More Twaddling

On the reading front, which has really come to the fore this year, I have come to the end of my 30K supply, and for a while I will be reading 40K. That will, however, be somewhat backgrounded because of the fact that I'll be reading paperback anthologies, rather than on my Kindle phone app.

What I'll be reading there will instead be a bunch of non-fiction. For my first couple, I have decided to look in on the Boss Fight Books collection I picked up a while ago. I started with the two I thought I might never read, Kingdom Hearts II, and one about a game I had never heard of before, called Soft and Cuddly.

The Kingdom Hearts II book was a personal analysis of a game I could not care less about if I tried. The parts where the author described her experience playing the game and how that fit into her personal life were nice, but the parts where she summarized the game plot and characters were pretty dull, I must admit. I skimmed through a lot of that.

Soft and Cuddly, and I'm only a chapter in, seems to be about placing the game of the same name in time and context. It seems to have been an accidental inflection point in the interactions between UK games and politics. I'm eager to learn more of this game I know next to nothing of and will never play.

When it comes to games, I've kept waffling back and forth between things lately. At first I thought I was kind of in the mood for some Mega Man X, but rather than hook up my SNES Classic to play that, I thought I would reinstall A.R.E.S. Exctinction Agenda and play a little more of game very much inspired by the old Mega Man games. There are some differences, of course. Ares doesn't seem to come together as nicely. Polygonal 2D games pretty much always look awful, and this is no real exception.

Next, I thought I could maybe actually get into La-Mulana in a real way, but that game continues to elude me. I admire it a lot, but it turns out I'd rather play Spelunky, after all. So I did just that.

Waking Mars I tried out because it begins with W. It seems OK, but I'm not sure I'll play any further past the 25% mark that my save has me at. It plays with jetpacking around subterranian Mars, and encouraging native plant life to grow, but something about it just wasn't quite hooking me.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine is free for new players at the moment, and so the multiplayer mode is experiencing a bit of a revival, which is nice. The last time I tried to play, no one else was. And that's a shame, because this is the best 40K action game out there. I got in a few rounds last night, and I'll continue checking in for as long as the audience holds out this time. It may be the last time the game is really playable online.

I have also begun a subscription to FFXIV. I haven't made much progress in the last couple of weeks, but I am committed to seeing it through to the endgame. Going into Labor Day weekend 2018, this is what I am most focused on.