Video game talk, anyone?

Welp, add Spiritfarer to the very short list of video games that have made me cry.

Been playing the first Trails of Cold Steel and enjoying it. The story is typical JRPG nonsense (built upon a whole extended universe of JRPG nonsense spanning 12 installments and counting), but intriguing enough to keep me going. The combat system actually has a small learning curve--in that it at least punishes you for mashing attack every turn--but is fairly easy and enjoyable to master. It features an FF7/materia-style system of character customization, but if you equip everyone with the same set of spells you're Going to Have a Bad Time, as the emphasis is much more on equipping your attackers with effects that allow them to stagger enemies and delay turns (ala MegaTen) with maybe one or two characters acting as mage specialists. Positioning--rare in a turn-based JRPG--is also pretty crucial. It's not revolutionary by any means but it's enough of a challenge to keep me engaged.

Well, there's a difference between games like Octopath where there's a stun meter that incrementally fills, and Persona, where exploiting an enemy's weakness immediately rewards you with an extra turn (and vice versa). The former can get tedious, I grant you, but I've always found the latter snappy and reasonably strategic in that you can figure out ways to chain turns together so that battles end in a few seconds with no damage taken. Cold Steel is somewhere in between--there are no stun gauges, but successfully pushing enemies down the turn order is partially RNG-dependent.

Ugh, I basically can't play first person view games anymore. They all make me sick to my stomach. Gonna try and push through with Outer Worlds but it might not happen. And that sucks.

I'm shocked, but after updating several settings I can play The Outer Worlds without getting motion sickness. I don't think I can play for hours at a time still but I can get a good hour and a half in and only feel slightly dizzy.

I started Deathloop and had one decent session, but I haven't been able to get the game to start again since. When I try to start it in Steam, it tanks my computer and ultimately does nothing. So, my current opinion of Deathloop is that it doesn't work. I might mess with it more at some point, because I enjoyed what little I've played. Love the world design and combat felt pretty good. 

And that's how they get you! *says the guy with like 8 streaming service subscriptions, half of which he's not using at any given point*

I completely meant to reply to this with a clever and interesting post comparing things I really liked about DA:O with things that I thought weren't going so well in Amazon's The Rings of Power, but writing clever and interesting things takes a lot of effort so I never got around to it. 

My first time around against the Archdemon was the epic, frenetic slugfest it should be, though it's never been repeated in any playthrough since then. I've never had that much difficulty against Flemeth, but only because I've always fought the High Dragon first - which usually turns out to be the most difficult single boss fight of the game (and if I didn't use forcefield every time my tank gets grabbed, one I'd have to leave until much later in the game).  


Anyway, since then onto Wolfenstein: The New Order. Never played it before. Loved it. Who'da thought that B.J. Blazkowicz, predecessor of Doom Guy, could turn out to be a compelling protagonist?*  Having spent many (many, many) a happy hour putzing around Skyrim and the Capital Wasteland, I love how Bethesda it all looks - though without all the glitches and needing to look up on the internet how a scripted event was supposed to happen. Flashes of Bethesda humour too, like the stuff with the elevators in the London Nautica building. The game does variation really well, in terms of levels in different settings, mixing up guns (or knives) and violence with quieter bits where it's more exploring and puzzle solving, and letting you have your favoured playstyle for the most part while still sometimes forcing you to mix it up between sneaking, or cover shooting or all out assault. And somehow they managed to throw in a sex scene that's simultaneously ugly, funny and a lovely bit of character work. 

A few minor flaws. The game's sense of unreality, though necessary for making it not unbearably grim (or completely tasteless), occasionally takes me out of it - like did Klaus just drive me from London to Berlin there? It makes a whole thing of Caroline's power armour suit, then never does anything with it. At the end of the prologue chapter where you're forced to make a choice on which supporting characters live and die, I don't think the game's earned it at that point. And the final boss fight at the end is so unfair (not the guy himself, just the fucking jets of flame everywhere) that I had to turn the difficulty down, which I hate. 

Overall, fucking great though, and I'll definitely replay it at some point.



*Though one who reminds me of that old Onion "Our Dumb Century" article about how former members of the Russian Aristocracy are continuing, for the seventh straight year, to kill Grigoriy Rasputin. ("In later years, Rasputin was set on fire, dissolved in acid, boiled alive, flensed, fed molten lead, ground beneath the wheels of a freight train, thrown from the top of St Basil's Cathedral, impaled on sharpened stakes, buried under 10 tons of hot gravel, struck at high speeds by an automobile, strapped to the mouth of a great cannon which was then fired several times, bolted to the keel of an icebreaking ship which was repeatedly run aground, drawn and quartered, crucified, run through with a cavalry spear from bowel to gullet, vivisected and eviscerated. Furthermore, throughout the process, he was continually re-poisoned, re-stabbed and re-shot. The team expects Rasputin's death to take place no later than 1925").  

I told myself I'd never get attached to one of my Guild Wars 2 key farm characters, but here I am with her at level 80, farming items to make her ascended gear.