Scarlet Nexus, Finally

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Back in December (I think?) I started playing Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age on the Xbox. It was on Game Pass and I was on a Final Fantasy bender. Then in typical fashion I got distracted and let it drop, but I still had it pinned near the top of the Xbox dashboard because I had every intention of getting back to it.

The other day I opened the Game Pass app and there under “Leaving Soon’ was “Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age.” Bummer. In theory I could drop everything and try to mainline FFXII and finish it by the end of the month (I think that’s when it drops from the lineup) but I know doing that when I wasn’t in the mood would just make me hate the game. I considered buying it, but it is still something like $40 which seems like a lot for a game that originally came out in 2006. Granted this is a remaster but still. Anyway, for now I wave farewell to FFXII and maybe I’ll snag it on sale at some point.

On the same day I got this news, I opened the Microsoft Rewards app to earn some sweet, sweet Microsoft Points/funny money. There was a challenge to “Earn an Achievement In One of Our Top 10 Games”. I looked at the list of games, which I think is more “The top 10 games we want to promote” than anything. Scarlet Nexus was in there.

Before it launched, there was a demo for Scarlet Nexus and I had played it and enjoyed it. I’d even planned to buy the game at launch but something came up…who can remember back that far? And then it popped up on Game Pass and I was happy I hadn’t spent $60 on it. Now I could play it for “free.” *happy dance*

Except I didn’t. This is my Game Pass Achilles Heel. A game I want to play hits the service, I get excited and put it on my mental list of “games I’ll play Real Soon Now” but…I forget that inclusion on Game Pass is transient. Generally games are on there for a year or two, maybe even longer, but most do eventually leave. Use it or lose it. Play it or… belay it? (I’ll work on that.)

So this Microsoft Rewards quest thingie was thankfully the kick in the ass I needed. I fired up Scarlet Nexus and quickly remembered how much I’d enjoyed the demo. It didn’t take long to earn an Achievement to get the Rewards points, but I didn’t stop there. Now I’ve been playing it for a couple nights and my intent, as of right now, is to finish it. Tomorrow that intent may change, what with me being me.

I particularly enjoy Scarlet Nexus while wearing headphones with the sound cranked up. I’m finding the music a delight, even though it is not really in my wheelhouse. The whole anime vibe of the game is enjoyable too, and the Others (the monsters you fight) are delightfully weird.

None of this is news to anyone. We all played the demo, and a good number of us enjoyed it, at least based on my Twitter circles.

So this whole post is really just a cautionary tale about waiting too long to play the Game Pass games you want to play. Don’t be like me, sitting here with my crushed Final Fantasy XII dreams…

I’ll come back to actually playing Scarlet Nexus in a future post. Maybe.

Dying Light: Stay Human 2 Ambivalence

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After all my pre-launch excitement about Dying Light 2, I felt like I really needed to blog about it. So I’m going to do that even though I’m not really ready to. I feel like I need to play it more, but I don’t really want to play it more right now. Let me explain…

I think there is a pretty good game buried in here somewhere and while I’m playing I have these brief moments of “Oh heck yeah!” fun, but between those brief moments I am experiencing a lot of bugs and a sometimes really repetitive gameplay loop.

I’m sure the bugs will get fixed. They range from minor (being prompted that you have unspent skill points when you don’t) to major (falling through the world, or through an object that you’re hanging onto).

A bigger concern is the story that, for me at least, causes some fatigue early on. You’re sent back and forth across the city to do quests, and in the course of doing so you’ll go past all kinds of events & activities, but you’re not REALLY equipped to handle these yet. So you just parkour your way past things to do and very soon the routes become familiar and boring.

Combat can be fun but is often pretty easy to cheese. You can take on a dozen human enemies just by climbing onto something and kicking the enemies off as they climb up to reach you, causing them to take falling damage. It’s amusing the first couple of times then starts feeling tedious since you’re not in any real danger.

As I said (if you choose not to cheese it) combat can be pretty fun, though again there is a downside. Weapons degrade and break quickly so I found myself avoiding combat to preserve my weapons. You can’t outright repair a weapon, though if you apply a mod to it it’ll restore some of the weapon’s durability. Later in the game is a hidden charm that you can use to repair a weapon indefinitely, but I’m not even close to getting to that point yet. Here’s a video describing where it is and how to find it:

The “Stay Human” part of the title refers to you being infected. The disease that eventually turns you into a zombie is suppressed by UV light, so during the day when you are outside you can ignore it. At night or when you are in a building a countdown clock starts and when it hits zero…something bad happens. I assume game over though I’ve never let it hit zero. There are herbs and consumables that help you stave this off, and I think the further into the game you go the more time you can spend out of UV without turning, but in the early game this is also super tedious. As you try to stealth your way through a building, taking out sleeping zombie enemies quietly, you’ll frequently have to back track to get outside and get a jolt of sunshine to reset the timer.

Setting aside that timer, stealthing through a building is fun and harrowing. Knowing that if you wake the wrong zombie it’s going to make enough noise to wake a bunch more and things are going to go very bad for you adds a nice tension to the gameplay. But with the timer and needing to go back outside the best way to handle these situations is to slaughter your way through the zombies, retreating frequently for a dose of UV and a bandage.

I read one review that said the game gets good once you’re finished the story and just have an open world of zombie combat to play around in, and I can see how that might be true.

There are lots of little things that bug me but they may just be me. It’s a first person game and your character blinks. I find that SUPER distracting. The screen will just go back for a fraction of a second and every time it happens I think my TV’s HDCP protection might be kicking in, which is a thing that happens with the PS5 from time to time. They also do the ‘in-game cutscene’ thing where your character turns and cranes his neck around so the view flails back and forth in a way no human has ever moved. It’s a pet peeve of mine since it always feels so fake and can be nausea-inducing.

Anyway I could go on and on but I think you get the point. I expect Dying Light 2 to get polished and tweaked over the next few months, and I’ve decided that rather than play the worst version of the game now, it makes more sense to wait and play it maybe in summer or next fall. So I’m putting it back on the shelf for now.

I do have some buyer’s remorse and I have been reminded, for the 1000th time, not to believe previews or hype. You’d think at some point this lesson would stick. Worst, I have both Horizon Forbidden West and Elden Ring pre-ordered, though the former I was always going to get no matter what. I hope Elden Ring lives up to the hype and I don’t have to learn this lesson twice in the same month.

On the other hand, TechLand is basically an Indie shop and Dying Light 2 is self-published, so I’m just looking at my full-price pre-order as a way to support an independent studio, the same way my $60/year supports the local PBS station.

But for now, this’ll be my only post on Dying Light 2. I think I may go back to Bloodborne while I wait for Forbidden West to come out.

I leave you with this link to a short video of combat against human enemies. This is me playing, but the ending is so gruesome that I have age-restricted it so I can’t embed it!

Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep: First Impressions

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A new month means new freebies from Sony for Playstation Plus members. One of the titles this month is Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep, a spin-off of the Borderlands series.

Now I haven’t really played much Borderlands and don’t really follow it, so hopefully I’ll get this right. Assault on Dragon Keep first released as DLC for Borderlands 2, and Google says it came out in June of 2013. I guess it must have been popular because next month a full stand alone game, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, launches. The game I’m playing now is the Borderlands 2 DLC re-packaged as a stand-alone game, I presume for the purposes of getting folks hyped for Wonderlands.

I know that’s why I played it. As someone who has always bounced off Borderlands but was intrigued by the trailers for Wonderlands, I wanted to play Assault just to see how different the game felt. I’m not sure I know yet, but there’s plenty of time.

The basic premise of the game is that Tiny Tina (who presents as a young girl but I am otherwise not familiar with the character) is running an RPG for some of her vault hunter friends. There’s Lilith, who I’m somewhat familiar with, and a bunch of others who I dunno who they are. Gameplay takes place in the RPG and the mechanics are (at least to a casual observer) very similar to Borderlands, aka it’s a first person shooter. While you play you hear voice-overs from the vault hunters who are playing the game within the game. (Still following me?). The conversations tend to be pretty amusing, at least to me.

Lilith wants to play the game kind of seriously while some of the others just want maximum mayhem. Tina tries to keep everyone happy, sometimes re-writing the world on the fly. For example her environment will be full of flowers and someone will comment about how that isn’t scary. Tina will say “You’re right!” and suddenly the flowers go poof and the world is dark and foreboding.


So let’s talk about why I bounce off Borderlands. I have two main issues. First is the humor. It is very “Jackass” in tone, and that’s just not my bag. I remember a lot of jokes about murder and torture, or bodily functions. (Yes, there are some of us out here who don’t giggle at poop and fart jokes.) There are suicidal midgets and things like that. There’s Claptrap who, OMG that character is so annoying I’m getting mad just thinking about it. Overall the ‘tone’ of Borderlands just rubbed me the wrong way (at least what I’ve seen of it, which isn’t very much.)

Second is the loot. There is so much loot. A constant shower of loot. I find it super-fatiguing. I get that the idea is you just kind of skim the loot and ignore it if it isn’t rare or better, but I am just too methodical for that. I have to open every chest, break every container, and check the contents of each one. And when my inventory gets full I have to go back to town to sell. The idea of just LEAVING LOOT ON THE GROUND is abhorrent to me. This results in a LOT of running back and forth and examining trash loot and my pace being super slow.

My first reaction to Assault on Dragon Keep was, “Yup, this is Borderlands.” Heck I filmed it:

Kill 1 skeleton, spend a few minutes opening chests. It was a drag.

I pushed on, though, and at one point I revisited an area I’d already been to and… the chests had all respawned. That was the straw that broke the back of my old habits, and after that I started ignoring about 75% of the chests I saw. Once I did that I started having a lot more fun.

The world of Dragon Keep is filled with Borderlands characters who don’t seem as distasteful as I remember them being. In fact I found them pretty fun. There’s a dude who is a real jock and no one wants to let him play because he’s not a ‘real nerd’ and they make him answer geeky questions to prove he should be allowed to play. Out of this comes a cautionary tale about gatekeeping where Lilith, who has been most opposed to letting him play, admits that she feels kind of like a dick for treating him so badly.

I still think there is too much loot, and I find the inventory UI kind of confusing, but I am digging the vibe. I’ve laughed a few times, and so has @partpurple. (I think it’s a good sign when a person not playing the game gets drawn in enough to laugh at jokes or have any other reaction to what’s going on in the game world.) I’m hoping the full game will be modernized a bit, but if they bring the same tone along, I’ll be interested in playing. It’s also worth mentioning that I am REALLY enjoying the music (which sounds fitting for a high-fantasy game, but really seems delightfully odd when you’re mowing enemies down with a shotgun).

Of course now Dying Light 2 is out so I’ll be transitioning to that, but I’m glad I tried out Assault on Dragon Keep and I’ll be keeping it on the hard drive. Heck it has me thinking that maybe I need to give the main Borderlands games another go.

January 2022

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I’ve noticed a lot of bloggers do some kind of “end of the month recap/plans for next month” posts. They seem like a good idea, if for no other reason than to remind ourselves “What was I doing last year at this time?”

So I’ve decided to jump on the bandwagon, but I didn’t take any notes along the way and I have the memory of a dust bunny so to some extent I’m winging it this month. But let’s see what we can see.

Games

I spent the first two thirds of the month just kind of flailing around. Part of this was my new resolution to try not to hyper-focus on any one game since that was kind of getting in the way of having fun. Part of it was that nothing was latching on to me.

Then I caught the Bloodborne bug and I’ve been playing that obsessively for the past ten days or so. At this point in my current playthrough I believe I’ve beaten 8 bosses, about half of which were optional. At least 6, and maybe 7, were first time kills for me. Next up is Rom the Vacuous Spider, for those of you who are Bloodborne savvy.

I’m not sure I’m going to tackle Rom as I may have hit my saturation point for Bloodborne finally. We’ll see.

Other games I dabbled in this month: Elder Scrolls Online, Death Stranding, Nobody Saves The World, Kingdom of Amalur: Re-Reckoning, and Persona 5. I made SOME progress in Death Stranding and Amalur but played the rest very lightly indeed.

TV

Earlier in the month I was on a Western kick. I re-watched all of Yellowstone and dove into the 1883 spin-off, though when it skipped a few weeks I drifted away. I was also watching old Westerns from the 50s, 60s & 70s.

Then I jumped over to HBO for Mare of Easttown and now I’m working through The Sopranos, which I’ve somehow never seen. Still in Season 1 of that.

Family viewing has been Lost in Space (the reboot) and now we’re re-watching Season 5 of The Expanse before we roll into Season 6 (with The Expanse we’ve always waited for a full season to be available so we can binge, and we always rewatch at least the previous season to refresh our memories). We also finished our re-watch of all seasons of Star Trek The Next Generation.

Books

Another month of Uhtred. In January I finished War of the Wolf and Sword of Kings, books 11 & 12 of Bernard Cornwell’s The Saxon Stories series. If you’re unfamiliar with these books, the TV series The Last Kingdom is based on it. The TV series only covers the first few books.

At this point. Uhtred is an old man who is dealing with the grandchildren of the people who were giving him a hard time when he was young. While the books do tend to get somewhat repetitive I’ve enjoyed just watching people enter and exit his life. Some random kid he rescues in one book might be one of his most trustworthy companions 5 or 6 books later.

On to the FUTURE!

February 2022

Games

February is going to be packed. On the 1st, Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep: A Wonderlands One-shot Adventure hits Playstation Plus so I’m going to check that out in order to measure my interest in the full-length game coming later in the spring.

On Friday, February 4th, Dying Light 2 launches. I have it pre-ordered and will be playing on the Playstation

Two weeks later, on the 18th, Horizon Forbidden West launches. That will probably be a “drop everything and pay attention to me” titles, as Horizon Forbidden Dawn is in my top-3 all time favorite games. (Along with the first Red Dead Redemption and…I dunno what #3 would be, maybe HZD is in my top-2 favorite games.). Obviously I’ll be playing this on Playstation since it is an exclusive.

Then just a week later, Elden Ring comes out. I wasn’t very interested in this until I had my Bloodborne revelation. Then I got so excited I pre-ordered it, though I probably won’t be playing at launch because of Forbidden West. Though you never know, do you? Elden Ring I will be playing on Xbox.

TV

The Sopranos will probably get me through the month for my ‘me time’ viewing.

Family viewing, after The Expanse we’ll probably go back and finish up some left over stuff, like Book of Boba Fett, Star Trek Discovery and who knows what else.

Oh! One new thing we want to watch is Kristen Bell in The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window which is a mystery-parody. We’ll watch anything the Bell is in, having been big fans all the way back to Veronica Mars.

I haven’t seen much buzz around this one, so here’s a trailer:

Books

I’m going to finish up book 13 of The Saxon Stories then…I’m not sure. I’ve been reading these books for over a year now. Having to make a decision on what to read next just feels very foreign. Maybe I’ll finally read the books that The Expanse is based on. I think I’ve only read the first one… Leviathan Wakes.

So that’s that. Recap of January, some loose plans for February. Maybe in February I’ll start remembering to take screenshots so I don’t have to keep re-using the same couple at the top of my posts.

Bloodborne & Me

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I’m still playing Bloodborne every night. This is only of any interest because I’ve spent the last few years telling everyone who would listen about how much I hate really difficult games and “Souls-Like” games in particular. Apparently I have no idea WHAT I like.

So, I was pondering that, in the way that we reclusive individuals ponder with only ourselves to talk to. Why am I enjoying Bloodborne now?

The reason boils down to a simple one: prior to this attempt at the game, I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about!

What makes this all even more amusing (to me anyway) and embarrassing is that I used to know better. Look at this post about Demon’s Souls from 2009: Demon’s Souls & its brutal(?) difficulty (PS3)

Mind you, I never finished Demon’s Souls on the PS3 but at least at the time I understood how Souls games worked. Sometime between then and now, I forgot.

Yes, Bloodborne is often challenging but you have tools to help you manage the challenge. Key things to keep in mind are that bosses do not scale to your level, and there is no hard level cap. You level your character via killing enemies and collecting the Echoes they drop. Since enemies respawn there’s an infinite supply of Echoes. Additionally you can upgrade weapons to make them more powerful, though there seems to be ‘hard stops’ where you no longer get the upgrade materials you need until you advance into a more difficult section of the game. (Early in the game you get materials that can take a weapon to +3, then the next area gives you different materials that can take weapons to +6, etc, etc.)

When you die, the only thing you lose are Echoes, which drop on the ground or are picked up by a monster. You can go back and recover those, though if you die a 2nd time before you’ve picked up your first batch of dropped Echoes, that first dropped batch poofs for good.

This can be frustrating for sure, but again there are infinite Echoes in the game. If you do lose a big wad of Echoes (and I definitely have, a few times) it’s a setback, but not a roadblock.

What I had to learn to do is mitigate risk. As you level up it costs more and more Echoes to ‘purchase’ the next level. If I’m getting close to being able to level up, I’ll start playing conservatively for a bit. I’ll often revisit an earlier area where enemies are now relatively easy to kill. This is a good way to get your Echo pool high enough to be able to spend them on a new level while also farming consumable items from enemies. And honestly it kind of feels good to go back and just burn through these baddies that used to give you so much trouble.

So after I spend my Echoes and have an inconsequential number left over, now it’s time to get really bold with exploring because if I encounter an enemy that I can’t handle, I’m risking almost nothing.

So that’s the way I’ve been playing and I’m still making slow but steady progress. And it would be unfair not to acknowledge I’m also following a guide, which helps a great deal.

I’m still really amped for some new games coming very soon and I still don’t think I’ll finish Bloodborne any time soon. Maybe I’ll come back to it, who knows? I did add Elden Ring to my “Playing Soon” list and I’m looking forward to having to figure stuff out at the same time the rest of the community is learning the game, too.

Point being, though, that I now think that I COULD finish Bloodborne if I was willing to devote the time. That realization opens up a whole genre of titles I now feel like I can play. Maybe not beat, but at least play enough to make them worth trying.

I had a point I was trying to make when I started this post but I’ve kind of lost it now. 🙂

I guess the take-away is that yes, Bloodborne can be difficult, but with some patience you can tame it and beat it, even if you do that by leveling up to the point where you’re super powerful.

Back to Bloodborne

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It all started shortly after Christmas when I was looking for something mindless to watch on YouTube and happened on Playstation Access’s “Christmas Maze” series. In this series one of the team members acts the villain, forcing the other 3 to try to beat various video game challenges. It’s pretty silly stuff, and clearly something they did before the holiday so the team could take some time off over the actual Christmas break.

One of the challenges tasked a team member with beating the first boss in Demon’s Souls. The catch was, every time she healed she had to put on another sweater. (Like I said, pretty silly stuff.) By the end she was wearing 9 sweaters over top of each other. I watched it because it was ridiculous but soon got interested in the gameplay since, with the help of the rest of the team giving advice, she made it through and it was (I think?) her first time playing Demon’s Souls.

It looked fun, and Demon’s Souls was on sale at the time, but I have an issue with difficult games and even on-sale I didn’t want to buy a game that I figured I’d play for 30 minutes then rage-quit from. Which led me back to Bloodborne since I already owned it. In fact I played it not too long ago (last August), though when all this started I’d completely forgotten that fact. Even curiousier, in that post I wrote about having finally killed the Cleric Beast for the first time. That is not correct, because I was looking at the trophies I’d earned for Bloodborne and one of them was for beating the Cleric Beast and I earned it in 2015.

So I was ready to play Bloodborne but I wanted a ‘team’ to coach me. It just so happens that Playstation Access has a playlist called “Helping a Noob Play Bloodborne” (for some reason the videos are in reverse-order in that playlist) in which someone who, like me, had been stuck since 2015 gets help from his friends. I jumped in, but quickly realized it wasn’t going to help me much for two reasons. First, it starts where Rob (the noob in question) got stuck in 2015 and that was well past where I’d gotten. Second, he actually had 2 players by his side, in-game. He basically just followed them along getting carried. Since I didn’t have 2 high-level players handy, I wasn’t learning too much from the stream.

But YouTube is a big place.

I was happy to find FightingCowboy’s “Bloodborne 100% Walkthrough” playlist and it has been tremendous help. For the first few segments I followed along meticulously, first watching a video, then basically doing exactly what he did. Often I’d stop the game and re-watch parts of the video to make sure I was doing everything correctly. I started a new character and increased the same stats he increased, opened shortcuts in the same order he did, and so on. That got me on my feet and this time when I encountered the Cleric Beast I beat it first try.

As I got more comfortable I started being a little less structured in my following Cowboy. I was feeling like not doing *any* of the exploring on my own was detracting from the experience. I tried completely cutting the cord but quickly got lost and started getting frustrated again. It’s really easy to stray into an area that you are NOT prepared for in Bloodborne (and maybe all Souls games).

Now I’ve settled into a routine where I explore a bit on my own, try to figure out where I think I should go, then I watch Cowboy’s video to see if I was right or not. Then I go back to the game and adjust so I end up at the same place his video ends. Then I start exploring on my own again. Rinse and repeat. It’s working for me. I have nothing but respect for the people who played this game blind and just figured out all the tricks and shortcuts through this maze of a game.

I’m not pledging to finish Bloodborne or anything like that, but I am enjoying a Souls game more than I ever thought I would. I’m on video 5 now (the series has 29 vids) and I’ve killed 3 bosses so far. I’m level 32-ish and just unlocked Ludwig’s Holy Blade, which Cowboy says will be my weapon for most of the rest of the game. In order to purchase that I had to find a hidden area that had some loot that sold for a ton of Echoes. And when I say hidden I mean I had to blind jump down into a dark area to land on a platform I couldn’t see when I jumped. How anyone found that area initially is beyond me.

One side effect of this experience is now I’m buying into the Elden Ring hype, too. It turns out my 60+ year old gamer brain/reflexes can actually make progress in these games, given a little help from the Internet. But I’ll probably wait for strong young gamers to figure out Elden Ring’s mysteries before I take it on myself. Plus between now and the Elden Ring launch both Dying Light 2 and Horizon Forbidden West are coming out and I gotta play both of those.

A Loss of Gaming Focus

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Here we are, January 17th and not a single blog post in 2022. I was feeling a little bad about that, but I felt like the silence was justified because I haven’t been doing anything worth blogging about.

I spent the first couple weeks of the year leaning into my ‘resolution’ of not forcing myself to stay with any one game if I’m not having fun. That was all well and good but it meant I was flitting from title to title like a butterfly in a field of wildflowers moving from blossom to blossom. While it was pretty enjoyable to do that, I didn’t stay with any one game long enough to really have anything relevant to blog about. I should add, these were all old games that most of my readers would already be familiar with, so ‘First Look’ content wouldn’t bring much value.

I’ve also been watching a lot more TV than usual. With the new season of Yellowstone drawing to a close I went back and watched that whole series over again, then jumped right into the spin-off 1883. I’ve been watching a bunch of pseudo-educational titles on PBS, like This Old House and a local program called Sci NC (I live in NC). Also watching some old, old Westerns from the 1950s and 60s. I really like TV but I grew up in an era where watching TV was considered slacking and was something to be almost ashamed of, and I kind of carry that baggage around still, so I don’t talk much about it. Plus I like a lot of shows that (at least based on my Twitter feed) most people don’t enjoy. I generally don’t want to get into a debate over the merits of a series so I try to avoid anything that comes close to a review of TV shows. Long way of saying, TV isn’t great blog fodder for me, either.

Getting back to games, I think I’m just kind of waiting for February when we’ll get both Horizon Forbidden West and Dying Light 2. Those are games I REALLY want to play and somehow I’m going to squeeze the budget enough to get them both Day 1. Horizon because I just can’t wait to play it (Horizon Forbidden Dawn is in my top 3 all-time favorite games), and Dying Light 2 because it has a multiplayer aspect and I’d like, for once, to be able to co-op with friends and not be carried because I’m so far behind. Hate that.

Of all the things to finally hook me, gaming wise, it was Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning. It was a freebie on Playstation Plus a couple months ago. I played the game back when it originally came out but that was a decade ago. Still, it’s funny how much I remember about it.

I miss games like this. I can’t even articulate what “this” means, though. I guess I mean single player RPGs with big worlds and lots of the kinds of systems that these days you generally find in MMOs. Of course Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning was supposed to be a warm-up for the Amalur MMO so maybe that’s why we get systems for crafting weapons, potions and magic items, I don’t know. But I roam the world of Amalur filling up my quest journal (everyone needs my help!), soaking in the lore (there’s a lot of it), gathering resources and fighting anything that moves because the combat is so damned enjoyable. Yeah, it has a certain amount of “rushed to market” jank still, and the graphics are definitely dated. But damn is it ever fun.

I really like melee combat in my video games. There’re plenty of modern melee-focused games these days but they generally now lean towards the “souls-like” genre; games that punish failure too much for me to find them enjoyable. The whole ‘replay this section over and over, memorize where the enemies are and git gud until you can finally make it to the next checkpoint’ just isn’t my vibe. KoA has a save (almost) anywhere mechanic so I only ever lose as much progress as I’m comfortable losing.

KoA is also not grim. I mean yeah, there’s a war on and all that. But the aesthetic is lots of color, and enemies are not grotesque nightmare fuel (thanks for that trend too, Souls-games). They are also not cartoon beings that look like they’ve escaped from a Nickelodeon show. Game devs: there’s a whole spectrum between cute and horrific: consider exploring it now and then.

Anyway, so that’s what I’m playing mostly now. It’s a little bittersweet because I can’t think of a modern game similar to this that is out now or coming out any time soon. Elder Scrolls 6 maybe, but that is years away yet. The new Fable? Again, not coming any time soon. The world has moved on and most gamers are looking forward to Elden Ring which appears to be another punishing souls-like with grotesque enemies that just seem to be a bit too gooey for me.

Yeah, the graphics haven’t aged well…

Gaming Resolutions for 2022

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Man it feels weird to type “2022” — that’s the kind of date that the sci fi novels I read as a kid would use.

Anyway, I’m not usually one for resolutions or gaming goals but I decided I’d make an exception this year since I’ve been thinking about how I needed to change my gaming habits anyway, and it just so happens to be the end of the year. Bam! Resolution. More accurately I should say I need to revert to some old “bad” habits.

Historically I have been really bad about finishing games. Back in the day I made more money than I do now and had fewer expenses so I could pretty much afford to buy any and every game that interested me. The pattern in those days was buy a new game, start playing it, be enjoying it, but then some other new game would come out that interested me. So I’d buy that and start it up, solemnly promising myself I’d get back to the first game, but of course I never would. For games that are not “finishable” (MMOs, live-service games) you can substitute “reach the end game” for “finishing a game.”

Fairly recently (heck maybe it was a resolution from last year!) I’ve tried hard to change that pattern. I’ve been making a concerted effort to finish the games I start, or just accept that I wasn’t enjoying them enough to ever finish them. Our financial situation is such that I have to think hard about spending $60 for a game and then only playing half of it. That was part of the reason for the change. The other part was that I was missing the satisfaction of completing something. Anything! In my life, both at home and at work, I seem to rarely take on (or be assigned) a project that has a satisfying conclusion. I build web sites and a web site is never really done, right?

Anyway so that was the plan and I’ve executed on it reasonably well, and when I finish a game it IS very satisfying. But the flip side is I keep playing games long past where they’re really enjoyable. I just push on and try to power through and while that has worked, it hasn’t been very much fun, apart from the satisfaction of finishing. I walk away from a game thinking “Thank god that is over, I never want to see that game again” even if it was a title that I initially really enjoyed.

So my resolution this year is to try to find a middle ground between never finishing games and being so bullheaded about finishing them that they become a chore.

One “tool” that I think I need to work on is being able to re-engage with a game when I come back to it, picking up where I left off. I’m really bad at remembering the subtleties of a game’s systems, so when I go back and pick up an old game I start over. If I could get better at re-learning a game without re-starting it then I feel like I’d have the ability to both finish games and be able to step away from them when a new shiny catches my eye or the current title is starting to feel repetitious. Go back to an old game enough times, always picking up where you left off, and eventually you’ll finish it, right? Of course I say this after having re-started Death Stranding from the beginning for the 3rd time (nope, I’ve never finished it).

I think basically this is a matter of patience. When I return to a partially completed game I get impatient with myself if it is difficult or confusing, but in this day and age there are tools, right? I could find a let’s play on YouTube and watch the first couple hours of a playthrough. I could read the start of a walk-through. For most games there’s a Reddit or a Discord where I can ask questions and in my experience visiting these places when a game is a little older is fairly pleasant. Most of the toxic people have moved on to the communities of newer games where there are more targets. The people still hanging around generally love the game and want more people to play and enjoy it.

Or of course I could start a new game but save my old one, re-play the first few hours then switch, though I’ve had limited success with this since I so quickly engage with my current character/decisions.

Anyway so that’s my New Year’s Resolution. Basically stop making gaming a chore or an obligation. Gaming is supposed to bring me joy, and it generally does but lately it’s started to feel more like an obligation than a hobby. Just a few days ago I threw in the towel on Metal Gear Solid 5 because I couldn’t face playing nothing but it for what appeared to be 5-6 more weeks in order to finish it. That was kind of an extreme decision and if I’d just let myself set it aside and play something else before I got tired of Metal Gear, it might still be on my hard drive waiting to be played.

So last night I set aside Death Stranding (which I’m once again enjoying very much) and fired up Ghost Recon Wildlands, a game I haven’t played in years. Instead of starting from scratch I’m just being patient with myself and re-learning the systems from where I left off, and it didn’t take very long at all before I was having fun.

2022 has a LOT of potentially amazing games on the way. All those titles that slipped from 2021 due to the pandemic are going to start arriving. Horizon Forbidden West is my next “Day 1 Purchase” game for me, and it’ll be here in February. I can’t wait!

I hope you have a year full of great gaming, and thanks for reading Dragonchasers!

Tapping Out of Metal Gear Solid 5

Posted on by Nimgimli

Over the past 5 days (4 of which were vacation days) I’ve been focused on playing Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain. And I think I’m done. I’ve gone from “Hey, this is actually pretty fun” to “Let’s see how much more I have to go before I finish this.” The answer to that last question is: 89%. After 5 days I’m at 11% complete. Extrapolating from that, I’ve got 45 more days of playing and I’m already getting tired of it so… yeah time to throw in the towel. Or at least put it in the “games I play every once in a while” pile rather than my “games I’m trying to finish” pile.

It’s not that it’s a bad game so much as that it’s a stealth game and I always forget that while I THINK I like stealth games, in practice I just don’t have the patience for them. Early on I play them the right way, sneaking around, hiding in corners, waiting for patrols to pass and so on. But damn is that time consuming and I’m so often cognizant of how much time I have to play and how much progress I’ve made. I get impatient and do something that I know has a small chance of success just because I want to do SOMETHING. Then I fail and it is back to square one. I spent 2 hours this morning trying to complete a trivial side mission and have nothing to show for it.

Which is a weird thing to say, isn’t it? I was playing a game so presumably having fun. When I spend 2 hours watching a movie what do I have to show for it? Somehow I’ve programmed my brain to expect some kind of progress for every hour I put into gaming. I wish my brain wouldn’t work that way. Though I suppose if I was really having fun for those 2 hours I wouldn’t care that I hadn’t made any progress.

While writing this post I did a bit of Googling and I guess you CAN attack the game full-on combat style but there are something called “Demon Points” that you accrue. For some reason Snake isn’t supposed to kill anyone in this war he is in. If I could go in and incapacitate dudes one by one I would. And you can do that, to a point. You can tranq them or knock them out. But they wake up eventually and then set off an alarm. I wish the game had a way I could zip-tie dudes and put duct tape over their mouth and basically take them out of the fight for the duration of the mission. (I hope that sentence is never taken out of context.)

I spent a lot of time watching this screen, waiting.

I’m not sure what Demon Points do beyond alter your appearance but I seem to have accrued a bunch of them because my Snake is constantly covered in blood. I send him to the showers (yes, you can really do that) and within minutes he is a smear of red. It’s ridiculous.

Also ridiculous is that every enemy base is playing either A-Ha’s “Take on Me” or the Kim Wilde’s “Kids of America.” EVERY SINGLE BASE. I guess Kojima could only afford to license 2 songs.

There’s a lot of interesting aspects besides going on missions. There’s a whole base-building aspect, there’s staff management, R&D, a bit of economic game. This stuff all takes a while to open up and I still don’t have everything unlocked, but I like having something to focus on beyond the immediate mission objectives. While you’re out in the field you can capture enemies (who magically switch to your side) and gather resources used to enhance your weapons and your base. You can even steal things like gun emplacements which are used to defend your base (which presumably gets attacked later in the game) or which can be sold for cash.

You can capture sheep and other wildlife because why not?

So I’m in this weird place where I enjoy kind of the sides, but I’m not enjoying the main course very much (sorry for the weird analogy but lunch is on the table and it smells so good and my stomach is rumbling). It really might be because I’m playing to finish rather than playing to enjoy. Or it might be that Afghanistan is so drab. I’m not at the “Rage Quit/Uninstall” stage yet, but I’m going to find something else to play for a few days/weeks and maybe come back to this later.

And y’know, if I wanted to spend hours just running around a bleak world, I could go play Death Stranding.

Game Grazing Lately

Posted on by Nimgimli

Over on Time to Loot Nathin asked readers what their personal Game of the Year was and… I couldn’t remember what I’d played in 2021. LOL And since I hadn’t been blogging for the first half of the year, I didn’t have any way of reminding myself.

That alone feels like a reason to keep blogging; at least then I could remember what I’ve played. Old age man…it stinks. Ask me about how bad my night vision has become!

Anyway since finishing Guardians of the Galaxy I’ve kind of been flathering around, not sticking with any one game. I keep waiting to settle into something to blog about it but it isn’t happening. So here’s what I’ve been bouncing around between lately.

On the Xbox I started Final Fantasy XII but so far I’m only about 5 hours in. I’ve played this before back when it came out on the Playstation 2, but never finished it and obviously can’t use that save, so I’m starting fresh. At some point FF XII was refreshed or remastered or something (it is now “Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age”), but the faces of the player characters still look like lumps of clay with features drawn on them. I find it really distracting. Oddly NPCs seem to look better, and the cut scenes look fine.

FF XII does come closer to scratching the FF XIV itch than the other Final Fantasy games, so that’s something. What I REALLY want to be playing is a single-player version of Final Fantasy XIV. If I were king of the world I’d command Square Enix to create such a thing.

Also on the Xbox, I finally started Halo Infinite but so far I’m not really feeling it. To be fair I’ve done all of one mission. I just think my tastes have moved past first person shooters, maybe.

Lastly, a week or so ago Ubisoft released some new content for Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, which is one of my favorite games of the past few years. I love that game so much I’ve been playing the new content slowly to make it last. Kassandra is such a bad-ass and one of the best video game characters since Aloy in Horizon Zero Dawn.

On the Playstation 5 I’ve been beating on my backlog. I’m back into Sword Art Online: Re: Hollow Fragment (these names…oof). This time I did NOT start over and I’m focusing on the Hollow Area and sticking with just partnering with one character. My goal is to finish the storyline and not to worry about stuff like trying to date all the girls. I’m vaguely proud of myself for being able to come back to this game and still know how to play it given how chaotic the combat system is.

I like it well enough but it isn’t something I can play for hours on end as it starts to feel pretty repetitious. It’s a nice game to boot up when I’m feeling kind of low energy and just want to grind through a bunch of enemies and stuff.

The other old game I’ve fired up is Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain. I almost bounced off this one due to the on-boarding process. I had to agree to 3 different Eula/Privacy things, then the game asked me what country and state I lived in, as well as my birthday (obviously I lied on all of this). Then early in the Prologue it asked me to customize my avatar which I spent a bunch of time doing only to not have the avatar used at all: I’m still Solid Snake in-game.

Then you start playing and you have to sit through credits for every mission. It’s like they actively are discouraging you from playing. If I took a shot every time Kojima’s name came up on screen I’d be passed out before Snake took his first step forward.

Once you DO get past all that nonsense, the actual game play is pretty darned good so far. And for a last gen game it looks really good. It’s an open world game; you can go in and do missions or just free-roam and find supplies and stuff. It’s supposed to take place in 1984 Afghanistan but a lot of the tech you have is pretty advanced. Lots of scouting and sneaking and placing C4 charges and things like that. Serious business then broken up by silly things like using a cardboard box to hide in, or air-lifting sheep back to base via balloons. This is the game I’m closest to settling into but it does play best when you have a solid chunk of time and can focus on it.

Lastly, just this morning I splashed out $60 for Rider’s Republic and the Year 1 Season Pass on PS5. It’s on sale for 40% off and it wasn’t a super responsible decision to make but hey, let me have this one bit of mad spending for the season. I bought the whole thing just for this:

I’m feeling kind of desperate for something festive and upbeat and this looks just like that. Hopefully it’s fun. I played a beta of it and the actual gameplay was pretty fun but cut-scenes and interacting with NPCs was super-cringey. My plan is to skip all that stuff.