sg2tiger

[sg2tiger]

Finally, this is my 2022 gaming wrap up! Usual ramblings under the cut.

Pokemon Throwback

With my 6-year old nephew living with us, it's my job to get him on and off the school bus. Last year, when he was in preschool, he had the afternoon class, so we had all morning to do whatever before we had to get ready. It ended up becoming a regular part of the routine to play Pokemon for an hour or so before get dressed time...and the game he chose specifically was LeafGreen. What we actually ended up playing was a FRLG romhack I found with a grab bag of pick-your-own QoL changes called Pokemon Throwback. In essence, we were playing LeafGreen, but things like cut trees staying cut, ability to obtain all pokemon in one cart, phys/special split, consecutive-use repels and other things just made life a bit easier, especially when coupled with the emulator's fast forward feature (GREAT for grinding).

Ultimately, over the course of the school year, we made it through the entire main game, Elite Four, and all of the Sevii Islands (I was pretty burned out by then, and he actually wanted to move on and play Gold, but he also didn't want to stop until we got his Dragonair to evolve...and it had about 5-6 more levels to go after we beat the Elite Four...). Then we went back, caught all the legendary birds, and Mewtwo. We didn't catch 'em all, but we DID catch every single Unown of the alphabet, which took about 3 weeks (again, we only played for about an hour every weekday) and probably made me go more insane than catching 'em all would have. In the end what matters is that he had fun and was excited to learn more pokemon than just the handful of popular ones on his pajamas and stuffed toys. And he really did learn them, and retain what he learned - kids are smart! Even if his sense of nicknaming was essentially 'the animal it's based on + y' (he had a real crisis when we caught Horsea).

We played the game on my phone, with my bluetooth controller. I really liked this controller and was pretty bummed when I upgraded to a slightly bigger phone and the mobile clip just simply did not fit anymore (we still use them as Switch controllers for multiplayer, but still). I ended up getting a different type of mobile controller that attaches horizontally for my new phone, which will hopefully accommodate at least one more phone in the future before they start making them TRULY gargantuan.

Minecraft: Arid Adventures

One night...at a time where I actually hadn't played Minecraft for several months...I had a weird dream. It started out with a friend gifting me some kind of VR survival horror game about exploring desert tombs and recovering artifacts while being pursued by the angry undead guardians. At some point, the dream called for sand physics, and my brain reached into the video game sand physics databanks and pulled 'minecraft sand blocks falling all at once'. The dream then shifted from a more realistic style to that familiar blocky aesthetic (though the non-aesthetic elements were still very survival horror and NOT minecraft). When I awoke and recounted the dream, the minecraft image ended up being what stuck with me, and I wanted to see if anyone had made any kind of desert-themed modpacks. I found...one, which I didn't really like, so I took it upon myself to spend a month and a half working on my own.

The result is a sort of desert-flavored kitchen sink pack, filled with tons of places to explore, loot to discover, challenging enemies, and some light survival with thirst/temperature mechanics (offset by lots of food items to hydrate and keep you cool because I didn't want hardcore survival to be the focus of the pack). I spent a lot of time creating a huge arid ecosystem of modded desert, badlands and savanna biomes filled with tons of desert ruins, bandit camps and other structures across the landscape. But despite how much time I spent fine-tuning and playtesting it, when we actually got it on our friend server we ran into more than a few problems...like the massive overspawning of deadly, deadly scorpions. Still, regardless of some oversights, I'd like to think the pack was a success, and we had some fun playing it together between April/May (I spent half of February and all of March putting it together).

Arid Adventures was ultimately my less-polished-than-I'd-hoped first foray into learning how to make Minecraft modpacks, and I've applied a lot of what I learned about things like NBT structures and datapacks to other packs I've made since. Still, I've got a soft spot for this one, and I'd like to recreate it on 1.18 or 1.19 if possible...and I think it should be, I'm just waiting on one mod in particular to update (Team Abnormals' Atmospheric, for its additional desert biomes as well as resources like aloe and yucca which my bespoke desert food mod incorporated as ingredients for lots of recipes). Maybe when the time comes that I'm able to remake and polish it up a bit I'll even post it publicly on CurseForge. I'm pretty shy and have a massive lack of confidence in my work, though, so I tend to just keep my packs private for our friend group server 😔

(we’re actually currently playing a winter-themed modpack called “Arctic Adventures” which is “Arid Adventures but Cold”. Except not really, because I just took a light vanilla+ modpack I’d made and threw a couple winter-themed mods on top of it. But I thought the name was funny, so maybe there will be more [x] Adventures packs in the future)

Vigil: The Longest Night

You can really tell that 2021-2022 was me trying to work up the nerve to play the actual Dark Souls by warming up with various Soulslikes first. I don't even remember how I discovered Vigil, but probably I figured that if I liked Hollow Knight and Salt and Sanctuary I'd have fun with Vigil too. And I did, actually. Unlike the aforementioned, I even finished Vigil with 100% completion, grabbing all achievements over the course of two playthroughs.

Combat and healing felt a lot more forgiving than the others Soulslikes I'd played, at least if you picked the right perks. I ended up running axes, focusing entirely on that tree and the general survival one, and generally it always felt like there were very few enemies and even bosses that gave me a truly difficult time by the latter half of the game (several of the early bosses did kill me many times). At least, as far as the 'main' content goes - once I hit the bonus bosses like Bluemagpie and Redsparrow I really felt like I had to memorize every possible move the boss could take and counter appropriately. Frankly, if not for the fact that I misunderstood one achievement as having to collect EVERY weapon/armor set in the game, I probably would have given up on fighting Redsparrow after my first 10+ deaths...but I persevered and killed every optional boss in the game too.

I think what I spent the most time on in Vigil was just my obsessive determination to discover every nook and cranny on the map, because games like this where your map is fogged until you traverse it always compel me to reveal it all (I'll never forget the hell Shin Megami Tensei Strange Journey put me through because of this urge of mine). The game is absolutely chock full of little secret rooms that you can just barely see a hint of on the map...usually there will be a small passage you have to slide through or something, sometimes hidden behind breakable objects or just otherwise in places you wouldn't think to look. I'd call it the 2D equivalent of Dark Souls' love of invisible walls. Between hunting down places that I sensed held secret passages and trying to platform my way through the trees in the forest areas, I got really into unfogging the map. But hey, in doing so, I was also working my way through all the various loot required for achievements, so one gameplay loop always fed into another in a satisfying way.

I feel like Vigil is the kind of game that's easy to overlook in the sea of 2D soulslike metroidvanias out there, but I had a good time with it. By the end I even really wanted to know more about the story and the lore, unfortunately somewhat marred by a translation of questionable quality. And with the way some of the endings played out, I'm really hoping that there might someday be a sequel, because it definitely feels like the devs left an open door for there to be. I'd say if you're into this kind of game, though, Vigil's worth checking out.

Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot

I was pretty torn between rating this "Pretty Good" vs. "Decent", because I feel like my expectations for this game were unfairly high, but I also feel like every time I play I find something that I feel like the game COULD have done better, but for some bizarre reason chose not to. Kakarot was a game I was looking forward to a lot when it first got announced, because conceptually it seemed like something pretty different that had a lot of potential to be interesting. And while I think Mistake #1 was choosing NOT to start the story off with kid Goku in the original Dragonball (which would have suited the survival and exploration mechanics so so SO much better if we started off with him before meeting Bulma) I understand that we must bow to the whims of the marketing gods at the end of the day, and 90% of the target audience doesn't care about the original DB at all. Still, despite the name being 'Kakarot', it was obvious that a lot of the game would be spent playing as characters who are NOT Goku...and in particular, Gohan, and the idea of playing through his training with Piccolo with these game mechanics sounded like a lot of fun.

That comes to my first issue with the game...speed/pacing. And I get it, because the game spans the entirety of DBZ from Raditz to Buu, but even so it always feels like we're skipping way too fast through the parts of the story that would service the gameplay the most. I thought what would make this DIFFERENT than the usual DBZ fighter is that we would NOT be skipping over the 'less interesting' parts quite as much, because the gameplay involves more than JUST fighting this time around, but more often than not I still found that it skips massively through major story beats when it should slow down and try to be more immersive. I've been playing intermittedly over the course of a few months so I don't have a lot of specifics off the top of my head, but the most recent part I finished was the whole entire Ginyu Force segment...in the space of about 45 minutes.

I remember being irritated that the game barely conveyed what an actual THREAT the Ginyus were to Gohan/Kuririn/Vegeta before Goku shows up, because of the way you still 'win' even the losing battles of this game. And while I know we're kind of in an era of de-bloodening the Dragonball franchise as a whole, the lack of violence also really lessened the impact of the absolute beat down Rikum gives everyone, and thus also diminishes just HOW powerful Goku - who shows up and stomps him in 10 seconds - has become. Then the whole Ginyu body change bit is just kind of raced through with little ceremony at all despite being one of the more iconic aspects of the whole Namek arc IMO...I don't know. I felt like Goku went from space ship to healing tank in even less time than usual, and in a game that's literally named after the guy it's EXTRA noticeable just how little time is spent focusing on him (admittedly if you go over all of Z in your head you'll realize Goku is actually out of the spotlight for a whole lot more than you'd think, but the game's fast pace doesn't help matters either).

Again, I'm sure a lot of this is just my own expectations being unreasonably high for a Dragonball game, but it bums me out when the general presentation - the extremely faithful cutscenes, the soundtrack, etc - is really immersive, but then they'll just go and race through a whole story segment to get to the next fight. Oh, I remember another one that annoyed me. Imagine if the game wasn't afraid to actually let you control BULMA for the brief interlude where Popo takes her to Kami's spaceship! Imagine actually having to explore around as Bulma (you could even give her Popo's magic carpet so she could still use the game's flight mechanics) and scavenge for mechanical parts (which is already a thing you CAN DO in the game mind you!!) to try and do some repairs to the ship. Or just having to search around the area, maybe in the middle of a blizzard (it was a snowy place iirc), to find the ship at all. Instead the game just kind of went from 'Vegeta got away' to 'but they found a spaceship to go to Namek' almost IMMEDIATELY. Being that I'm playing the game alongside my nephew, who started to get curious about Dragonball (I think he saw some kind of Goku vtuber playing Minecraft on youtube or something, and got excited when he found out that I knew all about Goku), there's lots of bits like this where I end up having to summarize some of the stuff the game glosses over, because watching the story unfold via this game IS his first exposure to Dragonball (which I guess in a way makes it a good thing that the violence is generally pretty toned down compared to the original).

Anyway, yeah, idk. I feel like even when the game does let you explore it's all very barebones and watered down. The fact that only the story cutscenes are voiced and all the original sidequests are just grunts and noises also irritates me because it feels so lazy (Xenoverse does the same thing but idk, it didn't bother me there, I guess because all the battle dialogue was still voiced and it was just overworld stuff that wasn't). I also don't feel like I ever really have to use mechanics like fishing or cooking or any of that stuff because the battles are pretty easy? At least on normal difficulty, because the combat system is so simplified compared to a proper DBZ fighter. It's more about like, Touhou-style attack dodging than anything, which is fine, but I find that it's rarely challenging enough that I feel like "damn I should have spent more time scavenging ingredients to cook food before the battle!". It just feels like they tried to make a game with these survival RPG mechanics but didn't know HOW to, so they're very tacked on...and they just made a bog standard 'let's rehash the same DBZ story once again' Dragonball game when it COULD have been something better. Especially if they dared to start with Kid Goku's life. Sadly I know that a AAA game focusing on OG DB is basically a pipe dream.

Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights

After I finished Vigil I was feeling hungry for more 2D metroidvania soulslikes, and Ender Lilies just happened to go on sale like, a few days later. It had really good reviews so I picked it up and spent the next few days playing it obsessively. In fact, based on the dates of my achievements from start to end, I finished the game in less than a week (31 hours total), 100% completion with all achievements. And after I did I just kept feeling like...it wasn't enough and I wanted more. I really got sucked into the world and its atmosphere, particularly through the amazing soundtrack. And once you start digging and trying to understand the lore, it's extremely compelling as well.

While I'd really like to see the devs make another game like this, maybe even set in the same overall world, I'm not really sure if I want a sequel per se. In a way, Lily's story has just begun, but I also don't feel like I want to PLAY whatever lies in her future. Probably because if I did it would mean what awaits her is more monsters and more sadness. But I really would like to explore more of the Ender Lilies world, perhaps beyond the boundaries of the kingdom, or maybe even delving into the past of the Ancients before the events that lead to the game's story.

I can't really talk about the game too much without spoiling too many things that I think are just better discovered for yourself. The game is tough, but not unforgivingly so (especially if you're not going for all the achievements), and it's pretty short if you can hit 100% in just 31 hours. I'd absolutely recommend checking this one out, especially if other similar 2D soulslike metroidvanias seem too challenging. Or at least watch someone else play it (ideally without commentary). Ender Lilies is a whole experience, between the art and the music and the story and the lore and the way the gameplay itself just clicks, and it's one of those things that I'm sad I'll never be able to play for the first time again.

PS - I want more games to take a hint from its map system, particularly in highlighting a room when I've collected everything in it to let me know I really didn't miss anything, because that shit is SO fucking clutch when you're achievement hunting, or just if you're the kind of person who hates the idea of overlooking anything.

Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes

As I mentioned in the addendum of my 2021 post about Three Houses, it took me so long to finish that game that I actually saw the release date of Three Hopes (mid to end of June iirc) as my deadline. And that wasn't because I had any intention of GETTING Three Hopes (especially on release day, because I just don't buy games like that), but because I knew my Three Houses-loving friends WOULD, and I'd be right back in No Spoiler territory with them after just finally breaking into the inner circle of 3H spoilers. Thankfully I did manage to finish my final route (Crimson Flower) just a week or so before Three Hopes came out, and I even played the Three Hopes demo afterwards to see what it'd even be like (I've never played a Warriors game before). When I saw that the story was actually pretty engaging I was like, oh, this is less brainless than I thought, maybe I'll buy it (eventually)...and ended up getting a gift copy from a friend instead. Nice!

Except...while my Three Houses friends all expected to get obsessively sucked into it (after also enjoying the demo), and I was excited to actually be there with them this time, they unexpectedly became engulfed by a DIFFERENT fandom...progress sort of halted on the Three Hopes front...and then I became the one who was afraid to spoil THEM by pulling too far ahead, so I slowed down...and eventually that just sort of killed my momentum entirely and...yeah. I've stopped playing for now.

Being that I had done the two Eagles routes back to back as my last two routes in Three Houses, AND that being the favorite house of said friends (and the one they were also gonna pick first), that's where I'm at. I have no idea how far into it I am because the game seems surprisingly on par with a normal FE game in terms of story pacing...maybe halfway, or not quite halfway through? I wanna say I got to chapter 8 or 9 before I burned out. I do want to go back to it at some point, ideally when (if?) my friends become re-interested, but either way after how long it took me to push through Three Houses I suppose it was a good time for a Fire Emblem break regardless. I've still got a bunch of other Switch games (notably Shin Megami Tensei V) waiting on my shelf, and I had intended to jump on that when I finally finished Three Houses before Three Hopes came along and threw me that curveball. I've just kind of had the cartridge in my Switch ever since, deluding myself into thinking I'm 'still playing it' because I know the minute I take it out that won't be true anymore.

I suppose I should actually give a review, huh? Well, despite how not far at all I actually am in the game (considering the other routes), I feel like I've played enough that I've seen pretty much every type of gameplay mechanic. I gotta say, despite it not being a turn-based strategy, it feels a lot more Fire Emblem than I thought it would. Just about every downtime activity from Three Houses reappears here in some form, and there's a lot more to do at your base and on side missions than I expected. Trying to get all S ranks can also be really addictive and I spent a lot of my playtime retrying the same missions over and over because I felt like just one small change could improve my time and get me that S (and so far, with maybe one or two exceptions, I've managed to S rank every mission by retrying it a few times). The missions are also still very much what I would call strategic, just in a different way, and the main missions especially give you lots of options for how to tackle your objectives so long as you've been thorough about clearing the map and picking up resources and intel along the way.

I find the gameplay pretty overwhelming with the realtime combat when so much is going on, so the way I adapted to that personally is that I spend a loooot of time pausing and opening the map screen to issue orders to the other characters. Then I usually pick one and try to carry out my own goal while they autonomously work through theirs, periodically swapping to someone else to see how they're doing and just for the variety of playing as someone else here and there. But I'm basically ALWAYS checking my map every 30 seconds to get a feel for where my units are and what they're doing, and what needs to be done...which I found helped me keep track of things a bit better amid the stream of endless enemies, special attacks flying around, and being constantly bombarded with dialogue while I'm trying to fight. It took a bit of getting used to but I think it's pretty fun once you get the hang of it.

What surprised me the most when I played the demo (and made me consider getting the full game at all) was that the story does play a big part in the game. I guess I just sort of expected an excuse plot that sent a bunch of familiar faces out to use anime moves against an army of bad guys. I have no idea how the plot kicks off for the other houses, but what really drew me in with the Eagles was how the decision to reveal and act on one thing at a much earlier point in the plot lead to a completely different outcome, spinning the usual Three Houses story off into an AU that still felt internally consistent with the original characters and events. When it came up, I was like, "no way, that's going to basically change EVERYTHING!" and got really sucked into the plot even before the demo wrapped up - so kudos also to the demo for providing enough content to actually suck the player in. That said, this game is very much only for people who finished Three Houses...at least, I sure can't imagine being able to keep track of the story, or even being interested in it, if not for knowing what ORIGINALLY happened and how differently a few factors of Three Hopes influenced them to change course. So while I'm sure there ARE Warriors fans out there whose interest in the game is mostly that aspect, I think for most people you're not gonna want to just pick this up without having played the original first...IMO, anyway, this game is NOT Standalone, despite being an alternate universe version of Three Houses' plot.

But yeah, I do wanna go back to this someday, because I was enjoying myself. I think just the combination of my friends falling off (not having anyone to talk about it with anymore after liveblogging ALL of Three Houses to them felt weird) and just generally needing a break from these characters after 8 straight months of them warranted a break. It's time for me to accept that, pop out that cartridge, and move on...I'll come back eventually. Probably...

DARK SOULS: Prepare to Die Edition

So, after all those soulslikes paving the way, we finally arrive at this point. All of it, training me for the mindset to go into a game known for its frustrating level of difficulty. I'd actually had Dark Souls in my Steam library for YEARS (that's why it's the old Prepare to Die Edition and not the Remaster), but only now did I finally feel like I was ready to take it on. And so, after applying the DSFix patch/mod (and one other mod that makes crates/barrels occasionally drop things like arrows and throwing knives because I was gonna smash them all anyway (currently really missing this in DS3)), I began my journey in June 2022...and only just wrapped it up in November.

I talked about this a bit in my Undertale review back in 2020, but what you know/expect/feel about a game before going into it can very much affect the experience you have when you finally play it. In the case of Dark Souls, I was strongly influenced by fear of how difficult it would be, due to its reputation. That fear lead me to watch lots of videos before playing, as a way to kind of prepare myself for what was to come (because going in blind was too scary). Most of these were challenge runs, so the focus was on the boss fights, but it all gave me enough of a taste of the general progression and various hurdles I'd be facing along the way. As such, I often knew exactly how to prepare, and how cautious to be making my way through areas, which trivialized a LOT of that expected difficulty.

To give perhaps the best example, I was very aware of Blighttown's reputation because it's practically a meme. People hate this Blighttown place. It's full of aggressive enemies and a deadly poison swamp that's become a staple of all future FromSoft games. It's the worst area of the game. Etc. Granted I later found out a good deal of the hate was due to the terrible framerate the game had on consoles (wasn't an issue for me on PC, at least with DSFix), but I imagine a lot of the hate also comes from people recklessly rushing their way through the upper level and getting caught by the constant ambushes, especially from the toxic dart guys. But because I KNEW ABOUT THIS REPUTATION, I went through Blighttown very slowly and cautiously. I had my bow ready at all times and a solid supply of arrows, which I used to tag enemies from a distance so they'd come attack me one at a time instead of ambushing me in large groups. I came prepared with blooming purple moss from Darkroot Garden to counteract the toxic from the blowdart guys, and since I knew they wouldn't respawn when killed I wasn't really afraid of them in the first place - after all, once they shot me, I'd pretty much know their position and be able to kill them, heal the toxic, and be on my way.

Aside from one or two deaths by fall damage (one particularly funny one was when I saw an item on a ledge that I could practically sense was schmuck bait...but I jumped down to get it anyway, and sure enough the floor collapsed under me and I fell to my death) I didn't have any trouble from Blighttown AT ALL, and definitely not one bit of frustration. It was TENSE, because of how dark the place is and because I was in constant fear of being ambushed, but it just didn't really happen because I could always spot the ambush from afar and tag the enemies individually with my bow. In a few areas with particularly dangerous drops of walkways I just decided that I didn't need the items that badly and ignored them. I got to the middle level bonfire without issue, and then made my way to the bottom of the swamp from there rather easily. And despite the poison swamp at the bottom itself being an obstacle, I had already gone back to the asylum to pick up the Rusted Iron Ring (though originally that was so I could get through the pool in Darkroot Garden), and the enemies at the bottom are much weaker than the ones in the top half of Blighttown so you're really only using your estus to heal off the poison anyway. I spent a lot of time farming the slugs down there for titanite shards and it felt like the poison, while it lasts for a million years, REALLY doesn't even do all that much damage, so as long as you don't panic and keep an eye on your health bar it was really easy to just periodically heal through.

The point is...one of the most hated areas of the game was a piece of cake to me because of the way I approached it. And I approached it that way to begin with because I went into the game knowing about its difficulty, preparing myself accordingly, and taking it slow and steady instead of rushing through and getting caught in a dozen ambushes. Of course this experience is built on the back of the millions of players who played this game when it WASN'T a decade old, and I'm not trying to trivialize the experiences of people who DID struggle with Blighttown by saying 'just like go slower lol'. But I do think it's fascinating how much easier this game is when you approach it the right way. I think, if I didn't know about all this stuff in advance, I too might end up trying to play it like Skyrim or something, just recklessly running into ambushes and traps and swinging my weapon wildly with no regard for enemy attack patterns. But by 2022 I think almost everyone knows that you can't play Dark Souls that way, and they probably wouldn't even try. And if you're not trying to play it that way...it's really NOT that hard of a game at all. It's a challenging game, and it will punish you for playing carelessly, but it's a far cry from the reputation the game has for being hard for the sake of hard. In fact, having recently played Megaman 1-3 with a friend via Switch Online, I feel like THAT is much more of a hard-just-for-the-sake-of-laughing-at-your-failure kind of game, where it just feels insurmountably difficult for no reason half the time, in a very un-fun kind of way. And the whole time we were playing it (and making heavy use of Switch Online save states along the way) I kept thinking about Dark Souls, and how much more forgiving it is than fucking NES Megaman (or NES Mario, or lots of NES games tbh).

Anyway. While this preparedness probably is the entire reason I was able to push through the game and finish it with 100% completion (even if it took me 6 months of playing cautiously), I did also end up feeling like it trivialized my experience in a sad way too, because I didn't really get to learn what the game wanted to teach me by punishing me, since I always knew what was around each corner. That's why I'm currently playing Dark Souls 3 blind (though I'll go back over a walkthrough once I finish an area to pick up items I missed, I'm NOT looking into things ahead of time). I think I probably would have been too scared to play Dark Souls blind, which is why I used those videos as a crutch in the first place, but I'm stronger now and I want to have that experience.

So, would I recommend Dark Souls? Yes, unless you absolutely hate third-person action RPGs in general. I think even if you're afraid of Dark Souls for its difficulty, you should give it a chance. Don't feel ashamed for looking up a walkthrough to prepare you ahead of time - you're still the one who has to beat the area by yourself, after all. While it did make me a little sad after the fact that I didn't get to experience the game blind, honestly, if I hadn't played like this I might never have had the courage to experience it AT ALL, so I'm glad that I did. I still felt pride when I conquered a tough area or boss on my own, even if I knew what to expect before going in. I guess it's like, if you were going to climb a mountain or explore the woods, wouldn't you feel a bit more peace of mind if you had a map of the area? But the map isn't going to climb the mountain for you...at the end of the day that's still something you've gotta do with your own power, and you can still be as proud of that as the guy who didn't buy a map. Or something like that, anyway. And also, don't believe everything you hear about on the internet, because I feel like the game's difficulty has been memed and exaggerated far beyond the actual truth anyway. Just take it slow and steady, prepare as much as you feel comfortable beforehand, and whatever you do, don't you dare go hollow.

Skyrim Together

Oh boy. So as we know, every year I find some way to play Skyrim again (except last year where I played Oblivion instead), and this year that took the form of trying to get Skyrim Together Reborn - the multiplayer Skyrim mod - set up and working with some friends. Except the idea of playing vanilla Skyrim (even with friends) sounded too boring to me. No, instead, I waited until someone else released a stable Skyrim Together modlist and then tried THAT out...and then proceeded to cannibalize it, removing mods I didn't like and adding new ones in that we wanted instead. You know. Just normal Skyrim PC player behavior.

Anyway, after about two weeks of working basically nonstop on my list, patching it and everything, making it as stable as absolutely possible on singleplayer...we took it online. And I learned that just because I've got Intermediate+ Skyrim modding knowledge, I don't know SHIT about what's going on under the hood in Skyrim Together's arcane black magic system. Long story short, we had uh. Problems. Lots of them. Most of them actually very funny, like, being attacked by a wolf (on my screen) and being told I'm actually crazy because it's a fucking skeever (on their screens). 

Or looting the dead wolf/skeever and finding 148 bones, 296 dog meat, 539 skeever tails and 148 wolf pelts on it. 

Or having...whatever this is, happen whenever your friends move around, except on THEIR screen YOU’RE the one doing it

Or getting launched into the sky for having the audacity to shield bash... 

OR the respawn system sending you to the back half of a dungeon you just started, potentially behind locked doors that only open from the front side, leaving you essentially trapped. 

Or

You know. Normal Skyrim behavior.

Suffice to say, after many days of saying "okay let's try it again but do [x] this time", we just couldn't get past a lot of these issues. And funny as they were, they were kind of impeding our ability to play Skyrim...together. Eventually we all just kind of got so tired of trying that we quietly abandoned the project. Even me, with the fierce determination I had to make the modlist work for that two week period, just couldn't understand why things were so hilariously broken once we got online, and lost all my zeal for trying (the only thing I could possibly think to do was to ask for help on a support Discord, and given the choice between troubleshooting with a stranger and just giving up, I chose giving up).

Honestly, even if things WERE working as intended, the whole process quickly became tiring. Every time I made changes to the list I'd have to reupload it for my friends to then redownload and overwrite their files with. And we had to get VPNs to connect to a private server session with (the need for extra tools like this is why I listed this as "PC" and not just "Steam"), and depending on which one of us was hosting we'd often experience slightly different flavors of bugs. And it didn't even matter how hot we made our orcs, because certain RaceMenu features just don't sync properly to the server, so all the time we spent perfecting our Himbo body morphs was for naught. It just kind of kept chipping away at our patience a little at a time until the cons started outweighing the pros of playing Skyrim together, and we all just lost the desire to keep trying.

But hey, this was all happening in September, just a month or so after Skyrim Together Reborn's official launch. And it was only DAYS after I saw someone else post a modlist that I then used as the basis for mine. It was probably too early to be as ambitious as we were. My hope is that development on Skyrim Together, and its Nemesis fork, make enough progress that by the time ky desire to play Skyrim again rolls around I might be willing to take another crack at it, and maybe things will work better by then. The day may yet come that our hot orcs will finally be unleashed on Skyrim...together.

Puyo Puyo Tetris 2

I've mentioned a few times how me and a friend of mine like to co-op play ostensibly singplayer games with Switch Online, but they do have some multiplayer-friendly games on there too, and sometimes we do also play those. One time we got very into playing Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine on Genesis. And then shortly after that my friend discovered an alarmingly similar game on the SNES called Kirby's Avalanche. We started to suspect this might be a case of some Japan-only game that they didn't expect to take off in the west without more familiar marketing, so we looked into it and it turned out to be the case - for a series of puzzle games called Puyo Puyo. After finding out there was a modern Puyo Puyo x Tetris crossover for Switch (that might be easier to play together than doing it via Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine) we both grabbed a copy...and I even grabbed a second copy on Steam when there happened to be a Sega sale about a week later and I spotted it there too.

Anyway, I may have briefly fallen into a week-long period of Puyo Puyo Fever where I couldn't stop playing, and all my dreams were haunted by falling puyos and tetris blocks. I got over it, but I still think it's a really fun and addictive game, and the multiplayer aspect of dumping garbage on your opponent's field to screw them over is a really fun way of turning what I tend to think of as a singleplayer genre into something competitive. And there's tons of different modes and ways to play, too, whether you wanna play Just Tetris or Just Puyo Puyo or a combination of both, time attack, all kinds of weird variations...and there's a weird over-the-top anime singleplayer story mode as well, where you can launch special attacks at your opponent as well. I actually got stuck on one of the bosses in this mode because I suck at utilizing the special attacks and you REALLY have to in order to beat her, but I'll get her...one day...

My nephew also got addicted to it and even got his own copy of the game for his birthday, so we can play together too (or by himself instead of him borrowing my switch all the time). He particularly likes that you can reskin your puyos to look like Sonic characters. But yeah, honestly it's a pretty fun game, especially if you just want something to pick up and play on the bus, or while you're in a hospital waiting room because you've had an ear infection for 3 weeks, or something. It's pretty pricey on Switch at least, though, so I'd either grab it on Steam (where it's $10 cheaper even when it's not on sale) or wait for some kind of Sega sale to get it cheaper. I think it's a lot of fun, just like, not $40 fun. There's also a Puyo Puyo Tetris 1 that's cheaper, which I imagine can't be all THAT different unless you care about the online scene or something.

Super Mario 3D World

My Switch co-op friend got me this because he thought we would have a fun and friendly time doing co-op together. Oh how wrong he was.

First of all. It’s a fun enough little game, though I prefer the gameplay style of Mario Odyssey myself. I feel like this game’s levels are definitely designed more for quick play sessions, with the star and stamp hunts kind of working like bite-sized versions of tracking down moons in Odyssey. I played through the first world or two by myself before we headed online together for jolly cooperation. Or more like (I’m Mario)...

You see, the game feels nice and friendly and colorful and there’s even a lot of cases where co-op is encouraged. But you can’t show me a results screen at the end of the level where one player can do better than the other, even to the point of being awarded a crown to wear into the next level, without awakening the blood fury inside me. Every time he performed better than me (due to my overwhelming tendency to hurl myself off cliffs) it would ever so slightly raise the rage meter inside my heart. I would become obsessed with doing better in the next level. And at first this was sensible...get more coins than him. Collect the stars before he can. Get the checkpoint and exit flags to show my M instead of his dumb L. All things that would give ME more points. But sometimes you’re just not as good at Mario games as the other person and it’s easier said than done to just BE better than the competition.

But what if there was no competition in the first place? The solution was in front of me all along. Eliminate him. Pick him up and throw him off a cliff, or into an enemy, then use the resulting precious seconds to race ahead and get all the goodies before he can catch up. Of course, this became less and less successful as time went by and he caught onto the fact that I’d try to throw him at virtually any opportunity. Sometimes he’d flip the script and throw ME off before I could get a chance, resulting in a lot of back-and-forth warfare. But more often than not it goes like this

Turns out I’m REALLY good at playing myself. In fact, while looking for a video clip for that first gif of me throwing him off the cliff, I found about 6 like this where I try to pick him up but end up being the one who dies instead.

Honestly though, my favorite was this time, where I spent a while playing nice and not doing anything overtly evil, until we got to a toad house...

The toad house gets marked as cleared as soon as you exit, and he didn’t have any powerups on hand while I was running around with my raccoon suit, so he was pretty pissed about this one. Perhaps my finest moment of video game dickery of all time, and it’s not like it was premeditated (I’m not that smart). I just thought it up on the spot and thought it would be funny. And it was (to me). And that’s what it’s like playing Super Mario 3D World with me.

[sg2tiger]

Repost of my 2021 game wrapup from Twitter. Unless otherwise noted, all text was written in December 2021, but if I have additional notes to make I'll specify that it's 2022 me talking.

Picking up where 2020 left off, I spent most of January through April playing World of Warcraft with some friends. One friend’s graphics card broke around this time so we stopped playing together, I started going through the motions and getting increasingly burned out, and then All That Shit happened at Blizzard so I finally canceled my sub and moved onto other games. Not to say I won’t ever play again ever, because I probably will if my long-time WoW player friend gets back into it at some point (she’s the reason I play at all), but the timing was just right to take a break from it for now, and probably for a good while.

Minecraft

At the same time I also got back into Minecraft after about 8 years of not playing or even thinking about the game, courtesy of my 5-year old nephew being obsessed with it. I had to re-purchase the game because my old account must have gotten stolen during my lengthy hiatus, and what started as something I thought would be fun for us to do together quickly led me back down the rabbit hole of one of my old gaming addictions. It’d been so long since I last played that the game had changed and introduced a ton of stuff that was new to me and I had to both re-learn old mechanics and learn-learn new ones.

For a while the idea of mods was very unappealing - I already had so much to adjust to after so long, and throwing in mods would just confuse me even more. But eventually I did dip my toes in the shallow end of CurseForge (which wasn't even a thing last time I'd played; back then if you wanted mods you just downloaded them off the minecraft forums and had to use weird mod launchers that didn't even work half the time). I started with Normal Minecraft + a few client-side mods, then a short-lived attempt to make a small modpack with friends for our server, before finally checking out the popular modpacks on CurseForge. That's when I ended up discovering...

Minecraft: Fabric Adventure Pack

Adventure Pack is a loot and RPG-focused modpack based around a mod called Age of Exile, with things like a custom skill tree with different classes and abilities, different weapon types besides the basic sword, leveled enemies, dungeons and structures, professions and more. I had actually tried another "RPG modpack" or two before this one, but this was the one that ended up clicking with me without being quite as overwhelming as the others (especially since I was still adjusting to mods and a lot of those packs add a TON of new stuff).

A nice thing about this modpack is that there was also a public server for it, so me and some friends ended up playing there from around April to July or so. Being in active development, the pack went through a lot of changes during this time, including a total server wipe for some major overhauls and a second separate, beta server that we also played on for a while. Eventually however the team behind the pack and the main core mod the pack was based around had some creative differences that lead to the pack's development becoming splintered. Since we were getting burned out from Minecraft around this time anyway me and my friends fell off, but I still keep tabs on the Discord now and then.

2022 Addendum: Shortly after the development splintered off, the pack’s dev became very inactive in the Discord, citing IRL issues making it difficult for him to work on the pack. I’ve seen a few updates here and there, but the Discord seems to be more or less dead since a few months after we had stopped playing, with little progress made on the current beta. The version of the pack on CurseForge is woefully out of date, with the ‘current’ version basically JUST being on the Discord community’s beta server, so it’s not the most accessible right now. Not to mention being stuck on 1.16, several versions behind the now-current 1.19 version and a lot of the popular mods. As it stands I can no longer consider this pack Recommended, and I’ve kind of given up hope of seeing the development progress in any meaningful way at this point, which is a shame. Still, I had a lot of fun during our time playing this, and maybe someday it’ll revive - I do still think it had a lot of potential, if only the devs have the opportunity to work on it again.

Nintendo Switch Online Service

I know, this isn’t a game, it’s a service. And I’m going to focus on a very particular, and very peculiar, aspect of the service that me and a friend of mine made use of this past year. The service gives you access to the NES, SNES, and now N64 and I believe Sega Genesis emulators, and though the libraries are somewhat limited, they technically all allow for online play…even though this feature was clearly intended for games with actual multiplayer. It started with me and my friend playing Super Mario titles together, reasonably playing more of a pass-the-controller kind of multiplayer between Mario’s turn and Luigi’s turn as we made our way through the game. But then we decided we could just as well do this sort of play in anything if we used a rule like ‘we swap control when someone dies’.

Which is what we did when we decided to play Zelda 1, 2, and A Link to the Past in co-op on what we called Triforce Tuesdays. It was pretty fun! For 1 and 2 we switched on death but for LttP we would each do the leadup to the dungeon and then the dungeon, and switch off for the next player to do the next segment in the same way. At the time we finished the N64 wasn’t on offer yet, and sadly it requires some kind of even more expensive online service instead of the regular one, so idk if it’s gonna be worth it, but we did think it’d be fun to co-op Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask the same way, so we’ll see. Myself, I’m hoping to see Gameboy come to the (cheaper) service because I’d love to see how we could work out a co-op Pokemon playthrough.

2022 Addendum: The service that offers access to N64 and Sega Genesis is disgustingly expensive and I’m really reluctant to recommend it as a result, but I gotta say, playing Paper Mario co-op is a lot of fun. I really wish I could recommend the service in good faith because it CAN be a lot of fun, but if me and my friend weren’t splitting the cost of a family plan so we can play these games together I would absolutely never in a million years be using it.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Zelda has always been my favorite Nintendo IP, and with one exception (*cough* Skyward Sword *cough*) I’ve enjoyed all the mainline titles. Despite Breath of the Wild being such a huge departure from what I consider to be the Zelda Experience, I’ve been well aware of its stellar reputation in the gaming community and wanting to play it myself was the entire reason I wanted a Switch at all (that and the then-eventual and now-out Shin Megami Tensei V). Unfortunately the regular Switch is fucking expensive so, like I did with the 2DS before it, I got a Switch Lite. In the case of the 2DS all I really lost out on was the 3D (which I did not care about) and clamshell design, so I never really felt like my experience was lacking. But the 3DS and 2DS were both strictly handhelds…the Switch is a console/handheld hybrid, and some games just feel like they were designed to be major console experiences. Plus the Lite apparently has a smaller screen than a regular Switch in handheld mode which I did not realize at the time.

Ultimately I just felt…weird, playing BoTW on such a small screen. Despite wanting to play this game for so long I found myself just never touching it. The experience just wasn’t right. I’ll revisit it sometime in the future and either just push past that feeling of awkwardness or, though less likely, maybe I’ll get a regular Switch where I can play it on a TV instead. For the time being I don’t feel like I’m fit to give this game a proper rating because I only played for like 15 hours and iirc was only just making my way past Kakariko. When that day comes it’ll reappear in this list with a proper review and rating, but I’m confident I’d love the game…if I can just get past how strange it feels to play it on a Lite.

Super Mario Odyssey

The aforementioned friend I played co-op Mario with got me this. I’m not the biggest Mario fan in the world but I find this game really easy to pick up and play for a short while when I might not have several hours to sit down and game. It’s sometimes a little awkward because I have a Switch Lite and the places where motion controls are involved require me to shake my whole system around but overall it plays very fluidly. I’ll load into a new kingdom, grab as many moons as I can possibly find, and then when I’m like ‘okay I have other stuff to do today’ I can just hop on the ship and head to the next kingdom, then save and quit for next time. Really just an easy game to pick up and play for short bursts.

Code Vein

I think I only got about halfway through this before other distractions popped up but what I did play was pretty fun, even if I’m not especially good at soulslikes. The story (as far in as I got) felt a little confusing because the characters knew so much more about the world than I felt like I did/they told me, but I really loved trying to piece the character relationships together through the little memory corridor segments. I also got to make myself an anime protagonist that would have done my high school self proud. Ultimately I got super lost in the big white cathedral level and every time I meant to go back in and try again I’d get distracted by something else. When the time comes that I revisit this I may just start over from the beginning because I think I’d definitely need a story refresher.

Salt and Sanctuary

Somehow I’m better at soulslikes when they’re in 2D, I guess. I got decently far into this one before life became very distracting around the end of August and I keep meaning to go back in but I’m afraid it’s been so long that I’ll have lost my groove with it. I really like the aesthetic and atmosphere of this one and the 2D platforming is a lot of fun. I definitely got that sense of satisfaction when I’d go up against what seemed like an insurmountable boss and manage to pull it off and surprise even myself. Had I known at the time that it was also on Switch I might have gotten it there because the portability might have helped at the time to keep me playing it even when I didn’t have access to the computer. Hell, I might decide to get it on Switch at some point anyway and just start over.

Hollow Knight

With my nephew now living here I started looking through my Steam library for anything that he might like watching me play. He had already taken a liking to things like Spelunky, so I was focusing on things that had a kind of cutesy art style or characters that might catch his attention. We ended up landing on Hollow Knight and playing it for a few hours before the school bus came…and then I just. Kept playing. While we still sat down and played it together, I found myself playing the game without him more and more simply because I wanted to. Like Salt and Sanctuary before it, I got sucked into the game’s blending of 2D metroidvania platforming and challenging combat and boss fights. I’ve slowed down a bit as the holiday season became a busy time, and it’s hard for me to sit down and start playing if I can’t stay focused for a 3–4 hour session, but I plan to continue and hopefully finish the game soon, and will definitely be grabbing the sequel.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

I’ve got this weird disease where every year around the end of August/start of September where I just HAVE to play Skyrim. And don’t ask me why that is because I also have no idea. I can only assume it’s because I think that’s around the time I played the game for the first time and I’ve just got this weird memory connection between that shift in seasons from summer to fall and playing this game but idk, point is, every year I inevitably start a new playthrough around this time. But I was determined this year to break that cycle…and played Oblivion instead. I had actually played a teeny-tiny bit of Oblivion back when it was current but I didn’t really get into it (iirc I was playing Neverwinter Nights 2 at the time and didn’t have room in my life for a second RPG), but aside from that this was basically my first proper playthrough. I used a Wabbajack list called Bevilex (since rebranded Heartland) which was basically just graphics mods, and the only gameplay mods I added on top were Maskar’s Oblivion Overhaul (I disabled some stuff I didn’t want) and Ultimate Leveling. Otherwise it was more or less just vanilla Oblivion with less potato people.

I wasn’t sure how far into the game I’d get, expecting to burn out and go install Skyrim anyway, but I actually stuck with it and managed to finish the game, beating both the main quest and Shivering Isles. I did just about every sidequest I came across and did the entirety of the oft-praised Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood questlines, but I only did the very beginning of the Fighter’s Guild and only finished the Mage’s Guild up through getting admission to the University. Oh, and I did the whole Arena questline as well. I know I did end up missing a lot of side content in the Shivering Isles and I feel kinda bad about it because I know how much people love that DLC but at that point I was seriously fighting burnout so I’m glad I finished its main storyline at all. I also skipped Knights of the Nine because I heard it’s not all that good (I think it’s mostly just remembered for Pelinal).

I had intended from the outset to be a kind of spellswordy character since, unlike Skyrim, wielding magic and weapons at the same time is much more viable in Oblivion, but somewhere along the way early-ish on I got the very powerful Hatred’s Soul bow from an oblivion gate and regrettably fell back into that classic archetype of being a sneak archer. To be fair I was really just an archer-archer for the majority of the game but by the time I got the Ring of Khajiiti and a Chameleon sigil stone I realized I could basically make myself completely invisible to the point that even having a light spell active and standing right next to an enemy they wouldn’t notice me. So I started oneshotting everything in every dungeon from stealth effortlessly. Stealth AI in Oblivion is definitely jankier than Skyrim because once you’ve been detected you’re like, detected forever and they will Not lose aggro on you even if you become hidden again, and if one enemy detects you basically every enemy in the entire dungeon now knows you’re here, but once I got all that passive chameleon on my armor it didn’t really matter because I wouldn’t get detected in the first place. It really trivialized the dark brotherhood and thieves guild endgames as well as the entire shivering isles, but that’s what happens in these games…you’ll struggle for the beginning and possibly middle depending on how much you’ve modded your difficulty or handicapped yourself, but by the endgame you’re a fucking god.

Anyway, gameplay isn’t Oblivion’s strong point, at least not looking back on it from a 2021 lens. But I realized through playing it that it’s not just the nostalgia goggles of kids who grew up playing it that makes it so common to bash Skyrim and praise Oblivion. The quest design is just genuinely so much better in Oblivion. I think the writing itself is about as hit or miss as Skyrim’s where it can sometimes be really good and other times be kinda eh, but there are SO many more quests in this game that give you player agency with multiple outcomes and choices with how to approach them. The thieves guild and dark brotherhood definitely take the cake in that department of quest design but I feel like it was sprinkled throughout the entire game across lots of sidequests and even some of the main quests. This is what really made the game shine to me, even amid the bland and repetitive dungeons (yes even moreso than Skyrim’s, I’ll be glad if I never have to see another ayleid ruin again), obnoxious oblivion gates, and hilariously memey character interaction dialogue/AI.

And I know people who played Morrowind (I still need to get to that eventually) say that Oblivion was the first major step down into making Elder Scrolls less of an RPG, and Skyrim only continued/worsened that trend, but I still felt like Oblivion was more of an RPG than Skyrim because it actually felt like how I decided to approach quests had an impact on their resolutions. Even something like actually having to prove myself to all the mage guild chapters before getting admittance to the arcane university made me feel like I actually had to work for my qualification instead of just being allowed to cross a bridge because I’m the fucking chosen one, yknow?

It’s the little things and I think Oblivion had a lot of little things about it that just felt more immersive compared to Skyrim, at least when it came to questing and generally interacting with people in towns and cities. The wilderness…I’ll be honest, I spent as little time as possible wandering around the wilds of Cyrodiil, and when I couldn’t fast travel I just went everywhere by horse on the most direct route possible. Skyrim really nails the wilderness exploration so much better where I spend most of my game OUT of towns just wandering around on foot, attacking bandit camps along the way, looking for hidden treasures off the beaten path…going back to Oblivion after being used to that experience, yeah, it shows its age. But the towns and cities feel so much livelier compared to how small and just…un-lived in they often feel in vanilla Skyrim. It’s just a funny contrast I noticed while playing when I realized I spent a lot more time in towns in Oblivion, talking to people, exhausting their dialogue options, even shopping, compared to Skyrim where I like to just wander around and camp outside and avoid the cities as much as possible.

Anyway. As a Skyrim Baby playing Oblivion for the first time, do I think it holds up? Yes. I think it’s absolutely worth a playthrough if you’ve never done it before. I don’t think I’ll ever play it again, because I exhausted most of the content I cared about in my first playthrough already, and modded Skyrim just feels so much more infinitely replayable to me, but I’m glad I took a chance on doing something different this year and that I’ve finally experienced some of what makes this game so memorable for people. So skip over Todd Howard’s Please I Beg You Buy Skyrim Again Edition, and give this 15 year old game a chance instead.

The Elder Scrolls Online

Since I was streaming my first time playing Oblivion, a friend of mine ended up getting bitten by the Elder Scrolls bug and said it might be fun if we played ESO together. Having just finally escaped my World of Warcraft prison only like, a month prior (I was playing less and less all summer but didn’t end my sub until August) I didn’t really want to get caught up in another MMO…but they talked me into it and we started playing together. We were playing together for little over a month before said friend stopped and went back to Final Fantasy…and I stopped shortly after because I felt lonely…but during that brief period I had a lot of fun, and made like, 5 characters.

While certain pervasive elements are basically nonstop screaming in your face THIS IS AN MMO! GIVE US YOUR MONEY! (namely the crown store…) I have to say that the game overall feels less MMO-like than most of the MMOs I’ve tried. It does a really good job capturing the Elder Scrolls flavor with its gameplay, even with things I’ve never really seen (nor expected to) in an MMO, like all the thiefy skills and the actual crime system where you can get a bounty and have the guards on your ass if you don’t lay low or pay it off. Forget questing and dungeons, I had so much fun just breaking into off-limits areas, stealing valuable shit and selling it off to a fence while desperately running from the elder scrolls cops. And unlike the singleplayer games where money eventually becomes so plentiful with so little to spend it on that it has no value, it constantly has value in the MMO world where I’m always gonna wanna increase my bag or bank space, change my cosmetics, maybe even buy a house someday. So even if I’m ‘ignoring the game’ to just become a master criminal it actually feels like there’s meaning to it…and also it’s really fun. Add the Dark Brotherhood’s Blade of Woe ability to the mix and you can just make your entire gameplay loop be breaking into people’s houses, killing them, and robbing them blind with no witnesses.

That aside I do think the game also has some great writing and questlines. The Morrowind expansion (which is free) has some very well-written and lengthy quest chains, and I enjoyed the Orsinium DLC a lot which I played from start to finish and even surprised me in a few places. I only dabbled in a few other areas thus far, focusing mostly on Morrowind, Orsinium and Blackwood during the time I was playing, but I found myself liking it a lot and often forgetting it was an MMO and not a singleplayer game, at least until I walked into the heavily-populated town centers. I think having come fresh off WoW also helped me appreciate the game a lot because WoW’s got so many archaic elements that are just inherent to the game due to its age, no matter how much they try to refresh and modernize it. Even the very grindy MMO staples like gathering and crafting professions just feel more like they blend into my normal gameplay in ESO than in WoW where it’s like, I’m either focusing on questing or on professions, one or the other. In ESO the fact that I have to repair my equipment makes me engage with the crafting systems more and it feels more like a natural part of my gameplay loop, and even if it’s ALSO a money-making side activity that can be hyperfocused on, it feels like it’s got a more immersive reason for existing as well.

I definitely want to go back to it at some point, especially since I picked up a bunch of DLCs I haven’t gotten around to playing with yet. At the very least the wealth of content can help stave off the eternal wait for Elder Scrolls 6.

Fallout 4

It really just ended up being a Bethesda Fall for me. While I was playing Oblivion another friend was playing Fallout 4 so we ended up making a general Bethesda game chat channel on our Discord. Fallout is usually not on my radar because I’m much more a fan of fantasy than I am of post-apocalyptic or futuristic settings, and I’m not really big on shooters, but I thought I’d give it a chance anyway. The biggest indication that I’m not Fallout’s main target audience is that I think I actually spent the most time and had the most fun building up my settlement (I just love building games…ARK, Conan Exiles, The Sims 4…). Not to say I didn’t have fun with the regular gameplay too, but I was definitely way more focused on building my thriving drive-in community than I was about finding my kidnapped son or whatever. I should mention I was playing via the Wabbajack list Magnum Opus, which is a fairly large kitchen sink modlist, but nothing ever felt like it was just throw in willy-nilly. Everything always felt very well-integrated with the world and with the other mods and I was actually just starting to have a lot of fun once I pushed out of the very squishy early levels.

However, it was around this time that my brother and my 5-year old nephew ended up moving in, and I made the decision to stop playing for the time being because the kid was already making a lot of jokes about shooting and guns and his father and I both didn’t like that. My playing Fallout had nothing to do with it, but since he spends a lot of time hanging out in my room I felt like it probably wouldn’t HELP if he saw me playing it, either. So for now this is on my backburner, and I’ll either pick up where I left off or just start a new playthrough (likely on an updated version of the Magnum Opus list) when I pick it up again in the future.

Fire Emblem Three Houses

A group of my friends have been OBSESSED with this game since it came out, and it’s been on my games-I-need-to-get-now-that-I-have-a-switch list since, well, since I got my switch last year. But I also didn’t want to get it until I finally pushed myself to finish Birthright (which I reviewed last year). Another friend got me this for my birthday and that finally pushed me to finish the last couple of missions I had in Birthright so I could play this. According to my switch profile I’ve already logged “150 hours or more” in the game and I’m still only on my first route (Azure Moon, I think I’ve only got 2 missions left).

I’ve played every Fire Emblem since FE7 with the exception of Conquest/Revelation and Shadows of Valentia (which I own and never got around to), so there’s a lot about 3H that’s very different from what I’m used to, but I think most of the changes are good ones. The free class system took me some getting used to but I like the freedom you have to build units the way you like them. Combat arts and gambits are completely new and for a while I barely used them because I was like, ‘well what’s the benefit to this vs. doubling with my normal attack?’ (with the exception of Curved Shot/Deadeye for archers) but now that I’ve gotten the hang of it I like having situational options where you can weigh what’s best for you in a given moment. The loss of the weapon triangle still feels weird to me but I think it’d be hard to balance with the combat arts and gambits in mind, so maybe that’s why they cut it. I do dearly miss the pair-up system from Fates (which was an improvement from Awakening) and think the adjutant system is a step down, but it’s also a lot less abusable so that’s probably the reasoning behind that. Ultimately I think most of the changes to gameplay are all positive and if we can expect to see the same or a similar system in the next Fire Emblem I can only expect good things.

The monastery on the other hand…well…I actually liked it a lot during Part 1. The pace never felt ‘too slow’ to me but just slow enough. As a new professor it gave me time to get to know my students and the time we spent together during that year makes the fact that our bond is so strong in Part 2 feel more meaningful to me compared to how quicky the Fates protag takes to the Hoshido family he literally never met before in Birthright. Plus if you want to recruit students from other houses or train your units in auxilliary battles it really forces you to focus your free time wisely, and I enjoyed the experience. Having one major event happen per month often made more sense in Part 1 as well because of scheduled things like the religious holidays and school dances and whatnot which just happened to be convenient times for the villains to strike while the church officials had their guards down. In Part 2, on the other hand, the story is much more tense, and having to justify a month’s worth of downtime where I wander the halls and go fishing and gardening and have tea parties with my students just feels…out of place. Multiple times in Azure Moon have we marched our army somewhere far away only to turn around and go back to Garreg Mach instead of pressing forward, because the gameplay requires us to be there for free time, even if it makes little sense in the story (ESPECIALLY in the first half of Azure Moon).

And I’m also super burned out by it at this point as my units are so strong they don’t NEED multiple instruction periods per month anymore, so I just end up doing auxilliary battles for gold and ore to fund my weapon repairs, but playing the same 3 auxilliary battle maps has worn out its welcome too…really I think the slow pace is actively harmful in Part 2, at least on the only route I’ve played so far. Knowing that Part 1 is also nearly identical across all routes is also kind of pre-emptively burning me out because while I enjoyed that slow pace the first time around I can imagine it wearing out its novelty by the second or third run through…

In any case I think the monastery system is a bit flawed and could use some polish, but conceptually I do like having the free time to actually walk around an open area and talk to my units, and I think it’s an improvement over the castle in Fates in a lot of ways. If they could refine it a bit more and if you didn’t get SO many free periods between missions to make the pace snappier I think it could be great.

The characters in this game are also so much more likeable and interesting than the one-note stereotype characters from Fates (I only played Birthright but I’ve read that Conquest’s cast isn’t all that much better) that I actually do make sure I walk around and talk to everyone for my first free time of the month just to hear what they have to say, even if I’ve started to spend the rest of my free times Resting just to pick up the pace as I near the end of Part 2. The supports are also significantly better than Fates, with characters actually bonding over common hardships or talking about their difficult pasts with the occasional lighthearted and comedic ones for balance…it felt like nearly every support in Birthright was just COMEDY ROUTINE FEAT. MY ONE CHARACTER TRAIT AS A JOKE LOL! with maybe two exceptions I can think of (Awakening had a lot of COMEDY LOL! supports too but they just felt a lot better written than Fates’ and I remember finding them largely quite fun). There have been one or two 3H supports that left me with the same kind of ‘that was stupid and pointless’ feelings as 90% of Fates’ supports but they have been the minority so I’m a lot more tolerant when they do pop up.

Ultimately I think the game, while it might initially be a little jarring to fans of older Fire Emblem games, is almost a straight improvement over the last couple, and with some more polish I would like to see most of these systems make a return in future games. And if they can keep the cast of characters as interesting and likeable as the 3H cast I’ll be happy. I ended Birthright only liking maybe 3 members of my entire army, and while I loved Awakening and its cast when I was playing it I find that I can barely remember any of them if I try to think back to it now, so clearly they didn’t leave a lasting impression on me either (whereas I remember most of the Path of Radiance cast despite not having played that game in a decade). But honestly if I can sink 150+ hours into only my FIRST playthrough, I think it goes without saying that I’m enjoying the game despite a few complaints I may have, and I do look forward to experiencing the other routes once I finally wrap up Azure Moon.

2022 Addendum: It took me from when I started this game in November 2021 until June of 2022 to finally finish all routes, including the DLC. In fact, I ended up finishing it about 2 weeks before the spinoff Fire Emblem Warriors Three Hopes came out, which I considered to be my ‘deadline’ before all my friends got that and started talking about it and locking me outside the loop I felt like I’d just broken my way into (IE being able to have spoiler discussions). Didn’t end up being a concern ultimately as the same friends fell into other interests shortly thereafter and I didn’t get too far in Three Hopes myself...I’ll talk more about that in the 2022 post though. Either way, I don’t feel like my general opinion of Three Houses changed from when I wrote this review. I think the story and characters remained solid throughout and across all routes (though I think AM still ended up being my favorite, and I never ran another route without at least 2 Lions getting recruited). I have no idea what the future holds, especially with how unimpressed I am with what we’ve seen for Engage, but my hope is that future games take a lot of cues from what Three Houses did well. Just...maybe be less ambitious about having so many routes crammed into one game, and pace the prologue and timeskip segments a bit better, yeah?

Pokemon Wilds

My 5-year old nephew has awakened a peculiar fascination with, not just Pokemon, but ‘Old Pokemon’ specifically — with the Gameboy-era graphics because he knows those are the ones me and his dad grew up playing. So in my hunt for interesting gen 1 & 2 hacks I stumbled across this fangame that has quickly become his — and quite possibly my — favorite Pokemon game. Pokemon Wilds is like if GSC-era Pokemon had a baby with Minecraft. You start on a procedurally generated island made up of several different biomes (I believe more are coming in future builds), each biome populated by pokemon you’d expect to find in them, as well as specific berries that grow there, and some resources you can only find in that biome (such as evolutionary stones). You will find random pokemon walking around in the overworld that may either willingly join you if you have a free spot in your party (usually base stage pokemon) or may become aggressive if you try interacting with them (usually second or third stage evos).

You can still find the traditional random encounter pokemon in the tall grass as well, and catch them with pokeballs you either find or craft yourself. Crafting is done mostly with resources given to you by caught/tamed pokemon that you keep happy by placing them in an enclosure with their favorite type of habitat. So if you want to get charcoal for example you want to put a campfire in a fenced in pen and keep fire types in there to make them happy, and they’ll give you charcoal. Most types of pokemon have overworld HM abilities depending on their type, like grass types having Cut to cut down trees for wood, rock types having Rock Smash to get stone from rocks, and ground types having Dig to dig up soil that can be transplanted to other biomes to make pokemon happy (for instance ground types won’t be happy on grass, but prefer sand). Transportation-related moves like Fly, Surf and Teleport are mostly found on evolved pokemon, but many unevolved pokemon can also be ridden on (Rhyhorn, Ponyta, Kangaskhan) to get around quicker. You can use resources gathered from trees and stones to build and decorate your home and set up an entire farm of pokemon enclosures, or you can just ride around on your pokemon and explore the island, battling and leveling up and then plopping down your sleeping bag to heal up and rest at night.

The game is still in alpha but a quick look at the Discord shows that the devs are very active and hard at work on introducing new features, pokemon, and decorative tiles to the game. Multiplayer is apparently also a major goal for future builds which is really exciting. Even in alpha the game has a ton to do and I’ve been having a blast playing it, with or without my nephew (we have separate save files). I’ll definitely be keeping my eye on this one for updates in the coming year!

[sg2tiger]

I'm a weird person who likes archiving things. Making lists. Etc. My friends bully me for it all the time but it's simply who I am 😔 I always liked doing these little end-of-year gaming wrap ups but they never really felt right on twitter (and I had to post my rambling thoughts at an external link anyway). I thought about just coming back with 2022 and ignoring the two years I didn't post them here but the gap would bother me too much, so here's a repost of my 2020 gaming recap.

Unless otherwise noted, all text was written in December 2020. For a couple games that I’ve played more in the time since I might add some additional thoughts, but I’ll make a note of it being 2022-me talking if so.

The Sims 4

I feel like I have to preface this with the fact that I was never into the Sims franchise, and never played any of the previous games in the series. Yes, yes. I know that they were better than the Sims 4 in every way. But since this is my only Sims game and thus the only metric by which I can judge a Sims game for myself, I can still say that I’ve gotten a lot of fun and enjoyment out of it since obtaining it earlier this year.

It started because some friends of mine were playing, and I became intrigued by the building system (and the death traps one friend was constructing with said building system). I don’t think life simulator games as a whole really appeal to me, which is why I never got into the Sims before now, but I do love me a good building system. And I do think the Sims 4 has a good building system. I just love zoning out and making and decorating houses, even if I’m not exactly GOOD at it. 

Still, despite all the things I hear about how inferior Sims 4 is to its predecessors, I’ve enjoyed the gameplay too. Since I play on PC I of course have access to mods to improve some of the areas where it’s lacking, but even so, ON ITS OWN without having anything to compare it to I think it can be a lot of fun if you know how you want to play it. Like, the only real ‘playthrough’ I have done so far that wasn’t just me testing mods and CC and stuff involved me trapping a full household of 8 sims inside a house and forcing them to live together reality show style. Except the house was also cursed AND haunted, and I had a mod that made fires spread faster and kill quicker. The goal was, any sim that could survive until they reached Elder on the fastest aging game speed would be set free from the house and be granted eternal youth and immortality. I had a lot of mini goals pop up as I played this save, but there was a light at the end of the tunnel — “reach elder without dying” — and that helped guide my gameplay enough that I didn’t feel completely aimless, which can be a problem for me if a game is too open-ended sometimes.

I can’t say I’d recommend spending more than $800 for the game and all its packs, but if you were to acquire it through some other means (that I absolutely definitely wouldn’t and am NOT advocating, of course) I think you could theoretically get plenty of enjoyment out of it, especially with the plethora of mods and CC out there. While there are certainly a lot of areas that have room for improvement and I have hopes for with the eventual Sims 5, I don’t think the Sims 4 is a BAD game. At least for a newcomer to the franchise like me who can’t really be disappointed because I have nothing to compare it with. To me, it’s a fun sandbox where I can zone out and enjoy building, or just throw some hapless sims into a horrible situation and play god. And sometimes it’s nice to have a game like that where you can just turn your brain off and do whatever.

Undertale

Yeah, I know. Undertale in 2020, extremely late to the party, etc. Thing is, when I first heard about Undertale, it sounded like a cute and fun game that I would probably enjoy. And then the overzealous fandom blew up and no one would shut the fuck up about it, casual spoilers were literally all over the place, and people looked at you like you had two heads if you said you hadn’t played it or didn’t want to play it. I got SO SICK of seeing people not SHUT THE FUCK UP about FUCKING UNDERTALE that I developed hype aversion and came to actively hate a game I’d never played, a game I probably WOULD LIKE if I played it, because everyone was so goddamn obsessed with it. I was actively avoiding it for years for this reason.

Anyway, after many years of consciously avoiding anything to do with Undertale as a result of the hype aversion, I ended up deciding to play it after all at the behest of good friends whose opinions I trust and who knew about my hype aversion going in. We sat down and talked it through and decided that I’d stream it to them on Discord while playing. They wouldn’t influence my gameplay or talk out of turn and spoil things for me, or give me hints I didn’t ask for, or tell me how to play the game. We’d meet once a week for a few hours for ‘Undertuesday’ and they’d just watch me play and experience things for myself (even if I sometimes very definitely annoyed them with my gameplay). And I appreciated that, so thank you guys again for being patient with me.

Now…I think I had a lot of thoughts and feelings about this game when I finally finished it, but it was back in April, and I don’t seem to have put them in writing because we were talking in voice chat. Unfortunately I can no longer remember any of the specific commentary I must have had for the game when it was fresh. But I think my general take was…I wasn’t able to enjoy it as much as I think I could have, had I TRULY been able to go in blind. But I simply had too much meta awareness of what the game was expecting of me due to how much it blew up. My awareness of things like the mere EXISTENCE of ‘pacifist’ and ‘genocide’ routes ensured that I tried to do the right thing throughout and never kill any monsters, because I knew the game didn’t ‘want’ me to. I had foreknowledge that actively changed the way I may have played had I not known. I also knew that the player character and the original lost human were not one in the same. Perhaps my feelings about the story may have changed had I been properly fooled into believing they were. And in general I had a hard time letting myself like Papyrus and Sans because of how popular they had become, and how sick I was of seeing their faces plastered all over the internet at the height of Undertale’s popularity.

Lots of things like that, mostly little things, but those little things added up to an experience that felt inherently tainted compared to being able to go in without that foreknowledge. I felt like I was just acting the way the game ‘wanted’ me to, but didn’t always expect me to, because a part of me knew that I was supposed to act that way if I wanted the best ending. Because I knew I’d be guilted and punished if I acted differently. Because I went into a game that acts as a deconstruction of the genre knowing that it was a deconstruction. I don’t know how else to put it, but I feel like I wasn’t really able to play it genuinely, and it affected my perception of the game and its themes. Perhaps also being aware that my friends, to whom this game means a great deal, were watching me with expectations and hopes of their own that I would come away loving it as much as they did, and wanted me to. And I feel like I probably let them down because that just didn’t happen for me.

Undertale is a good game. It’s cute, it’s got some cheeky little amusing moments, and you can tell a great deal of love was put into it. I understand why it’s as beloved as it is. But I think it’s also a good lesson about fandom hype and how NOT to try and get your friends to play a game you like (or watch a show, or whatever). I know that when you’re very interested in something you want more than anything to get your friends to become interested in it too — believe me, I’ve been there, and I was definitely the annoying type about it (especially about Umineko). But I think it’s also very important not to let your excitement for a thing override the experience of others, especially if you want them to love it as much as you do. Undertale feels like the kind of game that really works best when you can go in blind and not have your experienced guided — directly or indirectly — by spoilers and meta knowledge. I feel like I definitely would have been able to appreciate it more had I been able to have a natural experience with it, anyway.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey

A lot of my thoughts on Odyssey are basically repeats of my thoughts on Origins from last year, so I won't rehash those here. The TL;DR of it is, I can enjoy both games on their own merits as vaguely historical open world action games, but not as what I consider to be Assassin’s Creed games. What I consider to be Assassin’s Creed has essentially ended with Syndicate, and it appears that we won’t be going back, now that Valhalla continues to follow in Odyssey’s footsteps in turning the franchise into (the very loose definition of) an RPG.

What’s NEW here from Origins is the addition of dialogue options and “choices” in how quests can complete. Except your choices aren’t real choices at all, and the player never truly has any agency in the parts of the story that actually matter in the end. (spoilers for this next part so skip to the end if you don’t want ‘em)

Phoebe always dies, for example. No matter what you do. No matter how fast you are. No matter what choices you made before this point in the story. Her character, regardless of what you do or don’t do, is destined to die. To me this would have been an IDEAL point in the story to have some actual cause and effect…like, maybe my actions earlier with her friend and the plague business could influence this, and if I choose poorly, I would have to live with the fact that I’d doomed her. Or something DURING the quest itself, as you pursue her. Maybe you could have acted in a way to get to her in time. I know they really wanted Aspasia’s reveal as the big bad to be a surprising end game affair, but it was pretty heavily foreshadowed at this point in the story (I didn’t think she was The Ghost yet but I certainly was suspicious of her being a cultist). Maybe if my character could have had the opportunity to not trust her, I could have advised Phoebe to not work for her at all, and not end up endangered as a result. There are any number of ways they could have given me the agency to either save or or TRULY end up responsible for her death by my actions. They did not. She is scripted to die no matter what you do. And this is just one example of many points in the game just like it where places that I feel like I SHOULD be able to influence the outcome with my decisions don’t do jack shit because it’s scripted. By contrast, most times that my decision CAN influence the outcome of a quest, the change is so minor (slightly different dialogue or the opportunity to pursue a bland out of the blue fade-to-black sex scene I don’t want) that it doesn’t feel worthwhile at all.

At the end of the day I’m left wondering why this even needed to be a feature at all. Just to give the illusion that this is an RPG now, and broaden the customer base? Because that’s what it feels like. The game could have played out almost exactly the same had they gone with a FULLY scripted story like all the previous games, especially since Alexios/Kassandra clearly already have a pre-written personality that comes across through the things they say and the way they say them regardless of which dialogue options you actually choose. The choices are basically tacked on for appearance’s sake, choices in name only. I felt nothing meaningful from a single one of my choices in all of my 207 hours so far (I’m still trying for 100% completion but I have finished the main questline with both Deimos and unveiling all the cult members). And that’s my biggest complaint about this game — the “choices” didn’t even need to exist because their absence wouldn’t have actually changed the game at all.

And that’s not even getting into the whole forced DLC marriage and child debacle (I don’t own it and plenty of other people have already gone on at length elsewhere on the internet about it, but I think it speaks to the exact same issue of the game promising and giving the illusion of player choice but ultimately still having a scripted story to tell and a protagonist whose personality is already set in stone regardless of your ingame decisions).

At this point I had a whole txt file with more specific examples of Quests That Did Not Actually Give Me A Choice but you get the picture, so I’m not gonna go on endlessly about each one…

Anyway. I feel like Ubisoft would be better off just making a new IP if they want to explore the RPG market so badly. Assassin’s Creed never fit this format and I don’t feel it ever will. RPGs with significant choices work best with silent protagonists (though I feel like KC:D did a serviceable job without one), not fully fleshed out characters who already have literally existed in a historical context by way of the game’s entire premise. By actively taking place in the past you are inherently limiting the things my character can do to influence the story, because that story has already concluded, and the results of it can be seen in the present day story. But they keep being so wishy-washy with the present day story that it’s like a relic at this point anyway that they’re just afraid to drop entirely to piss off the minority who still cares (me, I’m the minority). But when it clearly doesn’t MATTER anymore, why not just bite the bullet and do it already? You could always resolve the loose ends in a comic tie-in lololol

Honestly though, while I’m probably the .0001% who actually enjoys reading all of the stuff on Layla’s PC that gives more context on the lore of the modern day assassins vs. templars conflict and the overarching story that’s been running through this franchise since day 1, I think we’re at a point where they may as well just let it go. They’ve been doing it so dirty since Black Flag as it is, I’d rather just see it go than get further tarnished by being forcefully tacked on because it’s an artifact of the series. After the complete disregard for modern day that we saw in Unity and Syndicate I was genuinely excited when we got Layla, because I thought she’d step into the role of The New Desmond and have adventures that actually made the modern day story relevant again…but she’s actually LESS relevant than the nameless faceless Black Flag modern day protagonist, and that’s just sad. Just pull the plug already, Ubisoft. You’ve made it abundantly clear that you want this series to become a loosely historical sandbox RPG and the intricate and complex lore of the modern day storyline is only dragging you down. You don’t care about it anymore, so what’s it matter to people like me who DO care if you’re not giving it proper attention either way? Just let it die before it can be disgraced any more.

I’m getting off track though…honestly, it’s a fun game. Like I said, 207 hours and I’m still not done shooting for 100% completion by exploring every island and doing every sidequest that I missed my first go around. If I wasn’t having fun at all I wouldn’t still be here. I AM having fun. I think less fun than I had with Origins, if I’m being honest, but it’s definitely not a bad game. I’ll just never be happy with the idea of the series going in this direction in the first place, so I’m always gonna be here nitpicking about little things the majority of people won’t care at all about. Like the fact that haystacks and hidespots no longer exist despite being a literal staple of the franchise. Or the fact that you can’t die from fall damage anymore. Lack of true poison/berserk darts mechanic or any real ability to sow chaos in an enemy camp without breaking stealth because the game really really REALLY wants to force you into open dynamic combat because it looks cooler in the promo trailers. Feel like I had to fight the game to give my gear all the mechanics that boost Predator Shot and passive adrenaline regeneration so I can pull off multiple headshot kills without being spotted, y’know, like I want to actively do in a game where I expect to play like a proper assassin. Oil barrels also seem way weaker than they were in Origins where setting fire to camps was a risky (because it’s not exactly stealthy and quiet in the traditional sense) but very fun way of making quick work of enemies in the dead of night and then slipping away in the chaos before they could see you. The game just really wants me to be a Spartan Warrior Demigod and I’ve gotta work so hard to NOT be that and it annoys me. Can’t even blow up a grain silo from absolute and complete cover with no one around to witness SHIT and not get a mysterious bounty on my head. Are the horses and goats reporting my crimes again, like in Skyrim?

I could keep going with nitpick after nitpick but I won’t. I’m just cranky because I actually really liked both Unity (gameplay-wise, the story was a trainwreck) and Syndicate (slightly less of a trainwreck which is funny considering the presence of actual trains) and thought they did a lot to really refine that tried and true core Assassin’s Creed gameplay…and I know it’s never coming back. But Odyssey is fun I guess. If you aren’t an experienced AC fan you’ll probably enjoy it. And I guess that’s exactly how Ubisoft likes it.

Sonic Adventure 2

One day I was babysitting my 3-year old nephew and he told me he wanted to play a ‘blue game’. I didn’t know what that meant (I have since learned that this is how he refers to his parents’ Switch, which is light blue) so I looked in my Steam library for something blue. I landed on this, which I forgot I even had on PC. And that’s how I got my nephew obsessed with Sonic and also how I spent the next 2 months reliving one of my favorite games of the GameCube era.

I don’t really have a lot to say here. It’s Sonic Adventure 2. I got big into the Chao Garden, as one does, and trying to A-rank all those stages that used to give me the hardest time. I’m actually really proud to have A-ranked Crazy Gadget on all stage types, and Eternal Engine on all types except Hard (couldn’t manage more than a B). Also got all A ranks on Route 101, but I did that in the olden days too (after a great deal of frustration and one broken GameCube controller). Can’t manage to pull it off for Hard Mode Pyramid Cave though…and I know I DID finally get that one last time I replayed this game, like, 8 years ago, so I know I’m capable, but I just can't manage to pull it off.

Mostly I focus on the Hero stages though. Growing up, me and my brother used to share our save files on most games instead of having separate ones, and when he played I’d watch and vice-versa. For SA2 I always played the Hero story and he played Dark, so I’m always less familiar and more rusty when I try to do the Dark stages. I did get all A ranks on Radical Highway after many many hours of trying (fuck you, time attack)…but that’s about my sole Dark stage claim to fame. Rouge's stages in particular are exceptionally difficult for me.

I was still working on raising some Chao before I inevitably got distracted away by other games…but the good thing about having it on Steam is that my save data will be there next time I get the urge to play, whether it’s a year from now or 5+. No more hunting for old memory cards that probably got lost or thrown out when we moved houses, taking all those hard-earned A ranks and carefully-raised Chao with them. And I think it'll be satisfying to boot it back up after a long time and remind myself that I got all A ranks in Crazy Gadget (the finest achievement I'll ever attain in this lifetime and what should be engraved on my tombstone).

Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town

The original Friends of Mineral Town (back when it was still Harvest Moon) for GBA was probably my favorite Harvest Moon game, so I was excited to play the updated remake. It’s not PERFECT, and I did kinda end my playthrough on a sour note which I will explain in a moment, but looking back on it now several months later I’d say it’s a very comfy and largely casual farming sim that’s hard not to like. Fans of Stardew Valley or more modern farming sims might find it too shallow, but for people who played either the original FoMT, HM64 or Back to Nature, it’s a fun and nostalgic little game.

Of course, as with all remakes, there’s always those things you wish they didn’t change. Some of the character redesigns don’t sit as well with me as the originals, but most of them grew on me as I played (except Karen…). The removal of rival marriages is also a heavy blow, simply because a certain Japanese market didn’t like the idea that their waifus might get “stolen” if they didn’t act fast enough (and iirc you had like, 2 whole years before they WOULD in the original so like…)…I’d like to say the inclusion of same-sex marriage makes up for it, but I wish we could have had both. I always end up wooing everyone in town before I actually get married in these games, just so I can see all the events, and then I feel bad for leading everyone else on, so I like the idea that they’ll find happiness together too! I think that if the game were ever able to be hacked for mod support this would be the first thing modders would put back in.

But while these things are the main offenders you’ll hear people talk about, they’re not the worst. A lot of this is probably on the nitpick level that most players won’t care about so feel free to stop reading here. Granted that a lot of the game’s issues stem from being a little TOO faithful to the original and some of its more frustrating gimmicks (who honestly thought a 50 year wedding anniversary gift was a good idea in a game where no one will ever age?!), but there are a lot of things that were CHANGED from the original and made needlessly more difficult for some baffling reason…and then tied to achievements, to boot.

So, most of the achievements are pretty easy to get as long as you play normally and get past 3 years. Others require you to go a bit out of your way to achievement hunt for them specifically, but are absolutely doable if you set your mind to doing them. But then there are the ones that basically require you to plan your entire save file around getting them, and making no mistakes in the process unless you just really really REALLY love waiting around for entire ingame seasons before you get another chance. The main offenders here are all related to breeding farm animals, and how they needlessly changed the breeding mechanics in this game for seemingly no reason than to make things more tedious and difficult.

See, the remake introduced a convoluted friendship/happiness system to all your animals. I think the original had some hidden friendship requirements too, but the main thing in the remake is that animals you purchase have a friendship CAP, after which they cannot continue to gain more friendship, even if you’ve had them and cared for them every day lovingly for years. The only way to raise that cap is to breed your animals, and each time you breed a successive generation that heart cap goes up by one. Purchased animals cap out at 5 out of a maximum of 8 hearts. If you breed your 5 heart cow you bought, it’ll have 6 hearts. Breed that one and it’ll raise to 7. And so on down the line until you have a cow with 8 hearts…which is basically a requirement if you want to get several achievements, and if you aren’t aware of this and start doing it IN YOUR FIRST YEAR you’re going to have a very bad time.

See, you need your animals to have max hearts if you want them to produce the highest-quality animal products (milk, eggs, wool). And you need those animal products in order to cook some dishes, which you need for the achievement to cook all dishes in the game. And you need them at max hearts to win the seasonal animal festivals, which also have achievements. And the thing about those festivals is that they come once a year, and if you don’t have your maxed out adult animal by the time they roll around you have to wait a whole year to do it again. This is much worse than it sounds when you consider the aforementioned fact that the heart cap only raises by one with each successive time you breed…and it takes a full season (30 days) for a pregnant animal to give birth, and about another 20 for that baby animal to become fully grown. And then you have to actually GET that animal’s friendship maxed out up to its cap before you can breed them and pass that cap on to its baby (I think? I was playing in August so I’m a bit fuzzy but I’m pretty sure this was part of what made it so obnoxious because you couldn’t just breed the baby as soon as it hit adult stage if you wanted to do it right).

Now remember, the animal festivals come only once a year. You can’t submit a pregnant or baby animal, but you need an animal with 8 hearts or more (10 is actually the maximum but you only need 8 for everything that matters) to win the festivals. So if you time your breeding poorly, you might not have an animal that’s ready for the festival in time…there’s also holidays and the occasional typhoon/blizzard (which you can sort of cheat your way around in most cases if you’re vigilant about watching the weather channel) that can interfere in your ability to feed and brush the animals, which loses you precious days of raising that friendship.

Now let’s say you didn’t even find out about this cap system, or the 8 heart requirement for winning festivals, until well into your third year, after you’ve gotten most of the other achievements and basically done almost all you wanted to do in this game. Well too bad, because you’re basically going to need another 2 years minimum before you’ll actually have a prize-winning animal ready for the next festival! And if you’ve already befriended all the townsfolk, gotten all the romances, married, fully upgraded your farm, learned all the cooking recipes, fully explored both mines, and basically everything ELSE in the game besides these achievements…you’re going to have a lot of extremely BORING grind ahead of you where you basically just wake up, care for the animals, go back to bed and repeat. For season. After season. After season.

I was basically working like crazy to try and pull this off and I DID actually just barely not make it in time for the sheep festival one year which kinda threw me over the edge in my anger about this mechanic. And if you want to get all the products for your shipping log (thank GOD not required for an achievement, but something I was actively trying to complete before the breeding madness made me just say fuck it, achievements and then I’m done with this game) you have to do this for each type of cow as well…or at least have the sense not to buy any other type of cow besides normal until you’ve already gotten an 8-heart cow through breeding. Because whenever you buy a new animal of the same type after raising the cap, those animals will have the increased heart cap too…so if you had bred yourself a cow with 6 hearts, and bought a new cow, it’d have a 6 maximum instead of 5, and the different cow flavors all run on the same cap system as the normal cow (but only the normal cow’s milk is needed for the cooking achievement so the flavored cows are…well, frankly useless outside of the shipping log).

If this were the only frustrating system in the game I could probably suck it up and deal. It’s very obnoxious since, despite all the tutorial books in the library, I don’t think any of them mention this mechanic at all and basically require you to read about it in an online guide to know (and sucks to be you if you don’t do so early into your save so you can get started on it ASAP), and because it takes so much time to do it that it’ll take you a couple years for certain…but I’d probably sigh, complain a bit, and move past it. But the game decided that this was simply not ENOUGH of a punishingly specific seasonally timed game mechanic to tie to an achievement. No…instead they had to throw in that achievement for owning all 4 of the possible animal pets.

In the original FoMT you just started the game with a dog and you could take it to the fetch festival on the beach in summer. That was about it. The remake introduced different breeds of dog as well as cats, penguins and capybara you can get during different seasons from a special pet merchant. That merchant only shows up on the 15th of the month, and only if it’s sunny, and only if you’ve done some other stuff I forget exactly in order for him to start coming to town. And THEN, the pet he sells changes per season — cats in spring, penguins in summer, dogs in fall and capybara in winter. He won’t sell you a second pet until you’ve raised — you guessed it — your friendship hearts with your first pet, and it also has to be an adult…and you also guessed it, this takes a lot of time and daily dedication to level. And you have to do this until you’ve obtained all 4 pets from him, which you have to do EXACTLY on a sunny 15th day of each season, and only when all of your other pets are adults with maxed friendship.

Getting the idea yet? Another achievement basically tailor made to make you waste your time living through more ingame years than the game has engaging content to complete, and another element that you basically have to read about online to know exactly how it works. I wanted to get a cat. Cats are sold in spring, but it’s impossible for the merchant to come to town before the SUMMER of first year, so the earliest you can get a cat is year 2. It’s also not possible to get two pets in a row — your pet does not grow from baby to adult in time. I tried. So you CAN’T get a cat in spring of year 2, and then a penguin in summer of year 2…you have to skip over summer that year and you’ll be able to get a dog in autumn year 2. But then your dog won’t be an adult by winter of year 2, so you can’t get a capybara. But you can get a cat in year 3 spring! Oh wait, you have a cat already? Bummer. You effectively shot yourself in the foot and wasted time by not buying your pets with the maximum efficiency required to get this achievement.

I was in year 6 by the time I finally got all of the achievements. I had actually reached a point where I basically abandoned my actual save and made a second save file just to do this, neglecting my friends, family, livestock and farm for the sole purpose of waking up, playing fetch with my pet, going to bed and repeating until the time came that I could buy my next pet. The amount of time I wasted, both in real life and in the game, was just unbelievable. The unbelievably restricted mechanics in this game that can’t even be blamed on it being a remake of something so old, because they were actively INTRODUCED in the remake…by the time that last achievement finally popped I was just 1000% fucking done. I came away from a fun and jaunty little remake of a beloved game from my yesteryear feeling angry and soured on the whole experience. And I know that’s stupid, and I know you don’t have to get all achievements and I know achievements should be for things that you really SHOULD work to ACHIEVE and not be handed out like candy. But there’s a difference between achievements that make me feel like I worked hard to achieve them, and achievements that are gated behind ridiculously convoluted time-gated events that require you to actively stop playing the game normally and dedicate yourself solely to…waiting. To grinding your real actual time WAITING day after ingame day until the right time appears, and praying to God you didn’t fuck up and miss even one day in your routine. It’s bullshit, plain and simple.

And it’s not enough for me to not recommend this game, because I still had a lot of nostalgia and fun with it and this isn’t something that’s going to affect the vast, vast majority of players. I just…it’s remarkable how this game is both cutesy and casual and also so sadistic in its torments that it would make Satan himself blush. And it just kinda left a bad taste in my mouth by the time I’d finished and made me want to rant about it. And I put it in my notes, ‘rant about this thing when you write up the end of year post because I’m too angry to do it now’, and I didn’t wanna let my past self down. They put a lot of wasted time into getting those achievements, dammit, they deserve a little 10-paragraph rant as a treat.

But hey — at least I’m in the less-than-1% of (Steam) players who made it.

Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright

Been playing this on and off at a very slow pace for a while now…I’m not finished yet so I don’t really have a whole lot to say. It’s…alright. It’s like Awakening: More Differenter Edition, except it lacks a lot of the charm that game had and copypastes some of its mechanics over seemingly just for the sake of it despite it not REALLY making sense to do so (I’m looking at you, dimension babies). The characters are less charming and memorable IMO, and while I kinda like the story plot itself more than Awakening’s, I’m not a big fan of the Pokemon-style version split between the two stories. I’m basically never going to buy or play Conquest, so I’m effectively missing out entirely on the characters and perspective of that side…a perfect scheme to engineer people into buying two copies of the same game, of course (at least with Pokemon the idea is that you’re socializing with other people to get what you don’t have…that logic doesn’t really work when it’s an entire story that you’re splitting between two games that effectively must be played by the same one person to get the full experience).

I was enjoying it well enough though, even if not loving it, until the other day when I finally got to that mission. Suffice to say I didn’t have the requisite A-rank with a certain someone, who was then Doomed To Die By Cutscene In The Stupidest Most Convoluted Way Possible, despite that person being one of my best and most-used units gameplay-wise…so I was basically punished for not having them stand next to my PC character, specifically. But I’m not going to go on another 10-paragraph rant about why I hate game mechanics that come out of the blue and give you no way of knowing about them without seeking knowledge from outside the game. Suffice to say I just sucked it up and reloaded my save, grinded out the last level of support on one of the bonus maps (we were at a B support already…just not A 🙄), and then replayed what had been one of the hardest maps to get through in the game so far the first time (it was easier the second time since I knew about the reinforcements spawning nigh endlessly from the towers if you don’t block em off). The character’s life was spared and life goes on.

Still one of the stupidest things I’ve encountered in a game though, since no other Fire Emblem has had something like that locked to a support, to my knowledge (unless the old pre-GBA ones that I never played did), and there’s really NOTHING in the game’s story to that point that suggests this character’s relationship with the protagonist is important enough to doom them to Death By Cutscene if you don’t support them to A before that point. I was angry. But I managed to overcome it so I’ve moved on.

2022 Addendum: I finished this game the following year, before moving on to play Three Houses. My final verdict was ultimately one of disappointment, hence the updated ‘Meh’ review on the page image. The writing was just plain bad (and I’ve heard that it’s arguably worse on the other two routes), and the characters were just not that memorable or likeable to me with maybe two exceptions. What I did like about it was the gameplay - and at this point I can’t even remember the specifics, but I do remember that there were a few times playing Three Houses where I kept thinking ‘man I really miss being able to do [x] like in Fates’, so I guess there’s that. I know Birthright is also the Baby Easy Mode of the Fates trilogy, but I think Conquest would probably be hard enough to piss me off (I put up with that shit in the GBA era but I don’t know if 2022 Tiger is patient enough for that anymore). 

But mostly, the reason I don’t ever particularly care to play Conquest or Revelation is simply because Birthright wasn’t satisfying enough in the writing department for me to WANT to. Ideally you’d want one of your 3-part game series to hook the player into wanting to see how things go down on the other routes, right? Like, no one plays a visual novel, gets one ending, and says ‘okay that’s enough’ (r-right?). If the writing were GOOD it should make me want to see things from the other side. If the characters were compelling enough I should want to see them through another viewpoint. And if the overarching plot (which I spoiled myself on once I decided I didn’t want to ever play the other two games) actually had more hints to its presence IN Birthright’s story, enough to nag at my mind and say ‘there’s something unfinished here and I want to know what it is’...but well, it didn’t. Birthright didn’t manage to make me care about any of those things, certainly not enough to spend more money to buy both a second entire full-priced game and THEN a paid DLC on top of that. 

Some people play these games entirely for the strategy gameplay, and that’s the crowd I hear praising Conquest. But other than that I get the strong sense that I’m not alone in finding Fates a pretty weak entry in the series overall. Thankfully I feel that Three Houses more than made up for all of Fates’ shortcomings, at least in the writing and character department, but I’ll talk about that more in my 2021 Three Houses review. UNthankfully...well, I’m not too excited for what I’ve seen about Engage so far, so I guess time will tell as to whether Fates redeems itself in my eyes in the future.

Skyrim Modlist: Elder Souls

I think it’s becoming a meme at this point that Skyrim, in some form, will be on these lists at the end of every year. But I can’t help it…something about it calls to me every year around the same time (late August to September) and it always manages to pull me back in 😔

Anyway, last year I gave Ultimate Skyrim a try because the last time I modded my own game I broke things in hilarious ways by trying to make my own mod compatibility patches (turns out I’m not that good at it). I thought having someone else curate the modlist experience for me would alleviate my problems. And I loved that part of it, and how integrated Ultimate Skyrim’s systems felt compared to me just slapping together whatever I liked with no thought to how those systems would interact. Unfortunately I wasn’t as big a fan of Requiem, the entire system Ultimate Skyrim is based upon…

But in the intervening year between playthroughs, Automaton (the tool used to install Ultimate Skyrim) gave way to a new tool called Wabbajack, and an entire new world of curated modlist installers opened up before me. I decided to peruse the various Wabbajack lists and see if I could find one that’d suit me a little better than Requiem…and I actually really liked the sound of Elder Souls.

As the name implies, Elder Souls is basically The Dark Souls Of Skyrim. The world is harsher, bleaker, and filled with a huge variety of new enemies and dungeons chemically balanced specifically to kick your ass. The skill and leveling system is completely overhauled — aside from the crafting skills (smithing, alchemy and enchanting), you don’t gain exp and level up by doing anymore. You gain gold with each kill, and when you sleep you spend an increasing amount of gold to raise your level in the skill of your choice. Eventually you’ll earn enough exp to level up and gain perk points to invest. As you level, the amount of gold it takes to progress increases higher and higher, from the hundreds to the several thousands…but as you grow in power, you’ll be able to kill more enemies to earn more gold to put towards leveling up further. It’s actually a really cohesive and fun gameplay loop that works surprisingly well in Skyrim, and I came to enjoy it a lot.

Of course you can also earn gold in the usual ways…loot, selling loot, crafting things and selling those…everything you do in the game basically makes you think about how much gold you have and how you want to invest it. In the early game especially, when it’s so hard to kill and loot enemies, that expensive weapon at the blacksmith can be really tempting…but that means you’ll be spending the gold you need to level up, so it’s a judgment call. It also makes you really focus your character build because your skillups are restricted to when you can sleep and afford them, and your perk points become harder and harder to earn as each level up starts to feel so far away (though you can find perk points by exploring and finding waystones in the world as well, for a little extra help). Do you want to invest that perk in alchemy or enchanting? Or is it more practical to boost your damage or defense by taking a combat perk instead? It really makes you think about how you level.

In the early game, you’re a fragile little baby. When you die, you leave behind a gravestone and all your gold with it (you don’t lose your gear) and respawn in the last inn you slept in. If you can get back to your body before dying again, you can recover your gold…but if you die on the way, it’s gone forever. It may be practical to bring a follower along for better survival, but they’re expensive to hire and share in a portion of the gold you earn…is it worth the tradeoff for the survivability? I managed to get lucky and beat Uthgerd the Unbroken in a fistfight by using the architecture of the Bannered Mare to my advantage, ducking and weaving, so I earned a ‘free’ follower to carry my burdens and tank for me in my early hours. She also came at level 11 when I was like, level 3. I had to make her essential, though, because she kept jumping in front of my arrows when I tried to shoot the enemy and I killed her/reloaded about 5 times before I’d had enough of that 😔

By the middle to the end of the game, though, if you’ve been diligent in exploring, killing and building your perks well, you come to feel like an invincible god. You can take anything alone, and followers just get in the way. I was playing an Orc warrior, with two-handed/heavy armor/archery/smithing. Orcs in Elder Souls have passive health regeneration. With the Wintersun religion mod I followed Malacath, of course, and his boon allowed me to regain health for the amount of overkill damage I dealt with each enemy kill based on my favor with him. My favor with him was constantly high because I pleased him by constantly slaying great and powerful foes. With the addition of crafting equippable Runes I furthered my health regeneration per kill and buffs to my armor rating. For completing Meridia’s daedric quest I got a spell that…well I forget what it did exactly but it buffed me even more. Using Ocato’s Recital I had it autocast whenever I entered combat. As a werewolf, I also had further buffs to my health and stamina, even outside of my beast form. By the endgame I was further buffed by Black Books and the reforged Gauldur Amulet (which in Elder Souls has the extremely OP power of letting you revive once on death with a 15 minute cooldown — but considering the Gauldur brothers are extremely formidable, it’s a reward worthy of defeating them). And with the Cleave ability in the two-handed perk tree allowing me to deal AoE damage with each attack, I became a literally unkillable, unstoppable machine of death.

I’m not even a min-maxer. Optimizing builds and gear isn’t something I find fun, so I don’t really do it. This just was mostly a case of multiple factors all aligning in just the right ways to make me feel like a literal actual god. To further illustrated exactly how broken my character became by the endgame, there’s an enemy in the Vigilant mod designed to be unkillable — as in, you’re supposed to just RUN from her if she sees you. I’m kind of a weenie about horror in games in general so I was very scared and I did run and panic when I got to that part of the dungeon but then I got cornered in a room and in my panic flailed about attacking and…killed her. And then her equally scary friend who showed up shortly thereafter. Just killed them both. They’re either meant to have stupidly high health or defense or maybe both, I read about them online and they are definitely not meant to be killable because this section of the mod is more or less supposed to be a survival horror. You can’t kill the monsters chasing you, you can only run. Unless you’re me, the most broken Skyrim character who ever lived.

Anyway. To further drive home how much I ENJOYED Elder Souls, this is the first time I actually, legitimately finished Skyrim. In all my 2,193 hours of OG Skyrim on Steam, in only 228 hours of Elder Souls (this was my first time playing Special Edition so I did have the exact hours on hand) I did what I thought I could never do because I was always so distracted adding and removing mods and generally being too busy breaking my load orders to actually play the game. I beat Alduin. Then I did the Dawnguard DLC for the first time. Then I did Dragonborn for the first time. And then I did vicn’s trilogy of GLENMORIL (I was actually doing this concurrent with Dawnguard), VIGILANT and UNSLAAD. And there were even more quest mods I’d never played included in Elder Souls…but after being able to solo VIGILANT basically effortlessly it felt like nothing in this game could be a proper challenge anymore and I officially decided to call it quits. At level 49, Ushnak the Orc retired, too powerful for Tamriel to contain.

I was still in the mood for Skyrim after that, though, so I grabbed a new modlist and started a new file. But it just…didn’t click. It was a fun enough modlist in its own right (Equanimity) but it just…didn’t feel the same, after getting used to Elder Souls. The world felt so much more empty without all the enemy variety…sure, they had QUANTITY with bandit camps absolutely overflowing with difficult foes, but it wasn’t the same feeling as wandering through the desolate mountains and stumbling upon a minotaur, armed to the teeth and blocking your path. My gold no longer felt like it had value when I couldn’t spend it on skill ups, which had kept loot meaningful throughout the entire game. I feel like Elder Souls just kinda ruined a more traditional Skyrim experience for me…it was so DIFFERENT, and definitely took some getting used to at first, but when I stopped playing I finally realized just how much I’d warmed up to it.

I do wonder how much more punishing it’d be on a different build, though. I was focusing on archery more in the early game but then focused mostly on two-handed by the end, but how would the traditional Skyrim Sneak Archer survive in Elder Souls? What about a mage? I never play mages, but still. A squishier class, a race and religion without inherent health regen abilities…it might be fun to try next year when the Skyrim urge strikes me again. Or maybe I’ll venture out and try another new modlist again. I think I just couldn’t jump RIGHT from the Elder Souls experience into something that was a little closer to normal Skyrim, but a year off might ‘reset’ that a bit. Still though, I’d like to play Elder Souls again sometime. And I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who wants to play Skyrim for the 100th time, but also like, doesn’t want to play Skyrim for the 100th time.

2022 Addendum: Sadly Elder Souls has been discontinued, so my ‘Recommended’ rating feels a little weird now, but there’s other Soulsy inspired lists out there that can hopefully scratch a similar itch (last one I was playing before I got distracted was Ruvaak which was pretty fun). In general I still cannot recommend Wabbajack modlists enough, and since the time of this review I have not played Skyrim without it being a Wabbajack modlist (with the semi exception of me taking someone else’s Skyrim Together modlist and then kind of hacking it to pieces to fit me and my friends’ needs, but that’s a story for the 2022 game reviews).

Genshin Impact

Some friends were playing Genshin so I decided to give it a try. Especially since it was constantly being called a BoTW clone, and I figured I’d never get a switch or be able to play BoTW, so hey, why not?

I feel like I don’t have a lot to say about it. It’s cute and fun and while the gacha elements are, well, gacha elements, I think the game is still very playable and enjoyable without suffering under the greedy fist of Big Gacha. The elemental interactions are really fun — I love games that take elemental play in more exciting directions than simple “water beats fire” style (one of the reasons I like Divinity a lot). Exploration is also a lot of fun, and it’s always really rewarding to solve a puzzle and see a chest pop up. I was also pleasantly surprised by how much worldbuilding and story there actually is, since I kinda figured it was gonna go more sandbox-style and just throw me out with a vague premise and have me explore the world in hopes of finding my sister.

I’ve enjoyed it a lot so far, I just haven’t played it a ton yet because I’ve also had my hands full with other things. But what’s there so far is pretty fun and I think it’s worth checking out at the very least.

World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth/Shadowlands

A friend of mine usually buys me a couple months of WoW sub for every new expansion (I started playing when Pandaria was current). For reasons I no longer remember but are probably ARK-related, I didn’t end up getting a sub during the BFA period (my last sub came around the end of Legion). So about a month before Shadowlands dropped she got me a new sub, and I had to play catch-up on all the BFA stuff I’d missed out on…and THEN jump into Shadowlands.

Since I didn’t play BFA when it was current content, I think my opinions of it are pretty skewed. From what I hear, Azerite gear was wildly unpopular, but I kinda thought it was fun (granted I’m not into the endgame high tier raiding stuff where it’d really be an issue). I also liked how the Alliance and Horde stories were COMPLETELY different, and not just slightly different takes on doing the same content in the same zones. Both islands have a lot of personality and I thought the stories for both were interesting, and neither really required me to have a PHD in World Of Warcraft Lore Studies to understand them (which Legion sometimes felt like it did). I’m not SUPER thrilled with some of the changes they made to Outlaw Rogue since I was away, but I’ve gotten used to it…mostly.

Then Shadowlands came out JUST after I finished up my rep grind to get flying in BFA, where I now no longer had any reason to be and to fly (okay that’s not true, because it came in very handy when I leveled my horde main through BFA later, but it’s how I felt at the time). I kinda liked the more railroaded leveling experience for a change because of the way the story elements were able to be tied together and flow into each other, and I appreciate the fact that once you’ve gone through it that way once you don’t have to do it again on your future characters. Usually when I’m leveling I end up wandering off and picking up !s wherever I see them, getting vastly off-track from where the game actually wants me to go (I basically wandered away from like, the third story quest you get in Kul Tiras and ended up doing Every Sidequest in Tiragarde Sound before wandering back to continue the ‘main’ story there and realizing some of the places it would have taken me were places I had already gone to). For Shadowlands, since it wanted to guide me into focusing on the storyline, I decided not to do that — Bastion still had a bunch of the map unexplored by the time I finished the story there, but instead of wandering off to see it all I just headed right to Maldraxxus so I could do the story while it was all fresh in my mind. Then after finishing that, I went back to the other zones to wrap up the extra sidequests and stuff I had missed the first time around. It was a different kind of experience from how I usually play but I liked it for a change. Not sure if I’d like to see it as the new style for every expansion going forward, but I thought it worked well for Shadowlands in particular and the story it wanted to tell.

I’ve now got both my mains set up in covenants and am working on developing those. Another friend who hadn’t played WoW since WoTLK also recently came back and we have been working on leveling new characters together. As someone who’s mostly only ever played one Main Character, with a Secondary Character to occasionally experience stuff on the opposite faction, it feels weird to suddenly have all these ideas for new alts I wanna make, and having to find time to do all the things I wanna do. Thankfully my friend extended my sub as a Christmas gift, so I feel less pressured to have to do EVERYTHING I want to do by the end of the month now that I’ve got more time.

Overall I’ve been having fun though, after having been away from the game for a while. I’m kind of a casual WoW player in general, preferring the questing experience to doing stuff like Dungeons and Raids with groups of strangers that are gonna be putting pressure on me and my gear and my performance, so MY enjoyable WoW experience is not going to be EVERYONE’S enjoyable WoW experience. I get the sense that BFA was not terribly popular, but I thought it was better than Legion (and I liked Legion when it was current content). I’m also not as concerned with choosing the optimal covenant for Maximum Performance, but more based on aesthetics and style and how they fit my characters, and I’d like to see how all their little stories play out on alt characters at some point (right now my rogue is Venthyr and my hunter is Kyrian). Plus there’s still leveling my lowbie druid with my friends, and other alts I wanna make at some point…and working on stuff like pet battling and archaeology on the side. Lots of stuff to do, but hopefully now I’ve got enough time to do it in, and can relax a bit.

2022 Addendum: This was all before the whole big Blizzard scandals came about. At the time me and my friends were having a blast playing Shadowlands content together almost every night. Then basically all at once we all kind of stopped playing. For one friend, it was entirely due to the controversy. For the other I think it was a combination of conflicted feelings and general burnout. I kept going for another month or two until my sub ran out, but I was hitting the burnout around that time as well, and not having them to play with made me lose my zeal to work on my alts and other things to hold my interest, so I just let it lapse. I’m not really sure what the future holds as far as playing WoW together again, now...maybe someday. I don’t think there’s even been a new expansion since Shadowlands yet, anyway (I don’t really keep up with WoW news at all when I’m not actively playing). It’s kind of crazy how much can change in such a short amount of time. I’ll still look back at that time we were playing together and having fun, though, even if our WoW playing days might potentially be over.

Grounded

My friends came to me and basically said, “we’re obsessed with a new survival crafting game, do you wanna play”, and I said “why yes, I do love a good survival crafting game”, and the next thing I knew I had become a little ant…

Grounded hits on all the usual trappings of the genre. You have a vague premise (in this case you’ve been shrunken down to insect size and forced to brave the dangers of the backyard, Honey I Shrunk The Kids style) but otherwise are on your own to fend for yourself against things that want to kill you, while managing your own hunger, thirst, and other needs, building increasingly more advanced shelters and braving deeper into the world to get higher-level crafting materials and march ever toward advancement.

What makes it fresh is the way the ‘theme’ of being shrunk in the backyard feels really well integrated into the world. Things like finding a discarded juice box or soda can with a little (large, to you) droplet of liquid you can drink or fill your canteen with to replenish your thirst, which you can absolutely imagine finding in a backyard where children play. The giant bird who sometimes flies by and perches on a nearby bit of distant scenery, massive enough to blot out the sun from your tiny view below. The koi pond essentially acting as the ‘ocean’ biome, filled with hostile aquatic creatures and the ever-present threat of drowning. The vaguely 1980’s aesthetic of it all. It just all feels really cohesive and helps you immerse yourself in the world.

The mechanics are also a bit more…dare I say, casual? More forgiving? Than some of these games tend to be. Your only needs are really hunger and thirst, and while you CAN sleep, you don’t have to…you can just keep working through the night every night if you want to, without rest. Buildings can clip into the terrain by default, so where you build is a bit more forgiving (some games could stand to learn a thing or two from this…looking at you, ARK). When you die, your corpse basically stays there forever, so there’s not a ton of pressure to race back to where you died to recover your stuff. For that matter, anything you drop seems to stay on the ground forever. These things might change if the game gets persistent servers down the line for performance reasons, but it can be kinda nice in a multiplayer game with friends.

I think my favorite thing is how the building system is LEGITIMATELY cooperative. In games like ARK or Conan Exiles, it’s like, you basically designate one person in your tribe to be The Builder, with everyone else just being your resource gathering monkeys. One person has the plans, the ideas, the visions for how to build the base…and it can be hard to communicate that without wires getting crossed, and that can be costly when these games usually don’t return all your resources spent when you demolish a structure. But the way Grounded does it, you’re basically not placing down structures in the world right away, but blueprints for them. Everyone can see them, even as you’re trying to position them. Then anyone can get the resources and actually turn that blueprint into a structure. And if you decide you don’t like it, or change your plan, you can just destroy the blueprint without sacrificing the resources on it. It feels a lot more like I’m working with a team when I see blueprints that my tribemate made, and I can just go get the resources to build it when I’m able. Really working together, just like real ants…for queen and colony…

Another thing I love and think needs to be default in ALL these games, ASAP, is the ability to color code and add a floating icon to all your chests and containers as an easy way of saying ‘this is what we store in this box’, without requiring signs or mods or just you having to memorize/check every chest every time. Seriously, survival games? Please take note.

All that said, it’s still early access, and there’s some bugs (heh) sometimes. We’ve had some semi-frequent random disconnections kicking us back to the main menu and forcing the host to re-invite us back. There are also not yet actual servers, so the multiplayer game saves just live on the host’s computer. Latency can be an issue if their internet is better or worse than yours, and lagspikes and rubber banding is a bit more frequent than I tend to feel it in games with dedicated servers. Some hitboxes are a little wonky sometimes, for both enemies and resources. And lots of other little stuff I’ve already forgotten, but nothing I’d consider really gamebreaking.

Overall pretty fun if you don’t mind some bugs, both literal and technical (though there IS an arachnophobia slider that can make the spiders into basically cartoony blobs, which I think is a pretty cool consideration in a game like this). It seems like the devs have a lot of big plans on the roadmap as well, and a friend who was playing around in God Mode stumbled upon a few areas labeled as UNDER CONSTRUCTION, so the map might be getting some extensions at some point too. If you ever felt like you just wanna zone out and go about some farming tasks like a diligent little ant…Grounded is your game.

2022 Addendum: Grounded’s officially out of Early Access at this point and there have been a lot of changes to the game in the time since I wrote this review, and updates have continued coming out pretty regularly even post-release, which is always good to see. I think the funniest thing about my review in hindsight is that I don’t know if I’d consider it ‘casual’ as much anymore because combat has become a bit more deep and challenging...we even had to bump our difficulty down in an ongoing save at one point because we were having a rough time. I think more or less all the changes have improved the game, though, which isn’t something you see every day in a game like this (at least in the two I’m most familiar with, ARK and Conan Exiles, where every update tends to be met with a choir of angry players (usually PVP people, I don’t go there) about how the devs broke everything and suck and should issue refunds and also die). But yeah idk, go check it out, it’s pretty fun to be a little ant sometimes.

[sg2tiger]

Umineko fandom, 363 days of the year:

Umineko fandom, October 4th and 5th:

[sg2tiger]

It’s that time of year when I rise from my tumblr grave and come to post the end-of-year look at the games I played

As always, my lengthy ramblings can be found under the cut. I’m thinking of posting a more trimmed down version on Twitter (where I am also pretty inactive but have slightly more of a presence than Tumblr these days).

—————————————— Assassin's Creed Syndicate (Steam) FINAL VERDICT: Bretty Gud ——————————————

Coming directly after finishing Unity I moved onto Syndicate, knowing that it was to be the last 'real' Assassin's Creed game (with the next two moving to a more RPG-style and set in periods before the assassins and templars really existed in their current forms). I had actually originally planned to skip Unity after its terrible launch, and had purchased - and even started playing - Syndicate back in 2017...but my computer at the time was struggling with just the prologue, averaging 20-30 FPS. Once the game actually arrived at London proper, my framerate tanked to 11 FPS or lower, and I had to put the game on the backburner until I'd upgraded my computer enough to handle it.

Ultimately I'm glad that it worked out the way it did, and I did end up going back and playing Unity before Syndicate, because the games are definitely very comparable. Both are a return to the older games' focus on exploring urban environments after the past several moved the cities themselves largely out of focus, and the gameplay of Syndicate is basically a polished up version of the new system introduced in Unity. The controls were smoother and tighter, and much appreciated fixes were made to some of Unity's worst offenders, like having automatic cover behind objects now instead of doing it manually, and the 'enter' button prompt that appears when you're over a window to climb inside - something I believe I mentioned in my Unity review as one of the worst things (gameplay-wise) about that game. Also, the whistle button makes a return after its extremely baffling removal in Unity, making it actually fun and worthwhile to kill enemies from hiding spots once again.

Combat in Syndicate was decent enough once I got used to it, but personally I really did prefer Unity's style. Unity was the first AC game where combat felt genuinely tactical, and where it was possible to get overwhelmed and wrecked by enemies at ANY level, even postgame with all your upgrades and gear - thus, encouraging stealth more, and not letting it get to the point where you're swarmed by huge groups of enemies in the first place. Syndicate has some cool multi-kill moves, but I didn't even figure out how to properly execute those until the very end of the game (when I was replaying the highest-level fightclub over and over trying to get Robert Topping's rep level maxed). Aside from some fancy visuals on the killmoves, though, the combat felt watered down to me - press X to attack, B to dodge the enemy's heavily-telegraphed incoming attacks, and occasionally A on those assholes that block. I dunno, I just really enjoyed Unity's variety with stuff like the slower heavy attack, and ground execution, even if the skill points system to unlock them made them mid-to-late game abilities. In Syndicate, like most AC games before it, once you hit around the midgame point and have more gear and better equipment, you become a one-man (or woman) army and there's no challenge left - I remember I got a 124 hit combo without taking a single blow during one of the final bouts in the highest-level fight club, because it's just way too easy to play the hit, hit, dodge, hit hit dodge, blockbreak hit hit dodge game. It's my understanding that Origins changes the combat system yet again, though, so we'll see if I find that any more satisfying.

One of the main new things about Syndicate - and one I've seen a LOT of negativity about across the internet - is the rope launcher (AKA grappling hook). How realistic the steampunk-esque gadget it aside, gameplay-wise I actually liked it and thought it made sense, since London's buildings are significantly taller than anything in the past games. Here's my take on it - it's nothing new for an AC game to introduce a new traversal gimmick that's exclusive to that specific title and its setting, because it makes sense in that setting. Revelations had the hookblade, which in a way was like the proto-rope launcher. AC III had the whole 'treerunning' system because of its frontier setting, which had a very different feel to it mechanically than climbing around on buildings. And of course, Black Flag was all about ship travel. But aside from Rogue basically being Black Flag II, all of these things have largely been restricted to those specific games that introduced them, because they made SENSE for those particular settings and environments - like, just because the Ottoman assassins used hookblades to travel around Constantinople, Ubisoft didn't make the hookblade a permanent part of the AC hero's repetoire going forward. I feel like the rope launcher is no different...it exists to make traversal in THIS particular setting a little less tedious, because having to manually climb some of these buildings the old-fashioned way would otherwise be a nightmare. Besides, it's also completely optional and you CAN simply climb around the old-fashioned way if you so choose - aside from maybe the tutorial mission when you first get the thing, I can't think of any point where you were forced to use the rope launcher at all. Personally I really liked it - I don't think it 'killed' the franchise's iconic parkour system but rather integrated with it. Zip from the ground up the side of the building to a rooftop, then run and hop between the roofs and poles and rafters like usual, then zip across a large gap to a different rooftop, climb up and over a chimney, and jump across onto another roof. Sure, there's nothing stopping you from abusing the rope launcher to zip from place to place exclusively, just as there's nothing stopping you from not using the rope launcher at all. But that's exactly why it's stupid to complain about it. It's all about how much or how little the player feels like using it...and I mostly used it to fill in the gaps of otherwise standard AC roof running, mixing it in and integrating it with that gameplay, rather than replacing it. Maybe that's why I actually had fun with it.

The last new thing gameplay-wise I guess would be carriages. Once I got the hang of using them properly (gunning for first place in all the street races is very educational), it was fun enough, I suppose. I don't think the Grand Theft London jokes are lost on anyone, but personally GTA isn't my type of game so I can't say I especially LOVED the carriage driving either. I don't really care about the 'historical accuracy' of having video game horsecarts handle more like video game automobiles, I just don't really tend to like driving in video games in general. I also feel really guilty every time I crush an innocent bystander to death, which is VERY hard to avoid when you drive these things, so I think I spent a good while consciously avoiding driving unless necessary. Smashing through inanimate objects and causing wanton destruction is pretty fun, though. All in all not one of my favorite new features of the game, but I didn't hate it, either - which is a good thing given how many missions force you to get behind the reins.

As far as the story and characters go, Syndicate may not have been a marvel, but it was leagues above Unity. Jacob and Evie are likable enough, and while there's the usual share of forgettable one-note assassination targets there were also quite memorable ones like Pearl Attaway, Maxwell Roth and of course Starrick himself. I actually really liked Starrick as a character, though I felt it was a shame how little screentime he actually got considering he's the Big Bad behind the scenes of everything going on - I suppose that fit his role as sort of the businessman who uses his vast network of employees handle situations while he sits in his office and comfortably sips tea, but the out-of-focus nature he himself had in the story felt like a waste of such a charismatic character. It was however nice to see a return to the modern day story, even if it was still pretty far shoved into the background...it was at least THERE. And even Desmond got acknowledged for the first time in a while, which was nice. It's unfortunate that I know now the Juno plot was wrapped up in the COMICS rather than the actual games (something I really have no interest in reading but at this point feel like I have to just for closure), but if I had played Syndicate at the time when it came out I know I'd have been excited by a lot of the revelations that happened at the end, especially considering how far into the background Unity shoved the modern day and Juno storyline.

I think my biggest character complaint would fall to Henry Green, who's supposed to be your assassin mentor but felt like little more than a satellite around Evie for the entire game. When you first arrive in London and he gives you the rundown on how things are in the city, he reminded me of Yusuf from Revelations - someone more familiar with the goings-on than the player character, and a reliable companion and guide who the player can count on. After that, however, he felt pushed into the background and never really DID anything except, of course, accompany Evie on some of her missions. His whole thing is that he's not really a field agent, and yet the game forces him into the field JUST so he can tag along with Evie as part of one of the most forced obligatory romances I've seen in a video game. There is absolutely no chemistry between the two - Evie spends the whole first half of the game basically being defined by her work, and I NEVER got the sense that she really felt anything about Henry even when it became obvious he was interested in her. And then the game forces the whole 'oh Evie let her feelings get in the way and saved Henry and oh she's so conflicted because she's in love even though they've known each other for probably a couple of months at most but oh mixing romance and work is wrong but oh apparently Father and Mother were very much in love and it didn't compromise their work as assassins so it's okay and YES YES A THOUSAND TIMES YES I'LL MARRY YOU'. I was cringing the entire time - but of course, it's Ubisoft, so it had to be this way.

Speaking of Ubisoft's typical treatment of female characters, though, I DO have a few criticisms about Evie as well.  We all know about the controversy Ubisoft got itself into for saying female characters were 'too much work' during Unity, and Syndicate seems like a pretty obvious response to that backlash. Giving her a co-starring role with her brother made sense, too - if it was ONLY a female protagonist, right after the backlash, Ubisoft would be accused of caving to pressure and find itself with another controversy. I think it was a smart decision to do it this way, and the story missions are pretty evenly split so you're forced to play as each of them about equally, even disregarding who you choose to play as during the open world segments (though Evie probably should have been doing something during Sequence 8 while Jacob was off blowing shit up with Roth).

My problem is more with Evie's personality...or rather, the way she's used in the story. Jacob, like most previous AC protagonists, is flawed. His flaw is his impulsiveness and tendency to rush into situations without thinking of the consequences...those consequences then becoming immediately apparent when Evie has to rush in and quickly fix his mistakes. Evie however is more focused and methodical, putting all her attention on hunting Lucy Thorne and the Shroud. Ultimately the message here, I think, is that both of the twins need EACH OTHER because when they work alone they don't see the big picture. However it felt to me more like Evie's job was just cleaning up after her clumsy brother, because she's so perfect and infallible and always right. It felt to me like in the backlash over 'no female characters' they overcorrected somewhat with Evie, because she comes off far less flawed than her brother. Arguably her flaw is that by focusing too much on the Shroud she ignores the rampant corruption eating away at London, but the story never really focuses on that angle...Evie just comes off as always being right when Jacob inevitably fucks up the next big thing. You could also say the whole 'oh no I put personal feelings before the mission' is supposed to be her flaw, but the story also goes out of its way in the end to say 'no, it's okay to do that, your father was wrong'...so, also not a flaw. Then what IS Evie's flaw? I really can't see one...and I feel like that makes her less interesting as a character. I certainly didn't DISLIKE Evie, but I feel like she just didn't have as much personality as her brother, whose flaw was more apparent and impacted his development more (feeling betrayed by Pearl, and how apathetic he got in the aftermath with Roth, in particular). Evie just...spends half the game being perfect, being right, cleaning up after her clumsy brother, and then falling victim to a romantic plot tumor. Since she was the first playable female assassin as far as most fans are concerned (it's okay, Aveline, *I* remember you) this just seems like a shame to me...a wasted opportunity to make Evie just as interesting and flawed and capable of making mistakes as her brother (and no, compromising the mission by RESCUING ANOTHER HUMAN BEING FROM CERTAIN DEATH is NOT a flaw, only sociopaths would consider that a flaw, and the game even makes it clear that it also does not consider it a flaw). I think Ubisoft was probably just too afraid to make their first major female assassin come off negatively, so they played it safe - TOO safe, resulting in Evie ultimately being more bland and uninteresting than Jacob was. Don't get me wrong, they absolutely fucked up on multiple levels with Elise in Unity, but at least she felt like an interesting and nuanced character to me...even if she DID get stuffed in the fridge.

Anyway...ultimately I had fun with Syndicate. Worth mentioning that I did NOT get any of the DLC, because the reviews for both the Maharaja and Jack the Ripper DLCs on Steam were extremely negative and didn't seem worth it at all...nor did (to me) the assorted extra missions or the murder mystery packs. Murder mysteries were an alright change of pace in Unity, but they were also way too easy and certainly not interesting enough for me to want to pay extra for. I've got 98 hours logged for 100% completing Syndicate sans-DLC, compared to 138 in Unity for doing the same + Dead Kings, but Syndicate FELT longer to me. The world was bigger and I felt like I spent more time playing around in it, and aside from my aforementioned complaints about combat I feel like it did just about everything better than Unity. I've seen a lot of generally mixed reviews around the internet and even some people saying they thought Unity was better, but I can't really agree with that. All in all Syndicate was a solid and enjoyable game, and may quite possibly be the last Assassin's Creed game of its kind given the direction we've moved into with Origins and Odyssey, so...perhaps someday people will look back on it more fondly.

—————————————— Assassin's Creed Origins (Steam) FINAL VERDICT: Recommended ——————————————

Within the first 5 minutes of the game (if not less), things already felt innately...off. I knew that Origins retooled a lot of the game to be more RPG-like, but I guess I completely underestimated the extent to which EVERYTHING would change. After all, Unity sort of kicked off the trend of having a basic skill point system and different purchasable weapons/armor, and Syndicate furthered it with an even more in-depth skill tree and the reintroduction of crafting. I figured Origins would simply further refine these RPG-like systems, and tidy up combat yet again, which had also seen some changes in both Unity and Origins.

In any case, one of the first things (literally) I had to do was find the options menu and change the default control scheme, which is SUCH a huge departure from the system the series has been using for 10 years that it left my muscle memory crying. Fortunately the 'Alternate' control preset is far closer to the classic and familiar style (with RT as the run/climb button, for instance), and the PC version at least also allows you to rebind the controls further...which I did (particularly to put the drop/parkour down button on B, as it was in Unity and Syndicate). Rebinding the controls too much *can* lead to some issues with overlap and even breaking certain functions (I can no longer dive underwater with B presumably because I set it as my 'drop' button, so now it does a dash underwater instead...so I do have to use the C key on my keyboard to actually dive now) but ultimately those snags are pretty minor. That said, the resulting new controls during chariot races being so heavily concentrated on the right side of my controller did leave my hand seriously hurting after my first racing tournament.

(I wrote a lot about my thoughts on this right after starting, coming off Syndicate and feeling the unfamiliarity of the game hard, and it comes off a lot like I’m rambling about the Good Ol’ Days of AssCreed and how different Origins is from that experience more than an actual review of the game. While I think a lot of what I ranted about is still valid, it’s also not really about THIS game, so I think I’m just gonna skip over a lot of that and get into my actual, I-finally-finished-the-game thoughts instead)

Ultimately I enjoyed it a lot, and I did 100% complete the whole game + both DLCs, but at the end of the day I have to stand by my verdict that it’s not really an ASSASSIN'S CREED game as we’ve come to know them for so long. Did I have a lot of fun taking out entire camps with the predator bow before anyone could catch me in the act? Very much. But that's about the only kind of SNEAKING I felt like I ever had to do in the game, compared to older entries that had a wider variety of stealth options. Bayek was definitely more of a warrior than an assassin, IMO. I feel like, for all the flak it got as a game (and much of it deserved), Unity was the best AC as far as stealth mechanics and mission options. Syndicate refined those and fixed things like moving behind cover, but with Jacob being more of a brawler that also meant there was a lot of that game you could easily do without having to be super stealthy. Bayek, and the push towards the more RPG-like systems in Origins, makes it pretty clear that we likely won't be getting a return to classic AC form any time soon, and while I enjoyed Origins a lot that still makes me very sad.

Still, I look forward to Odyssey whenever it decides to go on sale enough for me to grab it, because Origins WAS a lot of fun. I ended up clocking 192 hours in it, completing all the DLC, and getting every achievement, so clearly I enjoyed the game. It's more just a bittersweet feeling that the AC franchise as we knew it is probably dead, as Ubisoft moves further and further away from the franchise staples, and continues to bury the modern day story and conspiracy theory angles deeper beneath the historical storyline.

(I also had some rants about how Aya/Amunet would have made a better protagonist of a proper Assassin’s Creed game while Bayek was more the protagonist of a general revenge story and how Aya, as she was, was much like Evie in that I didn’t really like her much and feel like I could/should have liked her more if she was utilized better as a more robust character, but in the interest of not going off on this game forever I’m gonna snip that part as well)

—————————————— 7 Days to Die (Steam) FINAL VERDICT: Bretty Gud ——————————————

Another of the plethora of survival/building/crafting games that have been all the rage these days. Sorta like ARK, but instead of dinosaurs, it's zombies. Zombie games aren't personally my cup of tea, because I am a big baby, and the game has a lot of elements that I think would classify it as survival horror and not just survival/building/crafting. Solo, I would never be able to tolerate this game, but with a friend or two, I found it quite fun. It scratches a lot of the same itches as ARK but the survival aspects take more of a forefront, whereas in ARK once you've progressed to metal tools and flak armor the temperature and hunger management aspects become little more than a minor nuisance.

When we started out, we were right on the border of the snow biome (once my friend trekked from their spawn point and found me, that is), so the cold and just barely avoiding constant starvation (sometimes) was an ever-present threat. It really felt like we were being pushed to raid the nearby houses in hopes of finding scraps of food and resources to keep us alive. After a while we were able to gear up enough to move slightly further out to a more temperate biome, near a large cornfield, where we could begin cultivating our own crops. Once starvation became manageable we were able to shift out focus to other tasks, like expanding our base in preparation for the titular 7th day (though it was the 30th day due to adjusted server settings for us) - the Bloodmoon, where swarms and swarms of zombies attack your base and you have to survive the night.

This sort of PVE tower defense mode is something I've often wished was a thing in ARK (and no, orbital supply drops aren't the same thing) - PVP is too toxic for my tastes, but a constant problem in that game is reaching the eventual 'now what?' point where you're practically unfuckable and nothing is a challenge anymore. Having that sort of ever-present danger and challenge to look forward to (or dread, if done right) keeps PVE gameplay in this sort of game a lot more interesting because you can't just sit on your laurels and get complacent. PVE builds are generally more about making buildings that look nice and less about fortifying them with adequate defenses because those rexes that stomp through your front yard can't bite through metal, so why worry? I like having that balance, where I can build a base that I think looks nice and is functional with storage and crafting and whatnot, but I ALSO like the idea that if my defenses aren't up to snuff...I can kiss my ass goodbye.

So the Bloodmoon mechanic, while terrifying, is a big draw of this game IMO. There's also the other side of that PVP coin that sounds fun in theory but is not in practice (because real people are assholes): raiding other peoples' bases. Of course, zombies spawn randomly in the overworld and you can run into them any time during your travels and resource runs, but the map is also littered with abandoned houses and other buildings like stores, factories, hospitals and even creepy mad scientist castles. These places often have pretty good resources and loot, so you're encouraged to explore them...but of course they are also crawling with zombies. And the zombies are not always out in the open for you to get off a quick headshot on, either - often times they'll hide, inside closets or above ceiling tiles, to ambush you if you're careless. You really have to be prepared for anything, and willing to drop heavy loot and run away if the going gets particularly tough. To me this feels more engaging than just killing stuff out in the overworld, because it's like I actually have to conquer someone else's castle and that feels more like a concrete goal to me.

In general it feels like a fairly standard, but enjoyable, early access (but frequently updated) survival/building/crafting game. However, these little things kept me coming back for more once I'd grown bored of being the unconquerable dino king of ARK. Would I recommend it? Only to a specific audience, but that audience has probably already played it. For me the general survival horror atmosphere and frequent jumpscares in narrow corridors when a zombie jumps out at you from above the ceiling and shit is a lot...even playing with my friend, I basically played the support sniper role in combat while they had the frontline with melee weapons, and that didn't stop my heart from leaping out of my chest on many occasions. I remember that time we raided a huge pharmacy building on a day where it just would not stop raining...the rain sounds in this game are VERY realistic, and also very loud. I could barely hear my friend over the rain half the time, let alone the warning sounds of nearby zombies being drowned out by the storm. We had to stay the night, and well into the next day it was STILL raining...we had so many close calls in there, and even a couple actual deaths (fortunately we had temporary beds set up in a safe room so we wouldn't have to trek back from base). Once the rain finally stopped, and we returned to base and called it a night IRL, I felt such relief...I hadn't realized how much I was ACTUALLY STRESSED by the game in such a tense situation. Which...is that "fun"? Again, I think it depends on the type of person, and even then is probably very situational. I think I realized in the aftermath that I did not have fun that night, but when I was there in the moment, the tension was certainly immersive.

So yeah. It's a fun game if you have a good friend or two to play it with, and if you think you can handle horror elements and potential jumpscares. Which I can't. But my friend is very supportive and understanding  of that so I didn't have to feel like a big baby when I got audibly startled during our gameplay sessions, so I really do think WHO you play it with can make a big difference, too.

—————————————— Ultimate Skyrim (Steam) FINAL VERDICT: Bretty Gud ——————————————

A bit of an odd thing to review, I know. Ultimate Skyrim is obviously not a game in itself, but as a modpack that completely revises the way the game is played I felt like it was worth mentioning...especially since it gives me something to pad out this very small list with.

I actually first heard about Ultimate Skyrim a couple years ago, but back then the install process was so daunting that even I (someone who can spend weeks perfecting my load order whenever I go to replay Skyrim) was put off by it. Plus, at the time, it was still in version 3 and I knew there was a version 4 in the works, so I figured I may as well wait for that before I gave it a try.

When I got the itch to replay Skyrim again, as I seem to every year once fall and winter come around, I remembered UltSky existed and check in to see that version 4 was out, had full gamepad support (essential for me), AND the install process was easier than ever thanks to the Automaton tool. So I thought, why not?

It was my first time trying Requiem, but I'm no stranger to some of the basic concepts the mod introduces, since some of my mainstay mods (ex. Advanced Adversary Encounters) make similar changes. Plus, a solid half of the UltSky pack consisted of mods I've played regularly, so I didn't think it would be that hard to acclimate to.

I was wrong.

Requiem changes much more than I expected it to, which, in hindsight, explains why practically every mod out there requires a patch to work with it. The constant stamina drain that you need to account for with buffs from food, made worse if you decide to go heavy armor...no natural health regen, and all potions being heal-over-time instead of flat instant heals...the perk tree really requiring thought and planning to budget your points right and not spread yourself too thin, and even getting 'locked in' to the type of standing stone you choose as your birthsign. All kinds of little elements piling up to make your early game a living nightmare.

I'll cut right to the chase here: I found that I don't much like Requiem. Now, I'm not opposed to challenge, and pretty much every playthrough I mod my game to MAKE the game more challenging because vanilla Skyrim is such a cakewalk. But it's the WAY Requiem changes things, the specific mindset and vision that toes the line between 'fun' challenging and 'you must be a masochist or hardcore minmaxer to enjoy this' that doesn't appeal to me specifically. I much prefer my usual combination of Advanced Adversary Encounters + Wildcat + Ultimate Combat + Mortal Enemies + maybe True Armor (I only played a little with it on my last pre-UltSky playthrough but I liked it) to make fights more deadly and tactical. Requiem makes combat more difficult, absolutely, but the vision is different, and it feels like minmaxing is the answer to surviving encounters more than strategy and skill. Like, if I don't have the right gear, or perked myself in a specific way, or else carry an assload of fortify potions (something I hate even in the base game but is made even more annoying to me through Requiem and UltSky's unpaused menu system)...then my chances of surviving are very, very slim. And to me that just isn't fun.

A deleveled world is kind of fun, though I'd never tried it before...that sense of progression where you can't just take on a cave of warlocks at level 2 gives me something to work towards, though it does also feel somewhat limiting as far as where you start. One of the appeals of alternate start mods and WHY they're among the most popular is that freedom of not having to go Helgen > Riverwood > Whiterun, but a deleveled world also makes me feel like I'm being punished if I get a random start up in Windhelm, and that I have to head down and chump it up in Whiterun anyway, because that's where the weak enemies who won't oneshot me are. I'm sort of whatever about that aspect though.

To me it's like...I can't agree with it being called 'the roleplaying overhaul' because having to focus so much on how I spend my perks, what spells I learn, my gear, which enchantments I use, having to carry at least 3 weapons at any given time and encumber my loot-loving ass because I never know if I might need a mace or a sword...the list goes on. I'm not trying to shit on it because there's clearly a huge community of people who love what Requiem brings to the table - they're just all things that don't appeal to me PERSONALLY when I can usually think of a mod that makes the same sort of changes to my game but does so in a way that I find more appealing, that's all.

So then...if I'm feeling this negative about Requiem (the very core of Ultimate Skyrim), why did I give it a positive rating? Well, because even if I don't love Requiem, I still think Ultimate Skyrim is fun.

I know that probably sounds ridiculous. But to me, I think considering Ultimate Skyrim as just 'that one Requiem modpack' is really selling it short. UltSky adds a lot on top of that core Requiem experience, and while some of that makes the struggle to survive the early levels even MORE hellish than base Requiem, I think it actually manages to bring the roleplaying and - dare I say - immersion - back to the table.

Of course, it's got a lot of the classic 'immersion' mods in there...iNeed, Frostfall, Campfire, even somewhat more niche stuff like Bathing in Skyrim. Needs mods I can give or take, sometimes I don't bother with them because the micromanagement can often feel more annoying than fun (I prefer cooking mods that make meals feel more worth eating with long-lasting buffs than mods that actually make me 'hungry', usually). I'd never used Frostfall before for similar reasons despite being very aware of it for years because of its popularity...I actually didn't dislike it though, and it really does make Skyrim feel harsher and like you have to prepare more for your journeys.

The thing about UltSky is that it's not just a big rec list of mods thrown together haphazardly. BelmontBoy has actually taken the enormous amount of time to patch all these mods together to make them work as one seamless, cohesive entity. Of course, it's not perfect - at the end of the day Skyrim was simply not designed with a lot of these features in mind, and the MCM configuration at the start of every new character you make is a huge pain in the ass. But once you get it going, the functions all fit pretty well together...planning my daily activities and general gameplay loop around the weather and time of day, making sure I drop into the tavern and have a bite to eat, deposit any goods in a safe chest and my (weighted) gold off with the bank service, and making sure I go to bed at a decent hour and sleep well.

Ultimately (heh) it makes Skyrim feel like a completely different game, and changes the way you play significantly. I may not agree with all of those changes, but I can't deny the appeal of having an easy to install pack that doesn't take me 3 weeks to perfect before I can play, and where the mods are all designed to work well with each other so unexpected conflicts don't pop up halfway into my playthrough when it's too late to fix them. The controller support and things like iEquip and EasyWheel are also conveniences that changed the game for me, and I will definitely be planning to make use of in future non-UltSky playthroughs as well...for that matter, I also found myself surprisingly enjoying the unpaused menus (though I disabled it for merchants because I got tired of their idle dialogue firing constantly while I was shopping).

Of course, being me, I did make some personal changes to my UltSky install (particularly things like Noxcrab's and kbeazy's Req and UltSky patches to tone down some of the more masochistic elements of Requiem), but the fact that it's as accessible and easy as it is to get up and running even for people who DON'T obsess over their load orders is a big deal, I think.

Is it the ultimate Skyrim experience? No, absolutely not. The ultimate Skyrim experience will always be the one you build yourself to your preferences, and don't have to make due with features you don't like. But I do really appreciate and respect the work BelmontBoy has done with Ultimate Skyrim, and I would absolutely recommend it to anyone who wants to try something a bit different.

Though I'm done playing it for the time being, I've still got another playthrough planned that I think will work pretty well with UltSky...it was a character I was really having fun with, but basically had to abandon due to mod complications fucking up my save and me not having the energy to troubleshoot. I think reviving him in UltSky would be pretty fun, so next time that Skyrim urge inevitably hits me, that's my plan.

—————————————— Ciconia no Naku Koro Ni: Phase 1 (Steam) FINAL VERDICT: Recommended ——————————————

Alright, alright. Ciconia’s not really a GAME, but as the first When They Cry in almost a decade I feel like it would be a crime for me to not include it on my list.

Worth noting, first of all, that I pretty much never buy games on day 1 at full price. I wait for them to go on sale for $20 or under, even if it means waiting a few years (which is why I'm usually so behind the times on the games I've played). But we've already waited 8 years since Umineko ended for the next When They Cry, when we didn’t even know if the franchise was gonna continue AT ALL. Besides that, the most fun part of a new WTC is getting to discuss it with people while it's exciting and fresh, and waiting around for a sale would mean missing out on all that. As it is, I didn't get into Umineko until a little before the release of EP5, so I missed out on all the live discussions for the question arcs while they were still new. I wasn't about to sit around and wait a year or more for the price to drop. Ciconia was a rare full-price day 1 purchase for me, and I finished it over the course of the release weekend.

Since I already reviewed the game after finishing my liveblog in the 07th Expansion Central Discord server, I’m going to basically reiterate and build upon what I said then when my thoughts were still fresh.

I enjoyed Phase 1 a lot and it definitely surprised me in how long it was, and how polished just about everything was (maybe except the small BGM selection, but that will surely be expanded in future phases). We had animations, detailed backgrounds and sprites, it definitely feels like a big improvement over Umineko in the presentation department...but it still falls victim to the same issue Umineko EP1 and Higurashi's Onikakushi had, something that Ryukishi seems to have trouble with in general - PACING.

To be FAIR, the whole setting of Ciconia did necessitate a lot more exposition than the previous When They Cry entries. Umineko and Higurashi took place in 1980's Japan - a time and place that actually existed. Ciconia takes place in the far future and had a LOT of worldbuilding Ryukishi basically had to establish from the ground up, not to mention taking place on a global scale featuring parts of the world that the average Japanese reader might not be familiar with, especially with how the factions of A3W also make those parts of the world so different than we know them today. So I DO understand why it had to drag on like that, to a degree, because Ryukishi clearly had a LOT he wanted to convey in both worldbuilding and social and political commentary (and a lot of what seemed like very clear Take Thats at people who missed and continue to miss the point of Umineko to this day, even after the EP8 manga adaptation should have cleared all doubts).

Even so...it's still hard to actually push through huge infodumps like that, before anything really engaging happens to hook you in. We had to learn about the state of the world and the factions and all the tech and just about everything and I do admire HOW MUCH worldbuilding he came up with here and how he managed to eventually explain just about all of it in a way that left me feeling like I had a pretty solid grasp on how the world worked...but at the same time, it was hard to just sit down and will myself to read through so much lengthy exposition.

I think if I had to compare it to Higurashi and Umineko's starting episodes, the beginning paced much better. Phase 1 was much LONGER than either of those two first installments, and it still managed to sprinkle a lot of intrigue into the early parts that made it a little easier to get into than, say, Higurashi spending an absurdly long time on the slice of life club game antics before the real meat of the story began, or Umineko going on and on ad nauseum about the family's history and financial problems when I'm just sitting here waiting for the witch to show up.

But while Higurashi and Umineko dragged their feet through the beginning, I think the worst of Ciconia's pacing was actually the MIDDLE section.

There was a point where it seemed that, after every genuinely interesting scene that left me curious and wanting more, I got teleported back to the bathhouse against my will to listen to the same 4 characters have the exact same conversation for 20 minutes before I could finally get back to the next interesting scene...only for it to happen again after that.

That endless pattern of:

>world is going to shit despite our efforts >we're just chess pieces and have no power >cheer up miyao you're having an impact on everyone and we can do it >let's protect the walls of peace together!!!! >shit goes wrong again, rinse, repeat

Look, I GET it. You're all comrades working together to support the walls of peace, and you're also treasured friends fighting against the corrupt and uncaring adults who don't understand or appreciate all you young gauntlet knights have had to endure for the sake of maintaining those walls of peace. And how no matter what they try to do to get you to hate each other or kill each other, you'll always be friends who will work together, to maintain the walls of peace!!! I GET IT. YOU DON'T NEED TO KEEP SAYING THE SAME THING OVER AND OVER. I KNOW that I am reading a When They Cry novel and that, to appreciate the full ironic pain that comes once these characters DO turn on each other and the cruel slaughter begins, I need to see them when they are insisting that they'll never hurt each other, but I'd rather SEE them bond than just be TOLD over and over that they're comrades supporting the walls of peace!!

The thing is, aside from a small handful (Cairo in particular), I DO feel like we got to see the characters bond. So why, on top of that, did we ALSO need to keep repeating walls of peace walls of peace walls of peace over and over again BESIDES? It felt like unnecessary padding at that point, when so many interesting things were going on, but we just had to keep cutting away from them to watch the same tired scene play out at least once per chapter.

It probably also doesn't help that Ciconia is a beast composed of two themes/genres I'm not really a big fan of - sci-fi/futuristic, and heavy political/social commentary. So the fact that the beginning was spent largely explaining all the futuristic sci-fi technology, and the middle was spent going on a lot about the political angle, may not have helped hold my interest as much. Not to say I didn't enjoy the story, just that those factors may have made it even harder for me to latch on than it may have been for other people. Still, I've heard a lot of people voice the pacing complaint for various reasons so I don't think it's ALL me, there.

In general, Phase 1 was a rollercoaster ride. I was really drawn in heavily by the conspiracy theory and mystery elements, but found myself grow bored during the more politically-charged parts. The social commentary was certainly topical and I appreciated the fact that Ryukishi had a lot he wanted to say (which almost seemed to be making up for how he kept Umineko vague due to it being 'difficult to talk about' certain key subjects of that story), but the parts about the strife between the factions over geographical and political issues were less engaging to me. The more conspiracy-laden bits of intrigue grabbed me a lot more - I felt a lot of overlap between that angle of the story and the early Assassin's Creed games (before the modern day got more and more shafted), with that strong angle of 'history is written by the winners and there's a whole bunch of stuff that happened in the past that is being deliberately covered up', and I really like that. The strong biblical undercurrent especially enhances that sort of mystique that makes ancient conspiracies so fascinating...the idea that there could be secrets from antiquity that have fallen into myth and legend due to the meddling of ancient sects like the Three Kings, seeking to guide humanity down what they consider to be 'the right path', regardless of how many lives are lost as they repeat their schemes over and over again.

For Phase 1, at least, there was a LOT going on, because so much had to be established. I imagine it'll get easier from this point now that all this stuff is out of the way, so we can focus more on how all these different elements intertwine. Hell, we spent all that time in the beginning talking about CPPs and Meow, but she basically faded off and became irrelevant halfway through the story. SURELY all that stuff was more than just Ryukishi talking some sense into the people who ignored Umineko's message, and will come into play more in future phases, but as of right now there's a lot of elements like that where it feels like we don't know enough to really speculate on how important it's going to be to the story. Right now there are so many things going on that it's hard to know what to focus on - content-wise, it feels like we got as much as 3 arcs' worth of Higurashi and Umineko. Of course, if Ciconia really is only going to be 4 phases long, that makes sense...but it does make it a lot harder to figure out what we should be paying attention to when SO much has happened already. The last 20 minutes of the game alone was far more of a mindfuck than anything in Higurashi or Umineko.

All in all I am very much looking forward to Phase 2 (which has already been delayed from its expected release of next May, though I already predicted that'd happen...does that make this a 'prophecy'?), and I've enjoyed discussing it all in the 07th Expansion Central Discord, so I feel like I got my money's worth already. Time will tell how Ciconia stacks up to the obsessive experience that Umineko was for me, but for better or worse, I have faith in Ryukishi to make this story a Hell of a ride.

—————————————— Kingdom Come Deliverance (Steam) FINAL VERDICT: Recommended (if the middle ages mysogyny doesn't put you off) ——————————————

I'd heard both good and bad things about KCD when it came out...people praised the attention to historical detail and realism, but complained about the plethora of bugs and performance issues (on PC anyway). I was a little surprised to see it offer a steep discount and free play weekend back in September, when the game only just came out in 2018, but I figured, why not give it a try since it's free? I ended up playing for almost 20 hours before the weekend ended, and found myself enjoying it more than I thought I would.

Coming right on the heels of my Ultimate Skyrim playthough, I was impressed by how much more enjoyable the RPG survival mechanics could be when a game was actually built with them IN MIND, rather than having to tack them on with mods. A lot of the core KCD features are similar to Requiem and UltSky - no auto-health regen, having to actually practice and train to get skilled using your weapons/armor, paying attention to your opponents in combat and not being able to win just by mashing attack, as well as having to keep yourself fed, rested, and so on. But since KCD was actually designed with all of these systems integrated, it felt a lot less clunky and tedious to manage them. I ended up being pretty sad that I didn't grab it during the sale before the free weekend ended and I found myself enjoying my UltSky playthrough a lot less after witnessing these kinds of 'hardcore' features done, well...better than Requiem does them.

The game went on sale again about 2 months later, and since it coincided with my birthday, I decided to go for it.

One thing I feel I've been getting more and more used to these days is the first-person perspective in games. It's always been something I've disliked compared to third person, and typically if a game gives me the choice I'll go with third every time. In crafting/survival games like ARK (which HAS third person but it kinda sucks), 7 Days to Die and even hearkening back to my Minecraft days of yore, first person was more tolerable and made sense because it's much easier to build things with a first person camera. It also makes sense for shooters because you get an unobstructed aim at your target - the same reason I'll usually switch into first for archery in Skyrim, even though I play everything else in third. But a full blown RPG in first, with no option to switch situationally, was still difficult for me to get used to. Once you understand the basics of how KCD's combat works and everything though, it's obvious why it wouldn't really WORK with a third person camera, so after a while it became second nature to me.

While I'm still not quite finished at the time of this review (just got out of the monestary and am wrapping up sidequests before getting locked into the final endgame story quests), I can say I've quite enjoyed the story so far. It's not exactly a groundbreaking premise - you start off in the Doomed RPG Hometown where you do your little tutorial missions and get a feel for how to play, then the bad guys storm through and slaughter everyone, including your parents, sparking the hero's quest for revenge. However, there's something about the characterization and the gravity of the situation (especially with Henry being a peasant and not a JRPG adventurer) still managed to suck me in. That scene near the beginning, when you're standing there on the castle ramparts in the rainy night, watching the lord of Talmberg try and deceive the enemy...and then explicitly disobey orders and flee back to Skalitz to bury your parents even though it's a foregone conclusion that it's a Very Bad Idea...there was something that just really gripped me and made me eager to find out what would happen next. Which, considering I was playing on a free weekend at this point, also worked really well from the standpoint of devs hooking you with a strong beginning enough to make you want to purchase the game.

Sure, with time, training, and enough money to buy some really good weapons and armor (or enough perseverance to win some in the weekly tournaments, like I did) you can turn Henry from a lowly blacksmith's son into an RPG God. BUT...it DOES take work to get there, and it feels believable as a result. You're handed a Really Nice Sword in the very beginning of the game but because you have no idea how to lose it you get your ass quickly handed to you, the sword stolen, and would be left for dead if not for the timely intervention of a neighbor. The thing is, though this event is of course scripted, it doesn't FEEL like the game is railroading me into purposefully losing a fight that I might have been able to win due to player skill...because at this point, Henry legitimately has no training!! No amount of savescumming (also made nearly impossible by the game's default save system, though I am using the unlimited save mod) or player cheesing could change the fact that a peasant who's never had to swing a real sword or fight for his life would get his shit kicked in by an actual trained warrior. Only after this event, when you have the opportunity to take lessons with Captain Bernard, can you actually learn proper (if basic, at first) sword techniques and work your way into becoming an actual man-at-arms.

That sense of actual growth and progression in Henry is a big part of what makes the experience fun, I think. You really do feel like you're a struggling nobody at the beginning, but as you work your way up in the world and become more respected by your peers and even the nobility, you start to feel like you earned it. You get to go from an unwashed peasant in dirty and torn-up clothes starting petty arguments with the local lord-to-be to a trusted and well-respected member of the local garrison, wearing your expensive and regularly-polished armor and listening to the people greet you accordingly. Does it have some of the power fantasy elements you'd expect from a zero-to-hero story? Maybe so, but they never felt like they were undeserved - all the respect my Henry got was due to his actions, and not just by virtue of being The Protagonist.

That said, there are some elements of the game that might not sit well with people. The game does take place in 1403 and its main selling point is its historical realism, and all that historical realism entails - but that doesn't mean the Medieval Misogyny is going to be tolerable for everyone playing it in 2019+1 and beyond. Females are generally cast in the roles you would expect of them during the time period and even the 'strong' female characters are still subservient to the men. That's how it was, and for a game that sells itself on its authenticity, it's a bit of a sticky thing to argue about. Likewise I've seen criticism about 'racism' simply because pretty much every character in the game is white...even though darker-skinned people would have been pretty rare to the area in that time period (possibly in Prague, but the game doesn't actually take you there, so that's a moot point). Still, while I don't think they're really fair arguments to make against the game for simply portraying things the way they were back then, it's still absolutely fair to say the game isn't for everybody and there's nothing wrong with people who might find the content offensive.

At the end of the day this is still a game where you are forced to play the role of a male character - this is not a create-your-own-hero game where you get to define who you are and what you look like and 100% of your character's backstory and personality. It's the story of Henry, and while you're given a lot of opportunities to play Henry as a respectable Knight or as an absolute Scoundrel as you please, it is still HENRY'S STORY - not yours. This is a game where there are achievements for having sex, and an achievement for remaining a virgin. You can use the bathhouses to have a good time and get yourself an 'alpha male' buff if you so choose (I've not once used them for anything but cleaning my clothes because I am staying loyal to Theresa). You'll bump into quests where you'll see things like a lord not wishing to purchase well-bred horses from a woman simply because she's a woman, or the very insinuation that you might want to help give a down-on-her-luck woman a job as a water carrier (physical work!!) absolutely ludicrous. All kinds of little things like that, which are in my opinion pretty minor in the grand scheme of misogyny in video games, but again...while I don't hold it against the game itself for its portrayal of the era, I also don't hold it against people who might be offended by these things to not play the game.

If you ARE willing to look past some occasionally uncomfortable 'historical accuracy', though, you'll find a very enjoyable RPG with largely likable characters and engaging (if not revolutionary) storytelling. The game mechanics are well-integrated and it feels less like I'm being forced to eat/drink/sleep/bathe and more like I'm willingly adopting a realistic schedule and means of planning my days. Once you master the combat system you can definitely feel like an unfuckable God, but all it takes is one extra enemy being alerted to your presence than you planned for, or a single failed block, to ruin your day and remind you that you are still a normal human being and not a supernatural video game war machine. If that kind of thing sounds less like a fun challenge and more like frustration to you, this is probably also not a game you will enjoy. Personally I really like it, and when I do get my shit kicked in it feels like it's my own fault for being too cocky and ill-prepared (great example: I never wear my helmet when I'm doing errands around town and talking to people because it seems rude as fuck but sometimes I forget to put it on when I travel and if I'm unlucky enough to run into a bandit ambush my head is now a very easy target). And that feels FAIR to me, unlike games where I fail because I didn't minmax enough or seek out some specific piece of OP gear that would allow me to cheese the situation instead of making use of my own skills and abilities.

I think it says a lot that this is one of the only games where I have considered doing a playthrough in Hardcore Mode, a mode that some games will include that is clearly designed for masochists who hate fun. But somehow, the idea of KCD in hardcore mode actually sounds the opposite to me, forcing me to REALLY pay attention to the gameplay systems I've largely become able to ignore by the lategame (I've literally had the Balanced Diet perk active for ingame weeks because it's so easy to keep my hunger between 80-90 just by eating from food pots). Whether I actually go through with it depends on how easily distracted I am (read: very) because I may just want to move on and play other games by the time I finish, but I can still see myself giving it another go someday and trying for those last elusive achievements.

In the end, I feel like KCD is one of those games, like Shadow of Mordor, where I'd love to see other RPGs take a page or two as reference. KCD's historical realism is one of the main things that sets it apart from your typical fantasy RPG, but I also think fantasy RPGs could benefit from those realistic elements (not just the need to eat/drink/sleep but also stuff like longer-lasting injuries, not being able to heal mid-combat, or people actually remembering and being pissed at you if you just robbed them blind the night before). But until that day comes, I'll settle for a KCD sequel.

—————————————— Divinity: Original Sin 2 (Steam) FINAL VERDICT: Unfinished ——————————————

I shouldn't even be playing this, since I've not yet finished the first one (still plan to, someday...I think I was like 2/3 through where I left off), but I grabbed it a little while back in a sale and started playing it with a friend.

As of this writing we're only just about to get off the introductory island and presumably end the first major story arc, so it's not really enough for a proper rating. However, it feels more or less like the first game, with a little more polish. The gameplay is pretty much exactly the same, and the writing has that same level of not taking itself too seriously. Feels like the kind of sequel that's basically 'it's the same core game but with a new story to tell', which isn't a bad thing, since the original was already quite good.

One major difference is that the characters seem more interesting this time around. In the first game, aside from the main duo that were basically just your own blank slate characters, you only had four other choices for your remaining two party members. I picked the mage and the archer since my main duo were a rogue and warrior type and I didn't want role overlap, but while the mage had a pretty robust and interesting backstory I thought the archer was a bit dull by comparison...and apparently that's because she and the rogue NPC were only added to the game later, so they weren't quite as enjoyably fleshed out as the mage and the warrior (who I didn't take). And even then, their stories felt a bit more...background? Sure, their personal quests tied into yours and you'd unravel bits and pieces along the way to help them resolve their own problems, but it never felt terribly integrated into the adventure of my main duo.

This time around, all the characters on the cover art are possible traveling companions with their own in-depth stories...but what's more, you can also choose to play as any one of them (or go the same route as the first game and just be your own character without a premade backstory). For my game with my friend we chose to play as two of the default characters, and are trying hard to stick to roleplaying in line with their backgrounds (and, also, villainous scoundrels). The interesting thing is that when you go that route you occasionally get in-character dialogue options that correspond to your character's backstory, in addition to the usual options. So while you're on one hand roleplaying as the character however you see fit, you also have the chance to explore the background story the creators envisioned for a particular NPC at the same time.

Again, I'm not really far enough to judge things like the story (though I am already a bit sick of how much has revolved around the dude I killed in the first story arc of the first game, like a thousand in-universe years before this game), but overall it feels like pretty much the same game as the first, just...a sequel. And again, that's not a bad thing. It's also fun to be doing it this time around in co-op, since the first game was so very clearly intended to be played that way too, but I was going it solo and just controlling both of the main characters (which made the occasional chances for disagreements between them very silly). Basically, if you like the first game, you'll probably like the second, but if you were hoping for something a little bit different than the first, you'd be disappointed.

—————————————— Conan Exiles (Steam) FINAL VERDICT: Bretty Gud ——————————————

Once again, I've been pulled in by a free weekend.

I'd heard various things about Conan Exiles...praise, complaints, and a lot of jokes about dick physics. But I've also been vaguely interested in it for seeming like ARK, minus the dinosaurs, but with the kind of satisfying third-person combat mechanics I like. So when it had a free (4-day!) weekend just before the start of the Steam holiday sale, I thought, why not give it a try?

I'll tell you why not - because it's ARK, minus the dinosaurs, but with the kind of satisfying third-person combat mechanics I like. In other words, the perfect ingredients to get me addicted to yet another survival/building game.

Now, I know next to nothing about Conan lore, but I also knew next to nothing about LoTR and I still had a blast playing Shadow of Mordor, so I knew that sometimes not having an extensive background of the source material can be okay. Conan Exiles is apparently extremely faithful to the original stories, and there is actually a LOT of lore sprinkled throughout the game. It's not unlike ARK's explorer notes, except they're all in English so I can actually read and understand them (turns out it's more engaging to read lore about a game within the game itself than on a wiki - who knew!!). And despite being an open-world survival/building game, it's also apparently got a concrete storyline with a concrete ending, which is pretty unheard of in this genre, so that's kinda cool.

At the moment I've only been playing in singleplayer. For the duration of the free weekend I chose to play completely vanilla - I don't like to mod games until I know the basic mechanics (so I know what sorts of things I'd LIKE to mod), but I also didn't touch any of the multipliers or anything either. I found the defaults a lot more forgiving than ARK's, but definitely still grindy. Once I decided to buy I started installing a couple mods and bumped my multipliers a bit. By that time I already had my current base built (though I'm thinking of moving) so I started just flying around in admin mode and building other stuff, particularly with modded structures (the Egyptian-style building kit was a lot of fun to play with).

The building mechanics are basically the same as ARK's, but refined and generally feel smoother. The snap points can still be a bit finicky but things seem to go where I want them to a lot more often than with ARK, and I've had a LOT less problems with my ceilings. The fact that the base game includes triangle pieces and didn't need to buy out a very popular mod to include them is also a plus. There's a bit more variety in pieces, too, like several different styles of roofing - not to mention the wealth of decoration items in the base game. Because of that this game seems to have a strong appeal to roleplayers, but to me it strongly appeals to my childhood fascination with LEGO and building crazy structures that I would then furnish and decorate with my other small non-LEGO toys. With ARK, unless you're lucky enough to find a server with a bunch of eco's mods, decoration options are sparse, so I really do appreciate all the clutter items the base game gives me to play with (and of course there are also mods that add hundreds more).

Then comes the part where the game feels like a totally different animal from ARK - general exploration and combat. In ARK, the main gameplay loop is taming stronger and stronger dinosaurs to perform harvesting tasks for you and to fight other dinosaurs or players. You can station them around your base to keep it safe from intruders, or start breeding OP ones to take into the boss arenas. The whole appeal of the game is to tame and ride dinosaurs, so aside from your first hour or so trying to survive on foot that's basically what you'll be using for all your traveling and fighting needs.

Of course, one of the main gameplay loops in Conan Exiles is capturing NPCs and having them run your crafting stations and guard your base, not unlike raising your dinos, and you can even capture baby animals and raise them as companions. But while you can bring (one) thrall or animal follower along with you on journeys, for the most part you are alone in these harsh lands surviving by your own skills. The most recent update introduced horses, but the riding controls leave a lot to be desired at the moment so I've mostly just been walking across the land on foot...which is harsh, and makes you really think about what you need when you set off on a long journey from home (food, water, healing items, tools, weapons, stuff to repair your equipment with if it breaks...and all of that stuff weighs you down if you haven't buffed your encumbrance, so coming back with your arms full of loot can be tricky).

While it can be a bit of a pain when you're accustomed to mount-based traveling in games like ARK, it does also solve one of ARK's biggest problems IMO - once you get a flier, you will never want to use anything else, and you can just avoid 99% of the danger on the map by flying everywhere. It's a problem I've started going out of my way to circumvent, but in Conan Exiles it's the default state. Even if they flesh out and improve mounts more, I think it'd be a bit awkward compared to solo traveling because the map is designed in such a way that you'll have to climb a lot of places, and I think that makes it a bit refreshing compared to ARK's 'you can get almost everywhere better and more safely on a dino's back so why would you ever risk otherwise' gameplay.

There's also a lot of fighting, and in my experience mounted combat is almost never good in any game that attempts it - especially if said game (like Conan Exiles) has a robust system of combos and dodging/blocking for normal combat, but mounted combat basically has to boil down to wildly swinging your weapon while also trying to maneuver around and both HIT the enemy and also not get hit BY the enemy. Seriously, the only game that I've played that did mounted combat RIGHT was Assassin's Creed Origins, because there were also mounted enemies everywhere, the horse was very easy to maneuver, and you got different weapon animations on horseback so you didn't have to deal with weird hitbox issues while trying to flail your weapon around blindly like an idiot. Also your horse actually did trample damage instead of ghosting through anything that crossed its hooves. Rant aside, I feel like it's the kind of game that was so thoroughly designed WITHOUT mounts in mind that having mounts would only make it feel weird, and running barefoot across the sand is an inherent part of the experience.

What I was going to say before I went off on a tangent was that combat in ARK - because you rely so heavily on your mounts - basically boils down to 'one button to chomp, one button to stomp'. If you're lucky the dino may even have a THIRD type of chomp/stomp/tail whip. It's very much a mash-attack-to-win affair where the stats of your creature matter more than your actual skill, which, to be fair, it's a game where breeding creatures with ideal stats IS part of the appeal so that's fine. But it can get a little boring to just go around on a rex and kill anything with a few chomps, where your only other 'ability' is a roar that's basically just cosmetic and has no special function.

Conan Exiles' combat is more of an actual feature of the game than a simple consequence of 'needing' to be able to hunt and kill things for the sake of survival and resource gathering. It's all about mixing up your light and heavy combos, of which different weapons have different types and also attack speeds. Different weapons may also have different abilities, like inflicting bleeding damage or slowing your enemy down. Which weapon you choose can come down to personal preference or experience, or it could be situational depending on where you're going and what you're planning to fight. For the first half of my playtime I basically stuck to dual-wielding daggers (dat bleed damage) but reached a point where I wanted something one-handed so I could use a shield and block arrows, or hold a torch when delving into caves and other dark places and still see what was attacking me. So I picked up an axe off a dead enemy and, despite being a lower tier than my steel daggers, was doing WAY more damage. Suddenly I felt like a God, mowing down an entire pirate ship full of enemies effortlessly when before I'd have to dodge out of the way long enough to eat some food and recover my health a bit while the bleeding damage slowly ticked away at them. From what I've read online, two-handed swords or pikes are 'the best' weapons, but I'm quite happy with my axe and my shield, and it makes me feel very fittingly barbarian-y as I hack my enemies to pieces, see them driven before me, and yadda yadda that one famous Conan quote.

As far as story progression and whatnot goes, I've only done the first dungeon and basically I'm just running around capturing thralls, pets, and looking for cool locations to build stuff. While I do think it's neat that the game has an actual 'progression' and a conclusive ending, I'm not too worried about it because that's not the reason I (or assumedly most people) play games like this. I'll probably get to it eventually...then again, I had more than 1000 hours in ARK before I fought a boss for the first time, so we'll see. I'm already starting to get a bit bored with singleplayer since I've started abusing my admin powers a bit too much, so I'd like to look for a decent server soon that's got some of the mods I like, but also won't force me into roleplaying with strangers. Ideally I'd love to be able to play with friends, but I don't know if any of my ARK friends would like it because it lacks the dinosaur appeal...so I might just have to venture off into the world by myself and...ugh. Talk to people, I guess.

Either way I am having fun, and I can see myself probably coming back to it when I just wanna chill out and BUILD something, much like I do in ARK.

[sg2tiger]

In celebration of the release of Ciconia, I made a When They Cry Bingo card!

[sg2tiger]

[sg2tiger]

IT BEGINS

[sg2tiger]

It feels so good to finally announce this after a year!! Please look forward to BISTROMANCE, a labor of love we hope you'll enjoy!!

Yeehaw! We’re super excited to announce BISTROMANCE, our upcoming lesbian dating sim!! Happy Valentine’s day! https://www.bistromance.date/

[sg2tiger]

IT'S THAT TIME AGAIN

Actually, it's a little earlier than I usually post these, but I probably won't be playing anything else new before the year ends.

I don't know why I'm even doing it this year considering...well, I think the image speaks for itself. Anyway this may be the last thing I post on Tumblr before the site implodes on itself so let's do this.

Lengthy text reviews under the cut as per usual. Expect spoilers.

—————————————— Heroes of Hammerwatch (Steam) FINAL VERDICT: Bretty Gud —————————————— I should note that I played this game with 3-4 friends, so the rating is based on how fun it is as a multiplayer game. Like the original Hammerwatch before it I feel like it'd get rather boring pretty quickly if played solo. That said, Heroes of Hammerwatch is in a lot of ways what I wished the original Hammerwatch could be. Me and my friends had a lot of fun playing the original, but due to the level design being static it got old before too long once you had memorized where to find all the secrets, or what enemies would be waiting around the next corner. Since HoH is procedurally generated, it keeps each run fresh and unpredictable. The rogue-lite style of the game also keeps things interesting and I prefer the system for unlocking skills and upgrades in the town to having to find the skill shop in the levels of the original Hammerwatch.

That said, while in a lot of ways I prefer it to the original, there's something to be said for the polish of the original static levels that procedural generation can't quite match. I remember one game where we had been doing extremely well until we got to the castle stage, which is a considerable difficulty jump over the previous area...but we had the misfortune of not being able to find a minecart to send down our gold for the past 2 levels, or any potion refill fountains. After an intense struggle we beat the first castle stage only to die horribly in the second one, losing everything in the process. And yeah, the luck element and chance you might lose everything you worked hard for is one of the main hallmarks of a rogue-lite genre, but that doesn't make those experiences less frustrating. After all, even if we were to die, if we had found a minecart it wouldn't have ALL been for nothing.

If you have a good group of friends to play with, though, I'd still recommend giving this a go. We got a few weeks of fun playing through and upgrading each others' towns and characters, seeing how far we could get.

—————————————— Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse (3DS) FINAL VERDICT: Bretty Gud —————————————— I've been playing this on and off in small bursts over the course of the year. I'm still not QUITE finished with this one, but at level 75 I think I'm far enough to give it a review score.

Gameplay-wise I think it's a slight, but still marked improvement over SMT IV, which I often felt was a little too easy (especially coming off having played Strange Journey and the SNES SMT I shortly before it). The early and mid game is still pretty easy, and I almost never needed to carefully choose my team/skills before fighting bosses, or rely on buffs/debuffs much at all. That gradually changes as you get closer to the end, though (I felt like it got harder around the time you first go to Mikado), and some of the main story bosses - and especially sidequest bosses (Mara, Arahabaki) - have felt more like classic SMT fights where you need to prepare the right demons and skills if you don't want to get steamrolled, or just spend an hour slowly chipping away at a boss who keeps using Makarakarn every other turn.

There's some neat changes in the game that I like, too, like the choice mechanic that happens in some boss battles. I usually go with my gut in how I answer if a boss asks me a question (which half the time is just 'ignore them and keep attacking'), but it can lead to screwing yourself over and giving the boss a damage buff, or having them heal themselves, etc. I also LOVE that dark and light skills are finally useful as they're not just one-hit kills that may or may not hit...they'll always do damage which makes them a lot more useful when fighting demons weak against those types, and the instant-kill-when-smirking is a good way to keep their 'classic' use as well.

Story-wise...well, I wasn't the biggest fan of SMT IV's story or characters, honestly, but I can't really tell if I like Apocalypse's better or think it's worse. It's nice to have a more diverse group and a larger party, but the 'power of friendship' angle they keep ramming down my throat is about as hamfisted as any generic battle shounen manga. Considering the stakes usually involved in SMT stories, the party's antics can also feel a little too lighthearted at times - Toki and Asahi's stupid harem antics over Nanashi being a really good example. Like, it's literally the Apocalypse, is this really the time to be fighting over my dick?

As for the plot, it's hard to say when I'm not quite at the end yet. Retconning the ending of SMT IV in general is a little weird, honestly. It'd been a while since I played SMT IV so I had to refresh my memory of its story by going through it on the megaten wiki, but I kept finding myself getting confused as to which things were still canon in Apocalypse and which things weren't anymore due to when the game is taking place. Here I am in the same exact Tokyo as the previous game, but somehow it FEELS different due to that difference in perspective...someone who grew up here, instead of an outsider. The gap between me playing SMT IV and Apocalypse probably helps too because while some of the areas feel familiar it also doesn't feel like 'ugh THIS place again', which would probably be annoying if I had played them back-to-back.

In general I'm having fun. I feel like the early game had a bit of a slow start, and again, the difficulty was still a bit low, but it picks up more in the second half once the party grows and the story starts to take off a bit more. For me I think the trip to Mikado was the most I felt engaged in the story and the characters. I'm hoping the end can follow through and be entertaining, even though I've got a feeling it's still gonna keep force-feeding me more Power Of Friendship messages.

—————————————— Divinity: Original Sin (GOG) FINAL VERDICT: Recommended —————————————— 2018 is the year of starting games but not quite finishing them because you keep getting fucking sucked back into playing ARK. *ahem* Anyway. I think I'm like...maybe a little more than halfway through this game? Enough that I wanted to give it a proper rating and not just an UNFINISHED, anyway.

Oh, and it is the Enhanced Edition, I just didn't feel like using the two-line title on the image.

In general I really really like this game. Once I started playing it I quickly found myself addicted to the combat and all the unique possibilities for exploiting the environment. It can be incredibly challenging at times, but having to restart and try new tricks and traps until you get it right can be really rewarding too. The fact that you basically get infinite saves and can save in the middle of battle is great, too - sometimes saving after a really lucky turn can save your ass if you end up having to reload, but just as often it can screw you over if you backed yourself into a corner before you made that save. Experimenting and learning how to fight is half the fun.

I only wish that enemies weren't always one-time encounters that can never be fought again - it gives the game that Fire Emblem-esque challenge to plan and train accordingly because your opportunities for experience are limited, but sometimes I really wish I could just find a random encounter and just go to town.

The story is interesting, but I think my favorite thing is that the game doesn't take itself too seriously. There's humor in almost everything and you can tell the writers had a lot of fun with it. I'm someone who tries to talk with every NPC in RPGs anyways, and in this game it definitely pays off, whether it's using the talent that lets you talk to animals or hiring a supposed prostitute only for her to read stories to you all night long.

Of course one of the main draws of the game is the fact that you control two characters, whether in actual co-op or singleplayer. I did play some co-op with a friend (two actually, via the mod that lets a friend control one of the AI party members), though my main file is my singleplayer game. Even in singleplayer I've developed personalities for both characters, and they disagree almost as often as they agree on how to handle things...and I really like how the AI party members even point out the potential dangers of the supposed leaders' differing points of view. In general I also think the rock-paper-scissors minigame is a cool way of deciding the usual intimidate/charm/persuade options for an RPG, instead of putting it all down to an invisible dice roll.

I could go on and on about the things I like about this game but I won't. I already grabbed the sequel during the last Steam sale, so I need to get around to finishing this one soon before I can play that. All in all a very fun game with some cool takes on roleplaying systems, very fun combat, and an ever-present sense of humor.

Just make sure you grab the mod that significantly lowers random NPC chatter, unless you just REALLY love the sound of the local cheesemonger going on endlessly about how nobody has as many friends as the man with many cheeses while you're trying to sell all your junk in the marketplace. Seriously, the chatter fires off so much I STILL have some of the NPC dialogue from the first town memorized, and I haven't played this game since August.

—————————————— Assassin's Creed Unity (Steam) FINAL VERDICT: Bretty Gud —————————————— Not quite finished with this one either, but unlike the others on this list I'm actually playing this one as we speak. Since I'm on Sequence 10 of 12 and have been in the process of mopping up side-missions over the past few days I'll probably be finished with this one by next week as I play catch-up in hopes of snagging Odyssey during the Christmas sale.

The last AC game I played was Rogue, back in 2016. Originally I had planned to skip Unity altogether - the launch was absolutely DISASTROUS, especially on PC, and even two years after release the reviews had been mostly negative. However I took another look at it during the last big Ubisoft sale and the reviews seemed to have finally turned, with most of the glaring bugs and performance issues fixed by the numerous patches. I had already BOUGHT Syndicate, fully intent on skipping ahead, but since my computer couldn't handle London at more than 11 FPS (I've since upgraded) I had to put it on the backburner for a while anyways. So I thought, what the Hell. I hadn't skipped any of the main series titles yet, so I may as well give Unity a fair go.

I actually am having fun. I don't think I realized how much I missed the URBAN environments that put this series on the map in the first place. Running around the huge Paris worldspace has been refreshing after spending much of AC III, Liberation, Black Flag and Rogue out in the wilderness. In a lot of ways it feels like a return to form in the vein of AC 1 and 2, but with smoother controls and better combat.

The 'run down' button has been a bit of an adjustment, admittedly (even though I haven't played an AC game in over a year the classic control scheme is forever etched into my muscle memory), but the addition of a proper crouch button and ability to hide behind objects as cover (though the implementation is finicky) is a game changer in the stealth department. The removal of whistling, however, is one of the stupidest decisions in the history of the franchise. I haven't even bothered with the optional objectives on missions with hidespot kills because it's so stupidly difficult to set them up now when the enemy AI is so quick to give up searching for you the second you're out of sight that it's just literally impossible to lure them to your hiding place 9 times out of 10. Apparently it's back in Syndicate, at least.

I think my favorite thing about Unity though is the openness of the story assassinations. I was actually really confused during the first one because I didn't understand what 'create opportunities' was supposed to mean...I was so used to the layout of the area and optional objectives more or less guiding my hand to killing the target in a certain way. Once I got the hang of it, though, I realized how much more enjoyable it made the main assassination missions. Yeah, it's not like, TOTALLY open, since the game still wants you to exploit specific opportunities, but it does feel a lot less restrictive than past games.

My absolute, ABSOLUTE favorite thing about missions in this game, though, is that...you don't desync the second you get spotted!! Yeah, some missions might still encourage you to not get caught with optional objectives to stay out of conflict or not set off any alarms and whatnot, but it's also not the end of the world of you fuck up and get caught. And to me that is a huge improvement over basically every game since Brotherhood introduced optional objectives. Having an alternative to 'git gud' in stealth-focused missions is just such a breath of fresh air when you don't have to worry about restarting the memory half a dozen times because you got spotted. In fact I feel like it's somehow made me MORE stealthy as a result, because it's actually fun to see how far I can push myself with the stealth approach when I'm not also super on edge in the back of my head about getting caught because I don't want to have to restart from the last checkpoint for the fifteenth fucking time.

I just the other night finished sequence 9's mission where you need to infiltrate the rich lady's mansion, which has like, 9 alarm bells, and the 'don't trigger any alarms' objective...sure, I COULD have just carefully made my way to the target without getting caught, but instead something possessed me to make my optional objective instead DISABLE ALL 9 ALARM BELLS WITHOUT GETTING CAUGHT and that just made sneaking around the mission area even more fun. In the end I pulled off both optional objectives despite making it needlessly more difficult on myself to do so...but it made it feel more rewarding when I pulled it off. If I had the threat of desync for being spotted hanging over my head I probably WOULD have just rushed to the target as quick as I could, hoping I could end the mission ASAP before I fucked up and got caught, and I would have definitely had a lot less fun than I did actually being able to explore the mansion's layout and find opportunities to slip by and kill guards to get to the alarms and disable them. I just can't stress enough what a huge improvement this makes on the overall feel of missions.

Oh, and speaking of getting caught, desynced, and having to restart a mission 500 times? I haven't had to tail a single target in the entire game so far. Those have always been among the WORST missions in the series, so I'm very, very appreciative of the fact that Ubisoft seems to have wised up and removed them (hopefully, though probably not, once and for all).

Is Unity perfect? Hardly. I really like being able to go in buildings, but actually climbing into windows can be a real pain in the ass sometimes because the game can't decide whether to go in, climb over them, or just get stuck hanging off them helplessly while a nearby sniper gets closer and closer to noticing me. Speaking of, I feel like detection AI is also WAY too accurate in this game - every guard in the area should NOT suddenly go on full alert the second I step out from behind a corner. I feel like the time between yellow 'suspicious' and red 'die criminal scum' is also way shorter than it used to be. I think if you also got desynced when spotted by these guards with fucking supernatural vision I'd probably break my controller and never play this game again. It's kind of amazing, actually, how on the one hand guards spot you more easily and have significantly smarter combat AI, but on the other hand got way, way dumber, completely giving up on coming after me the second I duck out of sight. The fact that I've yet to see a single guard try to CLIMB AFTER ME in the entire game is very telling, and disappointing. In previous games it was not at all uncommon for guards to climb onto a roof after you and chase you down - in Unity they'd all rather pull out their guns simultaneously and shoot me down firing squad style before I have a CHANCE of dodging. And gunshots do a FUCKTON of damage in this game. The ability to dodgeroll sniper fire when I'm NOT directly engaged with an enemy would sure be nice.

All in all though I think this is a similar case with AC III where a poor launch unfortunately tarnished a good game's reputation forevermore. Not that I'm excusing Ubisoft for fucking up their launches so often, but it's still unfortunate when an otherwise solid game gets skipped and overlooked because people don't check back on it post-patch to see if it ever got better. I really liked AC III (but not Connor), but a lot of people still consider it one of the worst games in the series to where I wonder how many of them have honestly gone back and played it after the main issues were fixed. Unity is the same. I'm glad I decided to give it a fair chance, because it's actually a pretty solid game.

I still think it's pretty silly that the French characters have British accents, though. Ezio didn't have a British accent, so don't give me that 'Animus accent translation' bullshit, either.

—————————————— ARK: Survival Evolved (Steam) FINAL VERDICT: Please For The Love Of God Save Me —————————————— If you are reading this then you are my only hope. I have been held hostage by this poorly optimized, bug-riddled game about building bases and taming dinosaurs for the past year and I cannot escape. Try as I may, I only find myself away for a few months at most before I am once again pulled under its thrall. Please save me from this prison that has kept me unable to play other games all year.

Anyway. I did my proper review of this game last year, since I started playing it at the very end of December. I don't really have anything new to say. I mostly play PVE, unofficial servers with less masochistic multipliers, and mods like S+, Automated ARK and Rare Sightings. Currently play Ragnarok and Extinction on a cluster. I've played PVP but only on low-pop servers; probably a good thing since I've heard horror stories about how absolutely toxic the PVP community in this game is. Maybe that's just officials, though. It might be fun in the right group, but finding the right group is the problem.

I've mostly been playing solo for the past several months since my friends moved on to other games. I wish they took me with them but somehow I'm stuck here, like a ghost. At first it was because I wanted to keep feeding our dinos while my friends took a hiatus, because we'd come back to it someday. Once it became apparent that 6+ months had passed and we'd probably never go back to that server I finally gave up on that, but I had already started playing solo on a PVE server and integrated into that community. I'm still playing there on and off but the zeal has died and I'm playing less and less...actually the reason I finally said 'I need to play other games' and started playing AC Unity. I know I'll keep going on to feed THESE dinos and make sure my base doesn't go into demolish mode, but I don't think the excitement's gonna come back until my friends want to play together again. Solo gets really boring after a while. I thought Extinction would reignite their excitement but Extinction's launch kinda shot that possibility in the foot. It also doesn't feel like something that took a year to make. It's an alright map but having my whole base destroyed in the blink of an eye because Wildcard doesn't fucking test their buggy-ass game before releasing an ALREADY DELAYED DLC kind of killed my hype a bit.

So I think that, jokes aside, I may finally be losing interest in ARK and ready to move on, aside from the aforementioned upkeep. It's just gotten dull in a way that only a fresh start on a new server with a good group of friends can really reinvigorate, I think.

But when it comes time to make my 2019 list of games, I guess we'll see whether or not I was REALLY able to escape this shitty dinosaur game's addictive-ass clutches.

[sg2tiger]

Something to start off inktober. I ended up touching some spots in photoshop bc I got weirdly anxious about uploading something I wasn’t happy with it. There goes my plan of doing carefree doodles

[sg2tiger]

EP7 

[sg2tiger]

day 6 for inktober. not feeling super good rn so it’s a bit more rushed than i’d like (i liked the sketch more boo)

[sg2tiger]

right???

happy umineko day(s) everyone !

[sg2tiger]

Welcome to Rokkenjima.

October 4th through 6th, 1986. 

[sg2tiger]

who is your least favorite umineko character and your most favorite

pls reblog or add in the tags w/ ur answers! i wanna hear from u guys

[sg2tiger]