Dark Souls
38 entries. 25,079 words.
2013-07
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Dark Souls on the PC.
2013-07-15.
I watched some very amusing “Let’s Play” videos of two of the GWJ guys playing Dark Souls, and decided that I finally needed to get this “killer” game. By killer I mean it has a reputation of being mercilessly difficult. So I got the “Prepare to Die” PC version from Steam.
Okay. So yeah, it’s hard. But it’s not hard in the way you might think. It’s hard because the controls and camera management are impossibly obtuse for a PC game, at least initially.
- RPG
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Taurus Demon Down.
2013-07-18.
I finally defeated the second boss in Dark Souls. I say “finally” because I spent quite a lot of time wandering around dying in the Undead Burg, leveling up with the meager amounts of souls I could accumulate from the skeletons there, and gathering bits and pieces of gear. I feel like I know the stretch of the map between the campfire and the boss like the back of my hand now.
- RPG
2015-07
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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
2015-08
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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
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Progression Report – July 2015.
2015-08-02.
Blaugust Day 2
July was a quiet gaming month for me. Work continues to be hectic, and I’ve also gotten it into my head that I might try to take a Microsoft exam so I spent a lot of time reading and studying.
It was around the end of July last year that I lost my job-not from anything I did, but from a contract changing hands to a different company.
- MMORPG
- Progression Report
- Status
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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
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Skyforge – Sound Design Matters.
2015-08-08.
I duck into Skyforge now and then but it’s rapidly losing its appeal for me. Part of it is because Dark Souls demands my attention right now, but I think I figured out another reason yesterday: The sound effects, or lack thereof.
On my 2-Hour Scorecard for Skyforge I marked the Sound as “Okay.” Now after five hours I’m going to downgrade it to “Bad.” When my Cryomancer is out in the world defeating bad guys and such, throwing out these huge AoE whirlwind spells and dropping comets from the sky (or whatever that ability is), you would think that my speakers would shake and rattle everything on the desk with the sheer magnitude of it.
- MMORPG
- Musings
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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
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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
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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
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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
2015-09
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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
2015-10
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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
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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
2015-12
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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
2016-04
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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
2016-05
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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
2016-08
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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
2016-11
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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
2016-12
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Most Played Games In 2016.
2016-12-29.
It took a little more effort to calculate my most-played games in 2016, because I changed PCs in the middle of the year. But the results are now in, and the number one positions were just what I guessed they would be.
(This data was gathered on December 24, 2016. I’ve pretty much only played Morrowind since then, although I played a couple hours of Elder Scrolls Online as well.)
- MMORPG
- Status
2017-01
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Top 10 Videos From 2016.
2017-01-07.
I know blog readers don’t care about videos, but I wanted to record my Top 10 game videos from 2016 for posterity.
One day I decided to click on that Analytics tab on YouTube and found there was actually some information there, like which videos people watched. YouTube ranks videos by watch time, not views, which I suppose indicates that these are the videos that people actually stuck around to watch the most, for some inexplicable reason.
- Videos
2017-08
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The Return of The Ringed City DLC.
2017-08-22.
Yesterday morning I finally returned to my Ringed City DLC blind playthrough videos after a two month break. The first thing I encountered was a dragon boss, Darkeater Midir. I died. I decided to go a different direction. :) I ran into Judicator Argo and his entourage of Dark Spirits. It took a couple of tries but I got through that ordeal to a woman whom I assumed to be Princess Filianore.
- Musings
- RPG
2018-06
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Week End – Fallout 76, Because SEO.
2018-06-02.
A summary of news and observations from the week.
I loaded Dauntless (and FRAPS) a second time just to take a screenshot for this post. In The News It’s been an incredibly bleak week for news, to my eye. Maybe everyone took the whole week off, because Monday was a holiday here in the US.
Bethesda teased us with an announcement of a new game called Fallout 76. It’s debatable whether this deserves to be mentioned on an MMO-themed blog, but see above about bleak news.
- MMO
- MMORPG
- Roundup
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Week End – Steam Flood.
2018-06-09.
News and observations from the past week.
I keep thinking I should write real posts about stuff, but I’m having a hard time finding anything that interests me enough to write more than a few sentences.
Dark Souls Remastered. It bugs me but also amuses me that the featured image I put in these posts doesn't match the title. In The News Star Wars Galaxies creator Raph Koster to release postmortem book on MMORPGs.
- MMORPG
- Steam
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Week End – WHO Pitch Forks.
2018-06-23.
Weekly summary of news and observations. I should really copy and paste a standard template for this opening because I have to type it from memory every time and I think it subtly changes every week.
In The News There’s been some hubbub about the World Health Organization’s gaming disorder classification. The WHO added “gaming disorder” to the “International Classification of Diseases,” and every gamer who has been on the defensive about that kind of thing since the 90s got out their pitch forks and torches.
- MMORPG
- Roundup
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Controller Woes: Aging and D-Pads.
2018-06-25.
I’ve been playing a lot of Dark Souls Remastered lately, which requires playing on a controller. Technically you can play the game with mouse-and-keyboard on PC (and it’s even easier in the Remastered edition) but the control scheme is completely alien to any other mouse-and-keyboard game, and it takes a lot of getting used to, and it’s just not worth the effort for one game. Even the controller scheme takes a fair amount practicing and learning, even if you’re used to using controller.
- Hardware
- Musings
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Dark Souls Remastered Edition.
2018-06-27.
To the dismay of I’m sure most people on the Internet, I could write for days about how much Dark Souls pitches exactly into my wheelhouse as a game (mixed metaphor used intentionally because it’s funny), but I’ll try to keep this post focused on just what is different in the PC version of the Dark Souls Remastered edition.
In short: There aren’t that many differences. But there are some.
- Reviews
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Week End – Trion, GW2.
2018-06-30.
Weekly news and observations.
In The News In surprise news, Trion acquired Gazillion’s assets. It’s not all that surprising, actually. After their implosion, I would think Gazillion was selling everything at a deep discount, so why not pick up a whole library of a competitor’s source code? Trion also seems to be trying to turn themselves into something like SpatialOS, which, again, why not? It sounds like they’ll be renting out the technology they already use and maintain for their own games.
- MMORPG
2018-07
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Demon’s Souls, Briefly.
2018-07-11.
As I wait for my hands and fingers and thumbs to regenerate themselves, which is taking forever-frankly at this point I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever be able to play an action game with a controller ever again-I thought I would try to injure my hands more by typing up a bit about Demon’s Souls.
If nothing else, The Nexus has a lot more artistic style than Firelink Shrine. I’ve wanted to play Demon’s Souls ever since I played Dark Souls, three years ago.
- Reviews
- Videos
2018-09
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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
2019-01
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My Top Ten Watched Videos of 2018.
2019-01-03.
It’s time for another performance review of my YouTube channel.
Thanks to YouTube’s change in monetization strategy at the beginning of the year, I basically stopped putting any effort into video production in 2018. The only videos I upload now are completely unedited-basically mini-streams without a chat room. (Occasionally I do some edits, but it’s minor and rare.)
In fact, toward the end of the year as I’m writing this, I would say that I only upload about 1 video for every 10 that I actually record.
- Videos
2019-03
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Sekiro Initial Thoughts.
2019-03-25.
Just some quick spoiler-free bullet points about the first five-ish hours of Sekiro, the latest game from From Software.
It looks like a slightly-improved version of the Dark Souls 3 game engine. It has basically the same bleached-film aesthetic. I’m playing with mouse-and-keyboard to save my thumbs. The implementation is slightly better than Dark Souls 3, which was better than Dark Souls, but it’s still probably going to be “best” with controllers.
- RPG
2019-04
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Games Played – March 2019.
2019-04-01.
March was a veritable explosion of gaming variety for me. I dropped Dwarf Fortress like a hot potato (just when people were starting to like my videos, oops) and picked up Souls again in anticipation of Sekiro. Not that there’s anything wrong with Dwarf Fortress, but nothing compete when the From Software fever hits.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, 16 hours. The new game from From Software. I just love writing “from From Software” and do it every chance I can.
- Roundup
2019-05
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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
2019-06
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Bloodborne Impressions (PS4).
2019-06-28.
Bloodborne: It’s fantastic. I’m not even finished yet and it clearly deserves to go into my entirely fictional All-Time Hall of Fame Game Library. That’s it. That’s my impressions. If you like this kind of game, it’s a must-play. (If you don’t, then you probably won’t like it, because it is the quintessential version of this kind of game, the template from which all others of this kind of game are poorly copied.
- Consoles
- Reviews
- RPG
2019-08
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Titan Souls – Steam Backlog Bonanza [Blaugust 25].
2019-08-25.
Speaking of Souls-like games, yesterday on the Steam Backlog Bonanza, I played a game that is frequently described as Souls-like: Titan Souls, from 2015. I got it in that infamous Winter 2016 sale, what turned out to be the last hurrah of Steam sales, for a whopping $3.74. I don’t remember why, except that I probably had a vague memory of seeing it described as a game that fans of Dark Souls would like.
- Reviews
- Steam
- Streaming
- Videos
2019-10
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Only Five Games In A Year.
2019-10-31.
Naithin poked some of us on the Blaugust Discord to chime in on this: If you could only play five games in a year, what would they be?
It turns out this would not be a terribly big sacrifice for me. I don’t play a lot of games in a year to start with. I’ve already done some research for my 2019 year-end post, and the number of new games that I’ve purchased and started in 2019 is extremely small.
- Musings
- Responses
2020-01
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Game Planning For 2020.
2020-01-14.
I don’t really plan my gaming very much, I tend to just play whatever I feel like playing on any given day. But I decided to make a list of the games that are currently on my highest priority “to play” list at the start of 2020, along with a rough estimate of how long they’ll take to play, according to HowLongToBeat.
The obligatory blog post picture requirement that vaguely relates to the text.
- Musings
- Roundup