Tale

Tried out XCOM Long War to see if I could do a series of posts about it. I'm still working out the kinks. Lots of stuff happens suddenly and quickly and becomes hard to capture unless I screenshot every single action, so I'll have to do more experimenting to find a format I like. Tried out Steve Jackson's Sorcery, part 1. Decent enough game, no real hook though. And Sunless Sea. Hooked me real quick, but I'm not sure how long that appeal can last. Not really sure about how to progress.

It's a fairly small business, I'm one of three office employees. These aren't payroll checks, either. They're for our vendors.

Someone apparently slipped the boss' wife a disappearing ink pen and she used it to sign company checks. Which is kind of fun.

Deadpool ended a little sooner than I expected. Apparently I had stopped at the final boss battle. I thought there'd be another level. Or maybe a cool boss arena. Opus was over very quick. A nice little story with a lot less stargazing than I expected from it. Now on to Styx. At least until tomorrow, when ZTD comes out. Edit: Ooh, and I did a test run of my name file with Long War. It made some good choices for the start.

How was Stories? I thought it was very good. The combat system was pretty great and I liked the concept of choose-your-own-adventure where you learn a secret you can use in the next playthrough. I can hardly believe I got the best ending in 3 hours. It felt much longer than that. I swore I played four hours just in the first night. And I still haven't seen 80% of the lesser endings.

I just wasn't hooked by PoE. Only complaint that I have. Which is why the game's been on hold for a couple months. I just gave OPUS: The Day We Found Earth a half hour try, now that has me hooked. It has a cute little robot and everything.

I finished XCOM 2, played a game called Stories which had some interesting stuff going on, and then moved on to the Deadpool game. It's a bit on the dumber side of Deadpool, but has quite a few chuckles. And it's up to High Moons quality from their Transformer games.

It's not on Steam. I grabbed the version that included DLCs back on Black Friday for PS4. Still haven't gotten around to playing it. Edit: Help, I'm addicted to the Steam sale. I just bought the Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;birth games. I know I shouldn't, but the reviews are so positive with people talking about quirky humor and stuff. And an education game about learning Japanese, that was made in RPG Maker. I need an intervention. Okay, that's it, no more games until Zero Time Dilemma.

I may or may not have just spent $110 on it. And I may or may not spend a bit more of Dragonspear goes on sale.

It's on.

On the upside, you can make Herve Caen and set him up as a Dark VIP.

Character pool in XCom 2 is a pain in the ass to set up, though. Because you got to fiddle everything. I don't want to have to pick out color schemes and helmets for everybody I'm putting in the list.

When XCOM 2 initially pissed me off, I figured I'd just end up abandoning the game so didn't set it up. But since I'm still playing, I guess you have a point. I'll work on the name list today and start up an Ironman run. Edit: There's a chance this will be XCOM: EW or Long War though.

Finally got a mission to rescue one of my old captured soldiers in XCOM 2. And it was the character I created with character pool, too! Two to go... I've almost killed the Berserker Queen. They're really quite easy if you savescum. And are playing Normal. I could not imagine playing this game with timers, Ironman, and any harder. Just imagining triggering the Berserker Queen while rushing against a timer and not being able to set up an overwatch trap to deal with it scares me. The Viper King used to kill my dudes in two actions!

I'm liking XCOM 2 more now that I use disabled timers from the workshop. Still got a timer yesterday to deactivate a distress signal, but it was a good change. I still don't like advent or all the micro on the map. Got a supply drop? Better fly all the way to South Africa to get it! Got X on the map? Better fly and scan for a few days there. ALARM, BETTER STOP DOING THAT, THIS OTHER THING'S GOING ON. I love the new overwatch behavior, where they're not all firing on the same guy, causing 4/5th the team to miss because he died to the first shooter.

She even says something about how she mixes up April's life with her own if you examine the portrait at the end.

You never see her birth, you just see her as a baby running around. And the later interludes kind of make the timeline on that confusing. In hindsight, I'm guessing the ghost lady is the white dragon, which would further the connection if true.

My understanding, and it's left up in the air, so I'm not 100%, is It just sounds like a bunch of stuff they really should have been doing instead of 3/4th of what was going on in Chapters.

I hear it was supposed to also be some of her story for after Dreamfall, too. Somehow. Wasn't there a whole thing about how April was supposed to reunite Stark and Arcadia or am I misremembering that?

I felt the same way to be honest, but once you push past those initial missions it seems things become more reasonable, assuming you don't keep on being stuck with rookies because they always die, but I'm not playing ironman so... (and you don't accidentally activate that DLC and end up fighting overpowered cheating snakes with rookie gear) That said I don't particularly enjoy the amount of timers. Especially that Avatar timer (which is rather badly explained in the game, like most mechanics, really. Like, I still have no clue how they could possibly know how long I have nor do I have a clue as to what I can do about it. For all I know I already waited too long and my game's already over but I just don't know it) The three guys I lost to a timer weren't rookies. I don't know if I'll ever stop being bitter over that loss. I've had two missions so far that didn't have timers and I really liked them. So the only way I see myself continuing is if I mod the timers away. But, bitter over losing THREE SERGEANTS BECAUSE OF A TIMER, is not likely to be something I'll do immediately. Strikes me as a bit unfair that I'll get a mission with such a tight timer and have so many stun lancers and Vipers on the same map. The stun lancer knocked one of my guys unconcious, and that means I effectively lost two guys as one of my others dedicated themselves to carrying her. Note that these are the only two who evacced. Because my lead two characters got poisoned, and my soldier backing them up ended up walking through the poison cloud even though I picked the one movement that said he wouldn't. One of those two leads paniced and did the stupid thing of jumping all the way to the ground. I was happy to leave her, but then this is when I found the other two had their movement practically halved and got stuck behind. It seems pretty uncool to have a mission with no concealment, enemies that can knock you unconcious on one hit, other enemies that debuff movement, and still have a timer.

I got about two non-tutorial missions into XCOM 2 and I'm less than enthusiastic about continuing. The timers are probably the worst bit, but having most of the enemies be humans (with funny faces) doesn't do it any favors either. And just the all around atmosphere of the game. Edit: And three of my guys just got captured because they were poisoned and that seems to make you run slower. So they couldn't make the evac point in time. Fantastic.

Finished XCOM: Enemy Within. All but Operation Slingshot, sadly. That last mission! Was not hard. Because I cheesed it with mind control, gene mods, and that cool guided plasma rocket thing. Edit: I'm thinking about creating a name list for XCOM 2 with Obsidian forum members. Might even do a thread on it.

Book 5 of Dreamfall Chapters Book 1 - 4 were dissapointments occasionally interrupted by sincere moments reminding me why I loved the series. The intro to book 1, with Zoe in dreamtime, put me in tears. The rest of it nearly bored me to the same. But Book 5 was what it needed to be. What the franchise needed it to be or at least most of the way there. It'll tug your nostalgia until it hurts. I still feel April got shafted. She deserved another adventure we'll probably never get.

I lost my favorite soldier last night, my first Colonel, my last remaining assault. Yeah, it was another EXALT mission. Those things have been the bane of my existence. And I lost my best support in the assault the alien base mission. I've been stuck running 3 snipers for a while, since they never get injured or killed, while trying to train up rookies to an assault. My third Colonel was one of those snipers and my second Colonel is another heavy. The heavy is the one who cleaned up the mess that killed the assault, I like him. Thankfully I just got the Operation Progeny soldier as an assault and stuck her in the psi lab with both of the Colonels. Lets see what happens. I'm kind of concerned, though. I thought I'd stabilized the assault Colonel, but couldn't find it after the mission. Maybe because I failed it anyway. So I checked the memorial wall and sure enough, there she was, dead of major trauma. But the interesting thing was my first three deaths, the ones that died to a randomly exploding tank. The memorial wall says they all died to a Major using a Sniper Rifle. A certain Major that's now a Colonel. I have to keep my eye on him.

Being a Sony exclusive there is practically no chance. They published Everybody's Gone to the Rapture on PC, but it's the exception, not the norm. So there's a chance, but it's small enough to fall within the bounds of error.