2020 GOTY

 2. XCOM Chimera Squad

1. Animal Crossing New Horizons

2020 has been mostly an off-year for me and video games, and I'm not going to try to remedy that in this post, but I did definitely want to record for posterity my choices for game of the year and an honorable mention, as above. Nothing else released this year came close in terms of time played.

I stopped keeping track of games I finished this year, because I don't really think about games in those terms like I used to. And many games don't fit neatly into the shape of something that you can finish. And also because I find myself less and less interested in the type that still do. Anyway, here's a list of games that I spent a good amount of time playing this year, in lieu of the old pile of skulls:

Hitman 2

Assassin's Creed Origins Carcassone Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin Genshin Impact Super Mario Bros. 35 Spelunky 2 Super Mario 3D All-Stars JYDGE Necromunda: Underhive Wars Tabletop Simulator Cube World DOOM Lord of the Rings Online Fire Emblem Awakening Wasteland Legend of Grimrock II Space Hulk Tetris 99 Legends of Runeterra Animal Crossing: New Horizons Horus Heresy Legions Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor Destiny 2 Assassin's Creed Syndicate - Jack the Ripper Ring Fit Adventure Blood Bowl 2 Assassin's Creed Syndicate Warhammer Underworlds Online Fallout 76 XCOM: Chimera Squad XCOM 2 The Elder Scrolls Online Magic: The Gathering Arena Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night Elite Dangerous Warhammer 40,000: Armageddon Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor - Martyr Dicey Dungeons Juno's Darkest Hour Slay the Spire

I can pretty safely recommend the majority of these games, for what that's worth.

Isolation Gamification

Well here we are about five weeks into our social distancing regime to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I've been playing more video games lately, to help pass the time. It's not so much that there's more free time, since I am working more or less the same hours from home, or even that I've slowed down other leisure activities significantly, I've just taken some of the vast amounts of time I'd spent reading and painting and playing 40K and diverted that into gaming, instead.

The most significant play totals have been in going back to Elite Dangerous for a week or so, and also in returning to my XCOM 2 campaign, as a kind of refresher and point of comparison to XCOM: Chimera Squad, which was unexpectedly announced last week, and is coming out tomorrow.

I had the urge to fly through space some, so I went and concluded the expedition I was on in Elite, doubling my net worth. The next step will be to get a Guardian tech piece for my frame shift drive, to enhance my jump distance for the future. I want to go farther, faster.

My return to my suspended XCOM 2 campaign (still my first) has brought a lot of good momentum to that effort. It feels like I'm on the upswing of a campaign that could turn out to be a winning one. With enough missions turning out positive enough results early on, and smart tech advancement, I could maybe pull it off. We'll see.

I also told friends I'd play Diablo III season 20, and The Elder Scrolls Online with them, and so I have dipped back into both of those, as well. I have been having a good time with both, so I might put in a little more time with them soon.

Otherwise, I've been keeping up with Ring Fit Adventure since getting that for my birthday a couple of months ago. It's pretty decent as an in-home workout, and has a mildly interesting JRPG style adventure to work through, as well.

I've also put a little more time into Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, and that is one that I really do need to get back to. Especially considering its being a spiritual successor to one of my all-time favorites, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

There was also a little time put into Magic: The Gathering: Arena, but not much to speak of. I think I'm still doing the tutorial stuff.

Actually, I've spent more time by far playing both sides of tabletop games of 40K that I've been setting up, using my two armies, White Scars Space Marines and my Astra Militarum (Imperial Guard) Planetary Defense Force for Icthyos Rho VIII AKA Tundra Bastion. That is a fun and interesting excercise, and very good practice for learning all the unit and weapon profiles and various ins and outs of the game rules in a stress-free, time-unconstrained environment. It's also incredibly mentally taxing, and takes many hours to get through a large game. I'm currently working on painting up a few new units before I do that again.

Making the Aliens Pay in the Near Future and the Far

For my next backlog removal task, I was due for a game with a title beginning with an X. As it happened, I also had XCOM 2 installed on my PC and ready to go, following a long period earlier in the year in which I was engrossed in the previous game and its expansion.

XCOM 2, thus far, seems like a smart evolution of the first game, featuring a lot of the same systems and mechanics as Enemy Unknown, with some new twists and additions, as well. The theme of the game this time out is guerilla-like resistance to an entrenched and oppresive alien regime, and a lot of the machanics flow logically out from that. This time, most missions begin with your squad in a concealed state, and you are able to move around and get into position before springing your ambush on the unsuspecting Advent soldiers. The game also hits the ground running in terms of difficulty, being much harder right off the bat. It seems to almost be picking up from where the first previous game left off. I'm doing well so far, a handful of missions in.

I have also picked up my campaign of Warhammer 40,000: Armageddon. Returning to the game, I am more interested in figuring out how all the myriad tanks and infantry units differ from one another, and in making it to some of the missions where Space Marines and Titans come into play.

I keep playing Spelunky in futile hopes that I am getting better at the game, and may one day be able to finish Olmec at least, if not make it through hell to the extra hard part.

I'm also chipping away at the final parts of FFXIV: A Realm Reborn. I went to play a little last night, but it was down for patch day, so no dice. I need to find some better gear to get my item level up so that I can go into the next story dungeon duty. Quests in this game are called duties.

Xenos Downed

I wrapped up my Enemy Within campaign, and my time with the 2012 XCOM series revival, this weekend. I ended up losing 4 nations from the council before stabilizing. I incorporated a MEC trooper into my permanent squad formation in place of one of the Assaults I had used previously, taking one of all 5 squad roles (MEC being the 5th), and a second Support.

Things started to turn around for this campaign as I got up more satellites, and was finally able to progress the main story by building the alien containment facility, capture some live aliens, and mount an attack on their base, while also fending off EXALT raids through covert operations. Eventually I both raided and destroyed both enemy factions' hideouts, and was raided in turn by the aliens, who lost grievously versus my well armed and experienced squaddies and a bunch of rookies. From there it was just a matter of encountering Etherials, researching psionics, and getting the last bit of research and tech-ing up done that was needed before I boarded the aliens' temple ship. The mission went off without a hitch.

After it was done I played another session to try and mop up a few achievements within reach. There are still others I could go for, but I feel like I've reached a stopping point. I'm planning to pick up XCOM 2 the next time I get a craving for the game. It's been a great time going at it intensively over the last few weeks.

Enemy Within

I've been away from gaming at large for a week or so, having to schedule a quick trip to my hometown due to my dad's death. I'm back home now and back more or less to normal, now.

During my time away I only briefly played some New Super Mario Bros. 2. I finished out the World 2 of that game. It plays like a New Super Mario Bros. game, by and large. It's solid.

I did manage to finish my campaign in XCOM: Enemy Unknown. It was my first victory. My first soldier with psionic abilities was absolutely clutch in the final mission. At one point he smoked two fresh Sectopods with a single critical psi storm ability. I believe he was a heavy, with the ability to double all damage to robotic enemies. They took 17 points each, and were insta-fried.

I'm now working on a campaign of Enemy Within, which so far seems a little bit overwhelming with new features. I've probably gone a little too far into cybernetic upgrades so far, not realizing my soldiers would lose their former classes in doing so. Now I am down to only a single assault and support trooper, while I have entirely too many heavies and snipers. I will need to get in some new recruits to hopefully get a couple more of each class I need, to ensure there is always one available and not wounded and recovering. I haven't delved into the genetic modding side of the expansion yet, but I am on my first covert operative recovery mention against the Exalt faction.

This new campaign is off to a somewhat rocky start, having lost 2 countries from the initiative so far,and being slow to accomplish priority tasks. I have built a stunner, but have yet to construct a live alien containment facility yet. I also have several nations at mid-to-high tier panic, so I'm worried about losing continent bonuses or even losing too many nations to continue, period. If this campaign fails, I'll have to be smarter about satellite coverage next time. I may be able to stabilize, though.

XCOM has finally hooked me in the way I knew it should have when I bought it over 5 years ago, now. I hope to finish a campaign of Enemy Within and then move on to XCOM 2.

Blasting and Backlogging

While I'm deep in XCOM: Enemy Unknown, I've been trying to play something new each week from the backlog.

Offspring Fling! - This must have come from an indie bundle at some point. It's a puzzle game where you play a forest creature who must navigate puzzle/platform levels while finding and ushering her offspring through them to the exit. One of the main things you can do to that end is to pick them up and hurl them across the level in a straight line. They will continue on all the way across without dropping at all until they hit something that obstructs their path, and then drop straight down. The levels couple this fact and the fact that the offspring are stacked on your character's head, increasing her height, and necessitating tunnels with a higher clearance, to come up with navigation and dexterity challenges. From the outset, there are 100 levels, mostly confined to a single screen, at least through the first 49 that I saw. It's a kind of cool little game, with a decent challenge curve as you get into it. After about an hour I had had enough, though. It's more than I can say for a lot of games, though.

Pokemon Picross - Picross is almost its own genre of puzzle game as far as I know. You have a grid of squares, most puzzles being 10x10, it seems, and you have to shade some of them in, based on numeric hints as to the number in the row or column to be shaded in each before there is an unshaded square or squares. When the puzzle is complete, the shaded squares make up an image of some sort. Pokemon Picross adds the wrinkle of a Pokemon theme, Pokemon bonuses at the outset or in the middle of each puzzle (reveal a few squares' true natures, etc.), and the F2P staple "energy" mechanic, which is just a progress gate that can be passed by paying a little money or by coming back after a timer has counted down. You also need to earn gems to move on to the next puzzle. It strikes me as Nintendo or The Pokemon Company's first foray into the mobile/F2P games paradigm, though this was a (free) 3DS game. The Pokemon and F2P trappings only serve to put me off, but I don't really know if I find Picross itself very interesting, either. It's not entirely dissimilar to Hexcells, but for some reason doesn't click with me at all in the way that game does.

Mostly, I have been laser-focused on XCOM in the last week or so. I finally managed to win a raid on the aliens' base, and now have my squad all up to colonel or major rank, all with titan armor and plasma weapons, and now I'm beginning to create advanced fighter aircraft to shoot down UFOs with weapons that will minimize damage to the alien craft. My satellite coverage is almost complete, though two nations have pulled out of the project. The next big task is to build the base facility for psionics and delve into that. I think I'll also get a couple of suits of the final armor types that offer stealth/flight/psi abilities and bonuses, as well. With luck I'll also be able to research and develop everything in one campaign. This one should prove winnable, now, I'm confident, especially considering that I can save scum if I need to. It's just a matter of time, I think, but I do need to be diligent in accomplishing the council's goals.

New? Video Games

I noticed a theme among the games I've been playing in the last week. New Super Mario Bros. 2, Geometry Wars 2, Spelunky, and XCOM: Enemy Unknown are all newer takes of previous games or series.

Geometry Wars 2 is the sequel to Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, which was an HD realization of the bonus mini-game Geometry Wars, which I believe was playable in Project Gotham Racing on the original Xbox. This is one of my favorites of my time with the Xbox 360, and I was able to play it for a little while via a friend's Xbox One's backward compatibility over the weekend, which was cool. It's one of the best arcade-style games I've ever played.

Spelunky is really also known as Spelunky HD, and it's the fully realized version of an older freeware game, I think. I've heard there are some play differences, and that it's not just a visual remake, but having never played the original, I don't know what those are. I still have yet to best Olmec, but I keep trying.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is of course the modern revival of a very ancient and venerable series known variously as UFO: Enemy Unknown or X-COM: UFO Defense. It's a fantastic game that delivers on nearly everything the original also succeeded at, but greatly modernized and streamlined. I'm at the point in my current campaign, which is going much more smoothly than any previous, where I can assault an alien base. I should probably do that soon, but I want to continue to tech up at least to the point where I can use some improved body armor before I try that mission.

New Super Mario Bros. 2 is the sequel to New Super Mario Bros., itself a reinvention of the Mario franchise in 2D. It seems to stick mostly to the beats established by its predecessor, but with an increased emphasis on coin collecting. I'm not sure how much of an impact that has on the game as a whole quite yet, though, having only just made it to the second world.

Plugging Away/Revisiting

I mentioned appreciating my good Warhammer 40,000 games in my last entry. Space Marine is one such game. Always good for a quick taste of the power and majesty of what it is like to blast some orks as one of Primarch Guilliman's finest, the Ultramarines. I wanted to see if anyone was playing the multiplayer mode of this still, in light of Eternal Crusade seeming dead. No luck, at least not at that time. I may try again sometime, but even if no one is playing, the campaign is still pretty cool.

Another game I jumped into for a little bit on a whim was Just Cause 2. It's just a big open-world playground where the object of the game is literally just to go in and cause chaos around the countryside to somehow whip up enough anti-government sentiment to topple it. It's ludicrous, but the game world is a gorgeous tropical paradise where everything can be flown or driven, and the character has a great grapple-arm and parachute combination to make the most of doing daring stunts.

I accidentally clicked on Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin Edition in my library the other day, but I might have carried on playing it had my save from the original version of the game been usable. Alas, it was not, so at some point I will have to restart the game in this version. That will be fun, when the time comes.

I have made record progress through Spelunky. I managed to get the Tunnel Man everything he needed to open up a permanent shortcut to the temple zone, and I've been running nothing but that zone ever since, trying to familiarize myself with its traps and denizens. It is by far the most ruthless set of stages yet. I've made it through to Olmec several times, but have yet to manage to beat him and win the game. That is my next goal. Eventually I would like to be able to go from the entrance of the caves through Olmec, and even on to the hell zone. Who knows if I'll ever be able to pull that off, though.

I also continue to make progress through The Witcher 3. I am to the point now where I am ready to rescue Dandelion from his captors. I have seen Triss and the other mages off from Novigrad with the help of the former Redanian spymaster, Sigi I think he's called. Next I'm going to pay a visit to the sorceress Philippa Eilhart at the request of the Redanian King Radovan. I think I'm getting these names right. I've also been going around Velen doing low level quests, trying to catch up my quest log to my character level. There's a lot in this game.

I've also found myself playing XCOM: Enemy Unknown/Enemy Within again lately. I'm allowing myself to reload after bad moves this time, and things are shaping up well for the very early stages of this campaign. I've just finished the first month and have already captured a live Sectoid for research and I'm working on unlocking beam weapons, now. This is such a cool game.

A Link to the Path

I'm still on track back to the Witcher 3. I'm drawing nearer to completion of this run of Symphony of the Night, with only about 4 sections of the inverted castle remaining to conquer before taking on Shaft and Dracula.

Something I've noticed this time around is that for as well as the castle inversion works for the game, there are some rough edges that prevent the second leg of the game from being quite so effortless as the first. It's easy to go the wrong way and find yourself under-leveled or under-geared for a section of the inverted castle, since there can be no mobility-based progression gating once you have acquired all of the motive skills and abilities from the first castle. Instead there is old-fashioned enemy toughness gating. This can still be gotten around, though, with some creative play and knowing when to mist by rougher sections on the way to gear upgrades or more beatable enemies to farm XP and upgrades on.

Elsewhere, I've done some podcast listening to Titan Quest and Spelunky while going for progression in those titles. I've also added some hardware to my setup, both a terabyte hard disk to the PC, and a Steam Link to the TV. The former allowed me to go and re-download some games that I plan to revisit, and the latter was cheap enough ($1) that I couldn't resist.

I toyed around with Skyrim and XCOM: Enemy Unknown a bit while trying out the Link. I decided to start a new non-Ironman campaign in XCOM just to see if I can't eventually actually win a campaign of that game. I'll need to focus on it at some point to make that a possibility.

The biggest addition to the rotation lately has been Opus Magnum, the new puzzle game from Zachtronics. I have long been a big fan of one of their previous games, SpaceChem. Opus Magnum is in some ways a lot like that one, though I haven't yet encountered its kind of insane difficulty here. Opus Magnum is a real looker, as well. It's got a great posh steampunk style and the alchemy machine works animate really well in a believably mechanical fashion. You play a newly graduated alchemist brought into a great house and tasked with combining base alchemical elements to do things like transmute mundane metals into gold or manufacture talcum power analogues, propulsion fuel, or even just hair product for your noble masters.

You're given a set of inputs and told what the required outputs are, and you have a selection of tools to use to assemble a machine to take care of the process that you have to envision and execute by programming grabber arms that can rotate or extend or move along tracks to deliver elements to various stations where they are transmuted or bonded or split in various ways so that you eventually end up with the finished product and deliver it to the output receptacle. It's a pretty basic concept, elaborated on in a huge variety of ways to create a very interesting and challenging and expressive puzzle game. Your creations only need to get the job done, but once finished they are evaluated against those of other players, so if you like you can chase efficiency on a few axes to enjoy refining your base creations, as well. I'm really enjoying the game so far.  

Regulars

I finished off Hexcells Plus in the last week, and have gotten into Hexcells Infinite. I've been lucky enough to not mis-click too many times, and I got the achievement for perfecting all of the levels in Plus. I'm looking forward to doing the same for Infinite. I tore through about 5-6 levels pretty quickly the other night.

In Dishonored 2, I played through the Clockwork Mansion level. I'm not sure what I expected, but so much was made of it that I was a little underwhelmed, to be honest. It is a cool design, to be sure, but I think it might have had more impact if I hadn't thought to expect to be blown away. Regardless, I am maintaining my low chaos world state, even if my stealth skills leave much to be desired. I noticed that I had begun this game on Hard difficulty, which I am now thinking was a mistake. For a first time through, especially in a game like this, Normal is probably better. I made the mistake of assuming that because I'd played a lot of the first Dishonored that I would be in tip-top shape to take on the sequel, not taking into account that I might spend months away from the game between levels.

I made a similar over-estimation of my capability in XCOM: Enemy Unknown, insisting on playing on Classic difficulty, and then never yet being able to complete a campaign. Well, I got the urge to play more again (XCOM 2: War of the Chosen just released), and decided to abandon that ongoing campaign and begin another in the expanded game, XCOM: Enemy Within. This time I'm sticking to Normal difficulty, albeit still on Ironman mode and with several of the "Second Encounter" options flagged to make the game more interesting. These seem like they can impact difficulty as well, but in both directions, as opposed to only making it harder.

In Elite, I made my way back to the bubble to pick up a second Auto Field-Maintenance Unit, and while there was able to fairly quickly rank up my Engineer relationship with Felicity Farseer to the point where she would do fifth-level upgrades on my Frame Shift Drive, meaning now I can jump nearly 46 LY at a time from star to star, where before I was only able to jump about 34 LY. Now I'm out exploring again, having dropped by Betelgeuse just last night. I'm angling above the galactic plane now, and directly out to the galactic east, thinking to explore some of the apparently empty regions out there to begin with. Maybe after that I will swing wide around back toward the core and the Colonia region. This would be months' worth of playtime, though. Who knows what might happen in the meantime, especially with a large game update not too far over the horizon. 2.4, which I believe has been dubbed "The Return" is going to be pushed out before too long, according to Frontier Developments.

A Return

I have very little progress to report on Yakuza 3 or XCOM: Enemy Unknown, but both have gotten attention over the last week. XCOM much more, but with very little to show for it. The alien base invasion mission continues to frustrate me. I think I have had 5-6 complete squad wipes there, now, two due to mind-control by the psionic Sectoid commander there.


A feeling some who don't know me might mistake for nostalgia has mounted recently, possibly in part due to my choice of musical accompaniment at work. I have become acutely wistful about my time previously spent playing Final Fantasy XI, which I ceased playing just about a decade ago, after devoting a heavy portion of the 3 years prior to. It also happens to be the game's 15th anniversary, and so I decided, after having gone through the PS2 to PC account migration procedures when the former version of the game was finally taken offline last year, that I would re-subscribe for a time, to the game which I may have to finally admit to myself is my favorite video game.


My longtime exclusive main character Nascia, formerly level capped (at 75) Black Mage, Monk, and Ninja, is now being trained as a Samurai in the wilds of Sarutabaruta. I have been away from the game for so long, and so much has changed, that I thought it made the most sense to effectively begin again, retaining of course, everything I had earned previously, as you can do with the character development system in FFXI. I could conceivably level up to 99 as SAM now, though at some point I would need to either level my Warrior (WAR) support job up to 49 from the 43 I believe it is at now.


Living alone in Japan with a less demanding job and mania for this game have in the past conspired to cause me to go too hard on it, so if I'm going to be playing it again, I think one defense I need to maintain a reasonable amount of playtime with it, is to clearly define a goal each time I sit down to play it, and to try not to deviate too much from that, and to try to end the session reasonably soon after attaining it, if possible. Otherwise, to find a sensible stopping point when it becomes clear the originally intended goal will not be achieved that session.


Last night, for instance, I sat down intending to explore the zones Sarutabaruta and Giddeus, and to level up from 5 to 10, approximately. That was exactly what I did, though in the end I still ended up playing a little too long. Thinking, planning, like this for game sessions requires a long-term vision for what I want to do in the game.


I don't know that I'll make it to the endgame, or even care all that much about progressing into the post-75 world. All of my love for this game is confined to the base game, and Zilart and Promathia expansions. I played during the Aht Urghan era, but that content didn't stick with me in the way the other did. Right now, I only know for sure I want to keep leveling up and revisiting old haunts. I was really struck by how enormous the zones were, upon revisiting. I thought perhaps they had inflated in my mind, but no, they are actually pretty huge.


I think my next foray in will be to the Auction House and weapon shops in Windurst to outfit myself with a coherent set of armor. I should probably also investigate Trusts to gather an adventuring group before setting out for much more serious leveling. I have no idea what getting those involves. I'd rather not have to go and do anything on my higher level jobs, but I will if I must.


Playing again after so long and on an unfamiliar version of the game (PC now, was PS2 previously), has me wondering how to recreate the routines and macros I used to rely so heavily on. This is one major reason I hesitate to jump back onto my higher level jobs--I'm not certain I remember exactly how to play them effectively. Beginning as a low-level, I am able to easy myself back into the swing of things, while enjoying the natural progression through the levels and geographic areas of the world of Vana'Diel  I love so much, even to this day.

Ain't Got Me

Mobile games are often trashy money sinks that mire you in infinite fiddly management to get a paid leg up in a weak core game. So seems to be the case with Fire Emblem Heroes. I gave it a shot for a couple of hours, but I felt like I pretty quickly saw through all the dressing to the lacking center. I have played a number of mobile games in this mold before, all ultimately unfulfilling despite how compulsive the character collecting and team building might be at first blush. The presentation is very stilted, full of idiotic plotting and dialogue, and I can't stand the tedium of endless optimization this type of game asks of you.


I only mention it because it is the second real attempt at a mobile game from Nintendo, after the qualified success of Super Mario Run, which I actually like, and am keeping around on my phone.
I have other, let's call them 'real', Fire Emblem games like Awakening and Fates that I am still interested in playing, actually more now, despite being let down by Heroes' nature as a F2P Gacha-centered borefest. Hearing from a few longtime fans of the series how this game differed from other recent entries has given me increased excitement to give those a go.


There is, at the moment, another tactical combat-centered game that is my focus--XCOM: Enemy Unknown has drawn me back to try to finish off my Ironman campaign. I am at a much better place than before, having teched up my squad to plasma rifles and working on titan armor. I have wiped a few times on the alien base invasion mission, so I am trying to level up a squad to take that on. I also finally managed to unlock the sixth squad member slot, which should help. I would like to successfully finish this campaign, but we'll see. Either way, I think I will play Enemy Within for my next campaign, and maybe until I finish one victorious. I haven't bought XCOM 2 just yet.


I haven't spent a heck of a lot of time gaming over the last week, partly due to returning to actively studying Japanese, after a decade or more of not. One thing I can do to combine these interests, neatly, is to play the Yakuza series. I've finished the first two on PS2, and once before sat down to begin the third, entirely in Japanese. That save file was lost, though, in troubleshooting some PS3 issues. I have restarted again, and will be continuing this time, both to brush up on my language skills, but also to progress through this series, of which I already own 2 further entries past this one, after which several others await. Even if I only played the mainline modern-era games, They're up to 6 now. Throw in Zero, remakes, and feudal-era entries, and that's a pretty hefty syllabus. Not to mention the odd zombie game or the portable entries, which I think I'll just ignore.

Play Salad

I've been into a ton of different things in the past few days:


Firewatch - I finished it. It was alright, overall, but I didn't end up liking it as much as I anticipated. Maybe I was just not in the mindspace for this type of thing. The high points are the style of the game's art and believable characters on display, though I don't quite buy that it is set in the mid '80s when the characters speak the way they do. Something about it just seemed off. Hiking around the nature areas was nice, but got old kind of quickly, and I was soon dashing everywhere, and dashing through to the end of the game.


Torchlight II - I'm not sure why, now, but something made me want to go back to revisit this game, as I felt like we had unfinished business. I feel like I'm finished with it now, though. I realized while playing it for a while that I wasn't particularly in love with either the play or the world in this game, and my time would be better spent elsewhere.


Borderlands 2 - Same story here as above. I haven't been able to get into Borderlands 2 for whatever reason, after a couple of tries. I played all the way through the first and all the DLC for it, and while I do enjoy the combat in these games, the randomly generated guns don't really do all that much for me, and I don't particularly like the world they've built here, unique though it is. I could play any number of other shooters and probably eventually find one that clicks in a way that this one doesn't.


Tomb Raider II - Another game not really on my backlog, since I did play all the way through it back at release on the original PlayStation, but that I did want to revisit. I bought the entire collection of Tomb Raider games on Steam a while back, and I want to try each of them out, for a while at least. I never played past the second when these were contemporary, nor ever played Legend, Anniversary, or Underworld in later years. The next TR game I played after II was actually the 2013 reboot. I still really like these original games in the series. No other game has done quite this sort of 3D world navigation puzzle with a very well defined move set and a collection of levels planned out so exactly. I hypothesize that the advent of the analog stick cut short this evolutionary path in gaming.


Rocket League - It continues to be a great game to dip into for a few minutes at a time as a break here and there during the day, or in the evening as a warm-up for more serious fare.


The Witness - The more serious fare, often. I've made some really good progress lately. I'm up past 250 puzzles solved now, I think, with 5 or 6 laser beams activated. I really like this game.


X-COM Enemy Unknown - My campaign continues. I'm at a stage where I have to infiltrate an alien base, and I'm just trying to build up resources and prepare my squad before doing that. I don't know if it's time sensitive or not, but it probably is, at least in the sense that alien activity is going to keep happening, and I can never address all instances of it. Eventually everyone will just pull out of the whole X-COM project. One nation already has, Russia, if memory serves.


Castlevania: Symphony of the Night - I have a game in progress that I am half-serious about completing, and that I keep going back to when I feel like a quick hit of action play and the PS3 is on, usually because Mia and Juno have been watching something.


Elite Dangerous - I finally made it back to civilized space with my tons of exploration data, and sold it, making about 8 million credits, which was enough to bankroll the best FSD available for my Asp, as well as other improvements, and now I'm off out into the black for another run. I don't know where I'm headed, other than to the bottom of the galaxy, and rimward of the bubble of settled systems. One of the new toys I want to test out is my SRV, the rover that can be deployed to drive around the surfaces of planets (rocky and non-atmospheric, for the time being). I need to do more and longer expeditions if I'm going to make enough money to buy an Anaconda or other large ship, and if I'm going to rank up to Elite in exploration. These are long, long, long term goals. I can play CQC mode in between bouts of jump, scan, jump, scan, jump, scan, and so on.

Steady As She Goes

The Ship is an older entry in my Steam library. As I recall, everyone who purchased the game ended up with a few free copies to give away to others. They were as common as dirt for a while, it seemed. I finally decided to try the game out, since it began with S, and I could at once knock out three separate entries in my unplayed Steam list (The Ship, The Ship Tutorial, and The Ship Single Player). It's a mainly multiplayer game of the type where every player is given one other player to kill, while avoiding being killed by whomever is hunting them. At the same time, your character has various needs that need to be met, such as having to eat, drink, sleep, shower, urinate, socialize, read, et cetera. The game is a balancing act of hunting, evasion, and character upkeep on a Titanic-era ship on the high seas. It's a good idea, and seems to have been executed competently. It's a shame then, that several years on, there are no players on the servers. It does have a functional bunch of bots you can play against, at least to get a sense of how the game is supposed to play, and the single player mode is a sort of campaign-tutorial mélange that seemed to mean well, but lacked a quick save, meaning lots of repetition. No, thank you.


Horizons, the first major expansion to Elite: Dangerous was on sale recently, so I added that to my game and was able to make my first planetary landing on a random body in a random system still several hundred LY outside of civilized space. I don't have a rover yet, so landing is really all I can do, but it was still cool.  When I get the feeling, I'll make my way back to civilization and hopefully be able to make some money from my exploration data to then afford one of the rovers. They look like a lot of fun!


Progressing through some of my 2016 planned gaming syllabus, I have been working on both XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Dawn of War II: Retribution. I suppose the XCOM2 hype and rave reviews have influenced me some, but I've gained some ground on my Normal Ironman campaign. I still feel overwhelmed and lack satellite coverage, but I may be able to claw my way to success with some luck. I've never made it even this far in a campaign, though, so who can say? I ran one mission in Retribution last week, but it's got me wanting to run more. I'm playing it through as the Blood Raven Space Marine squad this first time, at least. It might be interesting to try some of the other factions, too.


A quick update on The Witness: I keep returning to this game and managing to figure out a little bit, and make a little bit of progress before being stumped and putting it down. Figuring out the rules that govern a set of puzzles is a really nice feeling, though. It makes me want to go back and keep trying until I figure it all out.


Firewatch has just come out, the walk and talk first person exploration and drama game from the new studio Campo Santo, made up of people formerly of Telltale Games, Double Fine, Irrational, Klei, and others, I'm sure, as well as members of the popular Idle Thumbs video games podcast. It features art by artist Olly Moss, whose style is very full of visual wordplay. You play one of those people that goes and spends the summer in a giant watchtower out in the wilderness and watches for brushfires and acts as a sort of deputy park ranger. Henry (his name) has some personal issues and he is in contact with Delilah, another firewatcher, and they talk a lot on the radio while interesting things occur in the parklands. I'm investigating a bit of a mystery at the point I'm at, now.

Hit and Miss

Sometimes even good games can miss the mark for us personally, for whatever reason.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown has never really clicked with me, despite how plainly well designed and executed everything about it is. I certainly admire the game, and enjoy sessions of it, but it's one I have to make myself play. Even some of the best games require pushing through at times, but for whatever reason XCOM is always an uphill battle for me. I reached a mission last week that requires me to board an alien ship, and came across my first of the floating disc aliens, which promptly ended the runs of my entire squad. Now I am left with a bunch of rookies to face the same gauntlet, and I fear for the future of the XCOM initiative, and the world.

I checked out Payday: The Heist (yes, even though Payday 2 has been out for years at this point) as my P game for my mini backlog project. It was surprisingly fun playing alone with bots filling out the rest of my crew. I did the bank robbery heist, and thought seriously about going back to play more, probably trying the street battle scenario a la Heat, but then decided that was OK, I'd actually had enough. I should check out the sequel sometime.

This weekend saw some real leaps of progress in KOTOR. I started out just having arrived on Kashyyyk looking for the third piece of the star map, progressed through that and the scenario that followed which involved escaping Darth Malak's starship and the grand revelation that I was Darth Revan (before my turn as the light side boy scout I am now playing), and finally through the Korriban section of the game and acquiring the final piece of the map to the Stellar Forge. I think I must be pretty close to the end, now. Bastila is apparently being held by Malak, who is apparently also on the way to the Stellar Forge for some reason. I've heard Bastila can be turned to the dark side, but I'm unaware of whether it is a certainty or not. Perhaps it depends on what path the player character has taken. I'm squeaky clean, since for the most part the dark side options to me seem a little too moustache-twirling for me to roll with in this game. I've read that KOTOR II deals much more in shades of gray. I may play a bit more of a conflicted character in that game when the time comes.

Another very well done game that I'm not sure is really doing it for me is The Witness. I've never been the biggest fan of puzzles for puzzles' sake, but I do like a nice immersive world with enigmas spread about, and the game definitely has that. I'm not sure what portion of the puzzles I've done thus far, but I'd guess it's somewhere around 20%, probably. I've been wandering from place to place, abandoning areas as soon as they get a little too head-scratchingly obtuse. It's a neat game, to be sure, and I'll certainly keep plugging away at it, I just don't know if I'll ever figure it all out. I don't even know the totality of what there is to figure out, at this point.

For the next week or so, I'm really looking forward to finishing KOTOR. I'm not sure where to go from there, but perhaps back to Dawn of War II?

Mid-August 2014 Playlog

It's hard to find a theme in these large collections of games I play for less than an hour at a time, for the most part. To review:

Talisman - I picked up both the solo adventure and full 4-player digital board games on Steam in a Games Workshop sale. While very, even completely, dependent on luck of the die roll, the game is decently fun. I found the variety of abilities and characteristics each playable character had offered up some interesting in-game ramifications. I played 2-3 complete games, which can be fairly long, before deciding my time was better used elsewhere. It was a satisfyingly fun experience, though.

Mount & Blade - I began my campaign and was immediately overtaken by bandits and taken captive, only to escape sometime later minus my followers and much of my wealth and possessions. This happened over and over, until I was left with no one, not even a horse, and next to nothing. The only choice left was between going full-rogue to probably die alone and reviled and taking up arms in the arena, winning gold and glory and, and hopefully parlaying that into followers. That's what I'm in the midst of, now.

X-Com: Enemy Unknown - I advanced my campaign through a couple of battles, finally taking captive a couple of the aliens and beginning to get a handle on managing my forces. This is another game I don't know why I don't just play all the time.

Half-Life 2 - I played though about 20 to 30 minutes of stuff up to a point where I'm making my way up through a warehouse area from subterranean tunnels, and there are all these Combine soldiers fast-roping down onto catwalks above me and they keep killing me. They'll get theirs, eventually.

Colin McRae Rally - this really is a very bare-bones experience. It's good for a quick race here and there, though. For $7, it's really not too bad.

Hearthstone - I figured it was no more random than Talisman, takes only a fraction of the time to play, has much better production values, actual people to play against, interesting solo content, and all the might of one of the biggest and best game studios in the world backing it up, I might as well invest my time further into this as any other digital card or board game. I've actually been enjoying the hell out of the single-player Naxxramus "boss battles," which are just duels against players with unique abilities and traits. They're almost puzzle-like in that they require a certain approach to win. While nothing like them, they remind me of the puzzles I used to do in The Duelist magazine about 20 years ago, when I was big into Magic: The Gathering.

Final Fantasy III (DS remake) - I finally knocked a few minutes into playing this, before taking it and all my other DS games and trading them all in. Not much to say, other than it's FF, and why the hell isn't the action ever on the top screen? Total loss on this, by the way. I bought it new in Japan, and even had the cool strategy guide to go with it, which I gave up for a mere buck alongside the game. Oh well, not like I was ever going to use it, anyway.

Kurohyou: Ryu Ga Gotoku Shinshou (Yakuza spinoff for PSP) - This was also a quick try-out before trade-in job. It's a Yakuza game, that much is certain. I thought it looked nice enough on the PSP. Series diehards or PSP gamers not already tired of the series should take interest. It's only available in Japan, however, and these games are heavy and deep with the sort of high-level and macho- slang Japanese that many non-native speakers will have trouble understanding (from my own experience).

Wipeout 2048 - I thought I'd played this one before, but I suppose not. It was only for about 20 minutes late at night when I was practically falling asleep, but I was pretty impressed by how well it looked and felt. I did a handful of races and placed decently among my friends, and I'm looking forward to playing more.

Borderlands 2 - I have merely begun, playing Maya the Siren, and having just beat the first boss, a sasquatch type thing in the ice that was bothering a claptrap. I've got to play more to rally form up an impression.

Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition - A gift from Esteban. I haven't really played SF since HD Remix, and that only casually. Before that the last one I really played much of was Super SFII on the SNES. Wow, it's a nice looking game, and it runs flawlessly on the PC. What really pushed me over the edge in wanting to play it (and now wanting to play more), was hearing of the feasibility of playing with a keyboard. It's not something I'd ever considered, but taken logically, there's no reason it should not work, and in practice I found it shockingly easy to pull off special moves, if not completely second-nature in the way that playing with a pad is. I think the keyboard layout is fundamentally better suited to the game than the average 4-button control pad, simply due to the six-button layout possible on the NumPad (4-7, with other keys for button combos), but also due to the ability to use A,S,D, and space directions (space being up/jump). It sounds ridiculous at first, but in practice, wow. It works. With some practice and getting used to, there's no reason at all this control scheme should not be competetive with, or even superior to, other input methods.

Wrapping Up 2013

We're nearing the end of the year, and it's time to start thinking about Game Of The Year proceedings here at 9 Parsecs, and on Call Of Podcast. In light of that fact, I have been making a slight effort to look into 2013 games to try to cover as many bases as possible. Here are the meager fruits of this half-hearted effort:

Poker Night 2 -- OK, this wasn't really for GOTY consideration at all, it was just installed and I had a few minutes to kill with something. I played a handful of short Texas Hold 'Em tournaments and got a sampling of the mildly entertaining presentation of the game. I think maybe the assortment of characters in the first game resonated more. But then, maybe not. These are not poker games for serious poker enthusiasts. I'm not sure who they're for, but since they're never more than $5 and are a novel distraction and feature a base level poker functionality, I keep buying them.

Teleglitch -- It's Doom meets Hotline Miami meets Rogue, but with Quake's decor. It didn't really do much for me, despite the lauding I've seen it get elsewhere.

Monaco -- Designed as a co-op, top-down heist game with a trippy aesthetic, I expected to immediately vomit and uninstall, but to be honest I enjoyed the hour(ish) I spent playing this. About half of that time was spent co-op with a couple of randoms. It was sort of fun, and had nice music. I wouldn't go out of my way to play more, though.

Battlefield 4 -- I guess this is a 2013 game. I have only played one round so far, but it seems like a Battlefield game. I think 2014 might be this game's year to shine.

Apart from trying to tick boxes next to 2013 games, I've also done some quick hits on:

Wasteland -- The original, rereleased leading up to Wasteland 2's release, which I find to be a little too archaic or my tastes. This is like going back to play the first Dragon Warrior or something, but Westernized. I would like to really give it a shot, though.

Company of Heroes 2 -- The first game I ever streamed myself playing! It was a short lived disaster. I only ducked in long enough to see how the streaming worked and have the first person on my team in a 4 on 4 match go "WTF dude?," at my immediately apparent ineptitude before I quit out. Not sure what I was thinking, here.

Diablo III -- Esteban finally saw the light and has gotten into the game. I jumped in with my Barbarian as he was finishing up Normal to skip a few beats ahead in the game, and then later went back and killed Diablo on Normal with my now level 28 guy, and will probably move him on to Nightmare next time I play. Or should I go back and complete the parts of the game I skipped? I'm torn.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown -- I aborted my problematic Normal/Ironman game and began a new one, which so far is coming along very well. I'm starting to get into the game more, and wish I had more time to play it.

Hearthstone -- The game was recently updated with some changes to a few problematic cards and a new ranking system for constructed deck play. I continue to jump in and do the daily quests, though I sometimes wonder why. I think Blizzard needs to add more of a reason to keep playing the game, especially outside of Arena. Constructed play is nothing but a ladder grind, and luck has such a heavy hand in any game of Hearthstone that it's hard not to chalk up wins and losses just to luck of the draw rather than any skill surplus or deficit.

Spelunky -- I keep hitting the daily challenge every day, now on Vita/PS3 as well as on the PC version. I have a hard time wanting to play outside of the daily, though. Usually one or two runs will do it for me, especially if one happens to go on to the Jungle or beyond.

Assassin's Creed -- I've put some unholy amount of time into IV so far, and have not yet finished up the story stuff. I want to do that soon. I'm curious what happens with Kenway in the end, and whether Haytham figures into the end of the game at all. I re-installed AC III this weekend, too, just to play through the opening stuff again. The Kenway line is pretty interesting, which is why I'm curious where Edward ends up in the whole Assassin/Templar conflict. So far he's been killing a bunch of Templars, but for his own reasons; he's not explicity with the Assassins. Not yet, anyway.

Just When I Think I'm Out

Something pulled me back into Fallout: New Vegas this past weekend. I just wanted to get in there and get that Desert Ranger armor, so I played through the Honest Hearts DLC first, and then continued on to finish up some miscellaneous side quests around the Mojave. Honest Hearts had some really great writing, and it wasn't all contained in the primary quests. I felt like the journal entries of the "Father In The Cave" told one of the greatest stories in all of New Vegas. Then, to top it off, I came away from it with his cool Desert Ranger Combat Armor and Survivalist's Rifle, along with a sweet new pistol from the Burned Man, Joshua Graham, called A Light In The Darkness. I really am playing a badass wasteland drifter and gunslinger gal, now. There is still a bunch of content to get to in the game, as well.

Simultaneously, I am also now farther into Morrowind than I have ever been, before. I've climbed a good way up the ladder of the Thieves' Guild, and I've acquired some great weapons and armor even though my character is still only level 2. I still haven't decided my approach to playing through other guild quest lines and the main one, though I am leaning toward multiple characters. I think Elder Scrolls games work best treated as giant worlds to really role play in as though you were a somewhat plausible person, and not the focal point of all the worlds' goings-on--aside from the main quest lines, of course, where you are often The Chosen One.

There is an interesting point of contrast here between Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, which always cast you as the fulcrum of the world's future, and where every choice comes with an opportunity cost. In Fallout, going down one path will close off the other to you, and that is almost never the case in the Elder Scrolls. In Oblivion and Skyrim, they even make it so key NPCs cannot be killed and your reputation is very malleable, meaning that you can at any time go from being head assassin and dread lord to high paladin and mighty savior with relatively little effort.

Here and there, I've also gotten in quick hits of XCOM: Enemy Unknown and even New Super Mario Bros. with my daughter watching. I finally found how to get to that stupid warp pipe in World 1. I've even played a bit of some iOS stuff, though I try to make it a policy not to think too much about that platform of mostly disposable games. I may make exceptions here and there, but not today.

No Thanksgaming

It's Thanksgiving time in the US, and I'm out of town, resulting in slim to no game playing on my part. In the last couple of weeks before this trip though, I logged some time on a few games.

I played a smidge of Dirt 2 on a whim, mainly because it's such a pretty game with such beautiful weather in all the locations you race in. I like rally racing because of the locales you drive through. It's a shame I have no clue how to control a rally car at speeds above about 30 mph, though.

I've begun XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and while its quality is plain to see, I haven't given myself completely over to it, just yet. I've been playing a mission at a time, just here and there. I decided on Ironman mode right off the bat, because I think the permanence of consequence makes the game much more interesting. I felt kind of shameful about reloading a lot playing X-Com classic, and I wish I had played Ironman-style in that game, too. I'm not looking at it as a game to beat ASAP, but rather as an experience to enjoy long-term.

Dark Souls will probably turn out to be another long-term game for me. I'm not in any rush to finish it; that would probably hurt the appeal of the game for me. No, I'd rather inch through it little by little as time and impetus allow. I had to restart my game on the PC, since I'd put in around 8 or 10 hours on the PS3, previously. Despite already retracing all my old steps and decisions, I opted to keep rolling with a Knight over any other class. I feel like all the rest would focus more on agility and dodging, and what I want is to be able to stand toe-to-toe with the biggest and baddest the game has to throw at me. I played Demon's Souls as a roll-reliant Wanderer, and I'd rather go heavy this time around.

I spent the majority of the last few weeks' game time on Fallout 3. As a matter of fact, I plowed right through the game's main quest line and had completed it before I even realized it was over. I'm not sure what that says about the game, but I have been enjoying it quite a bit. It's not Fallout 1 or 2, but it's good. I'm in the middle of the proper post-game DLC, Broken Steel, right now, and I'm also going to play the rest of the DLC stuff, at the very least. One of the last perks I unlocked revealed every point of interest on the map, and to say that I'd visited even 10% of them through the main quest would be generous. I'm not going to commit to that, but we'll see how it goes. I'm already kitted out in Enclave Hellfire armor and Plasma weapons, but there is still a long way to go until I hit level 30.

Uninstall: Mid-'90s Strategy Master Class

It's about progress, modernization! It's about clearing the land of old construction to make way for new, while ensuring that the existing foundation, solid as ever, remains.

It's also about letting go of the past, and what might have been, to accept the path we've trod, and to seize the opportunity of the present, with an eye toward what the future may bring.

Dwelling on the choices we could have made, or attempting to turn back time to make another attempt will only cause us to be caught unawares by current circumstance.

It is to this end that I dedicate this memorial to the heroes, feats, and achievements of our forbears.

The ground you broke, the intrepid exploration, and their lasting contributions to our current prosperity,

Though consigned to the annals of time, will not be forgotten.