March 2025

It’s the end of March and I still haven’t done my taxes. Adulting sucks! But here’s the recap. Short and sweet this month!

Playing

Death Stranding has been my ‘main game’ this month and I’m having a good old time just puttering about. I spend more time building up and maintaining the world’s infrastructure than I do actually moving the story forward. Eventually I will move forward though as I find it really compelling (and really weird). Death Stranding 2 will probably be a Day 1 purchase for me in June! I have a deadline to meet!

Deadman leaning close to Sam Porter Bridges to whisper to him.
“Death Stranding is NOT a walking simulator, Sam.”

Dragon Age Veilguard hit Playstation Plus and I started playing. I like it well enough but not enough to pull me away from Death Stranding when I’m playing on the PS5. I don’t honestly know if my issue is with Veilguard itself or just that I’m so hooked on DS. I’ll probably circle back to this and start over at some point, but it certainly didn’t hook me like Dragon Age Origins or Inquisition did.

Borderlands 2 is the one game I finished this month and I had a good time, but everyone has already played it and I already posted about it, so I’ll just leave it at that. If I had infinite time I’d replay it with a different class but there are SO many games to play!

Atomfall turned out to be a bit of a disappointment for me personally, but I already wrote about it. It is short enough that I figured “OK I can just plow through this.” but after a couple sessions of playing I thought to myself, “Why?” and uninstalled. I spent $25 or so to upgrade to the Deluxe Edition so I could play early and boy did I learn my lesson doing that. Honestly it’s a lesson I have learned before but every few years I seem to need to burn myself to remember why pre-orders and deluxe-versions are rarely a good idea.

Some kind of nuclear plant seen from a distance

 

Watching

Arcane (Netflix) was amazing. This animated series is based on League of Legends but you don’t have to know anything about the game to enjoy the show. It’s 2 seasons long. Season 1 is a relatively straightforward origin story for the characters. Season 2 gets pretty weird and is dense. I think I could watch Season 2 several times and get something new out of it each time. Which season is ‘better’ really depends on your personal preferences but both are really good. Heck it’s worth watching just for the gorgeous animation style (and the soundtrack is really good, too).

The Wheel Of Time season three has been really good so far, for me at least. I honestly am not a fan of the books since they just feel way too drawn out and Jordan re-used certain phrases so often I find it distracting. Or at least that’s how I remember them; it’s been a while. So this is a rare case where I enjoy the show more than the books, though PartPurple, who is in the midst of a re-read of the books, grumbles about how much is different. We went back and re-watched S2 before diving into S3, but now we’re caught up and waiting for more episodes to drop.

Reading

Armageddon’s Children — Book 4 of the extended Shannara series. It’s I think 60 years after the end of Angel Fire East and the apocalypse has arrived. The demons and once-men are working to exterminate the remaining people. We meet some new Knights of the Word and a group of street kids living in the ruins of Seattle.  I liked this one quite a bit but I do love a good apocalypse!

Elves of Cintra — Book 5, and oh guess what? Elves have been here all along, remaining hidden from humans. With most of humanity now gone, some of the characters from Children team up with the elves to try to save the elven race from the demons. But I’m not finished yet so not sure what is going to happen. Enjoying this one so far, too!

 

So yeah, that’s the March highlights. I’m taking a 4 day weekend in April and hope to spend those extra 2 days in a gaming stupor, yay! And I guess do my taxes. Oh and sign up for Medicaire which, omg I have been sent about 50 different junk mails with different companies wanting to be my Medicaire provider and I’m just so confused. Like I said, adulting sucks!

Sam Porter Bridges runs down a road with a person strapped to his back
This is what a Lyft ride looks like in the world of Death Stranding. Yes, that is a living person in a body bag that Sam is carrying; the bag is to protect them from TimeFall

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:
.
.
.
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!

Recovery of an MMO Junkie

Having finished Rent-A-Girlfriend I was back to trolling through the far end of my watch list looking for something with the same kind of vibe, and I spotted Recovery of an MMO Junkie. This is one I’d watched before, but it’s quite short so I decided why not treat myself to a re-watch.

I think this one might resonate well with some of my readers. While it is not an isekai (a show about someone transported or trapped in another world, frequently a gaming world) it is, I guess, isekai-adjacent. The story is about Morioka Moriko, a 30 year old office worker who decides to quit her job, become a NEET and focus on playing MMOs. In simpler terms, she just stays in and games. She has fond memories of the last MMO she played, which she could only play on weekends, but it has shut down so she starts a new one, and decides to play as a guy named Hayashi.

She quickly meets Lily, a more advanced player who takes Hayashi under her wing, and from there winds up making a group of friends. She is very content with her online life (it is never really explained how she supports herself) but her IRL life mostly consists of putting on sweats and heading to the convenience store for food. The show bounces back and forth between in-game life and out-of-game life.

As things progress she and Lily grow closer and closer and Moriko struggles with this since Lily doesn’t know her real gender. Then one day she (literally) runs into a guy on the street and is impressed with how kind he is. This begins her slow journey back into the real world.

You can probably guess where this is going, but I don’t want to spoil anything. I will say events will really strain your sense of credulity.

In spite of that, I love this show. There’re no bad guys and nothing terrible happens. It’s just a real feel good show; very cozy. No screaming, no explosions. Even the enemies in-game are kind of cute. And if you’ve ever playing an MMO in a guild that grows into a kind of family, lots of what happens in the in-game scenes will feel pleasantly familiar.

It’s also fairly short (11 or 12 episodes) and the manga it is based on was put on hiatus when the creator got ill. As far as I know it never came back, and Recovery is from 2017 so I think it’s safe to say this is a 1 season and done show. If you’ve been away from anime for a while, this might be a good way to dip your toes back in.

Rent-A-Girlfriend

A while back I was looking for a new anime to watch. I have a pretty large Watch List on Crunchyroll because I add things on a whim, but I tend to use the old Last In, First Out methodology. So I’m always watching stuff I just recently added and shows further back in the list get forgotten. This time around I decided to go the END of my Watch List and pick something.

I’ve been “learning” Japanese on Duolingo for about 10 months now, and I find watching anime helps keep me motivated to stick with that. After 315 days of learning, I know almost NO Japanese. I’m still learning to parse the language; it is still a challenge for me to figure out where one word ends and the next begins. Learning what the words actually mean is a whole ‘nother level of difficulty! Of course in anime characters tend to speak even faster than they do in my Duolingo lessons but I still feel like, on some subconscious level, watching anime is helping me. Or maybe I’m just justifying sitting around watching TV. But when I DO pick out a word or phrase, I get pretty excited. The other day, for the first time, I caught a change between the spoken dialog and written. The spoken referred to someone playing a game with their younger sister while the sub-title said they were playing with a friend. I was ecstatic! LOL

And just to complete the circle, I got the idea that I wanted to learn Japanese decades ago with the goal being able to play Japanese video games and watch anime that hadn’t been translated. Back then there was a lot less translating stuff to English, at least officially. Of course today everything gets translated but I still had a hankering to learn it, plus I’ve heard learning a new language is good for staving off old-man-brain so finally, almost a year ago, I got started.

Anyway, way off topic. So I scrolled to the end of my watch list and just past the series I’ve completed was Rent-A-Girlfriend. I have no recollection of how it got added as it definitely isn’t in my normal wheelhouse. I was honestly a little hesitant because I was worried it was some kind of soft core hentai. (I’m sure there’s a word for soft core hentai but I don’t know what it is.) But it wasn’t. Mostly.

I don’t know if renting girlfriends is a real thing in Japan. I’m guessing it is. The idea (based on this anime at least) is that you’re basically hiring someone to be your date for the day. I guess we’d call them escorts. But the dates are just that: dates. No fooling around after. No going home with anyone. It’s a way to pay to have some charming company for an afternoon or evening. At least that’s what I gathered from this show. Could be a complete fabrication, I haven’t done the research.

Anyway, when the series starts out, 20-something college student Kazuya has been dumped by his first real girlfriend. To cheer himself up he rents Mizuhara who of course is beautiful, intelligent and classy. At the end of the date she holds his hand and he thinks she has fallen for him. Then he looks up her profile and all her other dates are sharing how great it was that she held their hand at the end of the date. Kazuya gets mad and gives her a bad review. But of course he rents her again. Through a series of hijinks, both of the fake-couple’s families meet the pair and assume they are actual boyfriend and girlfriend, and from there they keep up the facade so as not to disappoint anyone.

To make matters worse, it turns out the two go to the same school. And just to stretch credibility even further.. it turns out they are next door neighbors! What are the odds? “Off the clock” Mizuhara is very different from “girlfriend” Mizuhara and Kazuya likes the real her even better, it seems. By now they’ve gone on so many dates there’s a whole bunch of people who think they’re a real couple and they struggle to keep their secret. This leads to more women entering the scene. The ex gets jealous, they encounter another rental girlfriend who falls for Kazuya and blackmails him into dating her, and a few more are picked up along the way. I guess this is why it is tagged as a “Harem” show but really he for the most part (he IS still a horny 20-something) just has eyes for Mizuhara.

I really enjoyed this one. It was often funny, it was often sweet. At times it was a little sad, and yes, at times it was a little dirty. Most of the dirty stuff happens in Kazuya’s imagination and as someone who once upon a time was a 20 year old ruled by his hormones, I could relate to a lot of his thoughts, and so I found them funny. For example he’ll accidentally get a glance down a character’s blouse and he’ll quickly look away while in his head he’ll be screaming at himself because he can’t get an imagined naked image of her out of his mind. It never goes too far though and outwardly he is a gentleman. Just like I always was as I suddenly found a cloud or something super fascinating while the little devil on my shoulder urged me to sneak another peek.

The biggest issue I had was that Kazuya is so much his own worst enemy. He is always over-thinking things and that leads him to always say or do the absolute worst thing. I’d get frustrated with him fairly often, though I dunno, maybe that is part of why the show hooked me: “Will he EVER learn?” 🙂

There are currently three seasons and I’ve read there’s another coming next year. So, spoiler, there is no resolution by the end of season 3. But I found I was really rooting for the couple to get together. Maybe they will in season 4.

So yeah, no longer will I turn my nose up at anime labeled Romance, Harem, Shonen. Shonen in particular I generally avoid due to all the shouting. Kazuya mainly shouts inside his own head and it isn’t too bad.

I’m always a bit hesitant to recommend a TV show or a movie as I am definitely no critic and tend to be “easy” on this kind of media. And I’m even less of an expert on anime. But hey, if you have Crunchyroll and it sounds interesting, maybe give it a try. You might find it as endearing as I did. Though it CAN be a bit difficult to explain to your partner why you’re watching something with such a salacious title!

July 2024

July was the month I finally broke free of my Fallout 76 obsession! I mean, yes I’m still playing Fallout 76 but I’ve been playing other things, too.

I also bought a new gaming PC this month. I justified the purchase thusly: By buying a new gaming PC, I could re-purpose my older gaming PC into a new work PC. My current work PC is my even older gaming PC. It’s like 12 years old and getting super slow. (My official work machine, provided by my company’s IT dept, is gathering dust somewhere…thing is a total potato and so locked down I can’t install any of my tools on it.) The out-going PC I was using for work is old enough that the video card had a DVI port on it, and the disks were all HDDs. But the end result in terms of gaming is I went from an RTX 2070 that was OK at playing modern games on medium settings to an RTX 4070 that so far has been able to handle high or very high settings on the stuff I’ve tried it on. It probably helps that I am pushing a 1440P monitor with it rather than 4K.

But anyway, playing PC games on the widescreen monitor with high/very high settings and HDR and suddenly PC gaming is very appealing again!

Playing

Fallout 76 — As mentioned, still playing but I backed off quite a bit after my character crossed level 300 (and thus unlocked the final Legendary Slot perk) and I hit level 100 in the Season Pass. That is significant because up to level 100 you can ‘grind’ the season pass via a repeatable task to earn character experience. After 100 you just have a fixed number of daily and weekly tasks that will advance the season pass. Once I get to 150 (very soon — I’m at 145ish now) I can buy a bunch of perk points and level up my Legendary Perks and that will pretty much be the end of my character progression. From then on it’ll all be about chasing great gear, or just (gasp!) playing to have fun.

The pic at the top of this post is the new “survival tent” I got from the Season Pass. This is a Fallout 1st item, but they are SO handy. You can plunk it down almost anywhere and it gives you access to inventory, a bed to rest in, a couple of crafting benches (food and tinker) and a SPECIAL board so you can change your stats. I love this thing…though I’d love it more if it wasn’t so ugly!

My alt at Fasnacht. She is wearing a robot mask and carrying a mini-gun. Behind her the robots are lined up and ready for the parade
My alt all dressed up for Fasnacht. Just waiting around with her minigun BFF while the robots get ready to march in their parade

Guild Wars 2 — So how did I end up here? It started while watching Dusty Monk’s new YouTube channel where he was talking about the new World of Warcraft patch and how he is excited to be getting back into WoW. That inspired me to try to go back to WoW which just didn’t work. But in the midst of talking about that, some other friends were talking about an upcoming Guild Wars 2 expansion so I jumped over to try Guild Wars 2 for the umpteenth time.

It’s only been a few days but so far it is sticking. I (of course) made a new character and they’re level 50 after less than a week of playing. (I have something like 8 characters…one is level 80 but got there almost purely via daily login rewards rather than from being played. Another is level 54 and that character actually got played once upon a time. All the others never made it out of their 20s before I drifted away.) I’m mostly focusing on the story missions and events that pop up here and there. Something in my gaming brain has changed. I’m becoming less of a ‘game grazer’ and more likely to get stuck on a particular game for a good long time. My plan is to just move through 10 years of Guild Wars 2 content in order, but we’ll see how it goes.

A hidden underground grove in Guild Wars 2
Note to self: Figure out how to fit wide-screen images into blog posts.
Also I’m loving exploring Tyria! Look at this enchanting place?

The First Descendant — Before Guild Wars 2 hooked me, I was enjoying this free to play looter shooter. The core game is running around shooting and looting tons of stuff (surprise!) while doing some pretty basic missions. The meta game feels a lot like Warframe in that you level up both your characters and your weapon proficiency which unlocks slots to add mods to. People say the cash shop is predatory. I bought a Battle Pass for $10 just for grins but otherwise I haven’t spent anything, so the cash shop, so far, hasn’t bothered me much. It’s also worth mentioning there’s a lot of fan service in the character models. Skin tight outfits with plenty of peek-a-boo holes barely covering some unrealistically proportioned bodies. Oh, one more thing I enjoy: cross save/cross progression across PC, Xbox and PS5. I still WANT to play this but between Fallout 76 Daily Tasks and being hooked on GW2, there just hasn’t been enough time.

Once Human — This survivalbox MMO is proving to be pretty popular in the circles I visit. I like it but I am confused about how the Seasons work and how big a setback that will feel like. Because of this I haven’t really cut loose in it. It is definitely on my ‘things to circle back to’ list, though.

Diablo IV — I FINALLY finished the campaign, using a character I started last season that is now over on the Eternal Realm or whatever it is called. Now I guess when the new season starts on August 6th I can see if I find the post-campaign game to be more interesting. Because honestly I found the campaign all pretty boring in terms of gameplay, I’m hoping once you hop off that treadmill and just do what seems fun, it’ll all be more interesting.

Random shot from Diablo IV showing a couple of characters standing around doing nothing
This is the only Diablo IV screenshot I have and I think I maybe hit the screenshot button by accident or something 🙂

Watching

My Lady Jane (Amazon Prime) — We loved this. It’s an alternate (and much less grim) history of Lady Jane Grey, one in which there’s a tinge of magic in the world in the form of Ethians (spelling?): people who can shape-shift from human to an animal form. It’s based on a novel I haven’t read. The TV adaptation includes a salty narrator and a bunch of modern cover songs. It was a really unique show and I hope we get a second season!

WondLa (Apple TV) — This is a short animated series that felt like Horizon Zero Dawn meets Fallout meets Disney. Eva is a girl raised by a robot mom in an underground bunker. She heads to the surface to find other humans and to her surprise, the world has been drastically changed and is full of alien life. It was fun and kind of sweet. Not great but I think it was 7 episodes of 20 minutes or so, so it didn’t overstay its welcome.

We watched a lot of other stuff but nothing that stuck in my head so I guess none of it was that great! 🙂

Reading

Nothing. Well, I’ve been reading a lot of news lately. Trying to stay informed without depressing myself, which let me tell you is like walking a tightrope! But it’s still too hot to hang out with the doggo outside and get much reading done. Maybe in September or October I can get back to reading.

And that’s July, all wrapped up in a neat bundle. We’re halfway through the summer, thanks goodness. Not that August is any cooler but at least the days are getting shorter which means we have a little more shade during our after-work walk. Until fall comes we’ll just keep taking it one day at a time, I guess. Hope wherever you are it is cooler (though that probably requires being in the southern hemisphere, so basically Naithin) and that you’re having a great summer!