Endgame Viable

I tried out Pillars of Eternity next in The Great 2020 Holiday RPG Game Blitz, a game that I got for free on the Epic Game Store. (765 words.)

I only bought one new game in 2020 so it will be very easy to pick my own personal Game of the Year for 2020. But I also talk about a few other noteworthy games I played during the year. (560 words.)

Over the winter holidays, I got into an isometric Baldur’s Gate-style RPG kick and played several games in that genre. The first was Wasteland 2, a post-apocalyptic RPG in the style of the original Fallout 1 and 2. (733 words.)

I have rebuilt Endgame Viable as a static site, which means massive changes for me, the developer, and some changes for you, the reader. First, it probably looks completely different. Second, there are some things that you won’t be able to do on the new site, at least not initially: Search for posts. Update: The workaround is to type “your search term site:endgameviable.com” into Google. Comment on posts. For comments, I wired up a somewhat janky private Remark42 server. Like posts. Unfortunately those were the major sacrifices I had to make in order to jump to a static site. I know there’s at least a couple of people out there who still like to comment on blog posts, and I hate to take away that feature, but Progress Demands Sacrifice, as they say. (I’m sure somebody, somewhere says that.) For the time being, you can ping me on Twitter at @endgameviable, or yell at me in the Blaugust Discord. (289 words.)

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. (That last part might be true. Pathologic 2 is so far outside the mainstream norms of gaming that it’s not even on the map.) But somehow I still reached the end, which should give you some idea of the narrative possibilities of the game. You can lose badly, die repeatedly, make terrible choices, and still advance the narrative and reach the end of the story. Or “an” end, at least. (525 words.)

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. I couldn’t even begin to work on the objectives I was supposed to work on (saving the town from the plague). (316 words.)

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. (841 words.)

This is a post that I’ve meant to write, started to write, given up writing, re-started writing, given up again, and now re-started for the hundredth time over the course of the last three or four years. In the post-2020 election world, it seems like a good time to try again to publicly codify these things. (I’m reminded why I’ve never finished these posts before. The more I dig into my thought processes, the more I find a complicated and nearly-limitless set of rules.) (1356 words.)

It’s quite a thrill to find out some random word or phrase or sound you recorded months ago just happens to fit perfectly into a piece of music. Also, it’s a great distraction from the election, which is tomorrow. It feels like all of society here in the U.S. is on hold until we see how it turns out. So it’s a lot of waiting and hand-wringing for us here. Personally I’m tired of the speculating, and I’m ready to rip the band-aid off, to find out which version of Awful we actually end up with. (459 words.)

Sometimes I cope with daily stress by staring at hundreds of YouTube video clips of The Chase, stuffing food into my mouth, feeling smugly content that I can answer every question about American Football. Sometimes I cope with daily stress by making a thing. This is the latter. It was an idea that just popped into my head one day, fully formed. What if I export the isolated microphone track from one of my game videos, go through it and clip out any noteworthy words or phrases out of context, and set them to a beat? (134 words.)