Hi! I’m an old reclusive Gen-X software developer who writes about games or projects I’m working on or what’s happening in the world. Not AI-generated since 2012, despite what ZeroGPT says. Except the images. :)

The 2023 Baldur’s Gate 3 Playthrough Index

Trying Betrayer

56 words.

Here’s a video I recorded in October of the first hour of a game called Betrayer. It’s a first-person exploration/mystery sort of game set in the time period of Jamestown. It’s a neat-looking game, and I liked the idea of it, but I never finished it because I thought the pacing was a bit too slow. (56 words.)

Fallout 4 – Wrapping Up

629 words.

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. (629 words.)

GW2HoT – That Was Fun

324 words.

To follow up a bit on Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns, I played it a lot right up until the day that Fallout 4 came out, and I haven’t logged in a single time since. Which suggests that I was deluding myself for those few weeks I was playing it and having fun. Okay, that’s not true. I got my money’s worth. It felt like the good old days after GW2 launched when it seemed like this game had re-invented MMORPGs and changed everything. (324 words.)

Trying Bound By Flame

67 words.

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. (67 words.)

Fallout 4 – Better Than Expected

467 words.

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. (467 words.)

ARK – Um It’s Got Issues

529 words.

Here’s my advice: Do not buy ARK right now. At least, don’t buy it with any expectation of actually playing it. Because on my 12GB system it runs out of memory and crashes. If you run the “low memory” 4GB version it doesn’t crash, but it runs horribly slow. There is a good two minutes of loading screen to wait through before geting into the game (literally-I timed it). Then in order to get it to run at an acceptable frame rate (which to me is a rock-solid 60 fps, but I suppose in a pinch 30-40 fps will do) you have to disable almost every graphical setting, and then the game is painful to look at. (529 words.)

ARK – I “Finally” Bought It

57 words.

Okay, I just caved and bought ARK in the Steam Halloween sale for $20. Normally I try not to buy Early Access games unless they’re $10 or $15 but I keep hearing everyone talk about this game and I didn’t want to be the last person in the world to buy it … on launch day. :) (57 words.)

GW2HoT – Obey The Zerg

894 words.

Somewhat to my own surprise, I bought and installed Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns on Saturday. The first thing I did on my Necromancer was spec the Reaper thingy and train the ability to use a greatsword. That was pretty cool. I enjoyed the greatsword on my Guardian so it’s nice to have it on the character that I actually play the most. The game was nice enough to give me an exotic Reaper’s Greatsword of Air to play with, too. (894 words.)

The Light, It Burns

221 words.

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. (221 words.)

Progression Report – September 2015

157 words.

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. (157 words.)

Progression Report – August 2015

182 words.

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. (182 words.)

The Great Blaugust Flame-Out

240 words.

I flamed out of Blaugust, so I guess I can now break my own self-imposed Blaugust rule, which was not to write about Blaugust. There was this one day that I hadn’t scheduled a post, and it was a long, terrible day at work, and when I got home I had to decide whether to try to find enough energy to write a post real quick or play a game instead, and of course that was a no-brainer so I didn’t get a post out that day. (240 words.)

Dark Souls – Catching Up

528 words.

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). (528 words.)

Quake CTF Nostalgia – CC vs. DPS

315 words.

This is off topic for this blog, but my old Crayola Clan mate ]CC[-Orange converted some of our Quake CTF match demos into videos. It’s not an exact copy of what we would have seen on our monitors back then (we probably ran at 800×600, and the fov looks higher than I remember) but it’s close. Most of the time I was average, but this one Quake 2 match I was “on” so this is how I will choose to remember my performance from the good old days. (315 words.)

Pay-to-Win

371 words.

I don’t think I’ve written about pay-to-win before, mostly on purpose. Frankly I think most of the outrage is entirely manufactured. But I posted a brief comment on Jef Reahard’s controversial MassivelyOP post to the effect that “pay-to-win” is one of those emotionally-charged terms like “climate change” or “gun control” that evokes instantaneous knee-jerk, black-and-white responses, so it’s a dangerous road to travel as a blogger. Because in reality it’s a very complicated subject with many shades of gray, and it requires us to sit down and think long and hard about our gaming goals and values and who’s got time for any of that? (371 words.)