Tale

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.

I recently bought Stray. I'm trying not to buy new games at full price, but the tag on this was pretty reasonable. It's charming.

I went to pick up my dog's ashes from the vet today. I cried more today than I did when we put him down. He was a very good boy. I really wanted that vet to tell me it was just arthritis. I could help with that! I was helping with that. Bought a bunch of rugs to help steady his footing so he could walk. I was going to build a ramp so he didn't have to struggle so much coming in from the yard. But that's not all it was. The Vet made a recommendation. And now I miss my friend. My brother. I'm so glad for all that time I spent trying to help him, though. I'd carry him out back and put him on the lawn, tell him I loved him and he was good. I'd go out with him with a treat and make sure he walked around to keep his strength up. I'd make sure to play with him the few times he managed to stand up inside. I got quality time like that. But damn do I wish it meant more than even that.

If they don't know how to make my Manhattan "up" then the whole trip will be wasted.

I'm going on a cruise on Monday to Alaska. If I never post again, check the news for reports about drunken man falling off a boat.

Still watching the 8 film Spider-Man collection. And I have something controversial to say. The Andrew Garfield Spider-Man films are the best of the lot. He's tragic, but perseveres, his chemistry with Emma Stone is great, and all of his villains are interesting aside from Green Goblin. The Green Goblin in 2 is Venom in Raimi's 3 level garbage. Or a bit worse.

Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga This will be my first time experiencing Rise of Skywalker. Never saw it in theatres, never plan to see it. I have my own petty issues with that whole trilogy. But I'm kind of looking forward to seeing it through a Lego game lens.

Death Stranding Director's Cut So far it's the same game I played back in the day on PS4 when it first came out. None of the new stuff has been particularly noteworthy. But it's still kind of a great game. Sadly all the tension is sucked out of it being on a second play. Just grenade the BTs into next year and the Mules are quite vulnerable to being punched in the face. But even where the tension fails, the atmosphere excels. And it's great to just see a city appear as you crest over a hill and the music comes on. More open world games really need to do that.

Apocalypse was such a disappointment I didn't bother with Dark Phoenix. And I say that as a fairly big fan of the films. Days of Future Past even makes up for Last Stand. But Days of Future Past is where the franchise ends, if you ask me. On a related note, I'm starting a Spider-Man marathon. Never owned a Spider-Man movie before, never even watched a Spider-Man movie more than once before. But once I got out of No Way Home, I knew I had to buy the whole kit and caboodle the second it was available. And now it is.

Machine Uprisings never survive. They're a joke. They don't have a good economy and they have pretty pitiful fleets. It's the damage they do to the planets that sucks. I had three titans and a colossus by the time they took over half my empire. Set three of them to a planet, set the fourth to chase after the one 2 star fleet the machines had, and it was all but over. It's just going to be tedious as heck to rebuild all those planets. I don't remember them ever being good. I may have never been on the receiving end before, but I have constantly tried to help them survive their uprising. It always fails. One time I had a Machine only federation, but they got upset when my allies started a teensy little purge and refused to join us. Then died shortly after. You can pump them full of resources and they won't do anything with it.

Stellaris My first time playing spiritualists in a long time. So it's my first time seeing the Machine Uprising since back in the days when that was a crisis. Anyway, it ruined my empire. Half my planets lost pretty much all their buildings and my people are abandoning due to not having places to live.

You guys make me glad I don't subscribe to anything showing the new Star Treks. I've never seen anything beyond the clips Redlettermedia showed of season 1. I'm watching Maniac on Netflix. It's interesting. I'm not engrossed by it, but I don't hate it. That's a win for Netflix. Jonah Hill plays a Schizophrenic who thinks the pattern is trying to lure him into a drug trial to save the world. Emma Stone plays a stoner who just wants the drugs. Meanwhile the drug trial seems to be some weird drug ****tail and AI computer that's going to help them with their traumas. Because of course a comedy has to help everyone overcome their traumas and find themselves.

I can really only abide cheating when it's funny. Like in cards and for money. The bit about not liking her teacher saying retard is interesting, though. I thought the word was dead a few years ago. And then I end up in my current job with someone who calls people that all the time. It's basically this individual's only insult. It's still out there and in use by adults.

Destiny 2 might be taking up too much of my gaming time. I think I need to cut back and do some of those cyberpunk indie games. I've got Anno: Mutationem and Lacuna on my plate and am pretty excited to give check them out.

I put 7 hours into Maneater. It's genuinely fun. But I realized 7 hours in that I'd seen all the variety the game had to offer, despite being only halfway into the story. I guess it's one of those wide and shallow type open world games. So back to Sam and Max: Beyond Time and Space.

I played my way through Halo 5. I have Gamepass, so I thought I'd try it on Cloud gaming. It deserves its bad reputation even though it actually improves on some stuff from 4. I don't hate the Prometheans here and I even like their weapons. But everyone in it is simply dull. This wouldn't typically be an issue in a Halo game except they're constantly talking. Nobody has any personality, but the game is trying hard to build up this squad dynamic and not really succeeding. It's just Locke barking orders and everyone else making obvious commentary. The issue from 4 where the writing lacks any subtlety at all is still ever present. Which is sort of matched by the encounter design following the Doom school of throwing way too many enemies into an arena. Every level has to have like 3 or 4 BIG SPECTACLE FIGHTS. And it felt like every other mission ended with the floor falling apart under you... Because that's a thing people are doing. Got to have scripted destruction of the environment around or the player might stop and enjoy something.

Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe should come out... eventually?

So Sam and Max season 2 is out in remastered form. It's amazing how I still enjoy these after all these years.

Finished off Halo Infinite's campaign and immediately uninstalled it. It wasn't bad, but it's like 30 minutes of memorable storytelling at the end and several hours of absolutely nothing leading up to it. It'll be a good launching off point to make future installments. It feels like they just kind of had to finally make something after years of delays, so they rushed out a small map with a thin story. Year 1's always kind of stunk for Destiny as well. But that's means it's a year off before the meat comes and there's no incentive to do anything until then.

I got a promotion a couple of months ago at work. Barely a pay upgrade (partially due to the fact that I was already being paid more than people who were above me due to experience), but the work load... I've heard people talk about getting promoted and finding themselves having less to do, but I never thought I'd see it. I've spent the last decade of my life feeling overworked or anticipating regular crises and now I fear I may only feel that way two months out of the year. I enjoy the work, too. It's payroll data entry, but there's just enough playing with poorly designed computer systems and basic algebra to keep me from falling asleep when there's actual work to do.