Tale

The Room Two In this surprising sequel to the film, Johnny must solve puzzle boxes to find Mark inside an eldritch nightmare. But seriously, these are fun games. I binged through the first one last night. They're puzzle boxes with fairly simple logic. Ones that couldn't exist in the real world for a few reasons. And at like $1.50 in the sale, much cheaper than even a single box.

Finished Detroit Become Human. The first genuinely good Quantic Dream game. Some have come close, but they crapped themselves at the end. This one does not.

I went to the ER. The meds they put me on cleared up the pain from the kidney stone right away. The pain hasn't even returned yet. I'm the last person in my family to join the club. My dad's was as big as a thumbnail according to him.

I've only had one DM (out of 3) use a module and it was like the starter stuff from 4E. We were all pretty new then. During 4E I used to buy modules because I was a sucker who thought I'd ever get to use them.

Bouncing between three games. Still doing Diablo 3, I basically just try to hit one of the remaining season items a day. Detroit Become Human, I hear so much good stuff about it despite not liking Quantic Dream's stuff that I decided to give it a chance. It's really good so far, but that tends to be the way Cage does thing. Really good then something really dumb happens. Lastly is Doom 2016. I rented it at release as an old Doom fan and wasn't thoroughly impressed. Playing it again now I remember why. The platforming is garbage. Accidentally slipping a jump to die really does nothing to add to the experience. And scouring every corner of the map for the hidden path to a collectible certainly isn't contributing to exciting demon shooting.

The real annoying part for me is I don't even like bone armor. I dropped that ability a long time ago. I like summoning mages and ripping blood. But if I went back to that I'd be pushed so far back. So I went back to my mage and I'm actually playing around with different builds on her.

Got my season set in Diablo 3. And now I can play Torment VI and just walk through enemies so they die. I'm basically not even playing anymore. I'm just walking around refreshing bone armor. Some particular strong Elites can one-shot me, so I have to keep walking and make sure I use the bone armor stun to hit them. Which usually kills them in one or two shots.

There's a season buff where each Ancient item you have gives you a 750% buff if you don't have an item set bonus. So beating 1600% is quite possible. The numbers really are insane. They've just lost all meaning at this point. My Necro has 6,708 Intelligence and regenerates 23,242 HP per second. She has almost half a million health. Her strength is 77. I've been at the endgame for barely over a weekend!

Diablo 3 So I've got Ashbringer apparently. And am almost done with the first 4 parts of the season journey. I guess that ancient helm I upgraded from a rare is really helping me out. 750% damage buff! Only thing left to do to get the pet is a single greater rift.

Bioware's copyright is almost certainly with regards to the Infinity Engine. I seem to recall that being brought up around the Enhanced Editions. Minsc has been used so liberally by Wizards and licensors I don't think Bioware kept any rights on characters.

Is he stated to be a greater deity anywhere? He was only an intermediate before. And the FR wiki just lists him as a god. The last two Bhaalspawn killed each other and he came back. Gorion's Ward (though I hear there was some hand wringing about how it might not actually be him) and the teleporting dude, Viekang. No idea why Viekang picked that fight, he was a coward.

I was waiting on this. When they announced it and that it'd have new stuff I dropped my old game. And since it broke custom portraits, I guess it might have to start new...

5E I'd mostly describe as a mash of 2E and 3E, but with 4E's resting rules. Feats are rare, only taken in lieu of stat gains, instead of 3E's feat deluge. And there's multiclassing, but I've not played around with it. The Fighter in my campaign took a level of Cleric. Otherwise familiarity with 3E serves well aside from class changes. Like Warlocks don't do that shape/essence thing at all. It's Eldritch Blast, some utility abilities, and some limited spellcasting. I've got like 8 spells I picked, but I can only cast two a day. And it still likes doing the kit thing that 4E did. My Warlock is Infernal, we've got a Wild Mage (Chaos Sorcerer), and our Barbarian has some sort of elemental rage thing going on. Oh, and you don't assign points to skills at level. You just have proficiency and bonuses.

That's not how 5e works. There's no trees. Sword Coast Legends was not really 5e faithful if that's where you're getting it from.

Am I the only one hoping the main bad guy turns out to be an Illithid Bhaalspawn?

I've only ever finished Original Sin 2 and found myself thinking "that's it?" at the end. No real complaints beyond thinking it was kind of bare in the story department. Anyway, there's a teaser trailer out. Interesting direction. I was hoping for more ties to the saga, but I can't really complain about this. Aside from the fact that they're cheap buggers that I hated fighting.

I just hit Act 2 in Diablo 3. No more skeletons and ghosts to rip the blood out of. Got a nice little playstyle at work here, though. Singularity Skeleton Mage is kind of ridiculous. All of this is ridiculous. I'm playing Hard and Butcher went down in like 10 seconds. There's only one difficulty left to raise to and I'd have to start a new game to get it.

Ended up buying Diablo 3 Eternal Collection. All the while thinking "why am I wasting $10 more on this version when I'll never use the Necromancer?" Then I saw there's the whole seasonal thing and rolled a new character. Anyway, now I'm ripping all the blood out of ghosts and skeletons. Edit: I didn't realize Ancient Relics was coming out today. Else I wouldn't have bought Diablo 3. I don't have time for both!

Trying out action RPGs after Steam's spring cleaning. Grim Dawn, Path of Exile, and Diablo 3 For a casual action RPG player like me who hates lootfests and grinding, Diablo 3 comes across as the one with the most going for it moment to moment. Like my Wizard shoots freaking laser beams. The upgrades look more interesting than +10 int or +10 lightning damage, too. I feel like I played a bunch of Path of Exile, but all my character does is lightning fingers and the occasional fireball. Where's the laser beams and lightning strikes?

If there's one complaint, and there's definitely at least one, I have about Zachary Sergi's Choice of Games titles, it's his stat system. You're basically pushed into making completely nuance-void choices and unchanging characters. Because if you pick something that's not perfectly in line with what the game thinks you've been picking, it practically berates you for that. I still like Versus so far. But I'm getting paranoid that since I had the character treat friends and family openly in the beginning, it's going to start making me fail at everything now that I feel like concealing stuff from people who are clearly up to something.

General love for IE style RPGs. I don't know if I'd call it a diamond in the rough, but maybe a lesser gemstone. It's actually frustrated me at a few points where I call BS on the bosses. But I think the pacing of the game is the only true turnoff.

I've been playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker. I was really enjoying it until after the troll lair. Now... I'm not really sure what to do? Am I just waiting for the next curse event? Feeling pretty directionless, wandering around just filling in gaps in the roads. Really killing my interest in the game, like it just ground to a halt. By the time the story picks up again I fear I'll forget what I'm supposed to care about. Also doing some Choice of Games stuff from my backlog. A Study in Steampunk was decent enough. On to Versus: The Lost Ones, from the guy who did the rather excellent Heroes Rise series.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets My reactions in the intro: Why is this movie so poorly received, this is looking to be great! My reaction when the two leads start talking: Oh... that's just tragic. This is some of the worst dialogue I've watched.

It's time to try Pathfinder: Kingmaker again. And it's going a lot better than I remembered. Just beat the Stag Lord and didn't have half the amount of rage issues as I did the first time. Though clearing the camp was still way more metagamey than I prefer. It's impossible to help that in this genre. And I'm really aching to give Dead Space trilo another play.

Contradiction, the all video murder mystery. It's neat, but has some flow issues. It just feels super weird to be visiting the same four houses like twice an hour.