The Quickest of Hits

I've had a pretty crazy week, touching on a lot of different games, but basically all just because the whim struck.

Grand Theft Auto III - How many years has it been? I wanted to hear the soundtrack again, and just see what the game felt like after so much water under the bridge.

The Elder Scrolls Online - Revisiting the Orc paladin-analog I created here. Zenimax Online's dedication to the game has made me consider playing it more.

God of War II - Hype around the PS4 reboot made me want to go back and play this one that I never got to, previously. The first 45 minutes or so were pretty impressive.

Team Fortress 2 - I've been on a bit of a shooter kick lately. What really is the greatest of all time?

For Honor - I do like melee combat systems in games. This one seems good and crunchy so far.

Magic: The Gathering Arena - Maybe I do like this better than Hearthstone, after all?

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon - It was the game going when I turned on the Switch. Still very cool, of course.

Shooter McWeekend

I was bitten by the shooter bug this weekend.

I woke up Saturday and played a little Quake: Champions, and I would return to it late Sunday night after podcasting. Champions has the unparalleled feel of the original Quake game, and is a pretty casual and accessible shooter, being the basics of the genre as it emerged, and nothing like a lot of the more modern games which feature things such as cover, destructible environments, vehicles, and even reloading. I've had a good time playing the game so far, and I think I'll continue to do so. I've somehow managed to be the top scorer on my team in two of the four matches I've played. Matches seem to either go 10 minutes or until one team gets 75 kills. The mode I have been playing so far is four-on-four. I have one character unlocked aside from the Slipgate Marine, an alien warlord called Scalebearer, whose active ability and starting armor value I prefer, I think.

On Sunday morning, I thought I would check in on Call of Duty mutliplayer. However, no one is playing Call of Duty 2 online these days, so instead I decided to check out the campaign mode. I played the first 3-4 missions as a Russian in Stalingrad, and it was good fun, if a very simple game at its core. I don't think I'll bother going back to it, when there are so many other Call of Duty games to choose from. I have World at War still sitting untouched, and I would bet there are still people playing the first Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare online, as well.

Later Sunday, before going out for the day, I thought I would knock another off my backlog: Quake Mission Pack 2: Dissolution of Eternity. I played the first mission of the first episode, and it was cool. This may be a little more in line with the original game than the first mission pack, Scourge of Armagon.

Finally, Sunday afternoon, as a reward for finishing my chores for the day, I let myself try out Fortnite Battle Royale (now just Fortnite) for the Switch. I really like the game on that platform, maybe even more than on the PC. It's much less of a pain to run endless distances with an analog stick than by holding down W, and it seems easier to quickly swap to build mode, as well. I think it's a good fit for the system, but what's not? The only drawback I see is that the Switch requires Wi-Fi, and unfortunately does not use LTE, and so it's portable playability is hampered. I'll play more of the game this way.

Grim 'n' Gothic, Furturistic 'n' Medieval

Quake Champions - I have been curious to try this out, and it was free on Steam, so I thought I would give it a shot. It's much the same arena deathmach style of multiplayer FPS as Quake III or Quake Live were. It plays fast and smooth, with a focus on older values like knowing the power-ups, and raw reaction timing and aiming skills. It mixes these with the modern conventions of free-to-play games, including earnable loot boxes containing cosmetic rewards for your characters, and an overall player profile XP level. I want to play more. It's pretty effortless enjoyment.

Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin - I never made it very far into the vanilla release of Dark Souls II, but I had heard this was the better version to play for a number of reasons, so I picked it up on the cheap some time ago. I'm in a spot now where I want something to play while I can listen to some podcasts, and Souls games are almost perfect for this use. There is very little in the way of spoken or written narrative to concentrate on; its mostly crunchy combat and character building concerns, which I find go really well with spoken word audio.

At the moment I am building a melee-focused warrior, with an aim fight with a great axe or great club. I may try to get away from the sword and shield approach I used for a lot of the first Dark Souls.

Black Legion and Kharn

I've just come home from a week away on business, and I took the opportunity to dig deeper into Chaos Space Marines in 40K:

Black Legion - sequel to The Talon of Horus, and second book in the series of the same name. This one was all about the up and coming Black Legion breaking out of the Eye of Terror for the first time and starting their Long War on the Imperium. Rival traitor marine warbands in the Eye are a big threat, as are Sigismund and his Black Templars chapter keeping vigil over the Cadian Gate, awaiting the return of the traitor legions. Aaron Dembski-Bowden does not disappoint. And given the events of The Master of Mankind, I'm very much looking forward to the next book in this series, which it seems like will be about Abbadon claiming the demon blade Drach'nyen.

Kharn: Eater of Worlds - More than anything I was kind of shocked at how many beats this book shares with The Talon of Horus. In both books, the return of the legions former second in command is the centerpiece the whole thing swings around, in both the Emperor's Children are the main antagonists, in both a voidship is cast down as a projectile onto one of their cities, and both books are mostly focused on one warrior's point of view of the leader figure they are attempting to find or resurrect. From the looks of things both books must have been being written around the same time, as well, which is interesting. As for the Kharn book, it seems to have ended right at the climax. It's like it's missing a third of the book. What's here is pretty good, it just kind of ends, and there's no follow-up as far as I know. I would like to see what comes next at Skalathrax.

I didn't realize it until just now, but the short The Weakness of Others is from the POV of Kharn, and it is during the action on Skalathrax that earned him the moniker of Betrayer. It's just a short, though. A proper window into that event would have been nice, to see why it happened that way. It would still be possible, especially if told from the POV of the other characters in Kharn: Eater of Worlds.

One other short I read, Enyalius, In Memorium was about another onetime World Eater, dedicating the death of a massive Ultramarines voidship to a fallen brother Khorne berserker.

I still have a couple of Kharn/Chaos Space Marines books plotted out ahead of me, so I'll give an update on those when I finish them.

V Week, and Visitations

I wanted to check out Valkyria Chronicles for V week on the backlog. It made a really positive first impression. I'm definitely looking forward to playing more. I was a little surprised to find that the girl wearing the neckerchief in her hair is one of the military leaders at the outset of the game, Alicia. It seems to have a cool tactical battle system, though.

I played some of the newest single player content in Hearthstone, the Witchwood monster hunting stuff. In this mode you basically build a deck as you go, choosing passive abilities and cards to incorporate into your deck as you fight through a gauntlet of 8 bosses. I've made it as far as the seventh or either encounter, thus far, before hitting a seemingly totally insurmountable wall of a boss.

I have also spent some more time tooling around Skyrim in the past few days, not knowing what else to play so soon after coming home from a long business trip. I'm just checking things off the quest log in that game. I can't commit to any one storyline or character growth area for long, though I do like melee/ranged over anything at all magical.

Victory and a Ticker-tape Parade

I finally polished off my campaign of Final Fantasy Tactics using only generic soldiers and the job system. It wasn't easy, and I resorted to the use of save states sometimes, effectively creating my own version of the Chariot Tarot from Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together. It was pretty satisfying, though, even if I did lock myself out of a lot of side content by removing Mustadio from my party early on. Turns out you need him to get half of the side quests and other special characters later on in the game.

Victory would have been much more difficult to achieve if not for one of my Orators having convinced a Tiamat hydra to join us in one of the final battles. That thing was invaluable in the fight against Ultima, the reborn high seraph. It was a lot of fun to revisit this old favorite of mine. I still feel like it's one of my favorite games of all time, even seeing some of its shortcomings in a fresh new light this time around.

For lack of knowing what to play next, I have spent the past few days frittering away free time in Skyrim, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm.

I may have found a way to come to peace with Hearthstone. After having seen what a real Magic: The Gathering looks like in this format (hardcore and demanding of an attentive and dedicated player), Blizzard's dumb, bright, and capricious take might be more my speed after all.

I like playing Heroes of the Storm with and against a full load of bots. I don't want the pressure to perform or unwanted social interactions of opponents in... any game, really. I enjoy HotS and other games like it for the push and pull mechanics, comfortable in the knowledge that I have aged out of actually playing these against other people. I should probably just focus on single-player RTS games, but no one does progression and ongoing development like Blizzard.

There's not too much to say about my time in Skyrim over the weekend, other than that I decided to focus on some quests in a small area of the map, and decided to use fast travel sparingly on this character, to facilitate the completion of quests in a timely manner so the narratives aren't all hacked up, similar to how the medium of film uses jump cuts.

Talon of Horus, The

I've just finished Aaron Dembski-Bowden's 40K novel exploring the beginnings of the Black Legion, and the first in the series of the same name, entitled The Talon of Horus.

The book is set some indeterminate number of centuries after, but within a millennium of, the Horus Heresy. By this time the traitor legions defeated at Terra have all retreated into the Eye of Terror, and the Imperium has mostly forgotten about them and become accustomed to living under their undead god-emperor, now entombed on the Golden Throne.

It is told via the point of view of a onetime legionnaire of the Thousand Sons, Iskander Khayon, and has him laying out the story as a framing device to the Holy Inquisition on Terra, to whom he has willingly surrendured himself. Khayon begins the account with a short explanation of the state of the Nine Legions in the Eye, the ongoing Legion Wars, which pit them all against one another, for old grievances or for the glory of their respective Chaos gods, in some cases. We're introduced to Khayon's retinue, and before long he forms a loose band of other traitor space marines to go on a hunt for a weapon to foil the Emperor's Children and their plan to dominate the rest of the Nine Legions by cloning Horus, whose body has been kept by his former legion, until only recently having been taken in a raid by the Emperor's Children.

Over the course of the story, Khayon and crew come to meet Ezekyle Abbadon, former first captain of the Sons of Horus and right hand of the man himself, who goes on to be the main frontman of Chaos Space Marines in the 41st millennium, and the rest is fake history.

It was a pretty entertaining book for one somewhat versed in the overall lore of the setting, but I don't think I would recommend it as a place to begin for neophytes to 40K. Also, the Abbadon we see here is a wholly different person than the one present in the Horus Heresy series. Fair enough, it's eons later, and the man has been through some momentous things in the intervening years, but the only real explanation we have other than the obvious fact that time passes and things evolve and change is that at some point he went on a pilgrimage of worlds in the Eye, and through overcoming various trials basically reforged his personality, taking a lot of the edge off, while retaining and even bolstering his natural charisma and leadership abilities. He is able to compel loyalty and subordination here in a way not unlike how Horus and the other primarchs are described to so in their day.

Next up on my agenda is the next book in the series, simply called Black Legion.