Tale

The Spiritualists did not awaken. They have been crushed and left with two pitiful planets I don't even want. The Xenophobes did awaken, however. They are on the far side of the galaxy. Then the Xenophiles awoke and they are one of two F/AE's fully ensconced in my borders. Oh boy. The other are the Machines. So when the War In Heaven came, I bent the knee. And honestly, I'd rather it be me against 4/5ths the galaxy of regular empires than me against the AE with 4/5th the galaxy supporting me. I am so crushing them. I have 3 fleets expanding in 3 different directions, destroying everything in their path. And I finally have the first claim against me of the game. It's 2430+ and someone finally hates me enough to claim a system I own. That I just stole from them, so I guess I should forgive it. Forgiveness comes in the form of me beelining for their homeworld to crack it into little pieces. It's time I stopped playing nice.

I bought Nioh on sale last night. When will I play it, who knows?! Latest game of Stellaris is on hold because Chaos;Child is picking up. I got through two pretty serious twists in just two days, both of which I saw coming, but were paired with things I did not see coming.

Highway cleanup is hard. A meetup I'm part of has adopted a highway, about a 2 mile stretch of one anyway, and we went out and cleaned it up a bit yesterday. Even though the overall distance traveled is less than my jog, the work ended up being quite a bit harder and left my legs sore all yesterday. I also think my thumb is developing a blister from using the grabber.

Ended up playing Stellaris until 4 at night by accident. I'm playing my authoritarian materialist shadow anthropods. It's so much easier than my Driven Assimilators because nobody hates me. They're terrified of me, envious of my tech, so they start making deals with me. And that makes them like me even more. Nobody has dared so much as rival me the entire game. That's how terrifying my empire is to them. Which kind of puts a damper on the idea of me playing better-than-thou despots who go around kicking the crap out of everyone who doesn't give us some respect. Because they all give me respect! Anytime someone is losing a war and down to their last planet, they come beg to be my protectorate. And the people trying to conquer them turn around and says "Oh, they're with you? We had no idea!" The only people who look at me cross-eyed are the Spiritualist Fallen Empire. And that's because I went Synthetic Ascension. Oh man, they really hate me and they don't know how to handle it. Every few years, they start a war (they've done it 3 so far and show no sign of stopping) to humiliate me. But even they're terrified of fighting me, so they go and try to pick on this guy I have a defensive pact with whose sole remaining territory is on the other side of the galaxy. But I'm literally next door to the Spiritualist FE. So when they run off, I start raiding their stuff. They come back, see my my fleet, and start having second thoughts. They keep running away if I try to engage them. The three wars have all ended in stalemates, with me occupying a bunch of territory, but them kicking the crap out of my fleet after I finally force the engagement. But the difference is I can rebuild my fleet and they can't. The next one will be decisive. I'm about to start blowing up planets I'm so tired of their nonsense. Just not the big planets with unique buildings. I might neutron sweep those. Edit: Also fun, I had a Great Khan rise up shortly before all this Spiritualist business started. He went around conquering a bit, nearly destroyed the determined exterminators. And then seemingly when he should have started hittting his stride, even though it barely started, and just when I was going on the offensive... he died. And it split up. It was so anticlimactic.

Chaos;Head I came for crazy high school Steins;Gate, but now it's starting to feel like bloodless Dies Irae. Psychic swords is a bit too Chuuni for my tastes.

Sawyer looks strange without the beard, now.

What is Square Enix's obsession with porting phone versions of old games to PC? Chrono Trigger is out on Steam today. And there's some complaints. https://twitter.com/thatsmytrunks/status/968532390934188034 I don't mind the filter on scenes, FFVI's was worse. But the UI is a complete joke and the overworld is disgusting.

They seemed like they had a bunch done when they did the Kickstarter pitch. They had a demo out already, it looked fantastic, ran well. It was amazing. Then when they switched to Unreal, and up until cancellation, it seemed like they went backwards.

It seems like it was just scope creep by developers who've never had this much freedom before, so didn't know how to manage it. I'm hesitant to read into it some greater plan. Edit: You left out the part that sold me on this theory.

There's a bug in domination. Any empire with a modified version of the domination tradition, such as machine empires, does not get checked properly for vassalization/tributary.

Looks like they're changing war exhaustion to not force a status quo. Instead you take happiness, influence, and unity penalty until you accept. After I finish Chaos;Child, hopefully they'll have a good patch out and I'll do my next game. The War Exhaustion change makes me want to do yet another Machine Empire. I could see warring through exhaustion until the enemy empire fragments from rebellion. But I think I'll just do my Technocrat empire instead, so I have an excuse to blow up all the planets.

I think this ironman game of Stellaris is over. Y'know how I was terrified of Crisis before, but ended up crushing them? Well, they're terrifying again. More than a bit. And it's a long war of attrition I will lose. 600k+ defense fleet on a hub in the middle of my empire. And the largest combined fleet I can put together is about 250-300k. Cleary, in 2.0, that Crisis slider isn't joking. I could sit around, containing them. If you clear out one of their stations, they'll come back for it, park their fleet, and wait for a constructor. During which you can attack a different station. And they'll never move forward. Unless I make a mistake and end up getting jumped by a fleet. I could do that, for 300 years until repeatables let me make a dent in their defense fleet. I could. I won't. The most boring part about it is that's not even my containment strategy, I learned it after figuring out why the Contingency hadn't killed everyone else already. The rest of the galaxy is worse off than me, but even they're keeping the Contingency secure. They're just losing all their fleets while they're at it. So I don't even get to see them eat everyone up. It was an interesting run, but a boring middle, and such a letdown of an end. There was no upstart awakening, nor Khan awakening. 2200-2350 consisted of me having to fight multiple wars against 3 or 4 empires at a time. I lost a single uninhabited system once. 2350-2420 consisted of me looking at my shiny Colossus and Titan before trying it out on the most obnoxious of those aggressive attackers. The War In Heaven happened, and ended, shortly before the Contingency appeared. Without accomplishing much other than forcing a League of Non-Aligned to form.

Apocalypse I do not think I like Marauders, no sir. Had a crappy start, no primitive species close to me, only 2 planets that my cyborgs had more than 40% hab on and one of those is a 12. I'm surrounded by spiritualists. But on the upside, I have managed to get my fleet and tech up so that nobody attacks me. Instead my only neighbor who isn't a spiritualist rivaled me earlier and keeps sending Marauders after me. I actually fought off the first one. Now the second one comes and someone else nearby invited me to a war against our shared neighbor. So I have a marauder fleet twice the strength of my two combined fleets ravaging my systems and my only chance at making a friend appears. So now I'm fighting a war while being raided. What could go horribly wrong? On the plus side, I do have a claim on a primitive in the guy we'll war against. So my expansion plans are back on the table. I also have a ton of uncontested space to the south. The only other guy down that way doesn't completely hate me and is busy fighting a rebellion.

Yeah, but who wants to sort through the backseat of their car for one of those? That's where everyone else keeps theirs, right?

Xenonauts and Age of Wonders 3 are the only ones I don't have. I do wonder if it'd be worth it.

Some, perhaps quite a few, of us have become old farts who've abandoned mastery entirely. With talk of just wanting to relax, enjoy a story, or play a style without worrying about optimization being common enough. I know that I spend most of my gaming time with adventure games and visual novels. But I do also trek into action and strategy games, since most of the joints in my hand don't yet hurt from the moment I wake up until I go to sleep.

I finished Utawarerumono: Mask of Truth. Haven't done all the dream battles yet, but they're starting to feel like trial and error. I'll get to them eventually, probably. On to Chaos;Child! I was really excited for this one, it'll be my first Sci;Adv title that's not part of Steins;Gate. So far it's living up to my expectations with delightful characters, an interesting murder mystery, and hints at a conspiracy. The main character is so cringey it goes all the way to the other side and hits adorable.

Painkillers on Netflix. Ooh, it's got that guy in it who's in pretty much every sci-fi show out! And it's terrible. Like, I started watching it at 9 AM today, it's 3:20PM now. I've only made it 1 hour 20 minutes and can't stand to actively watch it. It's one of the dullest B movies I've ever seen. I simply can't stop myself from calling it out. From the time they are under fire, so they decide to jog away until the firing stops, to them spending like 10 minutes taking cover behind a single line of rusty barrels that couldn't stop a strong wind. The movie isn't futuristic at all, but for some reason one guy's very basic rifle scope does some weird scanning thing complete with obnoxious computer noises. Or how about the place it's paused now, where our hero has knocked some woman unconcious, but she's clearly smiling while laying on the floor as if thinking "oh yay, acting!" Edit: Onto Taking Earth. I have never seen acting this bad. It's like everyone barely knows how to speak english.

Moved to Computer and Console.

I think I'm nearing the end of Utawarerumono: Mask of Truth. It feels a lot more dramatic than the first one, or simply that there's not nearly as much downtime for the characters to goof around. There was one scene not long ago where the characters got to relax and be funny and it made me realize how much I missed those moments. Still, I really like this and am aching to go back and play the very first one. Also doing a bit of The Fall since Part 2 is out.

It helps. If you don't know why you like things, then it's harder to figure out what else you might like or to talk about it with other people.

My understanding is that THQ Nordic is just Nordic with a name change, not the old THQ. I'd be surprised if they had any of the management of THQ on staff, honestly.

I played a little bit of Mysteries of Westgate. I remember getting horribly bored of it quickly.

Radius on Netflix. I want to say it was good, but if anyone asks me to justify why, I wouldn't be able to say.

Quake 3 used to do it on Dreamcast, so no.