The Recluse Report - May 2025 Part 1

16 May, 2025. 4,026 words.

Gaming

The Devil In Me

Finished this one. It was meh. Not scary. Story makes no sense. No consequences for any actions. People die and then come back for no reason other than the trope demands it. No resolution for any of the mysteries. Forgotten immediately after finishing. Typical horror fare.

In my playthrough where I chose options randomly by dice roll, three of the five survived. You can always tell which ones they don’t expect the player to save because they don’t have any lines at the end of the game, and one of mine didn’t say anything at the end, just sat there.

Oblivion Remaster

I was unable to stop myself from buying it. It starts out exactly the same as the original. The first hour of Oblivion is incredibly boring, and I’ve played that stupid intro and interminable tutorial what feels like hundreds of times, to the point that I can’t stand Sir Patrick Stewart’s voice. “This is the hour of my doom” blah blah yada yada just die already so I can get out of these stupid sewers.

So I had to “get through” the beginning part in the remaster even though I kind of hated it. But I got to where it opens up, saved the game before stepping out of the tunnel, so I never have to do the intro again, and I’m looking forward to exploring it as a secondary game.

So far I’ve only wandered over to Cheydinhal with my wood elf archer. For all intents and purposes, it’s identical to original Oblivion. The game looks way different but it doesn’t play much different and the complexity (or lack thereof) of the NPC conversations in town definitely aren’t any different.

Incidentally, the game is a beast in terms of graphics usage. I assume it’s the new Crysis benchmark. On the High preset at 1440p it runs at like 15 fps on a GeForce 3070. But: See PC upgrade below.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Most every single-player RPG setting falls into one of these general vibes: Some Bankable IP, Military, Tolkien, or Japanese Anime. So it’s a rare treat to see a new game with a vibe that falls outside those tropes. Anything. Literally anything outside those tropes grabs my attention immediately.

And so it was that I noted the release of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 a while back, but I hesitated to buy it for fear that it would be all flash and no substance. A lot of games that look fantastic (i.e. every game based on a movie) turn out to be mediocre because they spent all their time and energy on motion capture and cut scenes while the gameplay is phoned in “default out-of-the-box game engine” fare.

I’m happy to say that they didn’t phone in the gameplay, and I can recommend it. It’s no Elden Ring or Baldur’s Gate 3, but it’s not bad. To be fair, the gameplay vibe is very anime even if it doesn’t look like anime, with the combat system being essentially a carbon copy of Final Fantasy XIII, with the addition of realtime quicktime events.

But the real star of Expedition 33 is the setting and the story (and the music). I can’t say enough good things about it. I find it very thought-provoking. So far, at least. I’m still in Act 1, so there’s plenty of time for it to plummet off a cliff. But I’m hopeful it won’t. The acting performances are very good.

There’s a big problem with the combat mechanics, though, and it was almost a deal-breaker for me. When facing a new enemy, it’s impossible to gauge when the attacks are going to land, and when you’re supposed to press the dodge (or parry) button, until you get killed enough times to get a feel for the speed of the attack animations and the rhythm of the combos. And you have to dodge to survive combat, especially on Hard difficulty. Many of the attack animations are deliberately designed to trick you into dodging at the wrong time (you know, enemies that slam their club down but they hit the ground instead of you, enemies that pull their spear back to stab you but then just sit there for a few seconds before moving again, stuff like that). It’s a recent growing trend in gaming that I despise. Undoubtedly game designers and animators are thinking “oh no players are getting too smart and too experienced, the bosses in the first Dark Souls game are laughably easy now, we need to do something to make things harder for them.”

Anyway, for that reason, the first six or seven hours of the game were very frustrating for me, before I got a better feel for the parameters of the gameplay and what the game expected of me and, more importantly, how I could master the negative feelings of being tricked constantly by the attack animations.

Recently I’ve been thinking there’s another big problem with the combat mechanics, but it’s more in the player’s favor. The realtime dodging is a unique twist on the turn-based system and a worthy experiment, but I think they’ve undermined the foundation of a typical turn-based RPG combat system. If you dodge successfully, there’s really no need to engage with any of the rest of the RPG systems in order to win battles. So far, at least. For example, since dodging negates all incoming damage, you’re guaranteed to win a battle if you’re mostly successful at dodging (because the enemies have no way to negate your damage). You don’t even have to risk any parries. Therefore it doesn’t matter a whit which Pictos or Luminos or Skills you have equipped, rendering all of those systems moot. They only determine how quickly or slowly you’re going to win the battles.

So I’ve realized that the main and only thing you need to build your characters for in combat are the small windows of time when you encounter a brand new enemy you’ve never seen before, when you don’t know the timing of the dodges. Those are basically the only periods of time when you’re vulnerable and it’s possible to fail in combat, barring lapses in concentration.

That’s my two cents, at least. I talk about this a lot in the videos I’m recording while playing. It’s the curse of having played video games for over 30 years. That competitive instinct to find ways to optimize gameplay for maximum success is burned into me.

Anyway, my current character builds have all points in Vitality and Defense and zero points in anything else, and the only Skills/Pictos/Luminos I care about for survival are the ones that grant Health buffs or AP or Shell buffs. I’m currently near the end of Act 1 on Hard difficulty and have had zero expedition TPKs except for that cursed Chromatic Troubador, which I gave up on. Except for that one, I’ve won every battle on the first try.

Also, the mouse-and-keyboard controls are phoned in, like the game developers had never even heard of a mouse or keyboard before, like so many other games before it. (Honestly I fear we may be approaching a time when younger folks writing games have literally never used a mouse or keyboard before and can’t even conceive of a world where they exist.) Don’t even bother trying to play without a controller. Luckily it’s not action-oriented enough to hurt my left thumb too much. Most of the time I can even use my left index finger to work the left stick for moving around without any fear of getting killed.

On a more positive note, the music in Clair Obscur is fantastic. One of the best soundtracks I’ve heard in a while, probably since Nier Automata.

By the way, I still don’t know who Clair is. But I’m only in Act 1. I’m guessing it’s like Horizon Zero Dawn, where you didn’t learn what the heck those three title words together meant until toward the end of the game. It’s so random-sounding it was like playing a game called Stick Umbrella Heaven.

Age of Wonders 4

I saw Age of Wonders 4 on sale and bought it impulsively, knowing for sure I wouldn’t be able to get into it for more than an hour before remembering that these kinds of games have long since lost their luster for me.

As it turns out, I was right. It looks cool, it seems perfectly fine for this type of game, but these big 4X games are all the same now: It’s like playing a game where you have to take a college calculus course before you can even start clicking buttons on the screen. They have tutorials that tell you what to do, but when they tell you what to do, it goes in one ear and out the other immediately, so you have no idea what to do on the second game.

I’d love to design a UI for a 4X game. I’d hide 90% of the complexity of the game at the start, and then slowly ask the player to opt-into more and more options and information over the course of time. Instead of, you know, presenting the player with a thousand screens of incomprehensible words and numbers right at the start, thereby ensuring that the games are unapproachable to anyone who isn’t already deeply invested in the genre.

I have fond memories of Empire on the Amiga and one iteration of Civilization (was it Civ II or Civ II Call to Power? One of those) on the PC in the 2000s. I played them to death and thought they were the greatest games ever made. Every single attempt to play a 4X game since Civ II has been a dismal failure for me. That mythical “just one more turn” thing does not exist and I have no idea what any of you are talking about.

New Gaming PC

It wasn’t exactly triggered by Oblivion–I’ve known this would be the year I upgraded my PC since January–but I finally ordered and received a new gaming PC to replace my 2021 PC. (That’s how I make big purchases… I decide I’m going to buy a thing for sure, then wait six months thinking about it off and on, then I suddenly wake up one day and buy it.) I hope it lasts until 2030.

This is the first time I’ve ordered a pre-built gaming PC. It’s also the first time I’ve gotten an AMD processor, and the first time I’ve used liquid cooling instead of a fan.

I hate revealing PC specs because it’s like waving a big flag and yelling “hey look how much better my life is than yours!” but it’s an AMD Ryzen R9-9900X with a GeForce 5080. In practical terms, on the old PC (an i5 with GeForce 3070), the beastly Oblivion Remastered ran at about 15 fps on the High preset at 1440p. On the new PC, it runs at a solid 60 fps on the Ultra preset at 1440p.

It was more complicated to setup than I hoped. I’m old now so I’m fully entitled to every luxury, so I ordered a pre-built machine so I could pull it out of the box, plug it in, and go. However I didn’t account for the unpacking process, which involved taking the tempered glass side off, checking components, and removing packing material. (I didn’t want a tempered glass side but it’s impossible to find a gaming PC that doesn’t look like a 1960s Star Trek bridge console, unless you build it yourself and dig deep in the bowels of the underworld to find plain-looking parts.)

I also didn’t account for rearranging my desk setup. I have a dream that someday I might have a gaming setup where I don’t have spiderwebs of connecting wires coiling everywhere on the floor gathering dust. So I had a crazy idea to setup a second desk (a writing desk, which was my previous gaming desk), and place all of my PCs on the desk instead of the floor. I’ve never put a tower PC case anywhere but on the floor at any time since I got my first one for playing Doom somewhere in the mid-90s. To be clear, I have no interest whatsoever in looking at the case, I just want it off the floor in the hope that I can organize the wiring better, and so I don’t have to lean over so much to plug in USB cables.

And I definitely didn’t account for migrating all my games and applications to the new PC. Thankfully Steam has this feature where if it discovers another copy of Steam on the same network, it will copy the files across the local network instead of downloading them from the Internet, which saved a ton of time re-installing Oblivion and Clair Obscur. However that doesn’t help with any of the other stuff I’m likely to install on the new gaming PC, like a Python environment and Davinci Resolve and stuff like that. (The new gaming PC is also going to be the new video editing PC, obviously.)

Normally I have a gaming PC and a recording PC. Now I have a new gaming PC, an old gaming PC, and a recording PC. Eventually I want to coalesce that down to a new gaming PC and a new recording PC, and retire the old recording PC. It’s a rather daunting prospect to think about all that software and hardware migration, though, so I’m going rather slow and I’ll likely have three machines for a while.

Side comment: It’s shocking how big and heavy gaming PCs are now. Somewhere around 2014, my gaming PC was a mid-tower case and light as a feather. Today it’s like a mini-refrigerator in size and weight, bigger and heavier even than the massive steel tower cases from the 2000s. I almost need a hand cart to move it.

Media Production

I have a conundrum with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. When I record a game series, I like it to be sort of a documentary showing the arc of my reactions and experiences in the game from start to finish. Ideally I’ll be struggling to play at the start and then overcome impossible odds to master the game and win a huge victory for God and country by the end.

Well, you see, Clair Obscur has been a roller coaster. I started on Hard difficulty. It was fine except I died a lot because it’s impossible to predict when to dodge until you’ve practiced the fights by trial-and-error. I switched to Normal difficulty and it got significantly better, but then I reached another point of frustration and switched it to Easy difficulty. Then I found the combat became boring and I wasn’t even paying attention. So I switched it back to Normal difficulty. (I got to the continent area following the Gestral Village.)

Then I had a sudden urge to restart again on Hard, now that I had learned a lot of things I could use to avoid dying in every fight, and thought of a strategy to put every attribute point into Vitality and Defense. And because I remembered that I played 95% of Baldur’s Gate 3 on Hard, but that little bit I didn’t play on Hard cost me the achievement for completing the game on Hard, which has annoyed me ever since.

The problem is, the video series now has hours of repeated content. Do I cut out the whole part I played on Normal and Easy? Or do I leave it in? It’s better to leave it in for the sake of documenting my experience of the game. But it’s better to cut it out for the sake of the viewer experience. Or do I cut out all the parts I replayed on Hard? Then nobody will believe that I got through all that stuff on Hard after I spent so much time complaining about it and dying again and again. Decisions, decisions. These are the kinds of difficult decisions that plague me when preparing game videos for the channel.

Undoubtedly I’ll take the easy path and just upload everything as-is, leaving the burden of skipping things or not to the viewer.

Media Consumption

The Last of Us season 2 (Max). Complex feelings. It’s not as good as season 1. In season 2, I find myself thinking, “Just skip to Abby’s story, that’s where the real meat is.” Show-Ellie’s story is kind of hard to watch, to be honest, because she’s so unsympathetic in season 2 (intentionally, to be fair). If it weren’t for Dina, this season would be completely unwatchable. I’ve just heard they’re splitting Part II of the game over season 2 and season 3 of the show. Yuck.

The Studio (AppleTV via. Amazon). Seth Rogan has never been one of my favorite comedic actors, but this show is pretty funny. Not riotously funny, but pretty funny, in a “ah okay I get what you’re going for there” kind of way. Also they’re obsessed with moving camera “one-take shots.”

Taskmaster series 19 (YouTube). I’m over my most recent Taskmaster uber-fan phase so I’m not as psyched as I previously was, but it’s still pretty funny.

Turning Point: Vietnam (Netflix). Good documentary. Every time there’s a new Vietnam documentary, there’s more and more details and interviews from the Vietnamese perspective. The U.S. perspective is always the same: What was that for?

Various True Crime Shows (Netflix). I got into another rabbit hole of watching true crime shows on Netflix. There’s something oddly comforting about the fake scary music and detectives droning on about their investigations in that cop-lingo affectation. One was a show about JonBenet Ramsey, which was an OJ-level 24/7 atomic bomb in the tabloid world but I steadfastly refused to pay attention at the time because of how gross the whole thing seemed. (However I now know that the publicly-believed story that the parents did it seems to have no credible evidence.)

Oceanliner Designs (YouTube). I found another weird YouTube rabbit hole of Titanic-related videos, and found a fairly respectable documentary-ish channel Oceanliner Designs, which did a number of “ship X sinking in real time” animation videos of famous shipwreck disasters (Lusitania, etc.). I love finding these super niche channels doing mini-documentaries, and I always wonder how and why they do so much work day in and day out. Do people still think they’re going to be “discovered” one day if they make good content, then become the next Netflix true crime documentarian? There’s been decades of proof that “luck” and “connections” and “money” are the driving factors in standing out in democratized content, so surely not. Are they making any money at all from their Patreons? I can’t even conceive of a world where Patreon subs could pay anyone’s rent.

The Raven’s Eye (YouTube). I don’t know if it’s just my algorithm bias, but I see a lot of good content channels based out of Australia and New Zealand. In a similar vein to Oceanliner Designs, which documents famous shipwrecks (among other things), I stumbled on this channel that documents obscure and famous air disasters (among other similar disaster-type things) with a thicker Australian (I think?) accent.

Disaster content seems pretty popular on YouTube. Grim to be sure, but this channel, at least, is well-made and more informative than exploitative (imo), and to be honest, I’d never heard of almost any of these stories. Based on this channel, I’m not sure how humanity survived the 60s, 70s, and 80s. There were so many huge industrial accidents and disasters around the world from human error or mechanical failures that caused hundreds or thousands of people to die.

“In these troubled times,” I find it oddly comforting to hear about these horrible stories from the past, to put current events in perspective. Today, my biggest headache in life (besides actual headaches, see below) is getting angry after the president tweets something idiotic, but that pales in comparison to the problems of someone living next to an industrial plant improperly handling enough explosive fuel to incinerate a whole town.

I’m kind of jealous of these sorts of pseudo-documentary channels, because I wish I’d thought of it first. A good documentary-style narrative is one of the coolest pieces of media out there, imo. It’s the kind of thing I wish I had the time and energy to make, but at this point it’s all been done before, and there’s nothing left to document.

Home Life

The Continuing Coughing Saga

So I’ve been on an acid reducer and a mild allergy med for half a month now trying to tame a persistent cough that got really bad some weeks ago. The good news is that the acid reducer is helping, the bad news is that the allergy med doesn’t seem to be doing anything, and I still have a persistent dry cough and I have a lot of headaches and my lungs seem to be laboring more than usual in the last month. I get winded very easily just by walking around the house a little bit, and when I was moving a desk around and setting up a new computer it felt like I was moving a piano.

So, I have two more doctor appointments coming up next week and the week after. The first is my regular yearly primary care doctor checkup, which luckily just happens to be right when I needed one. So I’m going to tell him about the ENT results and ask him what’s up with my lungs–if I might have gotten covid and didn’t realize it, or if I might have picked up a mild pneumonia, because it feels like the remnants of pneumonia, or some other respiratory chest illness. I’m hoping he’ll order some chest x-rays and give me an antibiotic prescription.

I’m trying not to think about the fact that I happen to be the exact same age as my mother was when she learned she had lung cancer and died a year later (she was a smoker though, and I’ve never smoked).

The second doctor appointment the week after is the followup with the ENT, and I’m going to tell him that the allergy thing didn’t seem to do anything, but the acid reducer did, but regardless I’m still coughing and I have a lot of headaches, which I suppose could be a side effect of one of the two meds he gave me.

In any case, interacting with the American healthcare system continues to suck. It’s a tremendous act of will to make the decision to seek out care and subject oneself to this bureaucratic torture rather than just ride it out and hope for the best like our plucky forefathers in covered wagons. And I’m one of the lucky ones with decent insurance.

Car Battery Saga

By the way, I mentioned my failing car battery a while back. I use a battery charger now every time I get back from the store, and I haven’t yet been stranded anywhere from an electrical system failure. Still need to get it to the dealership to check the alternator (and get an inspection).

Today, though, I discovered an additional thing to add to the repair list: The front right tire of the car is suddenly pretty flat. So I have to charge up my little battery-powered handheld air pump to fix that, too.

In the back of my mind, I’ve been thinking it’s about time to trade it in and get a small truck. The prospect of buying a new vehicle is pretty daunting though.

World Context

The new pope is American. This is apparently significant. I was somewhat surprised how much the pope stuff broke through the Trump stuff in the news here.
Courts are starting to reverse the actions of people being abducted off the streets by secret police, so there’s still a tiny shred of Constitutional law left in the U.S.
Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: America (since 1/2025), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022).

Bye!