After my last I wound up being swept into the vast world of the Witcher and never got around to actually play Fate/. And I gotta say I’m still brilliantly yellow that *some ports* got all the dlc *for free* after we all went and bought the *limited edition*.
I could go off on a tangent for a million pages why *certain companies* current practices dlc are absolutely disgusting and designed just to milk just that bit more money out of people, and I can’t believe why people buy into them, but I feel lucky in Fate/’s case that the dlc seems mostly to be additional content like outfits and junk, unlike some others where the actual end of the game is hidden behind an “expansion.”
Anyway, after the Witcher, my beloved cat died suddenly of cancer we all thought she had been bouncing back from after her treatment. Not more than a month later, I finally, finally got a surgery appointment myself. Which is great! Because I’ve been waiting two years for a surgery that many people get the second they’re diagnosed with the exact same problem. What’s not so great? The massive cut in my side is just as annoying as the issue I had surgery for. And it’s taken forever to heal. And it could totally have been done with less invasive means! So now I’m stuck with a huge, bloated, painful red scar on my side. Yay.
That was my year in a nutshell.
As for what I’ve been playing recently… I’m not sure I get it. Akalabeth seems to be purely dungeon crawling, occasionally surfacing to buy the massive amounts of food you need to not instantly starve. Gog help you if you encounter a thief because it can steal the axe right out of your hands. For 1979 I wasn’t expecting an epic, but maybe just a little direction other than “go kill all the trolls in the dungeon.” Very different experience than Might and Magic 2 that way. I think I’m going to skip a couple of the other early Ultimas.
Maybe it’s just me and early video games. Many of them I found impossible to play- in the 80s. I remember trying to play Frogger and the damn thing zipped by in two seconds flat, making it impossible to guide the frog across the road, just because I was trying it on an early 1990 Windows machine. All that memory! It made things so fast. But that’s what happens when you design a game to be as fast as possible by using up every scrap of memory it can. There was no real solution for that back then, other than using a slower computer or something that used up the extra. Of course, these days you can just fiddle with settings in DosBox. Lately, I’m finding Might and Magic 1 impossible because of the interface and the fact it’s way more difficult to tell where exactly you are than MM2. Crappy controls, interfaces, barely there physics on platformers- why do I play retro again?
Other games I’m playing right now are Shadowrun, and just trying to clear out some of my backlog. Who knows, I might start making headway with HumbleBundle falling to the dark forces of IGN.
Other things are, oh boy I have a lot to say about Star Trek Travesty I mean Discovery. The story of how the humans of Middle Earth went to war with space faring orcs!!!1! Add in tons of DRAMAAAZZZ ala Star Gate Universe and really obnoxious characters and really bad dialogue and it makes Enterprise look halfway decent, even with the huge “XINDI XINDI XINDI XINDI XINDI!!!” arc in the middle. Man, I got really tired of hearing Bakula saying Xindi, Park’s wibbling and Blalock’s lips, and it still did a better job of being a Trek than… this.
Star Trek was always about ‘things will be better, look at this better future we can make together, look at the discoveries and things we could be doing’ and it came in the middle of the Cold War. I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, but TV has become super dark, 2edgy4u, depressing, and dramaoverclocked in the last, oh, 17 years. I was looking forward to the new Trek as another beacon, and all I got was more conflict, Klingons that make Worf, B’Elanna and K’leyr unviable (and, well, icky) in the new universe, and ridiculously placed Alice quotes and Beatles songs.
Although that part is a bit hilarious because I was browsing a forum post somewhere last week that discussed the various songs and movies shown in the Trek series and someone went “Public Domain. That’s why everyone loves Mozart and Shakespeare, and hates Beatles and movies.” And then later that night suddenly Beatles song.
The one good thing about Discovery? They obviously have the budget to do good visuals. It’s just too bad the camera work is utter crap so you can’t see it more than a second, barely getting focused on it, before it flips to something else. Flip. Flip. Flip. Flip flip. Flip flip flip flipflipflopflipflipflipfilplfiplfiplfkjlakj.
