Tale

The game this most felt like it wanted to be after I started up is Jedi Survivor/Fallen Order. But not as good. The prologue is this linear cinematic action affair with a zipline and a slide even. But it doesn't sell the action or adventure nearly as well.

Only a handful of hours and I feel like I'm playing a AA fantasy action adventure instead of a AAA RPG. It's going to need to really nail the landing to end up getting a positive review from me by the end. The biggest issue might be how cinematic it wants to be while not quite managing it well. The game wants to have frequent cutscenes, but very little worth having a cutscene. Very little drama or action. Just dialogue dragged on a bit too long. Needed an editing pass to cut back the word count and add some drama. Right after the prologue when the new big threat is revealed, the party gathers round to discuss next steps. The other two characters come into scene by kicking back with cups of tea and I am a little lost as to why everyone is so cozy. There's just a jarring absence of tension 90% of the time. And the new darkspawn designs are the worst yet. But, on the other hand, the blight is the best yet.

The reviews I've seen all point to some big emotional finale of the franchise so far. And that has kind of sold me on it. If it can stick an ending and wrap things up, I guess I can work with that. DAO will always hold a dear place for me. And I think each installment has less magic than the last. But if this is potentially answering some of those big questions from long ago, I can't resist. I think I spent way too much time after DAO speculating on the nature of the Fade, the Blight, and the Black City to pass up.

I guess I'm a Warframe guy now.

Finished Shadow of the Erdtree and trying to figure out what to play next. The First Descendent? A story so offensively stupid I couldn't go on. And gameplay that just feels like waiting to die. I kind of own both Dying Light games. Maybe I should at least try them.

Still wasting too much time on games. Destiny 2 is looking to make up for Lightfall, but the constant FOMO and grind make it an easy game to burn out on. Maybe with The Final Shape I can give up on playing it for the story and go to other games that aren't made for gambling addicts. Dragon's Dogma 2 was pretty great. Weaker than the 1st in key ways, which is why I immediately started a playthrough of 1 after finishing.

How many months was I gone this time? Anyway, I'm playing a mix of Lethal Company, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Rogue Trader. RDR2 is the hardest to recommend, but maybe that's because it's a slow start. Probably more on me than the game.

This game has been weird to me. Up front I do not meet the minimum requirements as my SSD is too small to put the game on, so it's running on HDD. This is the likely culprit on a load of issues with it freezing up that are always connected to audio. The music cuts out after landing on a planet and goes deathly silent for a while before picking back up, the game just freezes for maybe no reason at times (probably loading something I don't even notice), every character I talk to starts miming their dialogue before the actual words get spoken... I spent hours dealing with this, getting frustrated, thinking it looked ugly right up until I just upped the resolution scaling. No longer am I running at half-resolution, but three quarters, medium graphics settings, and the game looks fine. And, magically, most of that freezing seems to have gone away. Everyone acts like they want to load every single dialogue they might ever say when I interact with them, but no longer does it freeze randomly while running around. Gameplay has smoothed out. And I think it even stopped the issue where it would freeze the first time I shot a guy in any encounter.

Played too much Diablo which put me on an ARPG kick. 4 has a good story, but left me unhappy with my character in terms of power fantasy or just interesting stuff in my build. 3 flips those around and is just braindead easy when doing a campaign run. Last Epoch tries on the story and I'm not comfortable saying it succeeds, but it does manage some interesting builds and power fantasy. I think I need to put all of these to bed for a while. Too much running between places while clicking on hordes of enemies.

Curse of the Golden Idol and Scarlet Hollow Curse of the Golden Idol was a good game. Like a 2d Curse of the Obra Dinn. I can't put my finger on it, but it failed to capture me in the same way. But it's all the same stuff, look at a scene and some dialogue, and piece together who everyone is and how they died. It's intellectually stimulating even if it is lacking the same magic. Scarlet Hollow is simply incredible. An episodic Horror VN that is leaving me with post-game withdrawals while I wait for the next release. I knew it'd be good from the demo of Slay the Princess (their other WIP game), but I wasn't ready for how good.

Cursed Halo Again came out and put me on a Halo kick. I finished that, it was fun, and now I'm jumping between Halo Wars (first time since before the game released) and Halo: Reach. I wish Reach had a cursed mod so much.

HELP Tokyo Necro, since I'm actually a big fan of Nitroplus VNs. Stellaris: First Contact, since I'm a Stellaris addict. Paranormasight, because horror VNs with good ratings end up getting bought by me even if I never have time (but I'm making time) Your Turn to Die, because indie early access horror VNs with good ratings end up getting bought by me even if I never have time. Seriously, I have at least 4 others and have touched only 1. This is an addiciton. And you know that Very Positive indie bundle of 26 games? I saw two games that looked funny and got that too.

I'm not even sure it officially qualifies as food. I just bought a bunch of Huel. It's my second time toying around with plant based meal replacements, the first being one of the early formulations of Soylent. There's something about finding bachelor chow I am fascinated by. Ultra easy low calorie meals. Am I lazy slob who is looking to suck all the joy out of food by turning it into a numbers game? I don't have to answer that and you can't make me. The Mac and Cheese was bland. This makes total sense for 200 calories at a half serving of Mac and "cheese." It's basically a cheese textured starch powder. Being inoffensively bland is a win.

Destiny 2 released an expansion. Am I our Destiny guy? I'm probably our Destiny guy. You may have heard people were disappointed. It's actually really good, but with a very notable problem. Like if you take the first half of the opening cutscene and the ending cutscene, you would not feel you missed anything between them. A window literally closes in the opening, then opens up in the ending. And everyone is standing in the same places. When (almost*) everything else is good, the story coming across like absolutely-nothing is a sticking point in a time period when the story is supposed to be ramping up to the end. Originally this was planned to be the final expansion of the current storyline until over a year ago they decided to add one more. It's as if they had the intro cinematic for that finale and cut it in half, then put the entire expansion in the middle of the cutscene. I'm kind of glad the game has the year, I just think they needed to redo the cutscene. They'll hopefully tie up some more loose ends they wouldn't have had the chance to otherwise. Almost*: Why are all the legendary weapons this season reskin? Something is going on with the art department. The last dungeon only had half a new weapon set. And now most of the new weapons are old weapons with new (utterly fantastic) textures.

Barotrauma was a ton of fun just messing about for a few months when it first came out. It's hard to find a game with that same feel now. Just running around, accusing the workers of sabotaging until the real saboteur does something, then everyone struggles to be the last to die. I can't fathom playing it seriously.

Dead Space 3 is down and with that my Dead Space trilogy is complete. Final verdict: Meh. I'll never do a full trilogy run again unless 4 comes out and it's as good as Remake. I almost gave up on 3 at one point. The second to last optional mission. There's a single room, maybe half the size of your average suburban living room, where 4 waves will come at you 3 at a time. All enhanced. It's mostly those lame pickaxe guys who are hard to shoot the arms off of and you have to take out at least three limbs to kill them. I'd end up reloading after the first wave, just to get stunlocked by the next. Line gun, ripper, plasma cutter. Kept dying. Turns out the line gun is simply garbage. Complete and utter. And the chain lightning gun is the best. Just changing the head on the weapon it goes from killing nothing and walking outside for a smoke break between shots to killing the entire room and being ready for a follow up shot by the time you move your cursor. It carried me the rest of the way through the game and through Awakened. As for Awakened, it's actually pretty good. Might be the second best Dead Space (if we only count Remake and 1 as a single game). But it's not worth the slog.

Dead Space 2 is done. I did not like it. I see why I never had the itch to replay it now. Dead Space 3 gets off a real bad foot by throwing Necromoprhs that are just zombies with pickaxes. They're hard to dismember with their arms at their side, so you just shoot them normal. And it follows this up with... normal guys shooting at you. Bad foot after bad foot. I've actually got far enough to get into the meat of the game. I love getting to explore a pseudo-open world starship graveyard, at least on paper. But it's all for the purpose of supporting their resource system. That's all you can find, not even new story beats or cool environmental bits. I can carry two guns. I don't need a gazillion gun combinations or the resources to build a gazillion guns. Mechanically it becomes a slog. The new line rifle looks cool, but the areas are so small, and all the enemies are so fast you can't use it. Once enemies are on top of you, it can't hit them. By contrast the plasma cutter, which makes boring "pop" noises when fired, is all around useful. And with the Planet Cracker head seems to do more damage than the line rifle anyway...

I finished Dead Space remake. Twice actually, so I could get the secret ending. It was a lot of fun and remains one of my favorite horror games. They did some smart additions. And I say this having been half afraid they'd screw everything up. When my only real complaint is the sound seems a lot more subdued than the original. Not enough constant clanging, banging, and screaming. Loses some of that industrial feel. So on to Dead Space 2. I have stuff I want to say here. This is my second "real" playthrough of Dead Space 2, not counting my abandoned first run at release. A couple minor nitpicks I had in remake were the over the top new cutscenes. A ship explodes, throwing Isaac clear, then a second explosion throws him to safety on the gangway. A necromorph transforms right on top of him making sure you see it up close. Dead Space 2 literally starts with that latter scene as the opening. And in my first two hours of the game, Isaac had been blown up three times. And in my several hours since they did not stop at three. Anytime the developers got bored of an area, explosions throw you elsewhere. Except that one time where you got sucked out of an window, then blown up back through a different window in the same building. Why? WHY? A lot of people complained that Dead Space 3 turned the franchise into a big dumb action game and I'm reminded that it did not start with three. Enemies come at you in waves so large, the game engine has to despawn bodies from the first wave to to have enough memory to send the last. Three maybe just turned the dumb up a notch. Sure, two features you Supermanning through a collapsing city only to make a superhero landing when you arrive, but at least it doesn't have three's piece-de-resistance of... Supermanning around to use your super kinesis to wrestle a moon. Or whatever that is. I guess I'll resfresh my memory when I get there.

The reviews on Hogwarts Legacy caused me to interrupt my Dead Space remake run... I'll never finish this Dead Space trilogy marathon, will I? Especially since Returnal just came out and Lightfall is in two weeks.

144 hours played, all three Dark Souls games down with DLC. I'm glad I did that. After all that, I feel like I need more closure from this franchise... It's a weird way of saying I want more. But when the grand finale is giving a kid black paint and her saying she'll paint someone a nice home, then I kind of want to see that place. Anyway, I was originally going to do a Dead Space marathon when Elden Ring interrupted. And now with the remake out maybe I'll start there.

Still on Dark Souls 3. Finished all the Lords of Cinder and am moving on to DLC before hitting up Archdragon Peak and the finale. I'm glad I did, because Lothric's Greatsword is absolutely killing Ashes of Ariandel. Chopping down trees with a flaming ultra greatsword is a good time.

A theory I heard on that elevator is that you were supposed to go to the Iron Keep from the Forest of Fallen Giants Salamander area. This would have been a good fit since FoFG goes basically nowhere other than the back entrance to Bastille. Which itself seems like it's just... there. And that explains why there's Ironclad Soldiers in both areas. That elevator was probably going to head underground somewhere like the Undead/Dark Castle, which became the Crypt. I just started up Dark Souls 3 and it immediately blows Dark Souls 2 out of the water. The atmosphere is great. And the mid roll feels just fun to use. Combat feels similar otherwise (I haven't tried powerstancing and likely won't this run), but that roll is such an improvement.

Dark souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin down. It's a weird game. Massively more ambitious than Dark Souls 1, but strangely taped together. I guess it's easy to say that when I've been told that's what happened, but I see it too. It's more imminently playable, but it fails to capture the imagination.

I ended up playing a little indie game you've probably never heard of called Elden Ring. Anyway, it's fantastic and I found myself wondering why I waited so dang long to check it out. I've been a big Soulsborne fan, though maybe I didn't find Sekiro worth finishing. But I enjoyed it so much this has turned into a Dark Souls marathon. Dark Souls 1 down and now I'm in the midst of Dark Souls 2. This is my first experience with Scholar of the First Sin edition and will be my first time with the DLCs. I recall plodding through the original Dark Souls 2 carefully and doing a pretty decent job. This time I feel like I'm getting drowned in fights every couple feet. As a conquence I'm massively overleveling this game. So that's a mixed bag. It's easier because of my levels, but it's tense because I'll go somewhere and fight like 6 tough enemies in a row followed by an NPC invader....