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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

 

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

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

Playing

Playstation

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

Xbox & Xbox Games on PC

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

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

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

PC

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

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

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

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

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

Watching

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

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

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

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

Reading

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

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

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!]

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.

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!