Games and Stuff - December 2025 Part 2

31 December, 2025. 2,945 words.

Oh hey, it’s the end of the year. Not a great year for me, what with finding out I have cancer and all. Then again, it’s possible I could have been dead by now if I hadn’t found out about it, since I had a big ol’ tumor in the back of my brain. Now, it’s all managed and under control. So good news, bad news, there.

Steam Winter Sale

I haven’t seen anything that looks interesting in the Winter Sale. It’s the curse of having been around video games for forty years: Every game looks the same.

Even the games I put on my wishlist look pretty meh. It’s always the same: This one looks like too many cut scenes and not enough gameplay, that one looks like a copy of a game I’ve already played, and almost every single game that comes out falls into one of those two categories.

Ashes of Creation

I saw a Bhagpuss post about Ashes of Creation and went looking for it on Steam. It’s there, 15% off, so I bought it. I had such great success with Stars Reach, playing it for a grand total of twelve minutes, so surely this one will also be a slam dunk.

True story: My first time launching Ashes of Creation, I created a character, zoned in, turned the camera a bit, and a breaker tripped in my house. To be fair, I had an electric heater plugged into the same circuit at the time, but I found it an amusing game review.

I didn’t log back in for many more days. I ran around a bit, clicked through and ignored all the dialogs, killed 5 sickly goblins with ease while trying to ignore all the other players, looked at a skill tree for a while after leveling up, and logged back out.

Side rant: If I never see another skill tree in my life, it will be too soon. It’s always a heavy sigh moment. “This again,” I think. “I’ve done this a hundred million times already, and it’s always the same. Why can’t they automatically pick the most optimal things for me because math doesn’t lie and nobody has ever balanced a game at launch time and if you do it’s homogenized to the point that making choices doesn’t matter anyway.”

In this day and age where AI does everything for us, there should be a check box to enable that says, “Let AI pick through this nonsense.” That’s what AI should be used for in games.

To be fair, it doesn’t actually need AI, it just needs a game designer to package all the tedious fiddly bits into presets for casual gamers who don’t want a wall of college-level study in the first 15 minutes of the game. So I can just click the one button that says “maximize DPS” or “maximize self-healing” or whatever and it’ll pick all the skills for me. Everybody always wants the same things, every single time, and there’s no actual choices to be made. Sigh.

Anyway. I went back the next day and ran to the next quest hub, where I was given a horse and had to attune to a new Aetheryte Crystal, I mean, Big Rock Thingy or whatever they’re called in Ashes of Creation. I got another quest but I couldn’t be bothered to continue and logged out. Total play time has not yet reached 30 minutes.

I genuinely can’t think of any reason I might want to play a new MMORPG when there’s a million hours of game time to play in the existing MMORPGs. Even if I just limit myself to only the Big Two of WoW and FFXIV. Especially when the new MMORPG is blatantly repeating the exact same things in the Big Two, but less polished.

But for what it is, it’s fine I guess. It worked. It’s just not very exciting. The combat seemed like a mishmash hybrid of different systems.

ARC Raiders

I kept seeing ARC Raiders on the Top Sellers list, and I saw a couple people mention it, so I thought I’d try it out. It was slightly discounted. I saw one review mention that it could be played single-player.

I didn’t have high hopes, though. Modern multiplayer games typically serve only as a platform to socialize with your friends, while the gameplay is an afterthought. In other words, the fun of playing the game is mostly the fun of hanging out with your friends, and unrelated to the game mechanics.

ARC Raiders looks really nice. I skipped all the cut scenes so I have no idea what the setting is all about. It’s an “extraction shooter” which I have zero experience with, and would be hard pressed to explain. I think you’re supposed to run in, do stuff, and then leave before a timer expires, or something like that.

It didn’t exactly leap off the screen as the most fun thing I’ve ever played. The shooting mechanics were okay, but it looks like a lot of inventory management and sorting through loot, which is a big turn-off. And I spent most of my time just kind of running alone from place to place on a map that seemed way too big, most of which was devoid of anything to interact with.

Occasionally some flying drone robot would fly by to shoot, and that was about it. My initial weapon was a light machinegun that fired like six bullets before you had to reload for twenty seconds, during which you couldn’t do anything except stand there and get shot, which isn’t exactly a fun experience. Eventually a flying drone started electroshocking me, interrupting my reload every time, so I couldn’t fight back, and I died.

Still, it was cheap, and it looked nice, so I tried another round. This time the audio was all distorted for unknown reasons. (I think because I had just upgraded my Nvidia driver but didn’t reboot.) And there was a gigantic crab robot roaming around the map. I avoided it and set out toward a loot location, armed with my new plan to verify I was supposed to go to one of the elevators. Once again there was almost nothing to do on the way to the location I picked out.

Then I got another shock when I saw a player running around the same building I was entering. So I quit out and returned the game hehe.

I really don’t know what I ever saw in those 90s MMORPG game worlds where other people can invade my space.

Final Fantasy XIV

I got a proverbial wild hair to log into Final Fantasy XIV. Playing Ashes of Creation reminded me that there are really only two MMORPGs good enough for casual play… it’s World of Warcraft for more nostalgia-driven players and FFXIV for more mechanics-driven players, and that’s it.

First of all, finding the right web site to renew your FFXIV subscription is a massive chore. Square Enix’s bizarre interconnecting system of web sites is one of the worst out there.

Then I had to remember how to copy my settings from another PC to my current gaming PC, another annoying thing about FFXIV. This is one of the best MMORPGs, but they don’t make it easy to return to after any amount of absence.

After all that, and waiting through a massive download of some 150 Gb, I logged in, looked around, had no interest in actually doing anything, and logged out again.

For the record, my main is a Bard level 80 and I last left off the Main Scenario Quest about a half dozen quests into Endwalker. It didn’t look like Bard abilities had changed much from what I remember, but of course I don’t remember the rotations at all.

To be fair, I went back later and completed two more MSQ quests. I have no idea what’s going on in the story.

The Division 2

I saw that I could get The Division 2 on Steam, so I could finally play it without having to mess with the Ubisoft launcher.

The Division 2 has my favorite shooter mechanics to date. There’s something about the cover mechanics and animations that feels exactly right. Shooters that don’t let you take cover, you know, like a normal person would do in that situation, feel extremely weird to me now.

Anyway, I did another massive download, logged in, played for a few minutes until I got killed in my very first encounter, then quit. That’s my standard process of playing games now.

I’m sure an entire post could be written about how games in general just aren’t very fun anymore, mainly because by now, literally everything’s been done before in gaming, but that’s a different topic.

For the record, my The Division 2 character is level 20.

One thing I noticed about The Division 2 is that it defaulted to full screen and HDR, and once again I was reminded how vastly better HDR looks compared to SDR. It’s like night and day. I can’t wait until HDR is the default for everything in PC gaming, and I’m somewhat baffled why it isn’t already.

Fallout Season 2

I remember when Amazon Prime shows aired without commercials. It was, like, a couple years ago?

Anyway, I don’t remember anything from the first season, but I think I thought it was mildly entertaining. One of the better video game adaptations. It’s no Last of Us, but it had the right tone.

The second season appears to be making the same mistakes that I remember from the first season though: Mainly, I couldn’t care less what happened in the before time flashbacks or back in the Vault 33, and they spend 2/3 of their time telling those stories instead of following the protagonists. Also, I think they’re leaning way too hard on the “play an old-timey song” bit.

The second episode continued the theme of 40 minutes of flashbacks and side stories nobody cares about, with 10 minutes of the Lucy and the Ghoul road trip we actually want to see. It’s like they wished to make an anthology show where every episode was a different setting and characters, but they spliced it all together in a way that every episode is a scattering of bits and pieces of ten different stories, so you never really feel like anything is advancing or resolving.

I hate to criticize it because they’ve really nailed the tone of Fallout, and it looks nice, it’s just that it’s… not very interesting so far. It’s mostly “on-in-the-background” material. Which, I suppose, in this modern Tik Tok age, is the standard of media excellence.

Wake Up Dead Man: The New Knives Out (Netflix)

In the end, I enjoyed it. I liked the setting, because it reminded me of all the small church dysfunctional social dynamics that I’ve witnessed in my own past. Small churches can be a petri dish of passive aggressive power struggles when you get behind the scenes.

However, mysteries are sort of hit or miss for me. They’re a bit frustrating to watch, because I feel like they always withhold information from the viewer so it’s not actually possible to deduce the killer. They don’t hide the clues to the point it doesn’t make sense, but they leave out the really important bits of information from the exposition, so if you blink at the wrong time or don’t specifically know what to look for, you’ll miss out. It strikes me as disingenuous.

The Long Walk (Amazon)

I usually end up reading or watching most Stephen King things. I’m sure I’ve read over 75% of all Stephen King works, and I’ve probably seen a similar percentage of screen adaptations. It’s rare that a movie is anywhere near as good as the source material in most cases, but it’s especially true with Stephen King.

I don’t remember much of anything about the book, which I believe was a novella… oh, no it was one of the Richard Bachman books. I remember liking it, but that’s about it. Stephen King has a way of making bizarre “what if” scenarios compelling.

I found the movie a bit dull, though. It was basically 100 minutes of walking and talking, in a typical Stephen King-style ensemble. Which shouldn’t be surprising, but still, I kept finding myself looking away and getting out the laptop and walking around and generally not being riveted to the screen. The end didn’t seem very surprising or memorable.

Frankenstein (Netflix)

I couldn’t get into it.

Musical Biopics

I just noticed there’s been a real glut of biopics about musical acts lately. Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and I just saw an ad for a Neil Diamond biopic. None of them were the slightest bit personally or professionally controversial, as far as I remember, so I have no idea what kind of conflicts might be explored in those biopics. Well, I guess Bob Dylan had the “going electric” thing, but I can’t imagine that taking up a whole movie. The only conclusion I can draw is that they’re all cynical PR stunts.

Teeth Extraction

I can report that getting two teeth extracted kind of sucks.

I’ve had teeth pulled before–wisdom teeth, a back right tooth, two other bottom teeth, some upper teeth–but I apparently forgot most of the process. I only remembered that the pulling part itself wasn’t painful.

It’s weird though. And undeniably stressful, even if it doesn’t hurt.

The doc had to give me two extra pain killer injections before it stopped hurting, though. After that it was a breeze. Well, depending on what your definition of a breeze is.

Both teeth broke apart, of course, with a shocking crack sound that resonated through my whole skull. Not unexpected with these two teeth–the doc warned me about it. Still, a weird experience.

And of course the doc had to, you know, pull the teeth out, and they were stubbornly stuck in there, more than I remember any previous ones. He had to shake my head back and forth like a dog pulling on a rope toy.

So the pulling itself wasn’t that bad, but then there’s the hours and days after the extraction, where your whole jaw hurts and eating or drinking anything is a chore.

The empty sockets bled a lot for me, so I was biting on gauze all afternoon and in the evening I had to bite on a tea bag, which finally did the trick. I’m on blood thinners now, but I stopped taking them a couple days beforehand to minimize bleeding, but it apparently didn’t help much.

Also, I’m not supposed to take ibuprofen during chemotherapy, so I just had Tylenol for pain and some Tramadol which actually didn’t do much of anything. So the first night was kind of rough and I didn’t get much sleep, and, when you get to my age, that pretty much ruins the next day, too.

As for eating, I got a bunch of soups, but I ended up mostly just drinking Ensures for the rest of the day and night.

After a fitful night sleeping propped up on the bed, the second day was much better bleeding-wise and pain-wise. And the salt rinses began. Still wasn’t big on eating but managed some oatmeal and Chef-Boy-R-Dee ravioli.

After that, things improved day by day but I was sucking down Tylenol every six hours for four or five days. The following Tuesday, I had a chemotherapy infusion, and part of that process is taking a steroid the day before, the day of, and the day after. Steroids act as an anti-inflammatory, so it helped a lot with lingering jaw pain, too.

As of publishing time it’s not quite back to normal, but I don’t need to take Tylenol too often anymore. The next step will be getting some kind of “appliance,” in dental lingo, to put back there.

Cancer Corner

My latest chemotherapy infusion was two days before Christmas, so I spent most of the holiday lying in bed watching football. If you’re wondering what chemotherapy feels like, it feels a lot like being poisoned with dangerous drugs and having to rest for a few days to recover. For me, who tolerates it fairly well so far, i’s a little like having a mild cold or flu for a few days every three weeks.

In addition to that, for up to a week after the infusion, everything tastes and smells funny. It’s a chore to find foods that are the slightest bit appetizing during that time. Between the tooth extraction and the chemotherapy, I’ve dropped a few pounds again.

Anyway, the infusion center was more deserted than usual right before Christmas, as you might expect. It was great for parking, which is usually a disaster at this particular hospital because of construction.

Someone had very kindly donated a bunch of gift baskets to the infusion center, so I got a bag of gifts that are pretty useful during chemotherapy: A little blanket, some snacks, hand cream, and a couple of Sudoku books. I thought it was a very humbling gift and I felt horrible accepting it, because my chemo treatments are a breeze compared to what others go through. Some people are there getting drugs for three or four hours, but I’m usually out in a half hour or so.

This was the very first time I’ve ever looked at a Sudoku puzzle, and I guess I can see why people find them fun. I found an app and installed it on my phone.

That’s it for this mashup of topics. Happy New Year!