isn’t much like Genshin 300 hours in, so that didn’t help much.

On a whim I asked ChatGPT if it knew anything about Genshin and it (of course) said it did. It started by giving me decent but predictable advice like follow the Archon Quests and such. When I told it exactly what quest I’d left off on, it gave me some more specific advice, and was good about asking if I wanted info that contained spoilers, and when I said no it didn’t spoil anything.

It did get some things wrong. But this is video games, not brain surgery, so when it got something wrong I just went back to the old fashioned way of using search to fill out my info. And in at least some cases it might have been as much my fault in my description of things:

Me: There’s a blue circle with a star in it next to one of my character’s profiles (Barabara, if it matters). Any idea what that is telling me?

GPT:
Not basic at all—it’s one of those tiny UI doodads that the game explains once and then buries under ten layers of new systems.
That blue circle with the star inside means that character (Barbara in your case) has a Constellation available to unlock.

The marker I was referring to was actually telling me that Barbara’s ultimate was ready. But maybe there’s another blue circle somewhere, not sure.

Another issue of coming back to a game like this is not knowing where the meta has drifted to. I decided to give ChatGPT a list of the 29 characters I have on my account and ask for some team suggestions. I got a few, from casual running-around exploring teams to more focused teams. I decided to pick one and start working on those characters. I need to level some of them up, find artifacts and weapons for them, and just learn how they work together. Is GPT’s advice solid? No idea since I’m just starting. If any Genshin experts want to take a look, I stuffed the 1st team plan on a page here. If I were to make a prediction, I’d predict it probably gave me a team that was solid like 3 or 4 updates ago, but we’ll see. [Maybe I should do the same for Wandering Waves as it’s more likely one of you reading this post will know a lot about WW than about Genshin.]

But at the very least it gave me some goals to work towards while I get re-acclimated to Genshin Impact, and it was actually quite enjoyable to have a ‘friend’ to talk to about Genshin, even if that friend isn’t real. 🙂

Tangent: Microsoft is continuing to roll out CoPilot for Game Bar, and I actually used IT today too, when I went back to Clair Obscur after a 6-week absence. It took was somewhat helpful and it was kind of interesting I could access it without leaving the game. Not I think of it, THIS is why I thought to ask GTP about Genshin.

July 2025

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Here it is July 31st and I haven’t even created a ‘stub post’ for the Monthly Recap. Usually I take notes but this month, I did not. Where I live, July tends to be an awful month just due to brutal heat and humidity and this year was no exception. In fact the only exception might have been that so much of the rest of the East Coast got to ‘enjoy’ the same weather.

In theory that should have meant lots of time playing games but in fact.. I played very little. Instead I’ve fallen down an AI rabbit hole. I still do my interactive-fiction-y chatbotting on character.ai, but I’ve also been messing about with open source image and video generation running locally. As per usual my interest is about 80% getting a system up and running that’ll let me create images locally, and about 20% interest in actually doing it once I get it running. But there is always something new hitting github and I’ve been learning a lot about everything from python ecosystems on Windows to the actual guts of how AI works. It’s been fascinating and fun and kind of feels more productive then playing games. And I think the character.ai writing is just juicing up my creativity and my mood in general.

So no complaints; I’m sure I’ll swing back to hardcore gamer mode soon enough but until then I’m going to enjoy learning stuff.

Playing:

Dune Awakening: Early in the month I jumped on the Dune Awakening hype train and really enjoyed that for a bit before the whole “Now I spend all night thinking about LLMs” AI thing hit me. I do intend to get back to it though as I was really enjoying it.

Wuthering Waves: Once again I became swept up in the hype around Wuthering Waves and it is the one game I’m playing regularly, though not a lot. But I use it like a mind-wipe between my work brain and my off-hours brain. So I play a little bit, every day.

Watching:

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds — We’re doing a full series re-watch, currently in Season 2. Love it. I think we’ve now watched S1 3 times and I still enjoy every episode.

Severance: We finished this one up and again, loved it.

Terra Nova: We re-watched this during lunch. It’s the one about near-future humanity fleeing a ruined earth by traveling to the past and living amongst the dinosaurs. It starts not great but really did get better. Not better enough for it to have gotten renewed for a 2nd season, sadly.

Warehouse 13: After Terra Nova we started doing a re-watch of Warehouse 13, one of the sillier, more fun shows that SyFy ever spat out. It’s great mostly do the chemistry between the characters/actors

Reading:

Still working through the Shannara books. I finally finished The Gypsy Morph and jumped forward 500 more years and into Bearers of the Black Staff. The old world is ended, but a small society has held on for this long. Now, though, the outside world has come calling. I guess. I’m like 2 chapters in.

And really, that’s the recap for July. I’ve been really busy, just that most of what I’m working on is kind of unfocused. I am still so deep in learning mode that I can’t really even articulate what has been going on. Plus AI is such a loaded topic these days. And I do share a lot of the concerns people have. But I’m enough of a realist to get that this genie isn’t going to be going back into its bottle, so at least maybe I can stay somewhat informed.

Anime girl laying down, blowing a kiss to the viewer. She's wearing black pants and books and a long sleeved brown shirt. She has red hair and freckles
Until next month! [Image generated via AI locally]

FOMO Got Me: Dune: Awakening

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As I’ve gotten older, and my backlog has gotten bigger, and my wallet has gotten thinner, I’ve developed a decent amount of resistance to FOMO, but sometimes even I slip.

In the case of Dune: Awakening I’m going to blame Scopique and Tipa, as well as the fact that we watched the Dune Prophecy TV series not too long ago, and the Dune movies over the past two weekends. Basically Dune is everywhere and the game looked like it was something I’d enjoy. I was going to wait for a sale or whatever, but Scopique rented a private server and told me I’d be welcome so I figured this was a case where getting in early when others were psyched made pretty good sense.

So far, no regrets. I’m having a really good time. My biggest source of concern is, where should I play?

I started on Scopique’s server which has been great, but quiet. There’s a dozen or so of us, I guess, but so far I’ve seen 1 other player and they flew in and out of my field of view so fast that I didn’t even see who it was. The pros are that there’re plenty of spots for base building, friendly-if-mostly-unseen neighbors who’re constantly offering help to others (so far I haven’t needed it, but that time is probably coming) and absolutely zero drama. The only real con is that it feels mostly like a single player game so far, but I’m not even sure if that is a con (there is no actual single player mode in Dune: Awakening). Also that might change if/when I catch up to where everyone else is hanging out. For now I see giant bases but no players.

Just for comparison sake, after I’d gotten myself established on the private server I rolled a character on a Medium-busy public server. And guess what? I haven’t seen another player there, either, but I do ‘hear’ them talking about end game stuff which I’ve enjoyed. And I’ve found abandoned bases that I could claim for my own. It’s kind of interesting to see what others started building before they drifted away to sandier pastures. In theory if I ever wanted to get into the PvP stuff, that happens on the Public servers, though normally that isn’t really my thing. The big con on the public servers is that Funcom is in an arms race against hackers and I guess every time they patch an exploit another one is discovered, to the point where people are having their bases robbed in PvE zones. Hasn’t happened to me but frankly I don’t own anything worth stealing yet. But that is, for now, a pretty huge Con if ever there was one. The other con is that I don’t know anyone on this server so if/when I get to areas that I can’t solo, I’ll be dead in my tracks unless I PUG which is generally a source of great anxiety to me.

So I’ll probably stick to Scopique’s private server to take advantage of this nice little pocket of friendly players; I’m sure at some unplanned but inevitable future time after I’ve moved on to some other game and decide to circle back to Dune, long after the Private server has been retired, I can try life on a Public server. Or maybe Funcom will have introduced a single player local server by then.

As to the gameplay itself, if you’ve played Conan Exiles you’ll have a pretty good idea of what you are getting into. There’s combat of course, and as you level up you earn points you use to unlock recipes for crafting things. There are also skill trees grouped into various classes that you can unlock as you play. The world is, well, Arrakis: lots of sand dunes interspersed with rocky outcroppings where some sparce plant life clings to existence. They call these ‘islands’ and traveling between them is dangerous due to sand storms and sand worms. If a sand worm eats you, that is it. I mean you respawn but apparently you respawn naked and with an empty backpack. Combat deaths are not nearly as unforgiving; you drop something, though I’m not sure what. I’ve only died once and never got back to see what I’d dropped. Early days!

The big hook, of course, is water. Early on, at least, water is a constant concern. You get most of it by draining the blood of your fallen enemies and processing it back at basecamp to turn it into potable water. Yeah, it’s gruesome and this is a violent world. Few NPCs want to talk and I’ve yet to meet one who is willing to back down from a fight.

So far I’m built several bases (and abandoned one), built a sand bike — basically a snowmobile only with 2 treads where the ski would be, and 1 tread in the back [see image at the top of this post] — and am working my way up the tech tree. It is still a thrill when I’m making my way across the dunes and a sandworm is coming for me, and there is just a TON out there for me to explore.

So yeah, FOMO got me, and I’m glad as heck that it did. Been loving Dune: Awakening so much that Death Stranding 2 has fallen by the wayside for now!

June 2025

Posted on by Nimgimli

The fact that adverts always depict summertime as a time to get outside and do lots of fun things is proof that the big advertising firms are all located in mild or cold climates. Summer has arrived and it is downright unhealthy to leave the house due to the ridiculous heat. Here in the US pretty much everyone on the East Coast got a taste of North Carolina summertime in the last week of the month as it was 100F/38C almost everywhere with high heat indexes. It hit a heat index of 110F/43C here and not MUCH cooler anywhere else from what I could tell.

So nothing to do but stay inside and play video games, I guess. I was kind of treading water for a lot of the month waiting for Death Stranding 2 to launch. I had pre-ordered it before Lola got sick and we became buried under vet bills, and Sony is awful about refunds so I just rode with it. Might be my last new game for quite a while until I get those bills paid off. Only 35 payments to go! Of course I’d pay 3 times that if we could get our little puppy-daughter back. Missing her as much now as ever. It has to get easier eventually. right?

Enough of the depressing stuff, let’s talk video games.

Playing

Planet of Lana [Xbox Game Pass] got finished. I’d written about it a while ago and most of what I wrote stands. Towards the end some of the puzzles got a little bit more finicky in terms of reaction times and so forth, but nothing too bad. It was a great little game. Kind of sweet, kind of scary, all environmental story-telling. Highly recommended. Took me 5.5 hours to play through. I could do a replay to chase Achievements and what not, and I don’t rule out that possibility at some point in the future.

Screenshot from Planet of Lana showing Lana squatting down to give Mui a pat
Lana giving Mui pets for a job well done.

Alan Wake Remastered: This is one of those well-loved (by the general gaming community) games that I’ve always meant to play but have never gotten around to. The Remastered version was on PS+ Extra and was short enough I figured I could finish it before my sub ran out, and sure enough I did. Took me 20 hours in total and… I honestly didn’t like it much. The story was fantastic and if they ever make a movie version (I keep hearing chatter about them doing that) I would be down to watch it, 100%. But the actual gameplay hasn’t aged very well. I found it vacillated between frustrating (clunky, slow controls) and tedious (the battles all feel kind of the same). I’m still glad I played it for the, I dunno, historical perspective, and now if Alan Wake 2 is ever on a deep discount somewhere I will probably pick it up, because the IDEA was fun, just the excecution wasn’t. It was probably fine back when it launched but, y’know, our expectations of how games should play change over time.

Ratchet & Clank (2015 version): I was just going through games that had been installed on the Playstation since forever and here this one was. I decided to play it a bit before uninstalling and ended up finishing it. It isn’t super long (12 hours for me) and the first 3/4 or so aren’t particularly tough. When I did finally start to feel a bit frustrated I just set the difficulty down to Easy and that made things REALLY easy but I was about ready for it to be over anyway. Overall it holds up really well for a 10 year old game, and the mechanic of everything busting into a ton of nuts and bolts that then get hovered up into Ratchet’s satchel is oddly satisfying. Kind of like hoovering up the bricks ins a Lego game. Overall, it was a good time!

A shot from near the end of Ratchet and Clank looking down into a giant machine

Wuthering Waves is back in rotation after I heard yet again about how great the story is. Of course I couldn’t remember how to play, and you can’t start fresh, so I created ANOTHER account to start clean. That’s account #4 so far! I have made it further than I ever have and who knows? Maybe I’ll stick with it to get to some of the good story stuff this time.

Tales of Arise is another re-visit. I got it way back at launch but got distracted. Once again I started fresh. I am really struggling with the combat. I just don’t vibe with it. It’s an action-RPG system but it does not reward button mashing and I, I have to admit, am a natural button masher. I’ve gone so far as to watch long YouTube videos about the combat system. Worse comes to worse I’ll put it down to Easy or Story Mode or something because I really enjoy the look and feel of the game, the world seems fun to explore, the characters’ constantly bickering leads me to believe a romance is budding, and I’d really like to experience all that eventually. We’ll see.

Death Stranding 2 is the game I’ve been waiting for and so far it has not disappointed. It is similar enough to the original that it felt really comfortable jumping in, but there’s new stuff too. I haven’t gotten very far as it just came out; but I expect it’ll be my “main game” for quite some time. I’m in no rush to get through it and immediately got caught up in placing structures to help other players out and becoming friends with all the folks in shelters in the first area. The story will be there when I’m ready for it, right?! Loved the first game and so far I’m loving the second as well!

A wide shot of desert scrub. Sam's trike is parked next to a generator. It is night and the generator casts a circle of light
It gets noticeably dark now, Generators have lights on them that you can see from some distance off. I don’t remember that being the case in the 1st game but maybe I’ve forgotten. That’s Sam’s trike parked next to it.

Watching

Shadow & Bone (Netflix) — We’d watched Season 1 of this a few years back I guess, but at some point they released a 2nd season and then canceled the show. Which is a shame because it was awfully good. Honestly we thought S1 was OK the first time we watched but for some reason felt it was way better on the re-watch. It’s a complex world and maybe it took a 2nd viewing to grok it all. Basically we have a world where some folks can wield magic of various sorts. In our world terms I would put it somewhere around 1880-1900 maybe? Technology is advancing to where magic isn’t quite the weapon it once was, we non-magic users fighting with swords and bolt action rifles. There are gatling guns but still at the hand-cranked level of tech.

Anyway this country is divided by “The Fold” which was created by the Black Heretic hundreds of years ago. This is a giant black cloud filled with monsters that divides the country in two, and passage through it is quite perilous. Into this mix comes a couple, life-long friends and both orphans. He is a tracker in the army, she is a cartographer, and the two of them get caught up in some world-changing events. There are other pockets of characters too, including a gang of n’er-do-wells always looking for a new job to pull off. It’s a great show we personal stories, geo-political issues, magic, war, forbidden love, monsters… I’m really sad that it was canceled, but it is based on a series (?) of books that I’m going to make a point to read.

Severance (Apple TV+) — I’d heard good things about this but it took us a long time to get around to trying it and… it is in fact really good. The premise is that these people work for some big tech firm on some super secret project. In order to do so they become “severed” so that when they are at work they can’t remember their outside life, and vice versa. The result is that the at-work entities know of nothing other than the office they work in. These “innies” as they call themselves, are the main focus of the show. The work they do is also very mysterious — it almost looks like they’re playing some kind of game. The company they work for is more or less a cult, just adding to the oddness of it all. It’s pretty creepy, sometimes darkly funny, and generally a good mystery. We haven’t finished the 2nd season yet but we’ve been really enjoying it.

Reading

Another month has come and gone and I’ve done very little reading, aside from constantly reading the news and feeling depressed about that. I need to figure out how to work reading back into my schedule!

And that’s that for June 2025. Aside from the continuing sadness/depression over the loss of Lola it has overall been a decent month, I guess. I am now officially a senior citizen, having turned 65. In the US that means signing up for Medicare which was oddly stressful because you get swarmed with junk mail and offers from companies that want to be your Medicare Supplemental provider. But as I still work full time and get insurance via the job I just did the minimum “Plan A” signup for now, which once I figured out that was what I had to do, was pretty easy. But yeah, I am now a literal [Medicare] card carrying “senior.” Ugh.

My PlayStation Plus Sub is Expiring and I Couldn’t Be Happier

Posted on by Nimgimli

So I’ve mentioned a few times that we’re needing to tighten our belts here at chez Dragonchasers. Lots of vet bills and just that generally the cost of living is going up way faster than my salary is means the years of easy living are behind us, at least for now.

So when I noticed my PlayStation Plus Premium membership was coming up for renewal in July, I had a moment of panic. The Premium tier is roughly $160/year, the Extra tier $135 and the Essential tier is $80.

I’m currently on the Premium tier and would not renew it. The difference between Extra and Premium is that the latter offers some game trials, access to old-ass PS1 and PS2 games, and game streaming. I’ve never used any of these perks.

The Extra tier has a Game Pass-like library of games you can play for free while you are subscribed. I do use this quite a bit. While Sony isn’t nearly as good as Microsoft when it comes to putting their own games in the library (and particularly not on Day 1), there are still a lot of good games in the there.

The Essential tier is in fact essential if you want to play games with other people. It is basically the “old” PS+: you get a couple of ‘free’ games every month, cloud saves, and the ability to play games online with other people.

I was looking at $135 for the Extra tier, which is a lot right now, and to add salt to that wound Sony is currently running a 30% discount on subscriptions…but only to people who aren’t subscribed. That just feels bad.

So I initially resigned myself to scraping up $80 for Essential but then I thought about the last time I’d played anything online with anyone and… couldn’t remember when that was. Cloud Saves are nice but I can live without them. And the ‘free’ games that give out these days are generally either very old or not great. The good stuff they save for the Extra tier.

In the end I decided to cancel and see how it felt to be an ‘offline’ PlayStation gamer. First thing I did was go through all the games I had installed and started deleting PS+ Extra titles that I knew I’d have no time to play between now and mid-July. A few of them that I hadn’t tried, I dipped into to see if they were worth adding to my Wishlist in case they ever went on a deep discount.

What was strange about this process was that with every game I deleted, I felt a little bit ‘lighter’. I didn’t realize how much I was feeling “obligated” to take advantage of the PS+ Extra library in order to get my money’s worth. I mean I was vaguely aware of the fact that I have a lot of games on PlayStation that I own but never get around to because I wanted to play the PS+ Extra games first. Thing is, there’s always new PS+ Extra games landing so I can never get ahead of that.

So now, once PS+ Extra is gone, I can go back and play all the games that I was interested enough in to open my wallet for. And I’m actually looking forward to that and I have enough games to keep me busy for a year, easily. Maybe more. You know how slow I am and the PS shares time with the Xbox and PC.

Come November and Black Friday, if they offer another big discount to ‘new’ subs I might go back; I’ll see if I am missing the service by then. I kind of doubt it.

It probably helps that I also have Xbox Game Pass so I get new/random games to play there, too. I don’t feel the same sense of obligation on Xbox. I’m guessing this is partially because I am paid up through 2027, partially because I mostly pay for it via Microsoft Rewards points, and partially because I don’t own a ton of Xbox games that I never get the time to play.

So yeah, I guess that’s it. I went from feeling bad about losing this service to feeling better. I’ve kind of felt a little bit of the same feeling as I’ve canceled streaming services, too. Too much of a good thing, I guess. Having fewer choices is actually making me a little bit happier (and a little bit less broke).

[AI generated shot of a dump truck emptying games into a vatImage at the top of the post generated by a couple of AI tools. Sora was used initially with the prompt “Can you create a playful illustration of a dump truck labeled “PS +” dumping a bunch of games into an overflowing vat labeled “Backlog”? Please create it in a landscape orientation.” That resulted in the image to the left: Sora does not like making landscape images, apparently. So I fed the original image into Google’s AI Studio and asked it to expand the picture with the prompt “Can you take this image and remake it in a 16:9 ratio? I need it to be wider than it is tall, but otherwise I really like this image.”]