September 2022

Posted on by Nimgimli

Today I put a sweatshirt on for the first time since March or April. It was awesome! Granted it had more to do with staying dry (Hurricane Ian is drenching us) than staying warm, but it is a step in the right direction. Tolerable weather is just around the corner!

Anyway, on to the recap.

Last Month’s Games

Something new I’m trying this month, because these recaps aren’t already way too long, is following up on the games from last month’s recap that I didn’t finish, and to check in to see what’s going on with them this month. In part this is to try to get me to be a little more deliberate in what I play. Sometimes I still WANT to play something but the game gets pushed to the back burner until I’ve been away from it for too long to re-engage easily. I figure if I make public choices about what I’m still playing and what I’m done with, that might help. We’ll see.

So anyway last month’s unfinished business consisted of:

Ni No Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom. This one I finished early in the month and wrote a post about it. TLDR I think I would have enjoyed it more had I played it differently (focused more on the story quests rather than trying to do every side quest).

Tribes of Midgard — I played once or twice. After being hot on this game for 4-5 days I may be done with it, for now. I’ve beaten 3 of the 4 big Jotuns and I think there’s some baddies even bigger than those that comes after, but I’ve also upgraded all my crafting stations and stuff and it’s all starting to feel kind of same-y. Plus the last straw might be frustration with the world design. The maps exist on 3 or 4 levels with ramps that lead you up and down between them, but terrain is so chaotic you can spend a lot of time looking for a way to climb up to the next level. Initially that was kind of fun but now it’s a PITA. You CAN build stairs to go up but there’s a finite limit on the number of structures you can place in the world so leaving stairs behind might cause issues later on.

Basically I gave Tribes of Midgard a shot when they revamped Survival Mode and what we have now feels almost like an Early Access game. The basics are there and decently fun but (assuming the devs keep working on the game) I think it’ll be a better game after a few more patches/updates, so for now I’ve taken it out of rotation while anticipating that I’ll come back to it some day.

My Ascent character looking kind of...meh

I jumped back into The Ascent around mid-month and it’s a pretty good game, but I had just enough issues with it to decide to set it aside. For me it is a little uncomfortable to play on console. The levels are cluttered with tons of details and twisty paths but they’re all just a tad too small for my old eyes to parse. It feels like it was designed to be played on PC and is probably a great game on that platform. (Gamers with younger, stronger eyes than me may not have the same issues on console.) I also find the loot system a little bland and the character model for my character is not great. In the end something has to give, and I wanted to finally give Cyberpunk 2077 a try so needed to free up a slot in my schedule. So I think I’m done with The Ascent and probably won’t come back to this one, unless I get on a PC gaming kick and play it over there. Even though I’m leaving it behind I would recommend it if you like dual-stick shooters and cyberpunk worlds. Particularly if you’re a PC gamer and will be playing it from 2 feet, rather than 10 feet, away.

Spiritfarer – I haven’t been playing this as much as anticipated but every time I do I enjoy myself. So this one stays in rotation. I’m actually not sure WHY I’m not playing it more, other than being obsessed with other games.

Kiryu looking confused as he teases apart a complex plot line

Yakuza 0 has been a real slow burn. I keep thinking it is time to kick it to the curb then I boot it up ‘one last time’ and have fun and keep it around. So that’s where it is, out on the edge but still in rotation.

Destiny 2 — I had planned to play a LOT of Destiny 2 in September but then Genshin Impact happened and knocked D2 right out of the running. Still in rotation, though!

Genshin Impact took over my life this month. Still very much in rotation! Heck it kind of IS the rotation!

New Games This Month

The Artful Escape was a single-day game that I rather enjoyed. Here’s the post about it.

Like so many others I jumped into Cyberpunk:Edgerunners on Netflix and caught the bug. With Cyberpunk 2077 being on sale for half-price and the general buzz being that it has been fixed, I decided it was time to finally jump in. I created a character and did the tutorials and then… well not to sound like a broken record but… Genshin Impact!

Steamworld: Heist: Every so often I get the urge to break out the Switch and play something on it. This month that ‘something’ is Steamworld Heist, a game about robotic space pirates. It’s a funny little game. Turn-based but you have to aim your shots and these bots have really unsteady aim.

So yes, a very boring gaming recap this month. I’ve been playing Genshin every night, generally logging in to get daily tasks done before I move on to playing something else, then I get involved and before I know it, it is bedtime.

TV

With Star Trek: Deep Space 9 finished, we rolled right into Star Trek: Voyager. I have so many issues with this show in terms of the arc and plot holes. If Voyager is traveling in one direction towards home for all this time, how is it they keep running into the same characters over and over again? Wouldn’t they be leaving these people behind? How does Neelix (god there is SO much of the super annoying Neelix) know about every place they go? It’d be like me knowing the best place to get pizza in Tokyo since I am from earth. But hey, it’s our lunchtime viewing and we tend towards ‘don’t think about it too much’ content at lunch.

Fort Salem: Motherland (Hulu/Freeform) is an alternate history show where the Salem witches reached an accord with the government. In exchange for not being executed, they would serve the US military (or I guess, what would become the US military since the witch trials took place while the colonies were still colonies). The show follows a group of young witches at Fort Salem (in more or less present day) which is basically a military academy but for witches.

It’s a really interesting premise but I couldn’t get past the main characters being very “understanding” about welcoming a terrorist who killed hundreds of innocent people, brushing it off as “You did what you thought was right.” There are 3 seasons. We watched them all (SOMEONE in the house liked the show a lot more than I did). S2 was the strongest, S3 was a trainwreck. S1 was somewhere in between.

LOTR: The Rings of Power (Amazon Prime) & House of Dragons (HBO): I’m lumping these two together because I have the same feelings about both. I WANT to love them but I’m still on the fence with both of them. I think Rings of Power will be a lot better when I can go back and do a binge re-watch. @partpurple isn’t too excited about the show so I’ve been using my bi-weekly movie-night pick to watch 2 eps every 2 weeks and it doesn’t exactly flow, watching it like that. House of Dragons just doesn’t seem to be able to decide what it wants to be: a political drama or a super-violent, super-gross ‘edgey’ show. Hopefully they’ll sort that out but for now I’m kind of meh on it.

Star Trek: The Lower Decks is amazing in Season 3, as it has been in Seasons 1 & 2.

She-Hulk is another show I’m struggling to get past the @partpurple censor. I like it, I think she is lukewarm on it. But again I feel like I’m going to want to go back and binge it.

In general I kind of feel like I’ve lost the ability to really enjoy a show in the traditional ‘1 episode per week’ way. I’m just all-in on picking a show and watching it start to finish. I feel like I get a lot more enjoyment that way.

There’s a lot more TV but not much worth discussing. I mean I could talk about Casey Jones, starring Alan Hale (which originally aired in 1957) but I doubt that would resonate with many readers. I’m getting a kick out of it, though. It might just be the novelty of seeing Alan Hale playing someone other than The Skipper on Gilligan’s Island.

Reading

*crickets*

I’ve been playing on the Switch before bed. I have started to sneak in a bit of reading while out with Lola now that it is getting a bit cooler and we can just find a spot and chill, but I haven’t actually finished a book in months. Haven’t even been reading old-timey comics this month!

So that’s September in the books. Now to endure 31 days of ‘spooky’ stuff happening. I like Halloween well enough but I think like a week of any holiday is plenty. I don’t need 31 days of Halloween or Christmas or any other holiday. Though maybe 31 days of Thanksgiving would be fun: all those turkey dinners!

Genshin Impact and I have our first fight.

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I’ve been playing Genshin Impact for a bit over a month now. I know because I bought a 30 day ‘subscription’ thingie that awards 90 Primogems every day and I had to buy a second one a few days ago. Needless to say, I’m enjoying my time with the game.

But last weekend I hit my first bad patch. Me and the game had our first fight. It happened when I hit two road blocks at the same time, leaving me feeling, for the first time, like I had to play the way the devs wanted me to play, rather than how I wanted to.

Road Block #1

So first, I hit Adventure Level 25. (Adventure Level is like the level of your account as a whole, and is separate from Character Levels). In order to go past 25 you are forced to do a quest which is basically a trial of sorts. The recommended party level for this was 35 but my party was much lower level, around their mid-20s.

Let me digress and talk about leveling in Genshin Impact. While you do get experience from combat, it is a trivial amount. The bulk of your leveling comes from consuming items that drop from chests and are given out as quest rewards and such. You can apply these to your various characters as you see fit. Or if you are me, you will HORDE them until your characters just cannot make any more progress without being leveled up. I love that I can basically choose my difficulty this way. Content doesn’t get trivial because I don’t spend these experience consumables to over-level my characters.

At least, not until Adventure Level 25. I tried to beat the quest as I was and nope, no way. So I leveled everyone to 35; a jump of 10 levels or so in one swoop. I hated doing that. And I still couldn’t beat the quest. I leveled everyone to 40. STILL couldn’t beat it.

More digression: it isn’t just characters that you level up. You can level weapons and artifacts, too (artifacts basically take the place of armor slots). And guess what? My party was under-leveled on both weapons and artifacts. But again, I’d been hording the materials to level these things up so I jumped everyone’s weapons and artifacts up quite a bit.

Finally I was able to beat the quest. By the time I got to that point I’d accumulated enough Adventure Experience that my Adventure Level jumped from 25 to 28.

So the good news: I was past the dead-end. The bad news: I felt like I’d been robbed of the fun of 10 levels of progression and now I’m dealing with some trivial content, which kind of stinks.

Road Block #2

In and around doing this, I was doing a quest line on Dragon Spine Mountain. A part of this quest was a challenge where I have X amount of time to kill a bunch of ice monsters. This takes place near water and in an environment where the bitter cold will start to drain your health if you don’t stay warm. This is SUCH an infuriating challenge. Either the ice mobs stun-lock me via their freeze attacks, or I fall into the water and lose time and health (due to the cold) or I just start taking damage from the cold. I can beat the baddies, but just not before the timer runs out.

I am still stuck on this one even with my massively over-leveled characters. I take some comfort in the fact that the Internet is full of complaints about this particular challenge. This isn’t technically a road block as, to the best of my knowledge, this quest isn’t gating any additional content. It was just frustrating to be dealing with it at the same time as the actual AR 25 road block.

Then We Made Up

Anyway I got past this tough patch and I’m back to having a great time. It isn’t a perfect game, of course. But it is close to perfect for me, for right now. It has become one of those zen games. I log in, get my Primogems, do my four daily commissions, collect my expeditions, do some mining, then start working on Story Quests or whatever. I rarely finish the story quests because I’m constantly being distracted by other fun things to do.

The world feels huge (to me, so far) and I really enjoy the soundtrack. There are things to find everywhere. Chests and challenges and puzzles and NPCs to help out. There are ample fast travel destinations so while the world is huge for exploring, it isn’t tedious to get around when you’re focused on doing on thing.

If I could change one thing about Genshin Impact it would be the female characters (at least the ones you get for free just from playing, which I assume have been around since launch). The female characters are either screechy little girls in that creepy Eastern way of showing them in revealing clothes, or they are “mature” characters doing the (in one case literally) sexy librarian schtick. “Oooo, aren’t you a naughty boy?” and comments along those lines.

They’re constantly adding new characters and it seems like the newer characters are more diverse. For instance here is the teaser for Candace, who is coming soon:

Compare her to someone like Klee who was introduced a couple years ago (just after launch, it seems):

I guess some folks find Klee cute but I find her grating. Fortunately I have Amber who isn’t annoying and bonus points for being a bad-ass archer.

And of course there is Paimon. Paimon, who floats around in her bloomers, screeching her screechy voice at everyone while referring to herself in the third person. I HATED Paimon when I started playing. But y’know what? She is growing on me. If I can just take the sound of her voice and lock it in a little box and put it in a deep well, what she actually SAYS can be amusing (thank you, sub-titles). In a lot of ways Paimon seems to represent the player, because she is always skeptical of what is going on in the same way you probably are when you are playing. Like all those fetch quests where you’re thinking “Jeez this NPC is lazy” but you still gotta do the quest? Paimon is right there, calling out the NPC for being lazy and just trying to get us to be its errand-runner.

I can’t believe I’ve come ’round to where I like Paimon, but that’s the world I’m living in.

Yeah, I dunno what it is but I can’t stop playing this silly game.

The Artful Escape

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Here’s another title that I decided to try based on the fact that it was leaving Xbox Game Pass soon. The Artful Escape is (kind of) a game where you play as the nephew of a famous folk musician who is, for reasons never really made clear, expected to follow in the footsteps of his uncle. And while he is a capable folk musician, in his heart there dwells a shrieking electric guitar rocker.

When a mysterious woman hears him shredding, she gives him a nudge that leads him on a psychedelic trip of self-discovery.

Scene from a fake late-night talk show
Things do get weird after a while…

So a few important facts. First, The Artful Escape is very short. Four or five hours long, and it has no more ‘replay value’ than a book or a movie. In other words, the only reason to play a second time is if you want to experience the story again. I played for a few hours this morning, broke for lunch and to do a few errands, then finished this afternoon AND I got all the Achievements. Too bad Xbox doesn’t have Platinum Trophies.

Second, it is barely a game. You move along a prescribed path with some very very light platforming (sometimes you have to double jump!) and there are sections where you have to play a Simon-like copy-cat “press the buttons in the order I pressed them” mini-game. These segments eventually get a little challenging as things speed up but I felt like the developers made this all fairly forgiving. I’m pretty sure a few times it let me “pass” the challenge after like 3 fails even though I didn’t nail it perfectly.

But there is really no exploring or puzzle-solving or anything like that. You have some multiple choice options here and there but they seem to be only for ‘flavor.’

Here’s a random 60 seconds of gameplay to give you an idea of what the experience looks and sounds like:

So yeah, basically it’s an interactive story, but a pretty entertaining one. You really need to enjoy jamming electric guitars though, as this kind of music plays a HUGE role in the game. Also I’d suggest playing with headphones and the volume cranked up.

Oh, and probably worth noting the voice talent is quite good, with some names most of us would recognize (Carl Weathers and Lena Headey).

The first 20 minutes or so, while you’re still in your sleepy little home town, are kind of sleepy periods of the game but things pick up after that. In the middle I started to get a little bored. When I stopped for lunch I was almost thinking “OK I’ve seen enough of this.” but after a break I came back and soon it was clear that the story was starting to move towards a culmination which convinced me to stick around and I’m glad I did.

So yeah, if you don’t mind the length (and I’m glad it wasn’t any longer), I’d probably recommend this one. Pay for it like you would a movie or something. Whatever you feel comfortable spending on a movie, spend on this game. If I had to put a price on it I’d say like $10. Probably you will spend your 4-5 hours on it then never play it again.

I have to say it felt kind of awesome starting and finishing a game on the same day. I wish there were more quality short games like this one! Also Bhagpuss, if you’re reading this, I kept thinking of you and your music posts while I was playing. I’d be really interested to hear what you thought of The Artful Escape!

Francis starring at a concert

How Ni No Kuni 2 Ruined Labor Day

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Last weekend was a 3-day weekend for many of us here in the US: Labor Day weekend. I had been almost desperately looking forward to it for over a month. I REALLY hate my job so an extra day off is always very much anticipated and my head was full of half-made plans about what I would do with that glorious extra day of me-time.

Instead of any of those plans, I spent the whole weekend playing Ni No Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom. That would’ve been fine if I’d been playing because I was really enjoying myself, but no. I was playing because it was one of those instances when a game just gets stuck in my craw and I can’t let it go until I finish it. For some reason I just felt like I needed to complete this game, and I never really understand my brain when it does this. Partly it was because I wanted to see what happened, partly because I’d already put 30 hours into it (over several months) and I wanted some kind of a return on that investment (said return being the satisfaction of finishing). I don’t think either of those reasons are enough to explain my behavior, though.

So yeah, I spent the whole weekend playing a game I wasn’t super-excited about playing and, to throw salt in the wound, I still didn’t finish it. Last night (Wednesday) I finally did. Golly I’m glad that’s over. (See, I’ve been playing it so much I say things like “Golly” and “Gosh” now.)

And before I get much further I need to add that it isn’t that Ni No Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom is a bad game. Not at all. It’s got an 87/100 rating at Open Critic. Most people really liked it. I just didn’t enjoy the tone (constant breathless enthusiasm) plus I played it “wrong”. If I could send a message back to my younger-by-a-few-months self about this game I would send this: “Do not do that thing where you try to clear all the side quests before advancing the main story, and consider playing on Hard difficulty.”

My usual methodical way of playing a game is to work on the lowest level side quests first, and work my way up until all that I can do are completed, then I work on the main story. Because I did this in Ni No Kuni 2, most of my 40-50 hours of playing were easy-mode since I was over powered for the content I was doing. What finally broke me out of that mode was when (at around 30 hours) a Trophy popped up for completing 50 side quests. That prompted me to check the Unearned Trophy list and I found there were trophies for completing 100 & 150 side quests! No way I was going to spend 90 hours doing side quests, so I just started to focus on the main story.

Once I did this I quickly caught up to where content was a bit harder which made the game more enjoyable but by that time the damage was done and I was already bored and in “let’s just finish this” mode. Plus I’d essentially forgotten how a lot of the game systems worked since I’d just been button-mashing and breezing through content since June. There were a lot of things I’d either forgotten or never learned I could do, like improving weapons and spells and leveling up the sickeningly cute little creatures that fight with you. Higglies or Higgledies or something. Useful but SO annoying.

But hey, it is done now. I’m glad it is done. And yet there’s a tickle in my brain that says “Next time I should play on Hard mode.” Like I said, it’s not a bad game and I think it could be a lot better with the challenge cranked up from the very start.

Here’s a battle with a dragon to celebrate the finish. Mind you I thought this level 50 beasties was the top of the monster food chain but nope. By the time I completed the game my characters were in their high-50s and the final boss was I think level 72 or something. (Don’t quote me on that.) So this guy was just a little fella.

Destiny 2: Why I Quit

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Recently I’ve started playing Destiny 2 again and I kind of want to talk about how much fun I’m having, but it seemed only right to begin at the beginning, so to speak. I played Destiny a lot, and was excited about Destiny 2 when it launched. Initially I enjoyed the second game (I think? I assume? I can’t really remember) but then I started having Issues.

So here’s the thing about me: I love progression. I love leveling. In a lot of games once I hit cap I stop playing. Finding that loot that is 1% stronger than the loot I currently have now is always a thrill for me. What can I say, I have simple tastes.

Back to Destiny 2, a game that Bungie keeps rolling out new content for. This is great, of course. New content is always fun. What wasn’t so great for me is that they’d remove older content. In at least one case (the Forsaken expansion) I purchased the content but before I could play it, Bungie “vaulted” it (ie, removed it from the game). That really pissed me off. Now to be fair I was WAY late to the party on that expansion but still… I bought it and couldn’t play it.

That was a big part of why I quit. I was simply mad at Bungie, as if Bungie was a person. But I’m not the first person to anthropomorphize a company.

There was also another reason why I quit. Bungie kept raising the level cap, which is common with games-as-a-service titles. I don’t mind that. But they also raised the level floor. (Maybe I should call it the level shoes, the opposite of cap?) In MMO terms, imagine a game had a level cap of 50, and an expansion came out that raised the cap to 75, but it made the minimum level increase to 25. That’s basically what Bungie does, but in Destiny 2 “levels” come from your gear rather than your character.

When the floor rises, every piece of gear that isn’t at the minimum level gets raised to the minimum level. I’m sure a lot of players appreciate this, but not me. Destiny 2 was never my main hobby so I was rarely at cap and usually wasn’t even at the new minimum level.

To make up a practical example, say I’ve been playing and finding new gear and I get my gear to level 40 & I’m feeling good about my progress. Then an expansion comes out that raises the floor to 50 and suddenly all my gear is now level 50. For me and my weird brain, this invalidates all the fun I had getting stuff to 40; that ‘work’ no longer matters. It started to feel like the most efficient way for me to level in Destiny 2 was to just not play and instead wait for an expansion to level me up.

So essentially, that’s what I did. I stopped playing. At the top of this post is one of my first screenshots from D2 where my power level was 58. Since then, without playing for a single minute, I have characters at 1350! That’s quite a lot of progress gained from not-playing! I’m so efficient! [This is also a lie; I played a lot more after that screenshot was taken, but eventually I did fall behind enough that the “level floor” kept boosting me up.]

Next post (in theory): So what changed and why am I back?

No Screenshots: Putting it in Writing

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I am not a natural screenshot-taker, and the more I am enjoying a game, the less likely I am to take screenshots because I’m 100% focused on the game and I just don’t think about taking them. Sometimes after a particularly exciting event I’ll capture a video clip, but even that doesn’t happen all that often.

Blog posts are “supposed” to have images. Images help posts get noticed (specifically when you share the posts on social media). And I do auto-tweet my posts to Twitter so I know I SHOULD add at least a header image to every post.

But let’s get real here. This is just my personal blog. It isn’t monetized and honestly I have VERY few readers (though I very much appreciate the few folks who come by here regularly). Last May the blog celebrated (I lie, I was oblivious at the time) it’s 20th anniversary. If it hasn’t gotten big yet, it never will.

But there are so many posts that bubble up into my head and then don’t get written because I don’t have a screenshot or image to go along with them. I enjoy writing posts and I detest messing with images.

So as of today I am, in writing, giving myself permission to write posts that HAVE NO IMAGES ASSOCIATED WITH THEM!

There, I’ve said it. “So say I all” as they used to say in Battlestar Galactica. Or something close to that.

That’s it. That’s the post. I feel more free already!

Side Note: I made the image at the top of this post and based on how good it is, I have quit my job to start a career as a kick-ass digital artist! See you on the red carpet! (Do digital artists get to go on the red carpet?)

August 2022

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Well we finally got August out of the way. Another month or so of heat and life outdoors can start again. Mind you we had a week in August where it was hot but not completely oppressively hot, so that was nice. A couple times I took the dog out around midnight and it was actually pleasant out there.

Yeah kids, it’s true. The older you get, the more you prattle on about the weather. So let’s get into the recap because it is stupid-long this month.

Games

Mafia Definitive Edition got its own post. Spoiler: I really enjoyed it.

Mafia 2 Definitive Edition also got its own post. Spoiler: wasn’t too much of a fan.

Ni No Kuni II is in the recap for the third month. Unless I give up on it, it’ll probably be in next month, too. I don’t know why I DON’T give up on it. I started it in June and here it is, end of August and it still hasn’t really grabbed me. There’s no reason to think it ever will. So why am I still playing? FOMO I guess? This series gets so much praise and I’m trying to figure out why, beyond that it has a lovely art style.

I just find it pretty boring. Maybe I should be playing on a higher difficulty level or something. I’m also not really a fan of the tone which is that kind of breathless child enthusiasm as seen on shows like “Leave It To Beaver.” (Am I dating myself?) But mostly it’s the boredom. The other day I spent over an hour in a session where all I did was solve “quests” that involved fast travelling/running to a waypoint on the map where some random character tells me “Gee whiz, yes I’d LOVE to join your kingdom!”

Well for now I’ll keep plodding along. There was a really dark moment at the very start of the game and I’m interested to see what happens in the story, with regard to this moment. Which I won’t spoil even though it happens at the very start of the game.

Moving on…

Every month a handful of games leave Xbox Game Pass. You generally get at least a few weeks warning, so whenever a new list comes out I scan it and if anything looks remotely interesting I’ll at least boot it up once to see if it appeals to me. That’s how I found Spiritfarer. Spiritfarer bills itself as a “cozy management game.” I’m not really sure what that means, but I like Spiritfarer quite a bit. In it you play Stella who has taken over for Charon. The river Styx feels more like a harbor or even an ocean. Stella sails around in her boat (which is also her base — you can see my version at the top of this post) visiting islands where she finds souls that need her help to pass on to… presumably a better place.

In order to help these lost souls Stella will have to gather resources to both improve her boat and provide for her spirit guests. She also spends a lot of time talking to the spirits to find out what they need, and I find their stories intriguing. It’s a pretty low stress game; I don’t think you can die or fail, though I’m not 100% sure. The spirits I have aboard seem pretty patient. For example, if you don’t prepare meals for them they’ll get unhappy because they’re hungry, but they won’t die (they’re already dead!), and I don’t think they’ll leave. I haven’t had anyone leave anyway.

It’s the kind of gameplay we’ve seen before but the spirits’ stories and the aesthetics are what make it special. It’s all hand-drawn, seemingly hand-animated art full of clever touches. For instance, Stella has a cat companion named Daffodil (you can have a friend join your game and they’ll play as Daffodil). Daffodil follows Stella everywhere, but when Stella goes swimming Daffodil follows her by balancing on a tiny ball of light which floats on the water because, y’know, cats and water. It’s cute as heck. Stella can give the spirits a hug to lift their…erm… spirits, and every time she does this I swear I feel it in my heart, these moments are animated so well.

I like Spiritfarer so much I bought it so I won’t lose access when it leaves Game Pass, so more to come on this one.

I’ve always heard great things about the Yakuza games but never made much headway in any of them. After being in the US mob in the Mafia games I decided to join the Japanese mob by playing Yakuza 0. So far, I have to say, it’s not really grabbing me. Running around the streets of the city (which you do a lot) feels really clunky in that old-school Resident Evil way. Other than that you mostly brawl. I’ve heard there’s a ton to do in these games so maybe they just start slowly. There’re a lot of very long cut scenes (my Xbox goes into idle mode during them, they’re so long). I don’t really mind these since the story is actually kind of interesting, but I mention it as a warning for folks who aren’t a fan of extended cut scenes. I’m on the fence with this one. Someone whose opinion I trust really loves these games which makes me lean towards keeping on with it for now.

When I first heard about Tribes of Midgard I was pretty excited because, hey it’s about Vikings! I also really dug the art style. Then I learned it was best played with others and I sadly crossed it off my list. At some point I got a copy for free (Playstation Plus, I think) so gave it a try and yeah, it was terrible solo. Well, terrible for me because you had to really rush around and maximize your actions in order to do what a team would normally be doing. The idea is that during the day you gather resources to improve the defenses of your village before night falls. There’s also some fighting to be done. Then when it gets dark your village gets attacked and you have to defend the village. All the while a giant boss creature is slowly moving towards your village and you have to defeat it before it arrives. I just found it really challenging to fight and gather and build during the daylight hours while keeping to a time table that would get me strong enough to defeat the boss before it crushed me and my village. Anyway, I deleted Tribes of Midgard and moved on.

This month a new update to Survival Mode came out. (I’m not sure I even tried Survival Mode before this.) No longer do you have a village to defend, unless you choose to make one. Instead it plays a little like Valheim. You gather, you craft, you find enemies to fight when you want to fight. When it gets dark harder enemies appear but you can fight them or avoid them: your choice. Eventually you’re supposed to take down some boss enemies but you do this on your own timetable. I do not like being rushed so this lack of a timetable made a HUGE difference for me, and now I’m enjoying Tribes of Midgard, Survival Mode (the other mode is Saga Mode which still operates as described above and is still much too frantic for me). It isn’t going to become my main game or anything but it did totally suck me in for a few nights. I killed 3 of the big boss critters before I got distracted by another game, but it’s still in my rotation.

Over on Twitter a bunch of folks I follow were talking about a new game called Tower of Fantasy which was being compared to Genshin Impact. Since Tower of Fantasy isn’t on console and Genshin Impact is, I decided to join in the fun one step removed and finally play Genshin and I have to say, it’s a lot of fun this time around. I have played it, some, in the past and bounced off it. It might have been Paimon, the little creature that follows you around yammering at you in that “adult voice actor doing a screechy child’ voice and referring to their self in the third person. Or it might have been my belief that it was an MMO, or my concern over the gacha mechanics. I just can’t remember.

Whatever the reason this time I came into it somewhat more educated. I’m still in the very early game but so far the vibe I’m getting is that this is a single player game with some of an MMO’s benefits in that it is constantly changing/being updated. I love the anime-inspired aesthetics and in the course of playing you get enough characters that you don’t have to enter into the gacha stuff if you don’t want to. Gameplay is a mix of action combat and some environmental puzzle solving, mostly involving how to get up high enough to get some item floating in the air.

Like I said, I am still VERY early in the game so maybe there’s a big ugly ‘gotcha’ (as opposed to gacha) waiting when I hit some point but for now I’m really enjoying it.

Last up, and I almost left it out because I just started playing last weekend, is The Ascent. Folks in my Twitter timeline were talking about a new season in Path of Exile and it put me in the mood for an ARPG, but PoE has never resonated well with me. I actually fired up Diablo 3 a time or two but, y’know, it’s still Diablo 3. Then I remembered The Ascent which is on Gamepass and which I thought was an ARPG. Turns out it isn’t; it’s a twin-stick shooter. Granted the difference is fairly subtle but I was getting my butt handed to me until my brain re-aligned itself.

The Ascent, which takes place in a cyberpunk-infused alien world, doesn’t make a great 1st impression. You start off in the bowels of some gigantic city fixing a sewage issue. You’re an indentured servant and life ain’t great. The titular Ascent is a mega-corporation that you work for. Soon after you get the toilets working, Ascent announces it is bankrupt and basically pulls out of the city leaving a power vacuum that plenty of gangs are looking to fill. You end up working as muscle for your unsavory boss, who, to his credit, is trying to get the gang leaders together so that some semblance of order can be maintained. And that’s about as far as I’ve gotten, but after that first mission the game gets pretty fun. You shoot a lot of baddies, scavenge and/or buy better gear, including implants and upgrades to your cyberdeck and fun stuff like that.

If I’m being vague it’s because I’ve barely gotten started, but here’s a combat demo for you:

And a super last-minute addition is Destiny 2, which I’ve come back to have a few years away. That one I will save for a separate post, though.

TV

For All Mankind S3 (Apple TV) was really good. We’ve enjoyed this alternate history of the space program quite a bit. Wondering if we’ll get a 4th season.
Sandman (Netflix) was also really good. We had only the vaguest notion of the comics so the first couple eps we were a bit lost but by episode 3 or so we were well and truly hooked. A couple weeks after release they dropped a ‘bonus episode’ which consists of two short stories that take place in the Sandman universe but that basically stand alone. This episode is worth watching even if the main series wasn’t for you.

Westworld (HBO Max) is such a fun, nerdy, confusing show and Season 4 didn’t disappoint. I’m going to have to rewatch it. The series always twists and turns and rewards a second viewing. Heck I’ve watched the first season 3 times now and am looking forward to a 4th time. I always pick up on something new. All that said if you enjoy your narratives nice and neat and tidy, Westworld probably won’t be for you.

The Old Man (Hulu) was a pretty great spy series with a strange ending that to me felt rushed and disjointed. A second season is planned and I’m hoping it’ll ‘backfill’ some of the “WTF?” moments from the ending of Season 1. In fact I might suggest waiting for Season 2 before you dive into this one.

We finished our re-watch of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Well it was a re-watch for me anyway. I remember not being thrilled with DS9 when it first aired and having watched it again, I haven’t changed my mind. Still I was somehow sad when it was over. I do remember really not liking Quark or Odo back in the day and this time they were my favorite characters, at least in the early seasons when Quark was always running schemes and Odo was always foiling them. Perfect set of frenemies, those two. And then the weird friendship between Bashir and O’brien. But most of the command crew: Cisko and Kira and Dax… meh, I never felt very connected to any of them. General Motag (?? the Klingon) stole every scene he was in. I’d watch a show based on him!

With Deep Space Nine behind us we rolled right into Star Trek: Voyager (another rewatch for me) which I am enjoying much more than I did DS9.

The Wilds (Prime Video) – The synopsis said this was a show about some young women stranded on a desert island after a plane crash. I was thinking “Lord of the Flies” but nope. The show opens with the women being interviewed after their rescue, which immediately drains a lot of the tension from things. Then over time you learn that there is something strange happening. I started thinking “Lost” but nope. Turns out [spoilers tho you learn this in the first couple of episodes] that there wasn’t actually a crash and these women were put there deliberately (though they still think they crashed). I wasn’t really enjoying the individual episodes but I did want to know how the ‘arc’ resolved. Unfortunately by the end of Season 1 it didn’t completely resolve. There’s a Season 2 but I decided I didn’t care enough to sit through 10 more episodes of angst. This might be more interesting for younger people, I’m not sure.

And still more TV, but in the ‘too early to say’ bin: She-Hulk (Disney+), Star Trek: The Lower Decks S3 (Paramount+) and House of the Dragon (HBO+). Of these, we love The Lower Decks seasons 1 & 2 so we feel pretty confident about that one, but the other two the jury is still out on.

Reading

Still on the classic comics, where I learned of a villain named Paste Pot Pete and now I wonder why he doesn’t have his own movie franchise. Basically he is armed with a gun that shoots paste. Terrifying!

The scary part about these classic comics is that there are SO many of them. I’ve only made it through a year or 2 of issues. Stuff I’m reading right now came out in 1963! I might have to start skipping around.

And that’s it for the overly verbose recap. I should’ve split a couple of those games out into their own posts, I guess. Hope your September is cool and crisp and dry in a way that I know mine won’t be!!

Mafia 2 Definitive Edition Review

Posted on by Nimgimli

After having a surprisingly good time playing Mafia Definitive Edition, I decided to see what else the series has to offer. As luck would have it, Mafia 2 DE is also on Playstation Plus Pass. I rolled right into it. I kind of wish I hadn’t.

I didn’t enjoy Mafia 2 nearly as much as I did the first game. It wasn’t all bad, but I had enough issues that I almost didn’t finish it. Let’s get into my critique.

First, and worst, is that it is a really offensive game. The dialog is chock full of racial, ethnic and misogynist slurs. I guess I get that they were trying to capture the times (the game takes place in 1945 & 1951) but you can do that without using every offensive term you can think of, and maybe making some up to boot. It was really way over the top and this is why I almost quit playing.

In Mafia 1 you collected detective comics. In Mafia 2 you collect Playboy magazines, and every time you pick one up you get a full-screen photo of a centerfold. I didn’t really mind this, but it was a little surprising and definitely earned some eye-rolling from @partpurple. I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I recognized a few of these and they were NOT from 1951.

The game is also not very stable. I had some crashes and a few glitches including some bad enough that I had to look online to find a workaround.

Vito and two women
Waiting for the “broads” to leave so Vito can go to work. The one facing the door kept walking into it without opening it

This time out you play Vito Scaletta, a real dirt bag with pretty much no redeeming qualities. As a kid he gets arrested but since he speaks Italian he is sent to the war to fight in the campaign in Sicily (this is all off-screen). When he comes back after being wounded, he immediately and with no hesitation starts taking on hit jobs. He never shows a hint of remorse over this. The story in Mafia 2 is much weaker than the one in Mafia 1. It’s really just Vito and his pal Joe making a lot of dumb decisions and murdering their way out of them.

The one giant redeeming quality in Mafia 2 is the music. It has a ton of great music (most of which wasn’t actually recorded when the game is supposed to take place, but what can ya do?). Check out the list of tracks over on the Wiki. Driving around listening to the radio was what convinced me to stick around.

I also thought the gun combat felt better in this game. Guns felt like they had more punch, and this one has regenerating health (in Mafia 1 you had to find a first aid station to heal). This made shootouts more fun (for me anyway) since you could play a little more fast and loose, knowing you could hide and regenerate health.

The melee combat still felt bad, and the driving felt good, though honestly by the end of the game I was pretty sick of driving around these streets, even WITH the great radio stations.

A line of old timey cars waiting at a traffic light
Sitting in traffic in 1945

Maybe I’m being overly hard on Mafia 2 just due to the fact that I played it immediately after Mafia 1, which may have led to some gangster fatigue, but I don’t think so. The story was meh, the dialog was so offensive it made me uncomfortable, and technically the game was rather dodgy. Also checkpoints were way too far between (this was a problem with Mafia 1 as well). At least it was quite short.

I dunno, I can’t really recommend this game unless you are just hard up for vintage centerfolds to gawk at.

Mafia Definitive Edition Review

Posted on by Nimgimli

Mafia Definitive Edition is a throw-back, in a couple of ways.

The most obvious is the story, which takes place in the early-mid 1930s, that strange part of US history where drinking a beer was illegal but grabbing a soda laced with cocaine was fine. It really does a great job of transporting you back to those days, with characters slinging old-timey slang left & right, and old music and news snippets playing on radios.

But it’s a throw-back in terms of gameplay, too. We just don’t get many games like this any more. The game plays out as a series of missions, each telling a chunk of the overall (and very decent) story. To support the strong narrative the missions are all quite linear, and while there is a pretty large city for you to drive around in, it is ‘open world’ in only the most technical sense. There’s no reason to roam around other than for fun. There’re no character levels, no crafting. There are collectibles but those are just for Achievements/bragging rights; they don’t impact gameplay at all.

There’s a lot of driving too, which I loved but might annoy others (it’s the 1930s, the cars aren’t very fast). Most missions start with you driving to the location and then after all the action you have to drive back home. It adds a certain cadence to the story and I enjoyed the driving but gamers who want all action all the time might feel frustrated. I went so far as to ‘roleplay’ my driving, trying to drive safely so as not to draw the attention of the cops on the way to or from a job. There are achievements that suggest that at times the cops will come after you for driving poorly but it never happened to me.

Driving around in Mafia
I loved driving these old cars around

As for the story, you play as Tommy Angelo (no customization available), who starts the game as a cabbie and gets involved with an organized crime family and rises through the ranks. Let’s be clear: you are playing a bad guy in this game. He has a little more of a conscience than some of his colleagues but he is still a very bad man. So keep that in mind.

I don’t usually do well playing a bad guy but for some reason I really enjoyed Mafia. Maybe it is just the era or something, or maybe Hollywood has de-sensitized me to being a bad guy in this kind of organized crime setting.

Overall I’d rate the actual gameplay somewhere around a 3 out of 5. It was fine, but not super special. It was the time period and the story that really hooked me. It also helped that it was pretty short. 10-15 hours or so. And that was enough. I was sated by the time it was done, and had no interest in replaying it or hunting Achievements.

This is the perfect kind of game to play on a subscription service (I played it via Playstation Plus Pass) or if you can get it for cheap as part of a bundle or something. Recommended as long as you like gangster stories.

July 2022

Posted on by Nimgimli

Hot enough for ya? July has been absolutely brutal in terms of the heat, not only here in North Carolina but seemingly everywhere in the northern hemisphere. Here at Dragonchasers HQ we’re all going a bit stir-crazy since it is so awful outside that we just sit indoors staring at the same walls, day in, day out. August isn’t looking much better in the long-range forecast, but in my mind I envision July 31st as existing at the bottom of a deep hot pit. May-July we’re heading down into the grossness, then come August 1st we’ve hit the bottom of that pit and are starting the slow climb back to temperatures that are comfortable (highs of 60-70F). We should get there by November.

Anyway, on to the recap!

Games

Deliver Us The Moon is part adventure, part puzzler, and part simulation. It’s fairly short, and I say that as a compliment because it doesn’t overstay its welcome. It also isn’t particularly hard. I suck at adventure games and only had to look up a hint once and that was really because I was tired and my brain was being lazy. Once I looked up what to do I realized I’d been looking at the ‘thing that can be manipulated’ without it sinking in that it was glowing as ‘things that can be manipulated’ do in this game. The story is both pretty implausible (you have to launch yourself in a rocket to the moon to fix a reactor that provides Earth with all its power) but also pretty entertaining. Definitely would recommend it if you haven’t played yet. You can easily finish it in a weekend. I played it on Playstation Pass (which is what I insist on calling Playstation Plus Extra- the tier that gives you a bunch of PS4 & PS5 games to play.)

Progress in Ni No Kuni 2 has slowed down. Now that I’m thinking about it, it has been a LONG time since I’ve stuck with an RPG for very long. They all start to feel so tedious since you wind up doing the same thing over and over for tens of hours. It’s really up to the narrative to pull you along, but generally these games have a 1-2 hour story stretched over 30 hours of game play. Same feels true here. It’s fun enough to play in short doses but I get bored after an hour and set it aside again.

Far Cry 6  completed and I wrote a post about that.

Middle Earth: Shadow Of War also warranted its own post. After writing that post I spent an evening having some success and making what felt like progress. I thought I’d turned a corner. Then the next evening I was back to rage-inducing frustration, to the point where the rest of the family literally left the room to get away from me. Haven’t booted it since. Not sure I will. When a game gets you frustrated to the point that your dog gets upset & worried, it’s time to set it aside.

No Man’s Sky got a new update. New updates always bring me back, but because I’m weird I always start a new game and tend to drift away before I get to whatever is in the new update. Same thing happening this time; started a new game, sort of played for a few days. Then everyone on Twitter was talking about doing the new Expedition so I started over AGAIN in an Expedition and am sort of playing. I really like No Man’s Sky but it always feels like a real time-sink. It’s a good ‘on vacation’ kind of game.

Stray — Short and sweet. Probably helps to be a cat fan. I thought it was OK, but I am not in the camp that sees it as a game of the year contender or anything like that. Playing it soon after Deliver Us the Moon was maybe a disservice since DUtM gave me my fill of wandering around doing puzzles with no combat. While the narrative and tone of the two games are very different, they still kind of scratched the same itch in my brain. You walk around, solve some puzzles, talk to some people.

Mafia: Definitive Edition is another game I downloaded thanks to Playstation Pass. I just started it a couple days ago but I’m finding it pretty engrossing. Weird thing is, I’ve hardly PLAYED the game; mostly it’s been cut scenes and driving around. Hopefully when I get to the real interactive parts I’ll continue to like that as much as I’m enjoying the narrative bits.

There’s more; quite a bit more. But just a lot of things that I’ve dipped into here and there and I don’t want to try everyone’s patience any more than I already have!

TV

Stranger Things (Netflix) surprised me by having only 2 more episodes to air in the ‘2nd half’ of the season, but they comprised 4 hours of show.  It was amazing. They have one more season of the series but I guess it won’t be out for a couple years. The characters will have to be in college by then!

The Dragon Prince (Netflix) is a YA Netflix anime show that I really enjoyed. It is kind of sweet, kind of light in a lot of ways. But it also explores some aspects of human behavior that we don’t often see. Watching characters you like drift towards becoming a villain without ever realizing they’re becoming a villain. Or exploring what it is like to be one of the family members of the villain. There’re three seasons with a 4th season coming out this fall, I believe, and I’m really looking forward to it. Would broadly recommend this series.

Lillyhammer was one of the first original Netflix shows. It’s about a mob boss who goes into protective custody in Lillehammer because he watched some of the Olympics when they took place there. He’s a complete fish out of water in Norway but soon returns to his old ways. It’s one of those shows  that I really WANT to like (mostly because Steven Van Zandt stars in it) but honestly, it’s just OK.

RFDS (PBS) stands for Royal Flying Doctor Service. This was basically a soap opera that aired on PBS Masterpiece. It takes place in Australia. Doctors have to do emergency calls via plane. Drama ensues. I like it since it was such a change from what I usually watch. Plus, y’know, lots of Aussie accents. Who (in NA) can resist that?

Ms Marvel (Disney+) was an absolute joy and a surprise. I never expected to love this show as much as I did. It was just (dare I say it?) MARVELous! Sadly I think we’ll have quite a wait for a second season and I’m not sure if they’ll be able to catch lightning in a bottle twice.

Strange New Worlds (Paramount+) was so so good. I’m sad it is over. If you watched Discovery or Picard and have written off ‘New Trek’ I urge you to give this a try. Strange New Worlds recaptures the spirit of the original seriess and Next Generation.

The Sea Beast is a movie on Netflix that you really need to watch. It’s about a world where wooden ships set sail to fight sea monsters. It’s both a great sea yarn and a sweet story about understanding, and it has one of the sassiest young characters I’ve seen in a while. She is, as the ship’s captain (voiced wonderfully by Jared Harris) says, “pure vinegar.”

We’ve finally gotten around to season 3 of For All Mankind (Apple TV) and so far the show still delivers. I was worried that it might slip as we got farther and farther from what actually happened (the whole show posits an alternate timeline where the USSR beat the US to the moon and the space race never slowed down) but so far, so good. Mind you, we haven’t finished the season yet.

Reading

All I’ve been reading this month are ancient Marvel Comics. I’m using this site (that someone shared with me in a comment last fall) and the Marvel Unlimited app on the iPad. The “Read it Online” links on the former open the comic in the app, making it easy to follow the order. These comics (we’re talking issues from the early 1960s) are honestly not great but I find them very amusing. If it isn’t a random alien causing problems it’s the commies! And it’s fun to see how some of the superheroes we know today started out. Thor was a regular guy with a magic cane that could transform him into his superhero self. The Hulk used a machine to transform between Bruce Banner and Hulk, and Hulk was acerbic but otherwise talks normally. Antman uses a gas to shrink and enlarge himself, and he gets to the scene of a crime by launching himself via catapult and telepathically ordering ants to form a big pile for him to land softly in.

The big names back then were the Fantastic Four, and the Human Torch seems to be the most popular character. He often appears in his own in spin off comics. In the first Iron Man, Tony Stark is captured by the commmies (it’s always “the commies” or “the reds” in these old books) while in Vietnam. The
origin story is fairly close to the scene in one of the Iron Man movies where he’s captured by terrorists in the Middle East. He’s supposed to be building them weapons but instead builds his armor. Only since this was the early 60s it all happens in Vietnam, and Stark is a wizard with transistors! (Remember transistors were cutting edge back then). Next hero to get his own book is Spiderman. He’d appeared as a 1-off in 1962, but in 1963 the first issue of Spiderman hit the newstands. This has been a really fun project, reading these stories and thinking about what the world was like then.

And that was July 2022. Kind of a ‘meh’ month all-in-all. Besides the heat, Lola was quite ill, work has been sucking the life out of me and there’s just not much fun stuff happening, aside from lots of great TV. But again, July is the worst month in a lot of ways. August should be better, and September better still. Right?