Dark Souls

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38 entries. 25,079 words.

July, 2013

  • Dark Souls on the PC. 2013-07-15 6:56 PM.
    • RPG

    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. I’m used to playing with mouse-and-keyboard, but the mouse-and-keyboard controls for this game are just horrible. It doesn’t even hide the Windows pointer. So you really have no choice but to play with the keyboard only, where in addition to the normal WASD controls on the left, your right hand has WASD-style controls on the right side of the keyboard, which controls your camera view and target-lock. It’s a bit awkward, to say the least. 525 words.
  • Taurus Demon Down. 2013-07-18 2:58 PM.
    • RPG

    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. Two skeletons, run across bridge, three skeletons, up stairs, three skeletons, up the tower, one skeleton sniper, down the stairs, two skeletons and a tough dude, then another skeleton comes running down, and then you’re going up the spiral stairs to the boss area. 353 words.

July, 2015

  • Dark Souls – Eat It, Bell Gargoyles. 2015-07-16 3:00 PM.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    • Status

    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. It’s really a gorgeous, atmospheric game. 607 words.

August, 2015

  • Dark Souls – Capra Demon Defeated. 2015-08-01 3:00 PM.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player

    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. It seemed like a fitting tale to start off Blaugust. 1,261 words.
  • Progression Report – July 2015. 2015-08-02 3:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Progression Report
    • Status

    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. Fortunately nothing like that is going to happen this year. I’ve since resumed working on that project, but everything is different and more chaotic now as the ripple effects from the contract change continue to permeate everything and everybody. 362 words.
  • Dark Souls – Gaping Dragon Defeated. 2015-08-05 3:00 PM.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    • Status

    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. Not always successfully. I had never been cursed before, and I hope I’m never cursed again, because halving one’s health is not pleasant. I spent a whole evening tracking down a Purging Stone to get myself back to normal. (Of course, being frugal, I had to run all the way back to the top of the church to buy the cheaper one-and of course because this is Dark Souls, you have to kill everything in your path no matter where you go.) 615 words.
  • Skyforge – Sound Design Matters. 2015-08-08 3:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings

    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. 304 words.
  • Dark Souls – Chaos Witch Quelaag Defeated. 2015-08-13 3:00 PM.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player

    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. Even after abandoning his knightly armor and switching to poison-resistant Thief gear, Thomas the Knight was quite sick most of the time. 472 words.
  • Dark Souls – Moonlight Butterfly Defeated. 2015-08-14 3:00 PM.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player

    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. Apparently they don’t like to be woken up. Fortunately they are slow and easily dispatched. 319 words.
  • Dark Souls – Screenshots. 2015-08-17 3:00 PM.
    • Musings
    • RPG
    • Single-Player

    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. The Tomb is so dark you actually have to find and use a hideous skull lantern to see more than two steps ahead. My Knight is seen here wielding the enormous, heavy Dark Knight sword you get from the Undead Parish: I got so sick of those Skeletons down there that I pulled out something that would smash them flat. 399 words.
  • Dark Souls – Catching Up. 2015-08-20 3:00 PM.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player

    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.

September, 2015

  • Progression Report – August 2015. 2015-09-03 3:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Progression Report
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    • Status

    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. I would like to get back to leveling in FFXIV, SWTOR, and possibly even STO. SWTOR has that 12x experience thing that I don’t want to miss (for subscribers only though I think). I might have already missed the super-fast leveling event(s?) in STO. The Rift Primalist is on the horizon as well. And through my hazy Dark Souls fog I think I heard that Heart of Thorns now has a release date, which means maybe I should try to finish that cursed Living Story. 182 words.

October, 2015

  • Progression Report – September 2015. 2015-10-03 11:30 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Progression Report
    • RPG
    • Single-Player

    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. SWTOR is still beckoning with that 12x experience thing that is probably going to end when the expansion launches on October 27th, so I don’t have much time left. Of course I still have much to accomplish in FFXIV, but there’s no time limit there. Rift and Star Trek Online both have new stuff coming soon. 157 words.
  • The Light, It Burns. 2015-10-19 3:11 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    • Status

    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. It’s like I’ve been through a religious rite and seen the Face of God. I’ve climbed to the mountaintop and seen the vast expanse of the universe laid before me. How could anything ever be as good? 221 words.

December, 2015

  • Games Of My Year 2015. 2015-12-26 4:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Opinion
    • RPG
    • Single-Player

    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. In other words, this is the pool from which I’m going to pick my games of the year. 597 words.

April, 2016

  • Dark Souls III. 2016-04-12 3:54 PM.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player

    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. The new FireLink Shrine. 257 words.

May, 2016

  • Dark Souls III First Playthrough Complete. 2016-05-10 1:58 PM.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player
    • Steam

    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.) 496 words.

August, 2016

  • Dark Souls Character Loss. 2016-08-24 6:12 PM.
    • Single-Player
    • Steam

    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. So all my plentiful characters remained on my old PC, which is kind of a bummer. (I was able to copy my Dark Souls 1 characters though.) 204 words.

November, 2016

  • Starting Ashes of Ariandel DLC. 2016-11-01 1:11 AM.
    • Single-Player
    • Writing

    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. That’s really annoying, From Software. All those high-level characters I have on my old PC are now worthless unless I want to play the DLC on that old PC, which I don’t, because old PC is old. The aptly-named Snowfield 368 words.

December, 2016

  • Most Played Games In 2016. 2016-12-29 4:13 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Status

    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.) 363 words.

January, 2017

  • Top 10 Videos From 2016. 2017-01-07 11:35 PM.
    • Videos

    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. 493 words.

August, 2017

  • The Return of The Ringed City DLC. 2017-08-22 2:30 PM.
    • Musings
    • RPG

    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. 380 words.

June, 2018

  • Week End – Fallout 76, Because SEO. 2018-06-02 2:55 PM.
    • MMO
    • MMORPG
    • Roundup

    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. 642 words.
  • Week End – Steam Flood. 2018-06-09 2:30 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Steam

    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. 660 words.
  • Week End – WHO Pitch Forks. 2018-06-23 2:30 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Roundup

    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. I personally think any gamer who is actually honest with themselves can probably remember a time when they made a choice to play a game instead of doing something more important instead, so denying that a “gaming disorder” could exist to the point that it impairs a person’s life seems silly to me. Of course someone could hurt their life by playing too many games. I think in this case it’s largely an argument over semantics. Addictive personalities and compulsive disorders are definitely a real thing, but whether you’re addicted to gaming or something else is probably irrelevant, so I imagine the objection here is singling out “gaming” as more of a trigger than anything else. 712 words.
  • Controller Woes: Aging and D-Pads. 2018-06-25 2:30 PM.
    • Hardware
    • Musings

    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. 915 words.
  • Dark Souls Remastered Edition. 2018-06-27 2:30 PM.
    • Reviews

    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. As a caveat, I haven’t completed the entire game just yet. But I’m pretty close. I have just three bosses remaining at the time of this writing: Kalameet, Manus, and Gwyn. I’ve spent over 50 hours in the game now and I feel like I have a pretty good handle on the changes. 1,368 words.
  • Week End – Trion, GW2. 2018-06-30 2:30 PM.
    • MMORPG

    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. The gaming industry is more about building game engines now than building games anyway. It’s turning into another record industry, where the artists (the game makers in this case) are the least important part. (Note: That might be a cynical viewpoint.) 672 words.

July, 2018

  • Demon’s Souls, Briefly. 2018-07-11 2:30 PM.
    • Reviews
    • Videos

    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. 978 words.

September, 2018

  • Resuming Dark Souls In The Worst Place. 2018-09-12 2:00 PM.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player

    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). He was the last boss I could defeat. 500 words.

January, 2019

  • My Top Ten Watched Videos of 2018. 2019-01-03 3:30 PM.
    • Videos

    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. Most of them just sit on my hard drive now. I recorded my entire playthrough of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, but only uploaded an edited summary of the first couple of hours of it. I’ve recorded probably close to a hundred hours of RimWorld videos, but I’ve only uploaded seven. I actually click the “record” button on OBS pretty much every time I play a PC game now. Hard drive space is a bit of a problem. 1,127 words.

March, 2019

  • Sekiro Initial Thoughts. 2019-03-25 3:25 PM.
    • RPG

    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. I’m regularly cursing how inefficient it feels to find the right keys and buttons, and this is after spending a good 10 hours practicing with mouse and keyboard in Dark Souls 3 The Ringed City. There’s no character creation and very few stats. There’s only one weapon and combat style (so far). The combat is very different from Dark Souls. There’s a focus on “deflection” which seems to be a hybrid of blocking and parrying. I’m terrible at parrying in Souls so this is not good for me. There’s no stamina management, but “posture” management. Timing is everything, and there’s very little room for error. I don’t quite have a handle on it yet. Experience with Souls is not necessarily helpful here. There are no player messages or multiplayer components (yet?). I get the sense they simplified the UI from the Souls series in a deliberate attempt to make it more accessible. There’s only one equipment “slot” to manage, as opposed to the four (item, spell, left and right hand) in Souls. There’s more “environmental storytelling” (in the form of overhearing conversations and such) than any Souls game. There’s a very prominent stealth component that isn’t in any Souls game. It’s skating around the edges of being a full-on stealth game, if you want to play it that way. You can also charge headlong into every fight if you want to (and frankly I have more success that way). The grappling hook is a bit more limited in its use than I expected. It works like what I remember of Far Cry Primal, where you can only grapple to pre-determined points around the environment. Sometimes you’ll see places you *should* be able to reach, but can’t because the game didn’t put grapple points there. The death penalty seems more forgiving than Souls, because there’s a limited-use resurrection-in-place. You don’t necessarily have to go all the way back to the last checkpoint. (But there’s still a cost.) I don’t quite have a handle on this system yet either. In general, it seems like they made a conscious effort to pick and choose some but not all of the elements from the Dark Souls gameplay formula, then sprinkle in some elements from games like Assassin’s Creed, to make a new game that would have a more “mainstream” appeal. The default voiceovers are Japanese, and the Japanese voice actors sound more professional and interesting than the English ones. The combat is pretty frustrating for me so far with mouse and keyboard. I’ve hit a pretty hard roadblock merely 5 hours in. I get killed over and over and over again, I’m early or late on every deflection, I dodge right into every attack, and I feel like my Wolf is hitting with the strength of a wet noodle. I think my Souls experience is getting in the way of doing well in Sekiro. 629 words.

April, 2019

  • Games Played – March 2019. 2019-04-01 2:00 PM.
    • Roundup

    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. I’m not sure what I think of it yet. Dark Souls III, 12 hours. This time was spent re-playing the The Ringed City DLC to get back to where I left off when my SSD crashed in 2017. Then Sekiro arrived and I stopped. (I also love writing “the The Ringed City DLC.”) The Division 2 Open Beta, 2 hours. It was kind of fun, but not worth a full price purchase for me. Dark Souls Remastered, 2 hours. Finishing up the Dark Souls Remastered Casual Nostalgia Tour video series. Maybe I’ll get to Manus and Kalameet in New Game+. Lord of the Rings Online, 2 hours. A somewhat generous rounding-up. I finished Volume II, Book 7, Chapter 8 “The Secret Road” and I’m back outside again! Still haven’t gained a level though, holding steady at 62. ANTHEM Open Demo, 1 hour. A generous rounding-up of time played. It just didn’t appeal to me. Considering that even the superfans are giving up on it already, it’s probably just as well. The rest of the month’s time was taken up watching or listening to Critical Role hehe. Which was, in fact, more entertaining than playing most games. 276 words.

May, 2019

  • Sekiro Completed. 2019-05-25 1:50 PM.
    • RPG
    • Single-Player

    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). 2,247 words.

June, 2019

  • Bloodborne Impressions (PS4). 2019-06-28 2:12 PM.
    • Consoles
    • Reviews
    • RPG

    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.) 1,767 words.

August, 2019

  • Titan Souls – Steam Backlog Bonanza [Blaugust 25]. 2019-08-25 1:30 PM.
    • Reviews
    • Steam
    • Streaming
    • Videos

    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. And it was super cheap. 1,044 words.

October, 2019

  • Only Five Games In A Year. 2019-10-31 1:33 AM.
    • Musings
    • Responses

    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. (Three-Sekiro, The Division 2, Astellia Online.) The number of new games I’ve actually completed is even less. (One-Sekiro.) 1,099 words.

January, 2020

  • Game Planning For 2020. 2020-01-14 6:13 PM.
    • Musings
    • Roundup

    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. Also a cool screenshot from Horizon Zero Dawn. 980 words.