majestic

We're not really getting a Star Trek Picard Re:View of the final two episodes. It seems like Rich really doesn't want to talk about it. He's baaaaaaaaaaack! Mike must have really hated the ending.

Played and finished Ori and the Blind Forest. Well that was fun, if a bit short.

I haven't seen today's episode yet, but up until last week's I enjoyed this season of Better Call Saul more than the previous ones. It showed that while you can set a show to the backdrop of forgone conclusions there's still a place for drama, tension and good fun. The ongoing hostility between Lalo and Gus is kept to its barest necessary minimum (and in itself utterly boring unless you haven't seen Breaking Bad yet) for the rest of the drug story to work while the Mesa Verde stuff was good fun - just please stop with the Jimmy does something montages. They're getting a bit old. But Jimmy being threatened is boring, and a full episode with him and Mike hiking through the desert? Nah, count me out. Jonathan Bank's age also has beomce a huge crack in my suspension of disbelief.

Well here's something for the thread: Dark Souls doesn't have subtle but awesome storytelling. It's set in an interesting world where mysterious events that you can piece together from observation and lore happened possibly so far in the past that they almost don't matter any more. But an actual plot that the game itself tells? In that regards it is as servicable and perfunctory as Mass Effect 2 or Dragon Age: Origins were, perhaps even less so as you need to superimpose your own motivation and drive as a player over your character's.

Ah, yes, that's the one I was thinking of. But I read that is set after the Battle of Terra, not the events before. Looks like I mixed them up a little. I played the WC Saga prologue and thought it was pretty awesome. Gotta give it a go at some point.

Wasn't that a Freespace 2 total conversion mod once? Or was that a completely different fan project attempting to tell the same storyline?

Everspace is an arcade shooter dressed up as space sim and while you can do some very perfunctory trading it's really just there to gather crafting materials to build new equipment and consumables. It's very beautiful and you can explore interesting locations for a while but you have a time limit per sector that manifests itself as a fleet of giant killer warships that follow you wherever you go, wanting nothing more than to blast your behind to a thousand pieces, and you'll be constantly harrassed by ships, missile silos and defense drones. It also has permadeath with unlockable ships and ship upgrades. It's a great game but it's very much the opposite of chill. It's also fairly difficult, even on "easy".

For a more serious reply, Joe's both an author and avid gamer, and unlike most people reviewing games he plays on a god tier level of skill. And sometimes without him realizing it that comes across as strangely disconnected from the reality of most gamers, a trifle arrogant, or both perhaps. Like his Furi review, where he shows the game stats of his first playthrough and goes all "I was pretty bad there, I died 84 times in total" and casually says things like "overall I thought Hollow Knight was too easy". He also really makes the best April Fools jokes on YouTube. Heh.

Moar food! Homemade cookies (my mother's uncle is 80 and bored while having to stay home, so he's baking sweets... all the time): Pork with zucchini. Home made sweet bread And lastly, some zander with parsleyed potatoes:

Finally found the time and inclination to grind out that final skill point in Sekiro. Last two achievements down. So that's that. Onwards to something else. I could go back to wrap up the final achievements of Cuphead. Edit: Well that was the wrong thread, how did we end up discussing played games here? 😮

Joe has a bunch of other videos you can spend hours watching, and he always says if you'd like to play the game at some point it's better to play first, then watch. Except for games where it really doesn't matter, e.g. Factorio.

It is finally here, after five thousand hours of work, 800 of which were spent on playing, reading and watching the Witcher franchise, here's Joseph Anderson's analysis, part 1: And yes, that 4 hour video is part one. Two more videos to follow. 😄

The game gave me the strangest dreams I ever had. Reading all them overwritten descriptions about how weird the world is before going to bed left their mark. For that alone it's probably a 10/10, but that might not work for anyone else.

I loved every second of Castlevania so far. It's a fun romp and well animated, something that's otherwise usually lacking in Western animation. It's no BoJack Horseman but it looks a damn sight better for sure.

I finished Tomb Raider. Groaned a bunch at the end when Lara picks up that second pistol to cutscene blast Mathias off that cliff with it. For a game that short it also really felt too stretched out for its own good. Every setpiece repeats itself ad nauseum. Lara climbs a crumbling tower. Lara runs over a crumbling bridge. Lara runs from explosions. Lara climbs a crumbling tower. Lara runs over a crumbling bridge. Lara runs from explosions. Lara climbs a crumbling tower. Lara runs over a crumbling bridge. Lara runs from explosions. In a game that - with padding - scratches the 20h mark? Just how did it get the raving reviews it did when it came out? The one thing I really liked, and that's Lara learning to cope with her situation and progressing from scared out of her mind to ruthless killer rivalling Steven Segal's bodycount, also got ruined by the end when she starts killing the otherwise undefeatable and scary Oni by the score. Really? Fully equipped commando teams couldn't stand up to them but Lara and her trusty bow can, after a few days of learning wilderness survival and camping?

Insist on getting proper moonshine and drinking it for breakfast for the full Balkan experience.

Finland, actually. Yes, that's another one of those in-jokes. I mean, not that obscure, that signature's been around for a while...

Great times at work. First we had our pay raise cancelled. Wait, sorry, delayed until June as if everything will be back to normal by then. Now we no longer get paid any overtime. We also should not be doing overtime. Which also means my lump sum overtime payment per month is gone, which just about kills 10% of my regular income. But we have more work than ever before. Yes, yes, I realize everyone else has less and less work to do, but that doesn't help us as a small team, and as a special bonus I'm supposed to use up my vacation credits. Next month I'll have 57 days left. That's going to go really well with the current workload, not sure how I'm supposed to drop at least 27 days, ideally more. There's a reason why I have that many days left, and it's certainly not because I'm a workaholic who loves being at the office more than being home doing a whole bunch of nothing. I'll just take six weeks off during an off-season peak due to everyone ordering stuff online because regular shops are closed. Seems a bit like first world problems, almost 8% of all employees here lost their jobs in the past two weeks and a whole truckload of small companies are facing doom, so all in all our situation's not terribad and our management is doing their best to keep everyone employed for the time being. That's great, really, and it affects a whole lot of people in a positive way. Feeling like collateral damage doesn't help though. Le sigh.

I haven't shaved (myself, that is) in years. With all the barber shops closed I'm beginning to look like a Canadian lumberjack.

Did you find Qis in your absence?

Well why not, but I've always found that image to be rather tame in comparison, at least compared to most of the others (Meatspin's pretty similar minus the ageism ).

Seven of Nine quite clearly had a thing with Bejazal, not that it makes it any better in terms of writing. It was pandering all right, but not entirely to virtue signal, this is Star Trek (eh, in name at least) after all. But, umh, Seven being bisexual was pandering to the ridiculous Voyager fanbase that used to ship her with everyone and the kitchen sink way back when. It's been a while but that brought it back. Feels a bit like that moment when Mulder and Scully finally admitted their feelings for each other so that every 'shipper on the planet can hug and sing Kumbaya together. Except those two had seven seasons of extreme on screen chemistry to make it believable. Seven has a one liner and a scene with Raffi after wanting to casually boff Ensign Kim on VOY and had a, dunno, thing with Chakotay. Seven getting terrible romance plots is kind of the norm here. Heh.

Considering how much of a beating Lara can take in the cutscenes I had to laugh at Roth dying from that little axe hit in the back. He really should have had her tank the hit.

I'm not entirely certain, I might be thinking of The New Adventures of Robin Hood. Because that was outright Hercules-ish. Although that is far too "recent" for me to only have vague recollections of it. 1997 feels like yesterday. Heh.

Tomb Raider since it was free on Steam. Game suffers from pacing issues due to checklist syndrome. GPS caches? Check. Relics? Check. Documents? Check. Challenges? Check! Aside from that it's fun and pretty decent. Eh, and no way Lara survives falling into that rebar spike.