Category: TV & Movies

August 2023

Posted on by Nimgimli

OMG you beautiful people, the hellscape which is August is OVER! Against all odds I have once again survived the heat of the North Carolina summer. Heck this year felt easy compared to other parts of the country. I think we maxed out at heat indexes around 105F or so which would’ve felt danged comfortable to the folks in Lawrence, KS who at one point ‘enjoyed’ a heat index of 133F. I can not even image what that feels like.

Forgive me, I’m old. Talking about the weather is about all I do these days. And when I say “talking” I really mean “bitching.”

Anyway, on to the recap, only 1 day early this month. I’m ditching the ‘last month/this month’ format. I’m generally pretty happy with this new ‘system’ of picking a handful of titles and sticking with them. My only real regret from this month is I’ve done so little VR gaming. A lot of that is just down to heat and humidity. I know it doesn’t make sense since I do my VR inside the air conditioned apartment but I still always somehow feel hot and strapping on the headset just doesn’t feel appealing. I’m also doing my VR workouts 4 times a week which, I fear, is conditioning my brain to try to avoid the thing because “visor = hard work and sweating.” I talked about this more in my VR workout post from the other day.

This month I’ve focused on five games:

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: I finally finished the Dawn of Ragnarök expansion which I quite enjoyed. In it you play as Havi/Odin rather than as Eivor and I kind of preferred him to Eivor. It was also pretty easy since I was over-powered for it. It meant I could just walk into a camp and take on all comers in a glorious whirlwind of arrows and axes. Once Dawn was completed I finished the final “farewell” quest wherein Eivor leaves her clan to go in search of new adventures. Which is a spoiler but not really since at the start of the game we’d found her grave in North America so we knew she’d eventually head that way.

The only major aspect of the game I haven’t completed is a rogue-like mode where you once again play Havi who is trying to rescue Baldr from Niflheim. I’m not generally a fan of rogue-likes though in this one you do get to carry forward some progression from run-to-run, which helps. But between being past the 200 hour mark on my save and the fact that the game (with all the DLCs) is a chonky 150 GBs (and my drive is rather full) I decided to bail on poor Baldr and move on. And while I still preferred AC: Odyssey to Valhalla, that 200+ hours doesn’t lie: I really enjoyed this game. And damn is it ever pretty.

If I really wanted to, I could stick around and chase achievements as there are still MANY things to do in the open world. Here’s a map that shows just a part of the base game and you can see all the white, yellow and blue dots that indicate treasures and artifacts that I never got around to collecting:

So many tasks left unfinished. If you tried to 100% this game I can see where it might make you a wee bit crazy.

After spending so much time with Eivor it was actually hard to click “uninstall.” I mean I could always reinstall it but it felt like saying goodbye to a friend. Yes, I’m weird.

Persona 4 Golden: Initially I started playing the console version of Persona 3, but then a remake/remaster was announced so I decided to wait for that, and switched to Persona 4 Golden. I just really wanted to finally make a serious attempt at a Persona game and it felt like something that I could play comfortably via Remote Play on the Steam Deck. It is early days yet… I’m under 10 hours and this is a long game. So far I’m liking it. I love the aesthetics and the music. There’re a lot of gameplay systems I’m still sussing out. So quietly optimistic about this one so far.

Redfall: When this came out it was so universally hated that I kind of had to play it (since it was on Game Pass). My inner contrarian was sure that the game must be better than folks said it was. I did wait until after their first big patch which I’m told increased the encounter rate, among other things. Given that the world can still feel kind of empty I can’t imagine how it felt BEFORE they tweaked that.

So I started playing and y’know, I was liking it OK. My plan was to just finish the main story and MAYBE to take one character to level cap. I was feeling pretty smug, given how clearly it seemed that my refined videogame palate that was letting me find the good bits that others missed. Then I kept playing and found myself liking it less and less, and the smugness faded pretty quick. I still don’t think it is awful but neither do I think it is good enough to keep playing, and I only got to level 10 (the cap is 40). I also didn’t spend $60 in it which probably softens my reaction to some extent.

The story is making so little an impression that I can’t even tell you what the plot is, but what finally got me to decide to pack it in is just how every fight kind of feels the same. I haven’t seen a new weapon in a while, just higher level models of the same handful I’ve had since early days. A lot of the character skills relate to multiplayer so it might be that playing in a group makes it all more fun but as a single player game, there’s just not much to hold me. I’m glad I tried it and if I didn’t have any other games to play I might keep playing but I have a lot of good and great games I want to get to. I can’t spare more time on what is, at best, an OK game.

The vampire plague seems to have been caused by technology rather than magic and here I think we’re supposed to be learning how but it is all so disjointed that I can’t follow it.

Final Fantasy XVI: To be blunt, I don’t understand the universal praise FF XVI is getting. I am not enjoying it all that much, which is odd because I played the demo and LOVED that to the point where I pre-ordered the whole game at full price, which is something I rarely do these days. What I’m finding is the full game is basically the demo recycled over and over. Fight some trash mobs then a mini-boss followed immediately by a Boss boss which will have several phases. There is very little exploration and the combat system, to me, doesn’t feel great. It is definitely a pretty game and the story is fine. I think I’d like it as a movie more than I do as a game. Side note: At one point I had to skip some cutscenes (the game has a habit of stringing together cutscenes without giving you a chance to save) which led me to seeing if I could find a YouTube video so I could watch what I missed. I found a video with all the cutscenes from the game and it is, get this, 20 hours long! That’s a lot of cutscenes.

One of my big gripes about the combat system is how hard it is to ‘read’ the fight since everything always looks like this. What is the enemy doing right now? I have no clue.

I could, and might, do a blog post about all the things that bug me about FFXVI [spoiler: a lot of it has to do with pacing] but for now I’ll just mark it as being something of a disappointment. I’m about half-way through it and decided to just flip the difficulty to “Story Mode” just so I can finish it as quickly as possible.

The Witcher 3: When we finally got around to watching The Witcher S3 on Netflix it got me in the mood to play the game again. I’m proud to say I did NOT start over but picked up where I last left off. I still am not as far as I’ve been in earlier (eventually abandoned) saves but I’m slowly making progress. There’re so many side quests and I KNOW I should ignore them and just follow the story line but…shiny lovely side quests! How can you resist them? Suffice to say I’m enjoying myself though I still don’t really understand “builds” in The Witcher 3. You have so many skill points but so few “slots” for skills. Fortunately not knowing how to build a powerful Geralt hasn’t really held me back. I guess thanks to being over-leveled due to those delicious side quests. 🙂

Watching:

The Witcher S3 which we enjoyed aside from the cliffhanger ending and knowing, what with strike and all, that it’ll probably be 2025 before we learn what happens next.

Secret Invasion was OK, but for me just OK. I found myself glad it was only 6 episodes. And yet they still managed to kill off a (somewhat minor) character that I liked.

Halt and Catch Fire is an old show on AMC+ that is about the start of the PC revolution. It ran for 4 seasons but by the middle of season 2 my interest was starting to wane.

Ahsoka is another one that, so far, I just find is “OK” though I think PartPurple likes it more than me. It’s early days so maybe it’ll ramp up but so far it kind of feels formulaic to me. And adult Ahsoka is so completely different from the young Ahsoka from the animated shows.

I guess we’re watching a lot of TV these days because I still haven’t listed Foundation or Invasion. Both of which we’re enjoying but in neither case do I feel like imploring you to watch. And with the writer’s strike still going on I’m leery about getting too invested in any show because it is really up in the air as to if or when anything is going to get a next season.

Reading:

I finally finished Leviathon’s Fall and the Expanse series and I’m really glad I stuck with it. As a series it was definitely 5/5 stars even though a couple of the books as stand alones dropped to a 4. I kind of feel like The Expanse has ruined all other space-based sci fi for me now.

And that’s the recap. Next up, September and Starfield. I wasn’t honestly paying much attention to all the Starfield hype until just recently, and now I’m kind of excited for it. I’ll be able to start playing on Thursday evening since I sprang for the enhanced edition upgrade (which was around $35 if you’re a Game Pass subscriber).

 

July 2023

Posted on by Nimgimli

Summer in the south is never a good time, and this July wasn’t any exception. Going to be a pretty short recap this month because I haven’t done much! Well, except for work. Lots of overtime in the second half of this month.

My days have been going something like this: Get up and start working. I’ve been working from 7:30 – 8:00 am through to 5 pm, with an hour break for lunch when I can get it. Then I walk the dog in the sweltering heat. Get back in and do my VR workout (always a struggle given I’m over-heated before I begin), then shower. By the time that is all done its dinner time, which these days has crept later and later until now we eat around 8 PM. Generally watch some TV, usually an episode of Jeopardy and an episode of whatever show we’re into. So that takes us to 9:30 or so. Then often another couple hours of work and… as you can see not much time for gaming except on the weekends.

Last Month’s Games:

I finally finished Ghostwire: Tokyo early in the month. I wound up enjoying it but it was a game that I dropped and came back to frequently. It didn’t really stand up to that obsessive “spend every free moment playing” pace. Mostly it was my weekend mornings game. I might have kept playing past main story end except I’d already hit level cap and that took away a lot of the incentive of exploring and rescuing souls. I still got something like 30 or 40 hours of fun out of it though. If there’s ever a sequel I’ll be there for it.

I’m still playing, or trying to play, Walking Dead: Saints & Sinnners. The PSVR2 has mostly been sitting idle, though very much NOT by choice. This isn’t about getting tired of VR; it’s about struggling to find spots where I have the free time & the free energy & the free living room to devote to it. (Unfortunately with the setup I have, I pretty much have to take over the living room to do PSVR so I have to wait until @partpurple is off doing something on her computer.) Lately those 3 things just haven’t been coming together.

[EDIT: This is what I get for posting my recap early. After talking about S&S in this post I REALLY had the urge to play so I did and… finished. I had no idea I was so close to the end. Great game though! Now on to the DLC!]

I’m also still noodling around in Final Fantasy XVI but struggling to get into it. I loved the demo and immediately pre-ordered as soon as the demo ended, but the full game hasn’t grabbed me. I think that is more on me than the game; I don’t think it shines when you’re playing for 30 minutes every 2 or 3 days. I might just set it aside until life settles down some.

New This Month

Early in the month I jumped back into an old Oculus Rift game, Shadow Legends VR. I played through it using the Quest 2 and Oculus Air Link. Even finished it and wrote a post.

TV

All the usual subjects are in rotation: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (still excellent), Foundation S2, The Witcher (@partpurple needed a refresher course so we went back to rewatch the first two seasons.) Our lunch time guilty pleasure is a re-watch of Stargate SG-1. We sneak in an episode at lunchtime when my schedule permits. If we watch the whole thing that’ll keep us busy until well after Christmas! My end of the day wind-down show was Walking Dead: The World Beyond, and I would not recommend it. I more or less watched it to mock it.

Reading:

I finished Tiamat’s Wrath and started Leviathan Falls, the final Expanse book. I’ve been reading this series for so long I’m not sure what I’ll do with myself when I’m finished!

And that’s been July. I have a 4-day weekend coming up; I just knew by about now I’d be in desperate need of a mental health break and boy was I right. One of the work projects that has been causing all the overtime is due this week (and should be delivered on time) so after that things should chill out a bit. Maybe next month I’ll have something worth talking about!

June 2023

Posted on by Nimgimli

Welcome to the really nasty months of summer. We actually had a pretty mild June here in NC; It’s only hit 90F+ in the last couple days. Compared to last year when by July 1st it’d already been brutally hot for more days than I felt I could handle, it has been a joy. Of course now I’m worried the pendulum will swing back and July-Sept will deliver record-breaking heat but that’s just me and my glass half empty attitude.

Anyway on to the recap, such that it is.

Last Month’s Games

[Ghostwire Tokyo] In life this little girl was a piano prodigy but now the music just sounds wrong. Turns out the music itself was cursed by a malicious maestro!

I think only one game made it from last month, and that is Ghostwire Tokyo which I’m still playing, and still enjoying. Just to give you an idea of how much gaming I’m doing these days, How Long To Beat lists Ghostwire Tokyo as being 21 hours long for “Main & Extra” content and 38 hours for the Completionists. I’ve been playing it for several months and still haven’t finished. I think I’m at something like 23-24 hours.

I’m going to be super-lazy and respost a comment I made on Nerd Girl Thoughts in response to a post that mentioned Ghostwire:

I’m enjoying Ghostwire Tokyo quite a bit (playing on Xbox Game Pass). I love the creepy feeling of moving around an empty city. And the Visitor designs are awesome; some of them make my skin crawl. When the parade of ghost demons [see image at the top of this post] comes sauntering down an avenue I always stop to watch it, from a safe distance. Getting pulled into that thing is not good.

I don’t really like “horror” but I do really enjoy “creepy” and there’s not a lot of games that offer the latter without leaning into the former. Plus the side quests always make me feel good. In general helping all these spirits move on to a better place feels a lot better than the typical fetch quests with very little narrative support that you get in other games.

And then there is the lore, whether it be learning about Japanese junk food or about some truly weird demons from Japanese legends.

Agreed, though, that the combat isn’t super compelling, but it gets the job done.

[Ghostwire Tokyo] This is Mr Gutsy. He shows up in a cursed school. He only moves when you are not looking at him. Mr Gutsy really creeps me out.

New This Month

Early in the month the last Destiny 2 expansion went on sale, so I bought it and as is typical, started playing but focused on the old content I’ve never done, and got bored and drifted away before ever getting to the expansion I just bought. Not really complaining though… I had a good bit of fun while I was playing. It just never holds me for very long.

It’s tough to get a good pic in Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners since you need both hands to hold off a walker and also stab it in the head. No fingers left to punch the ‘take screenshot’ button. After this shot I grabbed a knife in my left hand and put this one down.

Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is what I’m playing most in Playstation VR, when I’m just playing a game. It’s been a lot of fun. The basic game loop is you take a boat to an area and have a fixed amount of time before darkness falls and the undead swarm (I guess…I’ve always fled before I see what bad stuff happens). During that time you can scavenge for junk that you can break down to craft with back at camp, or you can try to push a quest forward. I guess if you’re really good you can do both but I tend to run out of time if I don’t focus on one or the other. It’s the kind of game which would probably be too basic to keep me interested in ‘flat’ gaming but in VR is pretty compelling.

[Walking Dead: Saints & Sinnners] Dark & spooky crypt is dark and spooky!

I’m dabbling in a lot of VR games but won’t list them here since I might mention them in a VR workouts post.

I also picked up Final Fantasy XVI based on really enjoying the demo though in all honesty I haven’t gotten very far in it. I like it well enough but I’m just not doing much gaming these days.

TV

The big hit with us this month is Silo (Apple TV) which is a dystopian sci-fi show about a community of people living in an underground silo. Something happened that erased all knowledge of the outside world; everyone knows it exists but they all believe leaving the Silo = instant death. Their technology & knowledge is limited in strange ways. They have rudimentary computers, but for instance there are no movies or video. They have a window or two into the outside world but they don’t understand what stars are. It’s really strange and fun. As this show is still airing I dunno what the truth is but I am loving it!

Very close behind that in my “OMG what great TV this month!” list is season two of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Paramount+). S1 felt like very traditional Star Trek but so far S2 seems to be stretching out to become it’s own thing and so far, I am on-board with that.

Yellowjackets (Showtime) is a show about a high school girl’s soccer team that gets lost in the mountains and isn’t rescued for 18 months. The show bounces back and forth between what happens in the wilderness as the girls struggle to survive (things get very dark), and their lives 20-ish years after rescue as someone is threatening to expose their secrets. This show seems quite well-loved but honestly I’m having trouble really getting into it. There’s enough there to keep us watching but we can also set it aside for a week and not miss it.

The Big Door Prize (Apple TV) is a strange show. As it stars Chris O’Dowd I expected it to be a comedy and it has funny moments but mostly it just felt uncomfortable and sad. The setting is a small town where a mysterious machine shows up in the local general store. This machine tells you your life potential and the adults of the town get really fixated on this, some of them changing careers or just flipping over the table that is their lives, while the teen-agers of the town just scratch their heads and try to figure out what the hell is going on. This one has been reviewed well but I just found it pretty depressing.

Loot (Apple TV) on the other hand, is pretty fun. It stars Maya Rudolph as a very rich, and recently divorced, individual who learns that she owns a charity foundation, and decides to get involved with it, much to the dismay of the person running the charity. Ron Funches shines as the lovable and optimistic IT dude and he steals every scene he is in. This (so far, we haven’t finished it) is a real ‘feel good’ show kind of in the vein of Ted Lasso.

Reading

As the temps climb I haven’t been reading that much since I do most of my reading while sitting outside with Lola. I’m still in the middle of The Expanse book 8 (I think?) Tiamat’s Wrath. Not finished so I can’t say what my final opinion will be, but generally I’m liking it less than the earlier books.

And that’s June wrapped up. Getting into doing more exercising has really impacted the cadence of my life. I spend a lot of time doing physical VR stuff and then being quite tired in the evenings. Tired enough that I often put on a soccer match or something rather than playing a game. It makes for short recaps but actually it all feels pretty good as I now play games when I really feel like playing them rather than just kind of out of habit, which I’d been doing for quite some time.

May 2023

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m a few days early, yeah. But we’re in another hell-cycle at work and I don’t know that I’ll have time to post during the week, and my mental state is once again in a very bad place (thanks 100% to the job), so I’m trying to free up tomorrow (a holiday here in the US) as a completely commitment-free day to try to beat back this depression. So the recap comes early this month.

I’m really thinking I need to find a new job but the idea of being 63 and on the market for a web developer job is fairly terrifying. It’s not that the actual WORK at my current job is bad or hard, it’s the management that makes everything awful because every project comes in hot with deadlines that some exec pulled out of his or her ass with no understanding of how much work is involved and no awareness of what other projects are in process. Because of this there is never enough time to do things properly. I’m not good at just letting this stuff go and I carry the anxiety of impossible deadlines with me all the time and it just crushes my spirit.

Anyway, I bought a copy of the teachings of Epictetus and maybe that will help. 🙂

Last Month’s Games

Only two games made it over to this month.

The first was Honkai Star Rail which I enjoy when I play, but I don’t play very often. I’m really looking forward to it hitting the Playstation and when it does I think I’ll probably throw myself into it in a big way. I’m just back to a “can’t sit in front of this PC for another minute” place because, as mentioned, work has been really, REALLY sucking again.

Creepy visitors trying to trap souls. We must stop them!

The other title is Ghostwire Tokyo which I continue to enjoy and chip away at. It’s probably the (non-VR) game I put the most time into this month, even though that wasn’t a huge amount of time. For sure though, if you have Game Pass or PS+ Extra, check it out. It’s good fun.

New This Month

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart hit Playstation+ Extra. This was kind of a tentpole launch title for the Playstation 5 and was supposed to show off the capabilities of the machine. I kept meaning to buy it but never did, and now I’m glad I didn’t because I can play it for pseudo-free! And…. it’s OK. I mean it is a beauty to behold, but I think I’ve just outgrown the genre. It’s satisfying to hop in and smash stuff and then vacuum up all the nuts & bolts (which pass for currency) but I never play it for more then half an hour before getting bored. So I’m REALLY glad I didn’t pay $70 or whatever it was at launch. A younger version of me would been over the moon for this game, though. Point being that it isn’t a bad game (it got great reviews), just not my kind of game. But it sure is pretty!

Alternate dimension lombax Rivet hangs out with Mort. That’s Mort on the left. also on the right. All these critters are named Mort, dontcha know.

Other than that I’ve been spending a LOT of time in VR. Doing the workouts (which means playing Beat Saber, The Climb and Pistol Whip) has been good for me but does leave me feeling tired and often too lazy to play a conventional game. And when I’m not working out I’ve been playing less-active games like Racoon Lagoon & Shadow Legend. I find it can be pretty hard to talk about VR games, though, because they always sound boring unless you’re in there, doing stuff.

TV

Mrs. Davis — Mrs Davis is a Siri-like digital ‘assistant’ that has basically taken over the world. She tasks a nun with recovering the holy grail. Like literally, THE Holy Grail. Sounds bizarre, right? Well it was, but it was weird enough to be hard to follow, but not quite weird enough to be in that “OMG I don’t know what I’m watching but I love it” category. [See, for example, Everything Everywhere All At Once]. We finished it but found it was not a good show to binge. It was best in small doses and in the end, well, it was OK.

Midnight Club — Teenagers dying from terminal diseases encounter the supernatural while living out their final days in a hospice. I was dubious but it ended up being really good, though as you might expect it’s not always the most upbeat of shows. Still there are moments of joy. There’s also like an anthology series tucked inside with some good stories (the kids tell each other scary stories as part of the titular Midnight Club). In fact it’s kind of 3 shows in once. The ‘short stories’ the kids tell each other, the ‘what supernatural thing is happening’ story, and the story about teenage kids facing their impending deaths together. The ending was not cut & dry, but still felt pretty satisfying even though not all the mysteries were solved. In fact that seemed somewhat appropriate. [Since writing this earlier this month I’ve learned that the show has already been cancelled. I still think it is worth watching but just be aware you aren’t going to get a nice neat ending and there are definitely mysteries that remain unsolved, but it doesn’t end on a major cliffhanger.]

Ted Lasso – I’d watched and loved the first 2 seasons but I could never get @partpurple to try it. Now I have and she is also loving it. Such a great show, full of good feels.

Reading

Finished Persepolis Rising and started Tiamat’s Wrath (both part of The Expanse series). Honestly so far this feels like part 1 and part 2 of the same book. Persepolis Rising starts 30 years after the prior book and that kind of saddened me, as of course all the old crew we’ve grown to know and love are now much older and I just feel like we missed out on hearing about so many adventures! The big bad now (spoiler incoming) is a Mars faction that took over a system that held ancient dockyards. Suddenly 30 years later they return with a plan to conquer all mankind, and advanced tech (they’ve been playing with the proto-molecule) to make it happen. Maybe I’ll get sucked back in; we’ll see. I mean both are still good books but not as jaw-droppingly good as I found the earlier Expanse novels.

And I guess that’s about it for May!

April 2023

Posted on by Nimgimli

I generally write these recaps as a kind of running journal throughout the course of the month, then just hit publish on the last day. This month I haven’t been doing that. This sentence is being written on the 23rd, so while I do still have a week to work on the post, I’ve mostly forgotten what I did in the first couple of weeks.

Like almost every other thing I’ve ever done on a predictable schedule, the recaps went from fun to routine to a chore, so might be time to sunset them. On the other hand I DID just renew the blog’s hosting plan for 2 more years, though I’m feeling a bit of regret about that. So if I don’t do the recaps, what will I do other than let the blog lay fallow? I guess we’ll see. For now though…

Last Month’s Games

I finally got free of Genshin Impact. When the new battle pass started, I made a conscious decision to NOT go after points for it so that I wouldn’t get sucked into that cycle of doing tasks to earn points rather than because I wanted to do them. And when my $5/monthly sub ended I didn’t renew it so I don’t have the incentive to do my daily log in for free Primogems. Now I play it when I want to play it which hasn’t been too often. I still like the game, just need a change of pace for a bit.

Almost nothing else from last month remains. I did boot up Pillars of Eternity once or twice for a grand total of maybe 2 hours played all month, and I continued to play Age of Empires IV for the first week or so, but it too has been set aside.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns is in danger of being forgotten amidst a ton of new shiny things that have distracted me, but I’m not ready to write it off yet.

New This Month

Golf games (2K, EA, Everyone’s Golf) — Early this month I got on a golf kick, trying ‘realistic’ games from 2K and EA, and Everyone’s Golf on Playstation, which is more cartoony and uses the old 3-click system. 3-4 days was enough of golf, though, partly because I couldn’t decide which variety I wanted to play. Choice paralysis set in and I moved on.

Everybody’s Golf goes with a fun, cartoony style. My avatar is apparently an elf.

Meet Your Maker — Wrote a post about this one, played for a couple more evenings then uninstalled. I just need some kind of narrative hook to keep me playing a game (even if that hook is only happening in my ‘internal roleplaying’) and Meet Your Maker doesn’t have one. Don’t expect to be going back to this one any time soon, but I do still think it’s an innovative game and I hope it enjoys a lot of success.

Ghostwire Tokyo hit Xbox Game Pass and I enjoyed it for a few nights before drifting away. I quite liked it but I’m just struggling to stay focused on anything these days. It’s nicely creepy but somehow doesn’t feel like horror, which is a good thing for me because I’m not really into horror or being scared. Real life is scary enough. Being creeped out, though? That I can do. Somehow fighting headless school girls comes across as creepy rather than scary.

Ghostwire Tokyo teaches you a surprising amount about Japanese food, and y’know I find myself making a point of reading all these!
Combat always feels a little sloppy and a little too chaotic for my tastes, but the lore and setting is pretty interesting

No Man’s Sky & Star Trek Online are both games I’ve started SO many times and never gotten far. Now I’ve started them both again and… surprise! I haven’t gotten very far. For No Man’s Sky it was because I opted to play it on PS5 and for some reason couldn’t access my PS4 saves. I probably had to convert them or something but opted to start fresh. In Star Trek Online I was DETERMINED not to start over but then there was an event where if you started a new character you could earn account-wide awards so of course I had to do that. Thus a Vulcan Science Officer was born.

I bet most of my crew looks familiar to anyone who has ever played, as does the newbie ship in the background

Honkai: Star Rail is like Genshin Impact, only in space and with turn-based combat. It’s out on PC and mobile and is supposed to come to Playstation soon. I’m dabbling in it but doubt I’ll play it seriously until it hits the PS5.

First mini-boss fight. Took me a couple tries to beat it

This isn’t everything but it’s all I can remember and I haven’t played anything enough to have much to say about any of it. I’m cautiously optimistic about Redfall, but that’s not out until next week. Sad that it is capped at 30FPS on Xbox but I can live with it.

TV

Picard Season 3 was gosh darned amazing. We just loved it. And cry? Yes, we cried… a lot.

The Mandalorian was pretty good, too.

The Walking Dead is a show we watched for like 10.5 seasons as it was airing before finally losing track of it. It’s finally hit Netflix so we decided to watch the last season and a half just so we can say we did it. That show got SO damned repetitive. We’re sorta glad we finished but I can’t see myself ever re-watching it.

School Spirits is basically an 8 episode mystery. It’s about a girl who was killed and is now a ghost, destined to haunt her high school. She can’t remember who killed her though. Show does a great job of leading you from suspect to suspect. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would even though I thought the protagonist was pretty horrible to everyone around her. It’s on Paramount+ and seems to have a modest budget, so even though many of the characters are ghosts there aren’t any special effects or anything which, it turns out, is absolutely fine. A good mystery trumps good CGI, I guess. My only real gripe was (of course) the ending which did present us with the solution to the mystery but in doing so opened some pretty big plot holes, AND then revealed kind of another level of mystery which, presumably, will be explored if they get a season 2. Overall I would’ve been happier with a tidy ending and a single season show, I think.

Also been watching a lot of Major League Soccer and English Premiere League football.

Reading

Finished Babylon’s Ashes and started Persepolis Rising. Yup, still doing The Expanse thing. Still enjoying them though, spoiler, there is a 30 year jump between the two which made me a little sad.

Sorry this month’s recap isn’t very interesting to read. It’s really mostly just a record for my own use if for some reason I ever want to remember what I was playing this month.

Not sure what next month will bring. While I like having a record, I feel weirdly embarrassed about starting so many games and not sticking with any of them. If I don’t do recaps I can just play what I feel like playing, whether it’s for 10 minutes or 10 months. But once I put it in a recap and then wind up dropping it by the next month, I feel like I’ve failed.

Might be time to go back to random “Hey I played this last night and it was kinda cool.” posts and leave it at that.

March 2023

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Well, March kind of flew by, at least for me. And I’m still here, blogging a bit. Overall things are better with me. Got through that dark patch when exhaustion was really impacting my mental health. I firmly believe ditching social media and in particular stepping away from certain individuals has really helped. I had several ranting paragraphs about my issues with social media, and Mastodon in particular, in the first draft of this recap. It made me angry all over again writing it, though, and probably would’ve made me angry re-reading it at some point in the future. So I nuked it. It isn’t worth rehashing beyond saying I’m much happier without it.

Last Month’s Games

Genshin Impact once again took up a huge chunk of time for the first 3 weeks of the month. I finally got caught up on the “Archon Quests” (main story quests, basically), I completed the Battle Pass with something like 2 weeks to spare, and I hit the 300 hour mark according to the PS5. That all felt like a reason to step back for a bit to free up time to play some other games.

Pillars of Eternity (which I deemed ‘dropped last month, I guess prematurely) and The Witcher 3 are both being kept warm. I jump into both games maybe once a week just so I don’t forget how to play/where I am in them. I’m not ready to give up on either game yet!

Persona 3 Portable, however, does seem to be dropped.

New This Month

Outriders isn’t really new; I played it a good bit when it came out. I never liked it very much, but I came back to it mostly because I was nearing an Achievement and I needed an Achievement for a Microsoft Rewards quest. I was close enough to the end of the campaign that I decided to keep going so I could finish, delete and get the 100 gb or so of drive space back. The actual gameplay of Outriders is OK, but the aesthetics and the story are not my cup of tea. Like everyone else I guessed the ‘mystery’ within about the first 10 minutes of playing. I didn’t like the script, I didn’t like the voice acting, I didn’t like the character models, I didn’t like the character animations, I didn’t like the look of the gear you earned. But the combat was OK if you’re not a ‘hang back and pick ’em off one by one’ kind of player. Just out of curiosity after finishing the campaign and a couple of side quests (wanted to get to level 30 for another Achievement), I looked at the Worldslayer DLC. It is $40!! Oh hell no. $40 seems pretty expensive at launch, but this long afterwards that it is still $40 made this one an easy “delete and move on”.

The Settlers — see blog post. I’m not sure I ever played again after writing that post. I went through a ton of tutorials and by the time I was done I was ready to move on! LOL It’s still just a bit too retro for my impatient old brain.

After dropping The Settlers I moved onto Age of Empires. First Age I Definitive Edition, but that, like The Settlers, felt a little too old school so I moved up to Age of Empires II Definitive Edition. It adds some QOL features like auto-scouting and patrol routes that make gameplay feel a little less fiddly. I skipped Age 3 since no one seems to like it as much as II, and then fired up Age of Empires IV, which is where I think I’ve settled, mostly because it’s the prettiest. 🙂 My only real gripe is that there’s a lot of live-service adjacent/e-sports type stuff when you first load it up. There is some kind of player level/score they pressure you to increase and I find that super off-putting, but so far I just ignore it and skip past to the solo stuff.

I tried one of the AoE games on the Xbox but nope, my brain just doesn’t like RTS with controller.

Screenshot of Age of Empires IV showing a very 1-side melee skirmish
Never tell me the odds!

Fire Emblem Three Houses — I hardly ever use my Switch and I’m semi-thinking of getting rid of it, or at least sticking it in storage or something. Before I do, there’s a couple games I bought and never played much. FE3H is one of them, even though I’ve loved earlier Fire Emblem games.  I think when I first started playing I didn’t like how much time you spent just talking to NPCs. I don’t mind that now. But what I do mind now is that the text is so small when playing in Handheld Mode. My plan was to swap the Switch for the Steam Deck for those “lying in bed” gaming sessions, but by that point in the day my eyes are too damned tired to deal with the tiny text of FE3H. I can of course play it on the TV but then it competes for time with Xbox and PS5 games. Talk about your #FirstWorldProblems, eh? But this is what knocked Persona 3 Portable out of the currently playing list.

I wasn’t planning on starting any other new games, but evil Microsoft made Marvel Midnight Suns one of their “Free Play Days” selections last weekend. I’d been interested in this game prior to launch, but once it came out it didn’t seem to make much of a splash so I kind of forgot about it. But for free? I’ll absolutely try it. And I really enjoyed it; enough so that I took advantage of a 50% off sale that was running to pick it up. Still enjoying this one quite a bit.

Midnight Suns gameplay example showing skill cards as well as super heroes arrayed for battle
Fighting some Hydra scum

TV

We finally finished Star Trek: Voyager. Whew! Definitely not one of my favorite ST series, but we both agreed having watched Next Generation, Deep Space 9 and Voyager sequentially was a good way to be sure we were pumped for….

Picard season 3. I get that this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but we love it. Keep in mind though, we love it more or less as a reunion show than as great stand-alone sci-fi. There are so many little factoids that I’m sure would’ve zipped right past us had we not watched the old shows fairly recently. Like Professor Moriarty (from Sherlock Holmes) showing up as a security system. That comes from a Next Generation episode based around a holodeck program where Moriarty becomes sentient and attempts to take control of the Enterprise. If you don’t remember that episode I’m sure you’d be “WTF”ing when the character showed up in Picard.

Finished The Last of Us and loved it. It could’ve been longer, in my opinion, but maybe less is more when there’s a story about constant fighting with other people post-apocalypse. I’m looking at YOU, The Walking Dead.

Alice in Borderland — This show was way more violent than what I’m usually comfortable with, but the mystery of what the heck is going on hooked me. It starts when 3 friends in Tokyo, trying to hide from the cops for an incident that caused a minor traffic accident, all duck into a stall in a rest room. Then the lights go out briefly. When they come out of the stall, the city is seemingly empty. But soon enough they are forced to play a series of deadly games. Where are they and how did they get there? Watch and find out. Think Hunger Games meets Lost, I guess. But a lot of graphic violence, so you’ve been warned on that front.

We’d watched Season 1 of Locke & Key back when it came out, but this month we re-watched S1 and watched all of Seasons 2 & 3. And that’s it; the series ended. I’m very happy it did because I found it to be a really dumb show, but it was her pick so I endured it. I mean, a lot of these teen-based paranormal shows have characters doing really dumb things, but this one just seemed over the top with that stuff. And if I took a shot every time a character held up a key and stared at it meaningfully (often in lieu of running away from the Big Bad), my liver would’ve given out mid-way through Season 2. There also seemed to be a lot of inconsistences within the show’s own lore, but maybe I just wasn’t paying enough attention. Also in my opinion, Bode, the youngest of the Locke children, was the true villain of the show.

Reading

Finished Nemesis Games (The Expanse book….. 5?) and started Babylon’s Ashes (Book 6). The TV show version of Nemesis Games was one of my least favorite seasons of The Expanse, but I enjoyed the book a lot more. And so far, Babylon’s Ashes is a good read, too.

I’ve also gone back to Marvel comic books. I had been working my way through all the comics in order but it was just overwhelming. I started this in Sept 2021 and I was still in 1964 two years later. Initially these old comics were a hoot but the novelty was worn off. I still want to get all the origin stories but at some point before I die I want to get into an era where the art is better and the villains slightly less cheesy. (Plus I’m learning origin stories change over time anyway; like originally Thor was some dude who found a magic staff that transformed him into the God of Thunder while he held onto it.) Anyway, I’ve skipped over to the 616 Essentials Order. And it’s still a lot, to be honest.

And that’s the recap for March. Life goes on… Hope you and yours are doing well, dear reader. See you next month.

February 2023

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Another short recap. The bad times I mentioned in my January recap ran into February and only in the last week or so have things really started to ease. I’m trying to appreciate the lack of crisis.

This was the month I pulled way way back on social media. I am not missing it, at least not now. I do maintain a Twitter account which I use mostly to follow games. I’ve been gradually unfollowing actual people. I deleted Mastodon, deleted Discord. I’d delete a bunch of others if I ever used them but remembering them and logging in just to try to figure out how to delete the account just seems like too much effort.

Even when work and stuff was just crushing me into a paste, I could feel this one parcel of my brain was feeling lighter thanks to avoiding the toxicity and toxic positivity of social media. The free periods I used to spend doom scrolling I’m now devoting to reading, which feels like a much better use of my time.

The one exception is Facebook, of all things, where I’ve found a small enclave of folks I’ve known for literal decades and who’re mostly content to exchange pleasantries now and then. It’s super low volume and hopping in once a day even feels like overkill. So that suits me pretty well for now. But damn is Facebook creepy. I bought a pair of windshield wiper blades from Amazon and literally within 5 minutes my Facebook feed was full of ads for wiper blades.

Anyway, on to the recap.

Last Month’s Games

Genshin Impact has been taking up like 90% of my gaming time. Still really loving it (obviously) and it’s been the perfect escapist kind of game for these trying times.

The other 10% is a bit of The Witcher 3 and a tiny slice of Persona 3 Portable which, in theory, I’m playing on the Steamdeck in bed. Except I’ve been staying up so late I tend to just collapse into sleep as soon as my head hits the pillow. It’s a great fit for Steamdeck though, considering it was originally designed for a portable device.

Pillars of Eternity is, I guess, dropped.

New Games This Month

Nothing

TV

The Last of Us has been incredibly enjoyable for us. I, of course, have played the game. Angela has not. I think we both enjoy the show about the same amount.

The Bad Batch isn’t grabbing us as much as the first season did. We are in season 2, right?

Poker Face is a new kind-of detective show, I guess? It’s about a woman (played by Natasha Lyonne) who has one ‘supernatural’ ability in that she can always tell when someone is lying. But she is on the run from some bad dudes and from the cops. She keeps stumbling upon crimes and opting to solve them. We, and a lot of others, are picking up kind of a Columbo vibe.

And we’re still grinding through Star Trek Voyager. On the last season and I feel like you can just watch the writers running out of ideas/interest.

Oh and Picard S3 but that’s just barely started. So far we’re digging it.

I’ve also been watching a lot of soccer. EPL and US Women’s National Team, plus MLS just started.

Reading

Lola was having some health issues in Jan/Feb and wasn’t up to walking much, but still wanted to be outside. So I was standing around a lot, and started back on The Expanse novels, reading via the Kindle app on my phone. It feels good to be reading something again. Nemesis Games is the book I’m on.

And that’s the recap. Maybe my last recap; I’ve been thinking a lot of turning off the blog. But I won’t go into all that just now.

January 2023

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The last couple weeks of January have been a hellscape for me so this month’s recap is gonna be short because my brain is just absolutely fried. And I better post this early over the weekend because I might not have time during the week.

Last Month’s Games

Genshin Impact is what I’ve been playing most. It has become, for me, that familiar comfort game that is just a way to escape from the world when you’re too wired and too tired to sleep and your brain is going 1000 RPMs and you just feel shattered and disconnected from the world. Which is how I’ve felt most of the time since mid-month. I’m back to doing some exploring and there are just some wonderful things to discover in this game. Lately it has been The Chasm which I thought was just a small area but oh boy, was I wrong. It doesn’t look that big on the map but the map doesn’t show how far down it goes. Great design. Loving it. Loving Genshin again.

The Witcher 3 is still sitting there waiting to be played and I keep saying “I’ll play that as soon as I’m done with Genshin for the day” but then I never get done.

Immortals Fenyx Rising is dropped. It just doesn’t grab me the way I need to be grabbed just now.

Final Fantasy 1 completed. Steam says I spent 23 hours in this game. About the first 8 were on PC, the rest was all on the Steam Deck, mostly playing in bed. Unpopular opinion: it wasn’t that good. At least not for me. I quickly became over-powered due to the constant random encounters I had to fight through while stumbling around lost. For the 2nd half (at least) of the game nothing could really threaten me, until I got to the last boss. There the difficulty spiked hard and I wiped a few times (first time I’d wiped in the game) until I read a guide. Beat the boss, now I can say I played it. Uninstalled and moving on.

Wasteland 3 dropped, just because the console version wasn’t great. The game itself seemed solid but the console port had some technical issues with button presses not registering, or sometimes registering twice. Or I’d think it hadn’t registered so I’d press a couple more times trying to get it ‘take’ and they’d all register at once and I’d confirm something I didn’t want to confirm. Still want to play this one, just not on console.

New Games This Month

Shapez was a random discovery that I had a good time with. Good enough to generate not just one, but two posts!

Pillars of Eternity landed on my plate this way: as mentioned I tried Wasteland 2 on console and it wasn’t great, But I really had the urge for a party based RPG. I tried the Pillars of Eternity Console Edition and it actually plays really well, but its a text-heavy game (if you dig into the lore) and I hate reading text from across the room. So then I decided to start it on Game Pass PC. Why didn’t I go back to Wasteland 3 if I was going to the PC anyway? Because I’m flighty, that’s why! Anyway I was really enjoying this until the January shit-storm landed on me; I hope to get back to it if/when things ease up.

TV

Mythic Quest S3 ended, leaving me sad. Glad to know it has been renewed for a 4th season. This is one of my favorite shows of the past decade. I just adore it.

The Witcher: Blood Origin got so much hate and so many bad reviews but we enjoyed it. Sure it wasn’t life changing or anything, but it was a fun fantasy adventure. I mean, it has Michelle Yeoh in it. That alone makes it worth watching. It told the story of The Conjunction of Spheres in a way different from what I’d sussed out of the books I’ve read (I haven’t read them all), but that’s OK. As I’ve gotten older I’ve learned to be flexible about how stories are told in different mediums or at different times. A fresh, somewhat different, take on a familiar tale can be fun. Granted, younger me would shake his fist at the screen and yell “That’s not how it was in the books!” but younger me was a punk.

Star Trek Voyager still plodding along. Thank goodness they added Jeri Ryan to the cast as Seven of Nine or I dunno if we would’ve made it through. We’re late in season 6 with one more to go after this.

Willow was a big disappointment. I really enjoyed the first couple of episodes from the point of view of it being a classic “fellowship heading out on a quest” tale, and I loved the music. The first episode ended with Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” sung by an artist I’m not familiar with: Sir Jude. I was pumped after episode 1 but the show got worse and worse after that and turned into a very CW-like show. Perhaps it was popular with young people but I cared less and less about the characters as they developed. I’m really sick of teenagers in all my fantasy shows. A better show featuring Hurdy Gurdy Man is Britannia.

Doom Patrol was a hit in our house for seasons 1 & 2 but we’re in season 3 now and neither of us have a clue what is going on. Really the only reason we keep watching it is that it is SO damned weird we just want to see what comes next. But it’d be great if at some point (we’re on episode 7 of S3 at the time of writing) they pull a plot together from all the threads floating around.

I’ve also been watching a lot of YouTube. I’m finally appreciating “Let’s Play” content when I kind of want a gaming fix but I’m just too tired to play myself. Granted I tend to fall asleep while watching, but that’s OK too.

Reading

Not a thing. 🙁

So there ya go. January done, February to come. Hoping life can go back to normal soon.

December 2022

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December has been a bit of a strange month. I guess that may be true for a lot of people, what with the holidays and all. But I feel like I’ve just kind of flitted around and haven’t really gotten deeply involved with anything. Having the Steam Deck has been a pleasing distraction as I’ve messed around with it a bit, and the knock on effect is that I’m paying attention to PC gaming again. I haven’t really PLAYED many PC games but over the holiday break I started watching a bunch of YouTube videos about great deals in the Steam Sale, as well as watching lots of gaming-related tech videos.

Last Month’s Games

Pentiment completed, and got a blog post.

Genshin Impact is back in rotation but once again I’m ruining it for myself by being fixated on the “Battle Pass” and playing to advance that rather than playing to enjoy the game. Not sure how I can break myself of this habit. I still haven’t started Chapter 2 of the story, for example.

Dying Light 2 got an update that includes a ‘prevent motion sickness’ setting, which led me to reinstall it. The setting in fact helps, so after making a huge announcement about how I am DONE with that game…I’m back to popping into it now and then.

Gotham Knights is, I guess, dropped for now. Haven’t played it at all recently, but I DO want to get back to it. I was liking it well enough, I just get so easily distracted.

Spiritfarer I guess I have to admit, is dropped. This was an Indie darling in 2022, I think, and I kind of like it but the pace is just so slow.

New Games This Month

Steamworld Heist completed. I’ve been poking at this on the Switch for months. Maybe years. It’s kind of a space opera. You control a crew of Steambots on a series of missions. Movement is turn-based but shooting requires aiming a wavering gun at the enemy. It was a pretty good game that, for me, overstayed its welcome a bit. Might have been due to how I play games, since I kept trying to keep all the characters leveled up which meant replaying missions over and over. Once I started getting bored I just focused on 4 characters and moved through the game fairly quickly. I ended up finishing at something like 26 hours when Howlongtobeat says it should take 12.5. So yeah, just me being me.

Geralt rides past a hanging tree.

The Witcher 3 got that Next Generation update so I decided to start it up again. I’m TRYING not to get distracted and do a ton of side quests because the last time I had a go at The Witcher 3 I got bored out of my mind because I became so over powered. That said, I noticed there is now an option to Scale Enemies and I don’t know if that is new or just something I never noticed before. As I write this I’m in Crookback Bog so still pretty early.

Immortals Fenyx Rising is a game I bought at launch since it was made by the team who made Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, a game I simply LOVE. But Fenyx is a lot more puzzle-based which I wasn’t expecting, and I bounced off it pretty hard. Now I’m giving it another go, starting fresh and knowing to expect the puzzles. I just got going with this one in the past week so we’ll see if it sticks or not.

Wasteland 3 is a game I’ve started a few times but never made a lot of progress in. Giving it yet another go. I mentioned I’ve been watching a lot of PC gaming videos on YouTube and they’ve created an itch to play something turn-based and tactical and Wasteland 3 seems to fit the bill. I’m playing it on the Xbox, but it is on Game Pass for both Xbox and PC and I’m a little conflicted. It definitely plays better with mouse and keyboard but I spend a lot more time gaming on the TV than I do on the PC so… we’ll see.

Final Fantasy, the pixel remaster, is my first Steam Deck game. I actually started it on the PC a while back and picked up where I left off but, boy howdy they don’t make this easy. There is no kind of quest log or anything and so I have NO idea what I’m supposed to be doing. I finally had to look at a walkthrough and I’m using that as my external quest log. You forget how hard these old games could be in unexpected ways!

TV

The Peripheral (Amazon Prime) was really good. It’s run by the same folks who did West World on HBO and has kind of that same trippy vibe. But it’s also the kind of show I don’t want to say much about because you should discover it all for yourselves!

Mythic Quest S3 (Apple TV+) has been quite enjoyable. Love this series.

Star Trek Voyager continues plodding along as our lunchtime viewing. I find it all really uneven. Some episodes are decent, some are super cringy. But you probably know this already. Who hasn’t seen Voyager?

The Essex Serpent (Apple TV+). It’s (I’m guessing) late in the 19th century and the fishing village of Essex is in a panic over a mystical/mythical serpent which may or may not exist. Meanwhile in London, well-to-do Cora is freed from a horribly abusive marriage by way of her husband dying. An amateur naturalist, she gets it in her head to go to Essex to determine if the serpent is real or not. She finds a village still in the throes of dark age religion, with the exception of a handsome vicar who tries to re-assure the villagers that the serpent is not real. He is constantly undermined by another religious figure (I was never sure of his rank) who preached fire and brimstone and claimed the serpent was sent from god to punish the villagers for their sins.

This is a 6 episode limited series that quickly turns from an interesting mystery to a painful romance. The first 5 episodes are grim, but it doesn’t take long for the serpent to be forgotten in favor of watching Cora be horrible to the people around her, all of whom, for reasons that I never understood, seem to be in love with her. She encourages them all before friend-zoning all but the one married man in her circle of influence, breaking hearts left and right with apparently no awareness she is doing so. Then in episode 6 all the bad stuff goes away and suddenly it is rainbows and butterflies. Even the people who die seem to get a happy ending somehow. It’s all very bizarre. I loved the first couple of episodes that focused on Essex and the serpent but it quickly went downhill from there, with many mysteries just being dropped along the way and a very unsatisfying ending. I’d skip this one.

Bocchi The Rock (Crunchyroll) was a delight. Thanks to Rakuna for recommending it. It’s about a painfully shy girl who decides to learn to play guitar so she’ll be popular. She ends up joining a band. I found the show laugh-out-loud funny at times, but even though the main character’s social anxiety is the source of much of the humor, it isn’t mean, which is quite a feat. In the end it’s a funny, heartwarming show and I found every character very likable. I sure hope we get a season 2. This was my favorite show for this month.

See (Apple TV+) posits a post-apocalyptic future where (almost) everyone is blind. Sighted people are considered witches and are killed, because it was sight that caused the end of the world. We’re in the last season and for me I’m kind of hate-watching it, though PartPurple enjoys it more. It just seems really implausible. Every character seems to have some kind of sonar or something. It’s also super violent and has some really detestable characters. Jason Momoa stars and he gives it his all and kind of carries the whole show. I was happy to see Joe Flannigan and David Hewett are both in the cast; they were both Momoa’s co-stars on Star Gate Atlantis, which was, IMO, a much better show than this.

The English Game (Netflix) is a period piece about the beginnings of football in England. It was recommended by Bree TruLove or I’d never have found it. It was created by Julian Fellowes, who was also behind Downton Abby and The Gilded Age, so if you liked those you’ll probably like this. Good stuff.

Conversely The English (Amazon Prime) is a western starring Emily Blunt so I was pretty excited for it, but after I sat through 2 episodes I was done. It’s just one long trope. Skip it.

Reading

Aside from my annual re-reading of A Christmas Carol, no reading this month. 🙁

And so we charge headfirst into 2023. What new disaster awaits us this year? My Resolution this year is not to make any resolutions so I don’t have too much interesting to say about 2023…yet.

November 2022

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Here we are, 11/12ths of the way through 2022. I love this time of year. Honestly November and December are about the only part of the year I really love. We need to move back north so summer can once again be something I look forward to instead of dreading.

Big news for me this month is I broke down and ordered a Steam Deck. It hasn’t arrived yet; I guess it is my Christmas present to myself. I’m not even sure WHY I want one but it just got stuck in my head that it was a cool gadget I needed in my life. I haven’t really bought a ‘toy’ since the new consoles 2 years ago so I don’t feel TOO guilty about spending the money.

Last Month’s Games

Spiritfarer is still being played every once in a while. I wrote a post about why I’m more or less done with it, but I still take a poke at it every now and then.

Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree’s Woe and the Blight Below got completed: here’s a post about that.

Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris has been dropped. I haven’t been able to shake off the ill will generated in the first part of the game.

Actually a lot of games have been dropped for no particular reason other than too many games, not enough time:
Fallout 3
Yakuza 0
Destiny 2
Cyberpunk 2077

New Games This Month

Dying Light 2 wound up warranting its own post. I have a complicated relationship with this game. In fact I finally had to uninstall it because I kept finding myself playing it even though I wasn’t enjoying it much and it was making my physically ill. Uninstalling it broke the cycle and I’m FREE!

You can pet the dog, so you know it’s a good game

Pentiment is a nifty little narrative adventure from Obsidian. It is (so far) all just talking to other characters so it is pretty chill. I really enjoy what I’ve played but that game play loop of just reading dialog is always a struggle for me. I always think “Heck, I should just read the book.” I do want to finish it, though. There’s been a murder and it must be solved.

Gotham Knights was a Black Friday purchase and despite my best efforts I’ve only put a short time into it. I’m enjoying it, but it is such early days I don’t feel qualified to say much about it.

And just at the very tail end of the month, I let Genshin Impact back into my life. 🙂

TV

Andor was great. Rogue One is my favorite ‘modern’ Star Wars movie and I really enjoyed the darker, more serious tone that Andor shared with that movie. Can’t wait for Season 2.

Winx: The Fate Saga was bad. Granted I’m not the target audience, but I’m kind of over these shows where some young person thinks they know every, and go off and do whatever they want, and wind up being the hero.

Star Trek Voyager is still voyaging. I think it generally has gotten better (I think we’re in Season 5 now?) but not consistently so. Some episodes are real clunkers.

Currently we’re watching Wednesday, which I expected to be a rather silly show, but has turned out to be kind of a dark dramedy and we are LOVING it. In case you haven’t heard of it, it’s about Wednesday Addams of The Addams Family after she’s been sent away to boarding school for non-human types. Now that I think of it, Winx is about a teenage girl sent to boarding school for non-human types as well, but the two shows are night and day in terms of quality.

Reading

Nadda. I’m back to not really doing any reading. 🙁

And that’s November. Wow, that was a short recap, eh? Hope everyone has a great holiday season and I’ll be back with December’s recap next year! Har! A dad joke to finish things off!