Single-Player

78 entries. 55,445 words.

2012-12

  • My First Look at Skyrim. 2012-12-08. I finally got Skyrim in a Steam sale. I’m not sure exactly what I expected but I kind of thought it would be something a bit more … well, different from Oblivion. All of the same annoying things from Oblivion are still there in Skyrim. The most annoying of which is when five people walk up to you and start talking at the same time. While you’re already talking to someone else.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    • Steam
    133 words

2014-08

  • Assassin’s Creed 3 Story Finished. 2014-08-04. Taking a small break from MMORPGs for a bit and getting back to Steam. I went back to Assassin’s Creed 3 because I wanted to finish the main story before I considered getting any of the newer installments in Steam sales. (I don’t yet have Black Flag and I see now there is a new one coming out soon.) I resumed the AC3 story about halfway through and powered through to the end, largely ignoring all of the side missions and sandboxy elements.
    • Reviews
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    495 words
  • The Witcher 2: Skip the Tutorial. 2014-08-18. It seems like years ago that I bought The Witcher 1 & 2 in one of those deep-discount Steam sales. I spent about 15 minutes playing The Witcher 1 (enough time to watch the opening movie and then get to where I could feel the intense pain of the combat controls), and then never played it again. Lately I’ve started to see some buzz about The Witcher 3, and I see that it’s now available for pre-order on Steam.
    • Reviews
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    523 words
  • Far Cry 3. 2014-08-30. Continuing my journey through cutting edge games from two years ago (also games I’ve already paid for), I’m finally playing Far Cry 3, previously purchased in a Steam sale. I enjoyed the first Far Cry. Well, I say that now, but when I look back on what I wrote about it in 2009, apparently I only thought it was “okay.” I picked up FarCry from Steam for $9.99 a couple weeks ago.
    • Reviews
    • Single-Player
    810 words

2014-12

  • Dragon Age Ate My Life. 2014-12-19. In case anyone is wondering, Dragon Age has eaten my life. Get that camera out of my face. I’m currently playing through Dragon Age II for the first time, after which I’m going to play Inquisition. So, no time for blogging, writing, sleeping, eating, playing any MMOs, or moving away from the PC screen for even a moment.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    • Status
    58 words

2015-02

  • How To Survive (A Game, Not A Guide). 2015-02-09. In January, I went through a phase where I wanted to play some survival-type games. Perhaps I was inspired by the news that H1Z1 rushed itself out the door too soon came to Steam Early Access. I already had TUG and Don’t Starve, but they never really grabbed me. (I keep hoping TUG will improve.) I have a bunch of these kinds of games on my Steam wishlist, but as I’m sure you know, 99% of them are still Early Access (including TUG), so I tried to find something else.
    • Reviews
    • Single-Player
    • Steam
    • Survival
    671 words
  • The Forest, A Visual Feast. 2015-02-11. In January, I went through a phase where I wanted to play some survival-type games. I’ve been intrigued by The Forest ever since I first saw it show up on Steam, but I generally try to resist buying Early Access games, particularly from unknown sources. Until one day when I was bored out of my mind with my current games and wanted to look at something new. And hey, it was only $15.
    • Pre-Release
    • Reviews
    • Single-Player
    • Steam
    756 words
  • State of Decay Is A-OK. 2015-02-17. In January, I went through a phase where I wanted to play some survival-type games. The first game I pulled out was State of Decay, which I already had on Steam. I’m probably the last person to discover this, but State of Decay is pretty cool. I had played it before, somewhere back when it first came to the PC I think, but it didn’t really “click” with me the first time.
    • Reviews
    • Single-Player
    • Steam
    • Survival
    282 words

2015-03

  • Banished From MMOs For A Bit. 2015-03-02. Most of my time lately has been spent playing Banished, which is a city builder game that I picked up on a Steam sale for $6. This might be the best $6 I’ve ever spent on a game. I love this game. Historically, I am terrible at city builder games and usually give up on them quickly because it’s no fun to watch people starve to death. (That’s how my cities usually end up.
    • Reviews
    • Single-Player
    294 words
  • Low-Energy Gaming. 2015-03-15. Real life’s been kicking me in the teeth lately-I’m adjusting to a new work role/schedule and of course there was the annoying end of Daylight Savings. So my MMO gaming (and writing, and overall mental attitude, and almost everything else) has suffered. Oddly enough I’ve landed on Path of Exile as a mental tonic, a game which I had previously rejected as uninteresting all the way back in its nearly-perpetual beta.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings
    • Single-Player
    297 words

2015-06

  • Dabbling In The Witcher 3. 2015-06-03. I’ve been dabbling with The Witcher 3 off and on since it came out, as I’m sure almost everyone who plays RPGs has. After playing The Witcher 2 there was no possibility that I wasn’t going to get the third installment. Anyone who has even a slight interest in single-player, story-based RPGs should get it without hesitation. That said, I haven’t yet been wowed or completely absorbed by it, but I’m enjoying it.
    • Single-Player
    • Status
    • Steam
    417 words
  • Besiege – Failing Is Fun. 2015-06-15. I found a hilarious physics/building game in the Steam summer sale… Besiege. There’s something about it that just makes me laugh and laugh. It’s pretty unique in that the most fun part of the game is failing. The more spectacular the failure, the more fun it is. It’s still early access but I give it a thumbs up. I’ll be honest, in the following videos, I was more concerned about running over the chickens than anything else.
    • Reviews
    • Single-Player
    • Steam
    77 words

2015-07

  • Progression Report – June 2015. 2015-07-04. There were only two games I played any significant amount in June: Final Fantasy XIV (28 hours) and The Witcher 3 (18 hours). The latter is not an MMORPG, but since it feels exactly like an MMORPG I’m going to count it in my progression report. In FFXIV I started in on Heavensward, but to be honest I’m still a bit burned out from all the catching up I did in May, so I haven’t played that much into the expansion.
    • MMORPG
    • Progression Report
    • Single-Player
    • Status
    228 words
  • Dark Souls – Eat It, Bell Gargoyles. 2015-07-16. Almost exactly two years ago I first played Dark Souls on the PC, and a few days later I defeated the Taurus Demon, the second boss. Now I can finally say that I’ve defeated the third* boss: The Bell Gargoyles. Knight with newly-acquired Zweihander. After weeks of enjoying the crap out of the hard-difficulty combat in The Witcher 3**, I decided to install Dark Souls again. Two years later, thanks to a Steam beta and DSfix, Dark Souls runs a thousand times better on the PC than when I first played it, and using an Xbox controller works a lot better than a PS3 controller did.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    • Status
    607 words

2015-08

  • Dark Souls – Capra Demon Defeated. 2015-08-01. Blaugust Day 1 Twelve days after defeating the Bell Gargoyles, I finally defeated the next boss in Dark Souls-the Capra Demon. Bosses in games aren’t usually worthy of a blog post all to themselves, but when you spend so much time crafting and practicing a strategy for defeating one, it’s a really big deal. Such is the case with the Capra Demon, the fourth boss I’ve encountered in my Dark Souls saga.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    1,261 words
  • Dark Souls – Gaping Dragon Defeated. 2015-08-05. In an unprecedented spurt of Dark Souls excellence, I defeated the Gaping Dragon in a single evening after just thirteen attempts! (I kept count this time.) The sewers of The Depths. There is a vendor through those bars at the end of the room, because this is obviously where you'd expect to find a merchant. It took some time to find the beast. My Knight wandered around the maze-like sewers of The Depths for days, falling through cleverly-hidden holes in the floor, stabbing rats of all sizes, dodging the cursed basilisks’ breath.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    • Status
    615 words
  • Dark Souls – Chaos Witch Quelaag Defeated. 2015-08-13. Previously on Dark Souls, our intrepid Knight Thomas dispatched the Gaping Dragon on his way through The Depths. The Gaping Dragon dropped a key which opened a door leading to Blighttown, a total bastard of a zone, pardon my French. Let’s just say that Thomas the Knight died a lot-sometimes from falling but mostly from getting poisoned. Not just regular poison, either. Super-duper “toxic” poison, delivered by friendly neighborhood Blowdart Snipers hiding in hard-to-reach areas, spitting deadly darts rapid-fire while you climb up and down ladders and navigate across shaky wooden bridges, dodging Ghouls and Flaming Attack Dogs.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    472 words
  • Dark Souls – Moonlight Butterfly Defeated. 2015-08-14. After defeating Chaos Witch Quelaag, ringing the second bell, and leaving Blighttown, our intrepid Knight Sir Thomas wandered far and wide looking for the right path. His journey took him back to the Undead Parish bonfire, past Andre the Blacksmith, to Darkroot Garden, where the Demonic Foliage lives. (I’m not making that up.) Darkroot is also home to a clan of Giant Stone Knights, napping among the trees. You’d think they would welcome a fellow Knight, but they did not.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    319 words
  • Dark Souls – Screenshots. 2015-08-17. Have some Dark Souls screenshots to start your work week. I am absolutely in love with the “look” of this game. I’ve always been a big fan of realism in game graphics and this game looks like you could reach out and touch what’s happening on the screen, at least after you install the DSfix mod. Tomb of the Giants Before I found out that Anor Londo was the place I needed to go, I wandered around The Catacombs and the Tomb of the Giants for quite a while.
    • Musings
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    399 words
  • Dark Souls – Catching Up. 2015-08-20. Don’t really having time to write up every boss fight in Dark Souls right now, but here is a quick summary of the bosses and mini-bosses Sir Thomas the Knight has gotten through. Havel The Rock A mini-boss waiting at the bottom of the Watchtower right before the Taurus Demon. He hits really hard and takes a ton of damage, but is otherwise fairly straightforward. He drops Havel’s Ring, which boosts your carrying capacity (and typically increases your movement speed).
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    528 words

2015-09

  • Progression Report – August 2015. 2015-09-03. August was a very easy month to summarize gaming-wise: Dark Souls, Dark Souls, and more Dark Souls, for a total of 132 hours. My Knight is about halfway through NG+ at the moment, and I can still see myself playing this game for a long time to come. I want to finish with my Sorcerer and my Thief, then try a Cleric and a Pyromancer. In the MMORPG space, my second and third most-played games in August were FFXIV and Skyforge, for a whopping one hour each.
    • MMORPG
    • Progression Report
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    • Status
    182 words

2015-10

  • Progression Report – September 2015. 2015-10-03. September’s report is again pretty easy: No MMORPG progression, however quite a lot of Dark Souls progression. I started Dark Souls II on roughly the 5th and as of this writing, I’ve completed the main storyline and have moved on to the post-launch DLC content on my first character. I’ve been posting a video series of my play-through on YouTube for those who might be inclined to watch. I’m starting to get a little tired of the Dark Souls rabbit hole (the Dark Souls II DLC content is getting pretty frustrating), so I might finally get back to some MMORPGs soon.
    • MMORPG
    • Progression Report
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    157 words
  • The Light, It Burns. 2015-10-19. Now that I’ve finished Dark Souls 1 & 2 I’m slowly emerging from the rabbit hole back into the sunlight. Mostly to read about Dark Souls 3, but still, it’s something. I managed to gain a handful of levels in SWTOR, but not nearly as many as I wanted. At the risk of sounding like a fanboy, every RPG now seems like a kid’s game compared to the Dark Souls experience.
    • MMORPG
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    • Status
    221 words

2015-11

  • Fallout 4 – Better Than Expected. 2015-11-12. I must confess that I did not like Fallout 3 and New Vegas as much as everyone else did. To me, Fallout 3 was exactly the same game as Oblivion, which I had already played enough to be tired of it. So after I finished the main Fallout 3 story, I was done with it. (Steam reports that I played some crazy number of hours, but that was only because I left it running 24/7 on a secondary PC.
    • Reviews
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    • Steam
    467 words

2015-12

  • Trying Bound By Flame. 2015-12-02. Normally I would write about a new game I tried, but since I never have the time or energy to write anymore, I thought it might be fun to record my first hour of play instead. (Fun for me, at least.) This time I tried out Bound By Flame, an action RPG I got for around $5 in the recent Steam sale. In short, it’s pretty average.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    • Steam
    • Videos
    67 words
  • Fallout 4 – Wrapping Up. 2015-12-07. I finished the main story in Fallout 4 (I think) and I don’t see myself going back very much any more. I reached a point where I almost decided to quit the game. Like a lot of people, and like the game almost forces you to do from the beginning, I kept trying to maintain my Minuteman settlements. I was under the illusion that it was a side quest chain that would eventually end, at which point I would resume the main story.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    • Status
    • Steam
    629 words
  • Games Of My Year 2015. 2015-12-26. Here’s my year end “Best Of” list, because if you’re on the Internet, you have to do a year-end list of some kind. It’s the law. 2015 Contenders After studying my Steam purchase history and searching my memory, I’ve come up with the following list of new games that I purchased and played in 2015. These are only games that were released in 2015, not every single game that I purchased or played in 2015.
    • MMORPG
    • Opinion
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    597 words

2016-04

  • Dark Souls III. 2016-04-12. Fantastic game and a worthy sequel. Nothing new or radically different, mind you (except a mana bar), just more of the same, excellent quality gameplay in different yet somehow familiar settings. Visually it resembles the first game more than the second one, in my opinion, but at the same time it’s got its own bleached-film style. My only complaints so far are that I seem to get stuck on terrain a lot and sometimes the camera is more wonky than I’d like.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    257 words

2016-05

  • Dark Souls III First Playthrough Complete. 2016-05-10. I finished my first playthrough of Dark Souls III Sunday morning. I think it took around 84 hours and 87 levels, using a Knight build based mainly around strength and vitality. All bosses defeated solo, although I almost cracked and summoned help on the Twin Princes. (After the rather dismal experience I had with the Dancer of Boreal Valley, and when it looked like I might be heading in the same direction with the Twin Princes, I did summon help twice, but both times I died very quickly, which I took as a sign that I should stick with my original plan to get all the bosses solo on the first playthrough.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    • Steam
    496 words
  • New. 2016-05-16. I am writing this post on my phone while I sit in my new cubicle at my new job, which is not so much new as it is different, in that I have only moved about 15 yards away from my old cubicle which I left Friday. I moved from an old and dying project where I constantly had to deal with the world collapsing around me to an equally old but at least stable, funded project where I will only be responsible for a straightforward set of requirements.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings
    • Single-Player
    • Status
    584 words

2016-08

  • Doom Impressions. 2016-08-12. I bought Doom when it was half off on Steam a while back and have been playing it here and there. I’m not quite sure what to make of it. On the positive side, it’s a beautiful game, and it runs beautifully on my new gaming PC. It’s suitably fast and violent and hard on Ultra Violence. The chainsaw had me giggling like a kid when I found it. (Remember how the world thought the original Doom was over-the-top gruesome?
    • Reviews
    • Single-Player
    • Steam
    311 words
  • Dark Souls Character Loss. 2016-08-24. You might be wondering why I’ve been playing WoW and/or LotRO instead of continuing my re-plays and re-re-plays and re-re-re-plays of Dark Souls 1, 2, and 3, the greatest three games in the history of the universe. (Not to be hyperbolic or anything.) It’s because I setup and moved to a new gaming PC. Guess what? You can’t move your characters from one installation to another with the PC version of Dark Souls 2 and 3.
    • Single-Player
    • Steam
    204 words

2016-10

  • Battlefield 1 and (not) Civilization 6. 2016-10-21. Fridays are the worst days of the week for me, in terms of being bored. Usually half of the workforce is gone on Fridays, so it’s abnormally quiet and I have to spend eight solid hours trying to entertain myself in library-like silence. Using only my phone, mind you, because god forbid we have access to anything “fun” or “entertaining” on our work computers. The most interesting thing I can manage on my work computer is reading Wikipedia articles.
    • Single-Player
    • Status
    506 words

2016-11

  • Starting Ashes of Ariandel DLC. 2016-11-01. Over the weekend I tapered off of Civ 6 to push through to the end of my umpteenth Dark Souls 3 playthrough so I would finally have a character ready for the Ashes of Ariandel DLC. It took a total of about 18 hours to go through all the bosses and all the areas (over the course of a couple weeks, not two days :). I had to make a new character because, if you didn’t know, you can’t transfer DS2 or DS3 characters from one PC to another.
    • Single-Player
    • Writing
    368 words
  • IntPiPoMo: Friede and Bugs. 2016-11-02. I thought I would try IntPiPoMo this year, because NaNoWriMo didn’t seem like enough to do in November! Since I’m currently playing Dark Souls 3’s Ashes of Ariandel, most of the screenshots for now are probably going to be from there. That is Friede on the right. She seems nice, right? It’s just a room with blood and corpses and giant flying insects.
    • Single-Player
    63 words
  • Snap Judgment – Novus Inceptio. 2016-11-18. I should be really excited to play Rift: Starfall Prophecy but to be honest I couldn’t care less about any MMORPG right now. I’m just in one of those moods. Instead I installed one of the many games on my Steam list that I’ve never tried so that I could bring you another (cue huge reverb and echo) … Snap Judgment! .. judgment .. ment .. nt. Novus Inceptio is yet another Early Access survival sandbox game.
    • Pre-Release
    • Single-Player
    • Snap Judgment
    • Steam
    249 words
  • Devil Daggers. 2016-11-24. I saw Devil Daggers on Steam when it first came out and thought, “What an odd-sounding game.” I saw the “Too long, didn’t play” guy on Gamers With Jobs call it “punishingly hard,” and use it as the benchmark for measuring hard games ever since. I put it on my wish list. I laugh at hard games! Ha! Recently it went on sale and I bought it for $2.99, along with some other stuff I might play some day (including another one of the Batman games-I have them all now but haven’t played any of them yet).
    • Single-Player
    • Snap Judgment
    • Steam
    417 words

2016-12

  • Morrowinding. 2016-12-20. I was sick a lot last week, so I’ve spent a lot of time in the world of Bethesda games lately. First it was New Vegas, but I got a little burned out on it so I turned to Morrowind and now I’m totally into that. Morrowind is enormous. I thought Oblivion and Skyrim were pretty big, but Morrowind seems to dwarf them. (Admittedly part of that could be because the movement speed is so slow it just feels bigger.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    • Steam
    484 words
  • The Prestigious Endgame Viable Awards 2016. 2016-12-22. It occurred to me that the end of the year is approaching, and it’s time to do one of those year-end posts that bloggers love to do. Unfortunately I kind of hate doing them. It’s a lot of work. You have to actually look things up and think and count and multiply and divide and things like that. That goes against my normal principal of blogging by “just typing words into a text editor.
    • MMORPG
    • Single-Player
    • Steam
    690 words

2017-01

  • Morrowind – Learning The Ropes. 2017-01-18. I’m trying a new thing here. This is both a diary of my Morrowind adventures and an index to the videos. P. S. Don’t spoil anything for me, I haven’t finished the game yet. :) Morrowind 1 - Arriving in Seyda Neen. Story. I’m a Dark Elf Witchhunter. I was released from prison and transported by ship to Seyda Neen, on the southern coast of Vvardenfell island in the Morrowind district.
    • Single-Player
    • Videos
    1,253 words

2017-02

  • Conan Exiles, Part Three. 2017-02-14. You might be wondering why I’m still talking about Conan Exiles after trashing it for two posts in a row. Welllllll, see, it’s still kind of fun. :) Some random shrine of some random priest. It has that same sort of addictive crafting progression treadmill that ARK has: I want to see everything you can craft, so I have to keep leveling up and unlocking new recipes and finding more and more resources.
    • Single-Player
    • Survival
    851 words

2017-03

  • Mass Effected. 2017-03-15. Over the weekend I tried to do three new gaming things: Play Mass Effect 2 (to finally finish it), play Mass Effect 3 (for the first time), and play Mass Effect 1 (over again). I installed Mass Effect 2 from Steam, hoping beyond hope that by some magical time-space temporal vortex I would be able to pick up where I left off years ago (probably at least two computers ago), but of course I had to start over.
    • Single-Player
    710 words

2017-04

  • Mass Effect 1 Replayed (Spoilers). 2017-04-03. I’m writing this draft on March 21, launch day for Mass Effect: Andromeda. I probably won’t post this until much later, because I’m very paranoid about exposing myself to Mass Effect story spoilers right now, and my vivid imagination sees everyone running to the comments to post their Andromeda thoughts even though this post has nothing to do with Andromeda. Not only do I not want to hear about Andromeda, but I also don’t want to hear about Mass Effect 2 and 3.
    • Reviews
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    1,572 words
  • Mass Effect Andromeda Impressions. 2017-04-04. No razors in the future. There are no story spoilers below, but I totally understand if you’re on complete blackout and want to skip. (I was, and did, and still do.) I finished the first three Mass Effect games and finally started Andromeda. First, if you’re like me and were way behind on the series, there is no connection between the original trilogy and Andromeda. Much to my chagrin, there is no need to play the first three or know anything about the previous story.
    • Reviews
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    982 words
  • Mass Effect 2 Halfway Point (Spoilers). 2017-04-05. Continuing with Mass Effect week here on the ol’ blog… I’m starting this draft on March 22, but again I probably won’t publish it until after I finish Mass Effect 3. There are story spoilers below if you haven’t finished the game. Mass Effect 2 is a much, much larger and longer game than Mass Effect 1. I’m well over 20 hours into the game, and I don’t even think I’ve gotten to the halfway point yet.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    829 words
  • Mass Effect 2 Replayed (Spoilers). 2017-04-06. Continuing with Mass Effect week… I’m writing this Mass Effect 2 “review” on Tuesday, March 28th. I finished ME2 on Saturday. It took 31 hours, according to ManicTime, which is actually a lot less than I expected. I thought ME2 was huge compared to the first one and would take at least twice as long, but apparently it only felt bigger. There were definitely more cut scenes to watch in ME2.
    • Reviews
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    1,187 words
  • Mass Effect 3 Halfway Point (Spoilers). 2017-04-07. Mass Effect week continues… I don’t know how far into Mass Effect 3 I’ve gotten at this writing (March 29th), but I’ve just gotten the Quarrians on board the Normandy. Percentage-wise, I have no idea where that is in the game. I’m just guessing it’s the half-way point. I have some initial impressions which I’ll write down, and as usual, I’ll follow it up with another post when I finish the game.
    • Reviews
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    1,849 words
  • Mass Effect 3 Finished (Spoilers). 2017-04-14. Whoops. Forgot to publish this dramatic conclusion to Mass Effect week. I finished Mass Effect 3 on Friday night, March 31st, completing my play through of the original trilogy. I spent a total of 42 hours playing it, but I restarted it twice so you can probably throw 6 or 7 hours away. (And if you’re keeping tracking of days and hours played, yes I played these games a ton in March.
    • Reviews
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    1,367 words
  • Mass Effect Andromeda – 50 Hours In. 2017-04-15. Possibly some spoilers below if you haven’t reached Kadara. So this game has pretty much taken over my life, as I figured it would. Honestly I think this is why I put off playing Mass Effect 3 for so long. These Bioware games are really hazardous to your health. :) The first three games took over my life, too, but I played them more quickly than I might have at the time they came out.
    • Reviews
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    1,395 words

2017-06

  • Far Cry 5 Outrage Hype!. 2017-06-01. Hey look, I downloaded the fan kit with ready-made images for blog posts! There wasn’t much happening Friday the 26th except some kind of Far Cry 5 reveal, so I’ll see if I can summon up some words about it. From what I can tell, Far Cry 5 is going to be essentially the same gameplay as Far Cry 2, 3, 4, and Primal, except it will be set in America with a Christian cult as the bad guys, and of course, that’s where the controversy begins.
    • Pre-Release
    • Single-Player
    799 words

2017-11

  • Snap Judgment – Necropolis (Brutal Edition). 2017-11-03. Not surprisingly, there was a Steam sale for Halloween, and one of the games that’s been on my wish list for a long time was really cheap: Necropolis. They apparently made some changes from the original launch version and now call it the “Brutal Edition.” I didn’t want to buy it, because even though it was only $4.49, I didn’t want to send the signal that it was “okay” to release an incomplete buggy game at launch and then fix it later.
    • Reviews
    • Single-Player
    • Steam
    883 words

2018-03

  • Life is Strange. 2018-03-05. Steam is having yet another one of those sales, and I saw that a lot of Square Enix games were available cheap. Life is Strange, for example, is available for $5. It’s one of those games that everyone says is fantastic. It also happens that the first episode is available for free, so I thought I’d try it out and see if I wanted to spend the $5 for the entire thing.
    • Single-Player
    • Steam
    689 words

2018-05

  • Ryse: Son of Rome. 2018-05-14. You play Marius, a Roman soldier with a gruff Sean Bean-style accent. The main reason to play Ryse: Son of Rome is because you bought it for $7 in a Steam sale three years ago, and you’re bored of everything else and desperate for something-anything-new and interesting to play. (Without the bother and expense of spending $60+ on actual new games.) That being said, it’s actually not a bad game.
    • Reviews
    • Single-Player
    1,244 words

2018-07

  • Monthly Recap – June 2018. 2018-07-02. Games Played It's true, I have a nearly limitless supply of images from Dark Souls to put into my posts. Dark Souls Remastered, 65 hours. It feels like I’ve played a lot more than this, actually. I now know this is beyond the limit of how much I can play a controller game in a month. (I remember once thinking that controller games were easier on my hands than WASD mouse-and-keyboard games, boy was *that* wrong.
    • MMORPG
    • Single-Player
    • Steam
    331 words
  • BioShock Remastered. 2018-07-16. Way back in May I was looking for an easy game to play*, and I found the Remastered editions of BioShock and BioShock 2 in my Steam library. They appeared there for free when those editions were released, because I owned the original games. My original plan was to play BioShock 2, because I have owned it since the Christmas sale of 2010 and have yet to play it, but I didn’t remember the original story very well so I started up the first game instead.
    • Single-Player
    831 words

2018-08

  • Diablo III for the First Time – Blaugust 12. 2018-08-12. The quest for non-WASD games to play using only the right hand on the mouse inevitably leads to either strategy games or isometric action RPGs. I’ve been through a number of strategy games already and I just can’t get into them right now. In the past, I’ve turned to Path of Exile in this kind of situation (because it’s free), but this time I decided to try out the trial version of Diablo III for the very first time.
    • Reviews
    • Single-Player
    847 words
  • Cyberpunk 2077 Gameplay Reaction – Blaugust 28. 2018-08-28. Screenshot from the Cyberpunk 2077 web site. Well at least it’s not a post about Battle for Azeroth. But it is another post where I say what I really think instead of what people want to hear, so I’ll probably get in trouble. Like Roger, and late-breaking addition Scopique, I took a look at GameSpot’s Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay demo. My reaction was a bit less enthusiastic. (Those two links are the only other two reactions I’ve seen to the video, by the way.
    • Pre-Release
    • Single-Player
    976 words

2018-09

  • Resuming Dark Souls In The Worst Place. 2018-09-12. My thumb is finally well enough that I can use a game controller again. This is both good news and bad news. The good news is that I can resume Dark Souls Remastered and finish my casual nostalgia tour, my (latest) video series Magnum Opus. The bad news is that I’m in a terrible place to resume the game. The last time I played Dark Souls Remastered before significant pain in my fingers and thumbs impacted my performance was June 23rd, when I spent all day working on Artorias (technically it only took 1 hour and 35 minutes, but it was spread out all day).
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    500 words
  • The Witcher’s (Hard) Easy Difficulty. 2018-09-13. Before getting back to Dark Souls, of course I have to finish The Witcher, which I started after I got bored with Battle for Azeroth. I’ve never finished it before. I think I’ve always crashed out of it somewhere in Chapter II. Probably because of all the tedious running back and forth in the Temple District. The first Witcher game gets a lot of flak for its odd combat system (and rightly so), but I’ve never been bothered by it.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    1,044 words
  • Telltale and Last Of Us. 2018-09-22. So I guess I’ll write something about games this time. The eye continues to improve, and focusing on nearby things gets a little bit better each day. (Writing this post has been the easiest so far.) There’s still a slight bit of soreness there which crops up in unexpected ways. Sometimes it hurts when I yawn or squeeze my eye shut, and sometimes it feels like there’s something like a hair stuck in the eye.
    • Consoles
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    642 words

2018-10

  • Fallout 4 Podcast Completed. 2018-10-02. I uploaded the last episode of my Fallout 4 podcast yesterday. It took me a while to get the concluding episode out due to injuring my hand and cataract surgery and, frankly, a bit of malaise, but it’s finally done. Here is the series page, though it displays the episodes in reverse order. It’s a serial podcast, so it’s better if you start at the first one. In all there are 21 episodes for a total of about 5 hours of listening.
    • Podcast
    • Single-Player
    244 words
  • The Last Of Us, YouTube, and a Ripsaw. 2018-10-22. I just realized this image is pretty similar to the Horizon Zero Dawn image in my last post. I mentioned that I had abandoned The Last Of Us and gotten into Horizon Zero Dawn, so of course, right after that, I abandoned Horizon Zero Dawn and got back into The Last Of Us. You see, I was always interested in seeing the remainder of the story-I was just getting frustrated with the stealth mechanics.
    • Consoles
    • Single-Player
    • Videos
    1,577 words

2018-12

  • RimWorld First Impressions. 2018-12-10. The rest of the world has already played and finished with RimWorld, which I think has been in Early Access for quite some time, but I just started playing it. I happened to see Sean Sands from Gamers With Jobs playing it on their YouTube channel and thought it looked amazing, so I picked it up. I didn’t even wait for a sale, because I wanted to jump into it while I was interested.
    • Reviews
    • Single-Player
    • Steam
    354 words
  • Endgame Viable Awards 2018. 2018-12-31. It’s time once against for the prestigious Endgame Viable Awards for 2018. 2017 Awards 2016 Awards 2015 Awards I give out three awards for PC games only: Game of the Year, MMORPG of the Year, and MMORPG Expansion of the Year. In my warped worldview “Game of the Year” sort of implies Steam game of the year (because that’s the only place I buy PC games) and excludes traditional MMORPGs.
    • MMORPG
    • Single-Player
    • Steam
    1,055 words

2019-01

  • Games Played – 2018. 2019-01-01. Every screenshot of RimWorld kind of looks the same unfortunately. First, just the month of December, though I hardly need ManicTime to tell me this: RimWorld, 142 hours. The final tally changed right up to the end of the final day. Incidentally, as I look at the blah screenshot of RimWorld up there, I should say that I never found the game the slightest bit interesting from looking at other people’s screenshots or descriptions.
    • Roundup
    • Single-Player
    338 words
  • RimWorld Anecdotes. 2019-01-02. Raiders tunneling into Ancient Danger. Again, the screenshot looks dumb and meaningless. Just trust me when I say this was a super dramatic, white knuckle, holy crap moment. People on Twitter are probably sick of hearing about RimWorld by now, but blog readers can enjoy these quips for the first time! Unless you follow me on Twitter, then you’ve probably seen them before. But now you can read more about what I meant with the power of more words!
    • Musings
    • Single-Player
    • Steam
    2,082 words
  • My Brief Dwarf Fortress Time. 2019-01-11. I saw @Stargrace and some other folks talking about Dwarf Fortress in the blogosphere and on Twitter. It’s that game that has that reputation for being the greatest game ever, and also the most impossible to actually play, that I’ve been hearing about for the last ten years. I think I first heard about it on the Gamers With Jobs podcast years and years ago. It dawned on me that I’ve always heard it’s a game that sounds similar to RimWorld, and I love RimWorld, so therefore by the transitive property I should also love Dwarf Fortress.
    • Reviews
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    1,749 words
  • Return to Subnautica. 2019-01-14. Well we’re starting off the week by deciding *not* to post the post I was going to post about why blogging is such work for me right now, because of the reasons I explain in that post, because I just don’t want anyone to know how much work it is, which quickly kills off the era of “2019 is when I post my half-finished drafts even when they’re not done instead of letting them accumulate in Drafts for years on end.
    • Musings
    • Single-Player
    • Steam
    581 words
  • Building vs. Simulation – Dwarf Fortress. 2019-01-15. So a weird thing happened. I played more Dwarf Fortress. And then a little more. And I kind of started liking it. “It’s really not that hard once you learn it.” This is Bekarlogem, my third fortress. Bekarlogem apparently means "Dippedpainted" which makes me giggle every time for some reason. Ha! Just kidding. It’s still super hard. Every screen has a different method of navigating the menus. Sometimes it’s arrow keys.
    • Musings
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    839 words
  • The Fall of Bekarlogem – Dwarf Fortress. 2019-01-20. I imagine if you draw a Venn diagram of “people who play Dwarf Fortress” and “people who are programmers,” the two circles would overlap quite a bit. Unfortunately for me, I’m a programmer, so I think I’m more vulnerable to this DF sickness than most people. Playing the game is quite a bit like using a text editor, considering how much you use the arrow keys to select things in rhythmic patterns.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    • Stories
    764 words
  • The Fall of Guzilingiz – Dwarf Fortress. 2019-01-23. There’s supposed to be a diacritic or something on one of those vowels in Guzilingiz, but who can be bothered with such things. I started another fortress in Dwarf Fortress. Guess what? If you guessed “werelizards destroyed the whole fortress again” you’d be exactly right. Yeah it's another scene of unspeakable carnage and horror. So much gore splashed on the walls here it couldn't even get an R-rating if it were a movie.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    542 words
  • Gusilingiz: The Videos. 2019-01-24. This post is about the boring inside baseball minutia of audios and videos and scripting, so beware. I uploaded the four videos comprising the entire brief lifespan of my Gusilingiz fortress to my YouTube channel. Since I did some experimental stuff in those videos, I thought I would document it all here, because I love this stuff and you can’t stop me. By the way, I spelled Gusilingiz wrong in my last post, in case you’re an expert on the dwarven language and noticed that glaring error.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    • Videos
    2,417 words

2019-05

  • Sekiro Completed. 2019-05-25. I finished my first blind playthrough of Sekiro* this past week, so I can finally post my thoughts about it. It took me two months and two days, or 76 game hours by the game’s accounting. I recorded 95 roughly 25 minute videos documenting the journey. There might be some minor spoilers below, but nothing about the story. I'm part of the 22.7% club! Now I enter the second phase of playing every From Software game: Learning about all of the things I missed or did wrong the first time, as I finally go around reading about the game (a little bit, at least-there is still a lot I can discover about the story and different endings on my own).
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    2,247 words

2019-10

  • The Last Of Us Remastered Completed (PS4). 2019-10-28. The last time I wrote about The Last Of Us, I said, “I think I’m about 3/4 finished. I’ll probably get through the rest of it this weekend.” That was over a year ago. Red Dead Infected I wasn’t planning to play it again. I mentioned that I just bought The Division 2 on the PS4 because it runs better on console than it does on my PC. I’ve been playing that now and then, trying to catch back up to where I left off in the PC free weekend.
    • Consoles
    • Single-Player
    749 words

2020-10

  • Horizon Zero Dawn (PS4). 2020-10-02. I would have sworn that I’d written a post about Horizon Zero Dawn at some point in the past two years, but apparently I haven’t. So here it is. In 2017, everyone lost their minds over Horizon Zero Dawn, a game which was a PS4 exclusive at the time. I thought it looked cool, but I couldn’t play it. In 2018, I bought a PS4 Pro on sale, and Horizon Zero Dawn was one of the exclusive titles that I intended to play on it (along with Bloodborne and a slew of Naughty Dog games).
    • Consoles
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    1,253 words

2020-11

  • Pathologic 2. 2020-11-26. While everyone else is playing Shadowlands for some reason, I just got a game called Pathologic 2. It’s been on my wish list for over a year and I just saw it was on sale for $20 last week. I first heard about this game when I saw a YouTuber mention it while playing Death Stranding. They suggested it was, like Death Stranding itself, one of those atypical experimental sorts of games that more people should play, so I put it on my wish list.
    • Reviews
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    841 words
  • Pathologic 2, Addendum. 2020-11-27. I mentioned before that I hadn’t run into any “difficulty walls” in Pathologic 2 yet. Well, now I have! In my first playthrough, I got about 12 hours into the game, which put me at the start of Day 4-the beginning of Act III, where the story really starts going pear-shaped-before I reached a dead-end, no-win scenario. My hunger level was so extreme and my health was so low that I simply couldn’t walk far enough from my last save point to find any more food, and I died over and over and over again.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    316 words

2020-12

  • Pathologic 2, Credits. 2020-12-24. Just a quick note for the archives, to report that I did finish Pathologic 2, by which I mean I reached the end credits. I wouldn’t say that I “won” or “beat” the game by any means, since everyone died, and I myself died about a million times by the time I got to the end. A YouTube commenter quite explicitly informed me that I was playing my first blind playthrough using trial and error with no foreknowledge or wiki guidance very wrong, perhaps because I simply lacked the brain capacity to understand the game.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    525 words