Tale

The last thing we need is terrorists and mass murderers with the ability to use grappling hooks and parachutes to escape.

What do the developers of EVE have to do with anything?

Dallas reporting in. To say I have nothing special to add. I didn't even hear about this until this morning, but it is kind of all over the news, so maybe I've heard a bit more. Apparently the BLM protest was going swell and peaceful. The open carry gentleman pictured in camo earlier isn't even the shooter (though he is somewhat upset about having his picture plastered everywhere and getting death threats on social media as a consequence). I heard this all happened as it was wrapping up.

Played much of Inside last night. What is with these guys and killing kids? And I'm slightly ashamed to say I played some Hyperdimension Neptunia. Trying to figure out if the franchise is any good since I saw V II released. Well, it certainly plays like a VITA game got ported to PC... And it's lots of just two sprites making corny jokes.

He is literally sleeping with the fishes. Also, his Force of Anguish knock-back attack is the only reason my priest prevailed against the minions of Concelhaut. Steelspine Magus ... I hate them. Yeah, I found him last night. I skipped out on Force of Anguish, though. My cipher's got control down.

I feel like The White March is the Pillars game they wanted to make. No backer NPCs, Soulbound weapons, more scripted interactions, good pacing, musical score for the ages, no backer NPCs. Maneha the barbarian is hilariously lethal and Zahua the monk has the best voice in the game. I finally beat Concelhaut. Feels good to turn a lich into giblets. I'm liking Pelligina's voice in the base game and Devil of Caroc from White March. Haven't met Zahua yet. Spent most of yesterday going through the Endless Paths and realizing I missed like 3 levels because I hit a roadblock and just left instead of checking out the freaking stairs. White March keeps reminding me of Icewind Dale a bit. But I'm currently enjoying Endless Paths too much to really check it out. Kind of disappointed by how little there is to do with the stronghold, though. When I saw that I could send my idle companions on adventures, I expected to be constantly sending them out to do stuff and keep them up to level. Maybe with some risks, perhaps picking the best companion for the mission or something. Instead, once every blue moon a single quest shows up and I just send one person to do it.

Back to PoE for me. Now that the plot has congealed and I see where it's going, I like it more. Still wish the companions were more interesting. Durance is good and 'Iselmyr' needs to interact more. I guess the low budget's to blame here. Even Baldur's Gate just had weird throwaway companions to stumble upon and be interesting, even if they end up fighting the other half of the party within an hour of gameplay. I'm really liking Cipher.

Finished Zero Time Dilemma yesterday. The game ultimately lacked the charm of the first two. It's a solid continuation/sequel, but it feels like it's running out of steam. When you go into the game, knowing that time travel is going to come into play, and so do many of the characters, where else is there to go? It was nice to see more of those characters and their continued development, but I'm kind of hoping this is the last of the series. The only choices for its future are to become repetitive or jumping over sharks. The puzzles were fantastic, but they can always do puzzles in a brand new series.

Zero Time Dilemma is, so far, better than expected. It's actually more puzzle dense than I remember the previous ones being and they're pretty fair. The plot is also the most confusing to start with. But with knowledge of previous games, it kind of makes sense.

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.