Though This Battle Is Lost, We Will Fight On, Brothers!

It's time to pour one out for Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade. The multiplayer third-person shooter with aspirations to the Battlefield-like genre blend of open conflict both on foot and in vehicles, and with a long-promised-but-never-realized open world component, seems to be basically dead. I fired it up last night looking for a game I was never able to match into, and coincidentally also yesterday the developers posted a blog entry that amounted to them issuing and apology, lamenting their low numbers, and promising to do more. I can't see the game pulling out of this tailspin, to be honest. Games are a rough business at the best of times, and in the current environment a game like this that was released far to early to Early Access, that eternal curse, with no fanfare, is as good as dead, and no doubt destined to be as forgotten as any lost civilization in the darkness of Old Night.

I will hug my Relic 40K games close and support them as much as I can going forward.

The 4X bug came back to bite me over the weekend, and after reinstalling both of Amplitude's Endless Legend and Endless Space, I finished off suspended campaigns in both. I was able to pull out a win in Legend, as the Drakken, taking a diplomatic victory. I think this game must have been in progress for two years or more, but it's done now. In Space, however, I wasn't able to salvage the setup I'd found myself in. Somehow I had two games set up as myself playing the Pilgrims against a single other faction, the Hissho. I'm not sure how that happened, other than maybe they both started out as the same game in the base game, and I then completed it there in addition to in the expanded version of the game. In either case, I ended up conceding, unable to do any real damage to the other faction's fleets in war. I was inspired to start a new campaign, though, as the hostile Cravers, which exist only to consume and expand, and in fact cannot take part in diplomacy. It's early on in that campaign yet; I'm still expanding to fill my starting area and having to tech up to the point where I can get further out to start warring on other species.

I've been doing daily sessions of Spelunky, too. I'm still trying to get good again. I've never been great at the game, but I do hope to finish it someday, still. I think if I just keep at it regularly it'll begin to happen eventually.

Every time I play The Witcher 3, I'm convinced again that it is one of the best games out there. I'm pretty invested into playing Gwent within the game, as well. I still only have cards for the Northern Realms deck, but I may be on my way to getting the right cards for the Scoia'tel deck, as well. As goes the main thrust of the quest to find Ciri, I'm currently trying to track down Dandelion, who may have seen her recently. That involves talking to other people in the area who he's had contact with, to get a clue on where he might be, since the tavern he runs with Zoltan Chivay was left abandoned. I can hardly wait to play more.

Warcraft Booklogsta Spook-y Mechany

I finally finished off Altered Carbon, the cyberpunk noir novel starring Takeshi Kovacs. It was pretty entertaining. There are a couple more books with the same character, but I'm not sure I'll read those. It's a big bookshelf and booklog. I'll go back to some Horus Heresy material soon, but I'm also in the middle of a couple of other things, one being the Warcraft chronicle.


Speaking of Warcraft, much of the last couple of weeks I have spent plowing through the remaining quest lines of the new Broken Isles zones. At some point I'll run out of the authored stuff and into a sort of endgame phase where what's left is to either do PVP, more hardcore PVE, or seemingly repetitive World Quests, which it seems are procedurally generated. I'm not sure how much of that I'll be interested in doing. I do like how podcast friendly the game is, though, and I would enjoy finishing off my Artifact!


I mentioned Endless Legend previously. I went back and completed the tutorial to re-familiarize, and then jumped back into the game I was playing before. I feel a little more acclimated to the game now, but it'll definitely take more time to satisfy myself. I haven't even finished one game yet.


I seem to have stalled out in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I finished a bunch of side objectives in Detroit and have been sent elsewhere to a mission, at this point. Some sort of industrial location. I forget what the objective is.


New on the agenda as of late is Titanfall 2. I lucked into a copy at no out of pocket cost, so I have been giving it a go. I'm two missions into the new single player campaign, which is fun, and I've played a few rounds of multiplayer, too, which is also fun. I'll put more time into this for sure, even though I feel more and more distant from the FPS genre as time goes on.

God from Endless Warcraft

Amplitude's Endless series of games was on sale on Steam the other day, and it occurred to me that I still wanted to play more of Endless Legend, and that I could economically substitute that in my rotation this week as compared to purchasing the newly released Civilization VI, even when accounting for the 10 bucks' worth of DLC I purchased to bring me more up to speed with the state of the game. I thought I should probably replay the tutorial, since it had been a while, and I don't think I ever finished a game when I played it, previously. I'm about 45 minutes into that tutorial now, I think.


I also began Deus Ex: Human Revolution over the last week or two. I should have played this game sooner, because it seems to have aged kind of roughly. The graphics are below my expectations for a game of the prior generation, and there are ugly 720p loading screens and CG cut-scenes everywhere. The play holds up, though. I suppose it's pretty timeless, since it feels more or less identical to that of the original Deus Ex, which released in 2000, if I'm not mistaken. The game has style, too. A roundly mocked style, admittedly, but a style nonetheless. I happen to like this genre, known to some as the immersive simulation, so I'll keep playing it, but I don't know for how long. Dishonored 2 will be out in about a month's time, after all.


I also managed to make it all the way to 110, the level cap, in WoW with my Death Knight, Phoenixian, and I'm working through all the questing content in Legion in order to see everything in the expansion and power up my Artifact weapons as far as possible. There are a million things to do in this game, of course, but for my own purposes, I plan to do all of the one-time quests I can, and play through all of the dungeons and raids I can, at least once or twice. Given an abundance of time, I'd also like to go back and explore the rest of Azeroth/Outland/Draenor some more as well. In other words, no end in sight.

Steam Winter Sale BONANZA Pt. 2

Capping off the Steam holiday sale this year, just a couple of games.

Might & Magic X: Legacy - I was pretty disappointed with how little the quality of the graphics in game resembled the promo screenshots on the Steam store page. Bullshots, indeed. Otherwise, it seems like a pretty standard turn-based RPG in the first-person, advance-upon-a-grid genre similar to, but not so interesting as Legend of Grimrock, which it should be mentioned, is not turn-based, and more focused on puzzles, whereas M&M seems to be more of a quest-based type. It might be worth revisiting, at some point. Probably not, if I'm completely honest. Lack of time, better offerings elsewhere, etc.

Might & Magic VI - this was a freebie with purchase of the above. I understand it was a very impressive game back when it came out, but it looks like one of the most absolutely terrible things I have ever encountered in gaming. Time has not been kind at all to mid-'90s digitization of photos into game assets. I shudder to recall those pained, disembodied visages.

Apart from those, I've been cozying up more to Endless Legend, Dungeon of the Endless, and Ground Zeroes. I have one other new game to report, and that is Elite: Dangerous.

Elite is one of the oldest, longest-running, and most revered game series out there, despite being only verging on active over the 30 years since the first game came out in 1984. I gather much of the acclaim and appreciation goes back to the first game, which no doubt was a huge influence on almost every other notable 3D space flight, combat, or trading game since. Dangerous is the newest, crowd-funded game in the series,

Elite: Dangerous is very interesting in that it uses procedural generation to turn out billions of stars across our galaxy, all anchoring their respective system of orbiting asteroid fields, planets, and space colonies. The galaxy is built on a 1:1 scale with our own, real galaxy, and all the actual data we have modeled accurately (as far as I know), with the rest being computer-generated.

The game itself is about being a space freelance. Haul goods, become a privateer, a pirate, a mercenary, hunt bounties, explore uncharted space, mine asteroids, and just generally do whatever it is you wish to do to make your fortune and ascend the ranks of space pilots in the areas of military action, trading, and exploration. So far, I've eschewed combat for the most part, and hauled some goods back and forth for credits, but have been spending most of my time visiting and gathering mapping data on unexplored star systems. This is by far where I've made the most of my meager earnings in game to date.

I started in a system I've forgotten the name of, probably less than 50 LY from Sol, and I've been heading in a direction I'd colloquially term "galactic down" which is perpendicular to the galaxy's plane of ecliptic, parallel to it's axis of rotation, and down in that the coordinate number for that direction is negative relative to Sol's 0:0:0 origin location. I'm around 300 LY from Sol, at present. I'm planning to continue my exploration, and maybe to hunt some bounties or take on some military contracts here and there along the way. I got rid of my cargo hold racking in order to make room for exploration tools and a shield generator (mainly for safety from pirates).

I've been very impressed with the game. Very impressed, as I'll outline in my next post.

Steam Winter Sale BONANZA Pt. 1

It's Winter Sale time, and I've been trying to play everything as I buy it. This is my chronicle of this fool's errand, beginning with a few things I decided to catch up on before the sale:


Sid Meier's Ace Patrol: Pacific Skies - just a dumb mobile game ported to PC. It's got kind of a neat tactical WWII dogfighting system. I liked the first Ace Patrol on ipad and I had to win a gem auction in the sale lead-up period, so I chose a game no one else would bid on. It's worth a buck or two, but probably better played on a tablet.


Age of Mythology - Microsoft has seemingly come around to the existence of Steam and acknowledgement of their past as PC game developers, or at least they are allowing another studio to remaster and rerelease some of their past hits, such as this one. It seems it's an RTS where you can play various factions from world myths, such as Egyptian, Norse, and Greek traditions. I just did a couple of rounds of the tutorial campaign.


Dark Souls II - I really only played long enough to create a character and work through the beginning exposition to the point where you are given control of said character.


Dawn of War II: Retribution - I played some of The Last Stand, and started the campaign proper as the Space Marines' Blood Ravens chapter, the same faction (the only faction) that was playable in vanilla DoWII and the first expansion, Chaos Rising. I want to see their story through to the end, then perhaps check out Chaos or the Imperial Guard or another of the several factions in the game.


Dungeon of the Endless - It's a type of roguelike where you don't seem to have direct control over how your party members (2 to 4), but are able to alter the dungeon room by room as you go, gathering resources to level up your party and also trying to move an object from the starting room of a floor through to the end of the floor. I have yet to successfully make it to the second floor. It's interesting in that it shares the 4 primary resources (food, industry, science, dust) with Endless Space and Endless Legend, two other games that exist in the same universe.


Endless Legend - A 4X (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) empire-building game set in a fantasy and sci-fi melding world with incredible production values and aesthetics and really unique, distinct, and interesting faction design. It seems to be on the whole going for something Civilization-esque, but with a lot of tweaks aimed at making war more interesting by making stacked armies fan out to do battle directly on the hex-based overworld, which temporarily doubles as your battlefield, and addressing the common complaints about the endgame stages of these types of games involving too much micromanagement, as you have fewer cities to administer in Endless Legend due to a one city per region rule. I've been pretty impressed with the game so far.


Inescapable - I was given a copy to play for research purposes. It's a 16-bit looking sci-fi, alien planet, side-scrolling action and exploration game, obviously Metroid influenced, though without that much emphasis on combat, and instead more on revealing a story of ancient precursor races et cetera. It's solid, if not remarkable, though I did seem to hit a game-ending bug where I used up an item I still need to get around an obstacle. I don't see any way to fix this other than starting over from the beginning.


Mario Golf World Tour - It's a good golf game themed in Mario with some power-up gimmicks to spice it up, or not, depending on  your mood. This may see more play in the future.


Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes - A fantastic port to the PC. I made my way through the main mission once to this point, and I'm very impressed with how well it performs, and how well it plays. I'll be playing around with this quite a bit in the lead up to The Phantom Pain. It feels like the Tanker demo for MGS2 that was released along with Zone of the Enders so long ago. Keifer Sutherland as Snake doesn't even really bother me, though I would definitely prefer to have David Hayter back.


Primordia - I'm not a huge fan of point and click style adventure games that make you retread the same old ground over and over combining random items into puzzle solutions, but the plot synopsis made me want to try this out. It seems kind of cool, but again this style of play really does nothing for me, so I'm not so sure about it.


Rise of Nations - Another of Microsoft's old RTSs remastered and rereleased for the next generation. I liked the tutorial missions and the looks of this one a little more than Age of Mythology, I think, and the game has a stellar reputation, so it merits more of a look at some point.


R.U.S.E.  - The first few missions were really cool. It seems like RTS without all the busywork, basically just the strategic parts, with some tactical manipulation, but little if any base building or resource management. I didn't really get into the fake-out head games quite yet, though. I want to play more of this one, as well.


Space Hulk - Warhammer 40,000 Space Marines Terminators versus Tyranid Genestealers in very tightly-confined space ship corridors. It's a very tactical game, based very faithfully on the classic board game. Perhaps too closely for a video game. There are included options to speed up animations, but there is also the more recently released follow-up Ascension which I gather is aimed at taking a more video-gamey approach to adapting the source material. I like this one well enough, for what I played of it so far.


Total War: Rome II - Another RTS I only played the tutorial of. Seems cool, will have to follow up later with more time invested.


Wasteland 2 - Seven or eight hours in, now. It seems like a very solid and well written RPG thus far. I wouldn't say the hook is set just yet, but I get a feeling it might be were I to continue on further.


There are a lot of games above I really need to devote a lot more time to, and I still do not have a definite GOTY/Honorable Mention decision yet, either. The Steam Sale continues, and I kind want to check out Elite: Dangerous, too.