Tale

As a big fan of Roiland stuff, I was really hoping I'd latch onto it. It hasn't happened yet. There's occasionally a really funny bit, but it mostly feels like throwaway gags that weren't good enough to air on Rick and Morty.

I finally finished Callisto Protocol. I'd give the game 3.5 stars out of 5. I enjoyed playing it overall and want to see if the franchise improves for sequels, but there's a good chance I'll never play it again if it does not. I say it's a good game, but a good part of that is just how starved I am for space horror that's not put together entirely with assets from the Unity asset store. The combat system works, but not so well you can play 10+ hours (Steam says I have 15) dodging side to side without begruding it quite a bit. For a sequel to excel, they'll need to not make this the center of the gameplay. And maybe don't use the same encounter as a mini-boss 4 times. When I say "the combat system works" I'm not counting any boss fights. It didn't work for a single one.

Dear Obsidianites, I started a Fortress for the first time in years. A Fortress of the Dwarven kind. Send help. With ale. Sincerely, Tale PS: Why did I lay out the entire fortress on day 1 before I even remembered how to set up doors right?

Callisto Protocol gets better the further I get into it. People who said it feels like an advertisement for a better game might be on to something. All that stuff I complained about earlier in the game? I feel like I passed the part of the game where they fixed it. The majority of the "prison" part of the game is walking down drab hallways and disgusting vents. Nothing about what you're looking at feels like a real place. It's all just generic hallways broken up by scripted fights of various difficulties. But then I'd say around the hab dome area of the game that changes. Fights are still scripted, but the areas start having more identity. They're a bit more open, the paths more sensible. And when they weren't, I was catching little markings pointing me where to go next. There's a whole sequence in a concrete facility where it looks like someone went ahead of you and marked all the collapsed tunnels. And the combat... this is right around the part of the game where the tentacles come into play. They're presented as this step up in difficulty, the enemies are mutating. But what it really is, is an opportunity to end the fights early. Swing a few times, then the tentacles appear and you can kill them off by shooting them. It really improves fight pacing. Then we're on to playing a bit more with your own style. The number of environmental objects in the game has taken a sharp upturn. Explosive cannisters, wallspikes. So you can run through four or five guys by shooting a couple cannisters, beating one in the had a couple times, then double tapping them. It's made all of it more interesting. Maybe they thought they'd teach me all these tools over time, get me used to more tedious combat, then let me feel like a badass when I could exploit all the ways to manage it better. But what it really feels like is they were learning as they developed the game. The early level design feeling a lot less competent leaves me with this impression.

I decided to try out Darktide on Gamepass. One match and I realized they want me to grind a bunch just to get to the fun part. Hard pass. So I finally decided to start up Valheim. Kind of grindy too. But I like building stuff and exploring.

Lies and slander. My lightning thrower build from DS1 is one of my favorites.

I'm 3 hours into Callisto Protocol. Playing the medium difficulty and I've got my nitpicks. 1) The combat is overtuned. That's my fancy way of saying it's too hard while trying not to sound like an old fogie. But seriously, I think the combat is overdesigned for attack->counterattack loops. And the second I try to put my own spice on it I get bashed. Especially in scripted encounters where they are transparently programmed to keep you in combat with two enemies simultaneously. It's weird how it keeps popping up. Find two guys, take one down. Take another down and it gets an immediate replacement too. I die in those encounters a lot. Because someone got behind me, I wanted to try something out, I thought there was a reason to use GRP in combat and there really wasn't (despite this encounter teaching me about GRP), or I'm just getting frustrated at repeating this one encounter and I do something to try and speed it up. And then I see an animation of my face getting bashed in. Loading screen. Back to where I was. I need to learn to just stick to dodging left and right and then using standard attacks when it's safe. There's no room for personal style. 2) The level design needs work. Too often I'll come across two unlocked doors. Go down one until I hit what looks like an area transition, run all the way back to the other one, and check it out. Sometimes this leads to a back and forth as the area transition wasn't really the area transition. But the other one definitely is and you can't go back. It needs some better signposting of what areas you can't return from. And to build up trust that you'll get to go back to the fork pressing forward. It doesn't have that.

Running some quick tests of my own, I think they just didn't QA the PC well enough. Whatever's going on with the asset streaming or shader caching seems like a one-time issue. I watched the intro for the first time and the game stuttered every time the camera angle changed suddenly or an effect went off. I did it a second time, even after a full exit, and the problem is resolved. For that one scene. So if it's compiling shaders on the fly and that compilation causes the issue, then once they're compiled it's technically resolved. My limited time working QA, we weren't regularly diligent about doing clean wipes of our machines to test on either. Then again it was over a decade ago and issues like this may be more common now.

I'm such a huge fan of Beast Wars that I'm having to fight the urge to see that Transformers movie. I've skipped the last 4, but Beast Wars was my dang childhood. Everything about that trailer was simply the worst, though.

Unlikely. So what I'm gathering from all the discussions is that the biggest issue in Callisto Protocol has something to do with UE4 shader caching. Like the stuttering happens any time the game decides to stream a new asset or compile a shader for the first time. A lot of what I read says tools exist to fix this issue. Why it wasn't fixed before release is another thing. But it definitely seems the priority was the PS5 version of the game. I'm disappointed more effort wasn't taken to get the PC version into a better state before today. But I'm hopeful they'll be able to fix it quick now that they're being held to the fire. Sadly, my experience says even quick fixes may not be for a week or more. And I was hoping to play a bunch this weekend.

I'm answering in advance. Callisto Protocol launches tomorrow. Please don't suck. I need space horror right now.

Finished the last two Dark Pictures Overall I'd give season 1 a solid 4 stars. I've got my quibbles with it, but the sheer fact that I plowed through over 30 hours of the damned thing and my following thought is "I want to play Quarry and then maybe come back to these" says a lot about how I feel. They're not going to be my favorite games of all time, but they still leave me wanting more. House of Ashes was unquestionably my favorite. It felt like blockbuster installment of the season. And I just like the kind of story it is more. Being trapped in ruins, uncovering ancient mysteries.

The company that made the sour beer I mentioned above also brews Best Maid Sour Pickle Beer. I had to try it. It lives up to the name. If you've ever just drunk pickle brine, it's like a mild version of that. Not super salty or sour. The beer part is also pretty unoffensive and just lets the pickle flavor stand out. The ultimate verdict is it's strange. Like drinking watered down pickle brine that tastes like it's also under 5% alcohol.

I finished Little Hope and may finish House of Ashes before the end of the day. What to say on Little Hope. I remembered reading bad things about it, which is part of why I never touched Dark Pictures until now. But I was pleasantly surprised. Good characters, nice little mystery unfolding, and finishing off in a twist that had me think. On the downside, thinking about that ending is a bad idea. At first I thought it was clever, then I thought it was dumb. And as I type this, I realize it's Silent Hill with the numbers filed off.

Finally playing through Dark Pictures Anthology. Picked up a couple from Humble Bundle, the rest in a sale. As a big Until Dawn fan, I had to get around to it sometime... First up is Man of Medan. Better than I expected from all I heard about it. The downside is the twist was so predictable I figured out half of it in the prologue and the other half of it from a single clue later on. What it's doing with secrets would be so much better if it wasn't telegraphed to hell and back. Some strong ambiguity that I need to really pour through every clue to figure out my interpretation is something I like doing with stories.

What's wrong with me? I now have 99 hours in Fallout 4. The only reason I picked it up again was because I heard great things about Far Harbor and wanted to give that a second chance. I'm almost 100 hours in and have not gone to that accursed island. I'm building themed robots to do supply chains between settlements... I have time management issues.

Found a sour beer brewed in the area, Delilah Into Darkness. The first few sips of it I kind of hated. At first all I could catch was the "dark" and my palette was confusing it for chocolate. I've been there before with chocolate beer, I do not care for it. But once I got a little used to it, the sour and fruit came out and it was wonderful. It's my first sour beer and it's bit heavier than ciders that I also enjoy. It's a very dark beer, I put it in my large stein and it's pitch black. If you're in the DFW Metroplex of Texas and like sour beers or hard ciders, I strongly recommend it.

Played through Miles Morales. Definitely shorter than the first one and reuses the same map, but I'm still happy with it. It has a lot less filler and the same strong storytelling. Miles's new powers are great fun.

I bought Miles Morales and Devil in Me. Since I should be playing Pentiment, this feels like a bad idea.

Everything Everywhere All At Once I laughed out loud throughout the film. It's an utterly bizarre film in a great imaginative way. And very touching.

I liked Rings of Power. And I've been struggling to find anything else worth watching. Starting up Manifest just because someone at work recommended and it's not near as interesting as they made it sound.

Fallout 3 has the same problem I have with Oblivion. Aggressively terrible level scaling. At high levels of Fallout 3, you can't go for a jaunty stroll without running into a constant stream of Deathclaws and Albino Radscorpions. All sorts of enemies that ignore armor. It was not fun running around in power armor and getting 3 shot like I was naked by some enemy with a standard rifle because their name had Master in it. I not only like it less than New Vegas, I hold hate in my heart for it.

I guess first round of congrats to the team are in order. My gamepass pre-load is ready and it'll probably interrupt the many other games I'm juggling around aimlessly.

It's been a busy and shameful month for me. Halloween saw me buy a bunch of horror games to try and get in the mood. Played a bit of Signalis, lost some interest at the first boss fight. It's a great game, atmospheric and tense, but I'm not super into running in circles for a while waiting for weak spots to show up. Let alone repeating this process multiple times. Played a bunch of Bendy and the Ink Machine after hearing all the people review it as if it's the best horror game of all time. It's alright. Like an Amnesia-lite. Kind of got bored of being chased by monsters and hiding in closets a few years ago. And I'm not super into whatever's going on to pick it up again. The Eternal Cylinder. Another game that really failed to engage with me. Fascinating world they have, but the gameplay loop never grabbed me. Run from the cylinder for a while, then hunt down stuff to eat and mutate into the right form to progress. The finding the right mutation being the bulk of the game's puzzles. In my time with the game that's all there was. The Entropy Center. This is the winner of the past month. It clearly takes a lot of inspiration from Portal and falls short, but not so short. It's not as funny, but the characters are charming, and the puzzles are great. Working out the logic and seeing that fail or succeed kept me going until I finished the whole thing. Only game I've completed in a couple months. Dying Light. It was fun until I realized I'd seen all it had to throw at me 30 hours in and I wasn't even halfway done. Which paints me as a hypocrite for the next game. Fallout 4. In my defense, I like building things, I like collecting suits of armor, and the gunplay is at least workable. These are not features Dying Light shared. I could spend way too much time building robots. And then going into new buildings to collect garbage to build more robots.

I bought Final Fantasy XIV pretty recently. Decided to install and update it today anticipating I'll play it soon. This started my trial period, so I guess I can't delay that anymore. On the plus, I thought I didn't even qualify for the trial period. I played it a bunch on PS4 and didn't think I'd get the 30 days using the same account with a Steam purchase.