Tale

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....

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.