One more post, before the year is out

 The traditional acknowledgement of the shit state of parts of the world follows.  The Hamas/Israel thing is still going on (a pox on both their houses), and Russia's invasion of Ukraine continues (a pox on Russia, and Putin and his circle in particular).

Right, that out of the way, 2023 is coming to a close, and life is greatly unchanged for me, outside of a couple of bits in the gaming sphere.  As expected, an XBox gift card came my way from my brother, which I put towards finally picking up Baldur's Gate 3.  It's an unexpectedly large game, which forced me to make a decision.  Either Starfield or Destiny 2 needed to go, to make room on the limited drive space of the Series S.  I wrestled with that choice a bit, but, in the end, Destiny 2, in its current state, isn't really geared towards how I'm playing these days, so off it went.  Looks like it's been a bit over a year since I got back into Destiny 2, so it had a good run... and I'm definitely more interested in seeing what Bethesda does in coming weeks to shore up their latest game.

What about Baldur's Gate 3, you ask?  Well, I've hardly played enough yet to give a proper review, but I definitely like what I've seen so far.  Companions with issues, proper turn-based combat, wide ranges of choices to make, no matter how poor (let's just say I've ended up kissing a mind flayer, however unintentionally)... it's a wild ride, and it's hooked me deep enough for unintentional past-my-bedtime play sessions.  How much of that is, for lack of a better term, "nostalgic novelty", and how much is a really good game, I need more playtime to work out... but I'd lean in the good game direction, myself.

Well, that all said, goodbye 2023.  Let's see what the new year has to offer.

What's this? A way to get Bungie executives removed, you say?

 Before I revel in being a terrible person, here's the traditional report on people being terrible in Ukraine and Gaza.  In Ukraine, winter is setting in, so, likely, not a lot of news is going to come in on that front for a while... which is good, because we (USA and Europe, but mostly USA) can't seem to get our act together to keep Ukraine funded for their fight against Russian invaders.  Meanwhile, while there was a ceasefire and exchange of some hostages in Gaza, the fight is back on now... and apparently, the USA had to veto a resolution at the UN trying to force another ceasefire.  The UN is good for many things, but trying to decree the end of active fights, not so much.

Anyways, turning to something I might have a bit more influence over, it's the situation over at Destiny 2's developer Bungie.  According to reports from a couple of days back like this one, the amazingly tone-deaf behavior of Bungie's executive leadership team of late may be due in large part to a simple driver:  self-preservation.  Per reports, if Bungie doesn't make certain financial goals in short order, Sony can wipe out the current board and replace it with people of their own choosing.

Looking at that from a slightly different angle, one result I come up with is:  by not giving Bungie any money in the form of microtransactions or season/expansion purchases, I can do my part to usher the bad-for-customers-and-employees board members out the door.  There are a number of reasons why this isn't a sure-fire, unalloyed good of an action to take.  Most obviously, the current board is likely to cause even more chaos among the employees and players as they seek to avoid their fate.  Also, well, it's Sony who would set the rules thereafter, and they've demonstrated in the past that they're not the most customer-centric sorts either.  That all said, the current state of affairs for both players and employees is pretty bad, and Sony taking over direct control likely wouldn't be much worse (or, if it did become that much worse as an immediate result, it would be that much easier to walk away from the game).

So, yeah, I'm on board.  So long as nobody comes up with a compelling reason otherwise, count me in the camp of "I'm not giving Bungie any money until their current board is removed."  Will that happen before the next expansion launches later next year?  I'm hopeful (the sooner the better, really), but we'll see.

Wildermyth - where did those hours get off to, anyways?

 So, again, Ukraine and Gaza are still ongoing things, but no major changes of late, so we'll leave that there.

Meanwhile, here I am, just two weeks after praising Liberté, supplanting it on my "games that have my attention" list with Wildermyth (Compatibility: Verified), a tactical RPG more in line with games like Disgaea 2 (which I also, reluctantly, dropped from the list for now).  Am I just that fickle, or is Wildermyth just that good?  Arguably, both explanations are valid, but let's focus on how good the game is.  At a glance, it doesn't look like much, due to its "papercraft" style.  Watch or play a bit of it, however, and the good (maybe even unique) bits come to the fore fairly quickly.

Let's start with the more mechanical aspects of the game first.  Your party in any given encounter consists of up to 5 characters, each representing one of three classes.  There's warriors, your standard hit-things-with-big-weapons sorts.  There's hunters, your "good with a bow, but also able to sneak in close" sorts.  Finally there's mystics, who are not your standard fireball-slinging magicians - rather, they're "environmental" magicians, able to "interfuse" with different parts of the environment to produce a range of effects, centered or originating from the pieces they've interfused with.  Just to give one go-to example from my playtime, interfusing with stone things always gives you an option to use an action to chuck a stone discus from that item as a direct attack... however, depending on the skills your mystic has learned, you might also get a passive bonus just for having that interfusion, or be able to create stone walls, or help protect your other characters actively or passively, that sort of thing.

Combine that with a simple grid-based tactical system, where characters lining up next to each other provides a small defensive bonus, while attacking an enemy from multiple directions improves your chances of hitting them, and you end up with a lovely little tactical puzzle for each combat encounter.  Compared to something like Disgaea 2, it's a lot simpler to keep track of your options with a limited number of characters, while the customization of each character still lets them feel like more than "standard third-level fighter".  If this were the whole of the game, it might get easy to get bored after an hour or two, but that's just the start.

You see, each game of Wildermyth is a story of sorts, with a chapter-based setup, and an overworld where non-combat things usually dominate.  Traveling from one region to the next takes time, as does things like patrolling, building defenses against incursions of monsters, establishing outposts for crafting resources, and, especially importantly, recruiting.  After all, people die, or they grow old and need to retire from an adventuring life.  Plus, while the most you can have in a party is 5 characters, that's not to say that you can only have one party - and sometimes, for various reasons, you might only want (or be able to support) three or fewer characters on a particular task - maybe you don't want a full group bogged down while getting your newest recruit up to speed, so they're not just a farmer with a pitchfork out in the wide world facing horrible beasties.  Or maybe a bridge needs built or a mountain pass needs work.  Or maybe, there's a side story that's popped up that's tied to one of your characters.

And there is the real thing that elevates this game above most similar things, the stories.  Usually, there's an overarching story to attend to, but it's not the story.  Things come up during gameplay, and it's not in the form of a quest-giver with a question mark over their head.  Rather, sometimes, things just come up, depending in part on where your group is and what they're doing, and how you react to those events can have a big influence on how your game goes from there.  Just as an example, one event that came up on two games I've played has your group stumbling across a hill that's been shaped to resemble the head of a wolf.  You climb up and don't find anything, but then there's a bit of godly rumblings followed by a voice talking to your hunter about a pact their ancestors made, which you kind of have to acknowledge when the god's name comes unbidden to their lips.  In my first game, my options were to basically either have the hunter offer themselves up to receive the change the god offered, or for the warrior accompanying them to object strongly and loudly.  I went with the flow, and my hunter transformed into a wolf-man, gaining the ability to bite opponents on top of their usual attacks.  The second game, I had a mystic along for the ride, who condescendingly spoke of the "Woof-god" that he had tried to bargain with before, but admitted their faithful made some nice things, which resulted in the hunter getting a wolf-head amulet with some bonuses.

All in all, it's an amazing little bundle of a game.  If anything, the only thing I could point to as dragging it down a bit is that I'm pretty sure it's not an English-first game, and some of the translations are a bit clumsy.  Even with that, what I intended to be a quick "let's fire this game up and see what it's about" session turned into 10-12 hours of straight playtime (excluding the time needed midway to install it on my Steam Deck so I could play it on my couch more readily).  As long as you aren't scared off by anything turn-based, I heartily recommend giving this game a try.

Liberté - a lovely mix of horrors

 The world continues to burn in Ukraine and Gaza, but those horrors are too real and too fresh to be in any way "entertaining".  How about a nice mix of French Revolution horrors and Lovecraftian horrors instead?

Liberté (Compatibility: Verified) is just such a mix.  In an alternate-universe France, around the time-period of our French Revolution, King Louis has died and the crown prince is going through his coronation, when a giant "monster" appears, wreaks havoc, takes the crown, and disappears.  You awaken in the rubble, with a bit of the ol' amnesia at play, get identified as one of the Rebels, hack down a few soldiers with your rapier... and are led to meet with what's left of the monster.  One thing leads to another, you rescue a few more Rebels from the Monarchists, slip away to get the monster quietly established underground (running into (and through) a few Inquisitors of the Congregation in the process), whereupon you get the guiding quest for the rest of the game.  The monster (which calls itself Lady Bliss) sees itself as an agent of balance, while the world its in is wildly out of balance (there's a definite ecological aspect involved as well).  They want you to go out into Paris, which is in the throes of revolution, and ingratiate yourself with each of the four major factions involved (mainly by slaughtering loads of their enemy of choice at the moment), learn what truly drives each of them, and find someone worthy to receive the crown from Lady Bliss.

Now, that's a fun enough combination of ideas to begin with, but honestly it's not that much to hang a compelling rogue-lite game from on its own.  In particular, there's nothing there to justify central mechanics like reviving after dying to start a new run... or so I thought, until I died the first time.  Turns out, you're more pod-person than human, you just absorbed the appearance and memories of an unlucky Rebel named Rene, and you are sufficiently "attached" to Lady Bliss that she can squirt out a new clone of you whenever you die - and you don't have to come back as Rene, if you have unlocked access to other forms while getting in good with the factions.  So, handily, that not only covers respawning, but also different weapons and combat styles to experiment with.

All in all, it's a fun setup for a game, and I'll get some mileage out of it... but it's also fair to note that I likely won't see everything it has to offer.  The gameplay I've seen so far is what I would call "thoroughly adequate", consisting mostly of fights against a few enemy types per faction in fairly close quarters.  In part, that's because most of the fights happen in the streets of Paris, which tend to be pretty repetitive.  In fact there are some maps that, from what I could see, take advantage of your inability to move the camera to present themselves as a different map by simply rotating the map a bit.  Combine that with different "world tiers" that it offers when you go to select a mission, with each tier mainly increasing the difficulty level of the enemies, and it's clear that the intent of the game is for you to get to know the patterns of the enemies over many multiple plays... and, much like souls-likes, I doubt I have the patience.  But, who knows, maybe the story of Lady Bliss infesting everything while the various factions squabble with each other will be enough to keep bringing be back for one more run.

So, about Destiny 2...

 First, per tradition, the shit state of the world at large... Russia's invasion of Ukraine churns on, with nothing significant happening (from the outside view at least, not to minimize the sacrifices of everyone directly involved).  Israel has basically decided to stop playing games in Gaza, and are going after Hamas with the intent to kill... and look to believe that any incidental casualties among the Palestinians are unfortunate, but worth the price.  Sure, they've told people to move to another area if they don't want to be treated as combatants, but that's the barest of fig-leaves to try to cover their abandonment of the "rules of war".  Mind you, I've long been of the opinion that any war where one side tries to follow the rules while the other side blatantly ignores them is a losing proposition for the rules-follower, but I didn't think I'd see anybody follow through on that line of thought in my lifetime.  It will be interesting (and likely horrific) to see where this all ends up.

Well, that's the world at large, how's the shit state in gaming and corporate America going?  Recent events at Destiny 2's developer Bungie seem to show a little more creaking at the seams, at least.  The story, as best I've gathered, goes something like this:  Destiny 2's most recent major DLC, Lightfall, has not been well received by the gaming public.  Recognizing this, people at various levels of the company have, over the past several months, brought up issues and possible solutions, which by and large have been shut down by Bungie's leadership.  Fast-forward to a week ago, and Destiny 2's revenues are coming up significantly short against leadership-projected revenues, to the tune of 45% less.  Sony asked Bungie to come up with an 8% reduction in expenses (possibly reflecting that shortfall, possibly for other reasons), and Bungie leadership decided to meet that request by laying off about 100 staff, especially in areas that they might be able to outsource, without the input of the team leads, while the leadership team themselves faced no consequences whatsoever.  Oh, and they tried to somehow keep a lid on this by, effectively, telling the fired staff to GTFO without handing over to anybody still employed.

My takes on all of this:  so, in a game that's riddled with problems and whose player base is hungry for content, you're laying off the people who fix problems and create content.  If I were a shareholder in a publicly-traded Bungie, I would be long gone at this point.  Also, if unionization efforts don't take off at Bungie in short order, I'll be quite surprised.

As for my playing the game... well, I did already pay for the next season as part of my purchase at the beginning of the year, so I'll probably be around at least enough to pick up any story-beats from that.  Past that, though, I've already basically tuned out for the retread "Festival of the Lost" this year, playing mostly Starfield instead, so it's not looking good long-term.  That's especially true when they've announced they're pushing back the next major DLC, so there will be a nice, long period of "why would I play this game?" going on, to remind me of those staffing losses.  Who knows, maybe, if I catch wind of the leadership team sharing the pain a bit, I'll feel more inclined to step back up, but I'm definitely not holding by breath on that one.

Starfield: I like it, but it may well not be for you

 As per tradition:  yes, Russia's inept invasion of Ukraine continues, with Ukraine continuing to push back, but winter is approaching, which will doubtless make things bog down there.  But no worries, Hamas decided it was time to taunt the dynamite monkey that is Israel, so things going generally astray will continue for the foreseeable future.  All the more reason to write about games, I suppose.

So, eighty-odd hours of playtime later, I've finished my first pass through Starfield.  I enjoyed it well enough, but there are plenty of critic reviews, never mind user reviews, YouTube videos, and the like, calling it garbage, godlike, and everything in between.  It makes me stop and wonder, why might that be?

 Oh, quick note for the spoiler-averse, I'm not planning on outing any major plot points here or anything, but I'm not proclaiming this article as spoiler-free either.  Proceed at your own peril.

One theory I've seen, that has some weight, is that Starfield suffers, as an artistic piece, from a cognitive split between the "realism" the game world presents, and the "idealism" of playing the role of effectively-superhuman protagonist in that world.  Here's a nice YouTube video to watch, if you want to explore that aspect of things more thoroughly (and if you like games dissection in general, any of Adam Millard's videos are good stuff to watch, from what I've seen).  To my mind, that helps explain things, but it only goes so far.  I mean, maybe it's just my play-style, but, outside of a certain abandoned pharmaceuticals research facility cropping up on multiple planets, complete with the same founder's corpse in the same cave on each iteration, I didn't have a lot of problems "going with the flow" of the world as presented.

Another possibility that comes to mind is that Starfield suffers from comparisons (fair and unfair) to other games with similar subject matter.  No Man's Sky definitely has prettier planets with a wider visual variety of biomes, plus sentient aliens and the ability to freely fly from one point to the next (whether that's actually better or more efficient than various loading screens being open to debate).  Any number of space-combat games have better ship-to-ship combat (if you exclude the ability to disable and board ships, at least).  Person-to-person combat, well, any of the later Mass Effect games has Starfield beat, never mind dedicated shooters like Destiny 2.  If people are comparing these sorts of features this way, it's not surprising that they're coming up with the answer that Starfield "looks old", is "old tech", or any variant thereof.

However, that concept of the game being "old" brushes up against something else that I haven't seen explored at all.  Just like books are written with a target audience in mind, so are games made, and the people that make games, consciously or unconsciously, tend to make games they want to play.  While I doubt that there are many people on Bethesda's team that date back to the Elder Scrolls: Arena era of the 1990s, I fully expect that most of the people in charge have been around for quite a while.  Planning a space RPG that veers away from the standard "saving the world/galaxy from the big-bad" plot is only likely to happen if there's sufficient experience on the team pushing back against the business take of "we know this makes money" with a solid "but that's been done to death" defense.  Further, if you look at the actual plot delivered, outside of the random "go kill these guys" or "go fetch/deliver this thing" events that crop up, the stories involved tend to revolve around not only making choices (which any RPG worthy of the name should be doing anyways), but reflecting on, and even regretting, those choices.  That's not a super-popular theme to begin with, and on average it trends worse the younger the player targeted is.  Combine that with the fairly low-key combat mechanics in the game, and I can't help but think that Starfield was targeted at an older demographic than their other games to date.

So, maybe it's just lucky on my part that I'm able to enjoy the world Starfield presents, without constantly comparing it to other games, as an experience that hits squarely in my demographic group, and within the comfort zone of my physical capabilities.  I'll be looking forward to seeing what the first DLC brings to the table (having already bought it as part of the premium edition), as well as whatever oddities the modders come up with (once official mod support has launched).  In the meantime, I'll keep puttering about the Starfield - plenty of faction work and one-off quests to keep me occupied, for the time being.  Who knows, maybe Baldur's Gate 3 will be ready for XBox by the time I'm ready to move on for a while.

Starfield has come early for me

 As per tradition, Russia's invasion of Ukraine... Ukraine's making some progress in pushing the Russians back, but it's slow going all around.  Same old, same old, basically, if you're not in the region dealing with it directly.

So, on to happier things... Starfield is out now (for owners of the Premium edition at least, the masses get it in a few days).  I tried to apply my cheap-bastard tactics, but, in the end, I only held out a day before I succumbed and bit hard.  I blame the rare 10/10 review Destructoid gave it for pushing me over the edge.  My first impression, after a couple of days of play, is that yes, it's a very Bethesda game, and the roughly year's-worth of delay for polish looks to have been time well spent.  I'll probably be playing this game near-exclusively for a while.

So, what makes this game stand out from earlier titles from Bethesda?  Well, the scale of the thing is vastly bigger, naturally, and all of the starship-adjacent systems are an entirely new batch of toys to play with.  Personal combat is more in line with first-person shooters like Destiny, but enemy AI doesn't live up to that standard, so it's still fairly chill to play.  Skills are probably the biggest change (and for the better, in my opinion), where you get the standard "one skill point per level" to spend, but, to focus on any one skill, you have to actually use the skill to some degree before you will be allowed to advance it... and there are skill groups and tiers to keep you from just going for the best thing first.

In fact, if there is any one thing I had to point out as being questionable-to-bad, it's the new "backgrounds" system of character creation.  Don't get me wrong, I don't mind getting a few starting skills and some in-game tweaks based on "what I did before", but... well, the game starts you out as a new hire on a mining crew.  In contrast, the background I went with this time was Cyberneticist.  Frankly, I can't see the life-path somebody would take, outside of some drug-addiction fueled spiral, that would make somebody with that skill-set go "mining, yeah, that's what I should do with my life next."  Of course, I guess that kind of applies to taking up a life of exploring and scavenging on a not-necessarily-legally-yours spaceship, either, so there's that.

All in all, is it a perfect game?  No, of course not.  Is it a game that I'll be playing near-exclusively for months?  Yeah, probably.

Behold, a Good Game of the Old Ways

 As per tradition, first, the state of Russia's invasion of Ukraine... basically, Ukraine is still working on taking back their territory, while Russia continues to be a bunch of war-crime-committing bastards.  No major changes of late, really.

That taken care of... in what may be a first, I'm here to sing the praises of a computer game that I've neither bought nor played yet!  What else could it be but Baldur's Gate 3, the darling of the day?

What makes this game so noteworthy, so praiseworthy, that I would post about it before putting down my money and diving into it?  Well, apart from it likely being practically custom-made for me and those like me (a computer RPG that hews close to its table-top RPG roots), it's also more than a bit of a corporate anomaly.  The developer and publisher of the game, Larian Studios, acquired the rights to make this sequel to a decades-old pair of games, and promptly... made a portion of the game available in Early Access on Steam, so they could gather feedback from the community as they built the game.  For something approaching three years, they continued with that, then released the game... for $60, not the $70 that major publishers have been insisting is the necessary new normal, and without a micro-transaction, battle-pass, or day-one DLC in sight.  Yes, amazingly enough, they released a complete product, for a reasonable price, without any way to double-dip their customers at launch.

Reaction from the game-buying public has been amazing.  Of course, there's the YouTubers gushing over how they can actually just immerse themselves and play the game, without waiting for a second shoe to drop, and the review sites are all abuzz (Metacritic score is showing 97/100 currently), but the biggest indicators come from Steam data.  Concurrent players peaked over 800,000 on launch weekend (according to Steam Charts), and peaked a bit shy of 790,000 players last night.  Meanwhile, user reviews on Steam are likewise through the roof, where you can take your pick between 94% positive all time (from about 147,000 users) or 96% positive recently (from about 89,000 users).  Pretty much everybody is saying yes, this is good, more like this please!

So, if this game is so great, why haven't I jumped in yet?  In one word, Starfield.  Even if I had jumped in on launch day, my play-through wouldn't be done by the time Starfield launches in September, which would almost certainly leave me abandoning BG3 midway, making it harder to come back to later.  This game deserves better than that, so I'll exercise a bit of patience.  As a reward, BG3 should be that much better bug-fixed and polished when I come back to it, and all will be good... so long as I can avoid major spoilers in the meantime, of course.  Who knows, maybe they'll even have the issue fixed that's preventing launch on the XBox consoles by then.

Summer Doldrums

 We're past the 500-day mark on Russia's invasion of Ukraine now.  Wagner troops briefly rebelled but didn't push through to Moscow, so that civil war didn't happen, yet at least.  Now, we're giving the Ukrainians cluster bombs, which I have to admire their resolve to use long-term-unpleasant weapons like that on their own territory.  Outside of that, no major news on that front.

Here at home, we're entering my least favorite part of the year, the last two weeks of July and the first two weeks of August.  Here in Spokane, we've had a couple of unpleasantly hot days already, but no extended heat waves, and also no significant wildfire smoke impacts to date.  I expect both of those will change in the next few weeks, but I'll take what I can get until then.

On the EV front, I had cause to visit Seattle, so I got my first taste of the state of public fast-charging in the region.  The verdict:  eh, it's OK but not great.  There was at least one charger option I steered away from due to reports of vandalism on the PlugShare app, but otherwise my only issue was that chargers were sometimes too popular - waiting for an hour for your car to charge is one thing, waiting almost as long again for a charger to free up is something else (especially in unpleasant weather).

Finally, on the games front, yes, Steam had their Summer Sale recently.  Yes, I grabbed a couple of games from my wishlist at appropriate cheap-bastard rates.  No, none of them are so amazing that I need to go into great detail about them yet.  Although... on the off chance you haven't played The Stanley Parable yet, you could do worse than to pick up the "Ultra Deluxe" edition to have even more content to discover.

PSA: pix may disappear

 Google's gotten to be pretty well known for dropping/abandoning their more niche services in recent years, so I wasn't too surprised to find an email in my inbox telling me that something of theirs was going away.  What that something is, this time around, is a thing called "Album Archives", which, I gather, is a part of the Google Photos service (whatever it was called back in the day, the old name escapes me) that got sliced off of the main service at some point.  In my case, when I looked at what's currently stored there, it looks like its some mostly-older photos that I put in there specifically to display on this blog, without having to track down/shell out for someplace to host those photos online for me.

I could, of course, retrieve those photos, re-host them somewhere else, and hunt down and re-link them to their appropriate posts.  Frankly, that sounds like a lot of work for not much gain.  Besides, the current links on one of those ancient posts implies that the photo might have gotten hosted on Blogger proper automatically at some point in the past.  So... if you look closely, some of the photos on this blog might disappear in about a month.  Or, they might not.  I guess we'll see.

Now, pardon me while I keep waiting for Starfield to drop in September.

A bit of the lookback, a bit of the now

 As per tradition, the Russia-Ukraine fight goes on, with much of the action currently around one town that neither side is willing to give up on.  Russia's "Wagner group" private army was recently complaining about not getting the ammo they need, though, so that's a promising sign.

Here at home, the weather's nicened up a bit, so I've got plenty of work in and out of the house to take care of... so of course, I decided to take the time to look back over some of my old posts (basically, 5, 10, and 15 years ago).  Some take-aways include posts that haven't aged well (for example, it was easy to mock antimicrobial pens in pre-COVID days), movies I'd forgotten I'd seen, and the fact that, originally, my plan was to post once a week or shut down the blog.  Facebook took a bite out of that, I'm sure (and have I mentioned I recently dropped Facebook when they re-activated the Orange One's account?), and there just isn't that much interesting in my life going on to make a weekly post worthwhile... so, since this blog costs me nothing, we'll just keep going with the "monthly or so" schedule I've arrived at for now.

On the electric car front, I should have my charger hooked up in my garage next week... buried electrical and run length will make for a pricey install (more than $5000 after GM's credit), but it's just too convenient to pass up.  That, and it'll pay for itself over the years... for those of you wondering what the fuel cost saving are like, based on the past month of use vs. the month of gas purchases for my old Yaris, I've calculated it out to be less than one quarter of what I would have spent otherwise.  That's if I was charging at home all the time, of course.  Up to now, I've mostly charged at the level 2 charger at work, which costs me nothing.  Contrariwise, if I were charging solely at fast-chargers, the per-kWh rate on those equals or exceeds what the cost of gas would be, from what I've seen.  So, basically, EVs are great if you have someplace to charge them while they're parked, not so great (economically) if you have to rely on fast-chargers to meet your needs.

On the games/Steam Deck front, Steam did just have a Spring Sale, which triggered my inflation-adjusted cheap-bastard guidelines for getting a few games off of my wishlist (for the record, that's 50%+ off for a resulting price under $20, any% off for a resulting price under $10).  One of those that's made it onto the Steam Deck is a game called Slipways (Compatibility: Playable), which is a sort of space-empire puzzle game (that I have declared to be sufficiently different from Tiny Civilization that they don't share the same "niche").  It basically gives you the 4X game experience, without the eXtermination bit, resulting in a game that takes just a few hours to complete (mainly because you have an in-game time limit for how many turns you can take).  I had to crank up the interface scaling to make it work well on my TV, and I don't know how well I'll be able to see it in handheld mode, but I have high hopes for now.

And that's about it for this time, I think.  See you in a month or so, hypothetical reader!

New car time!

 So, for the obligatories... yes, Russia is still fucking around in Ukraine, and continuing to find out, more than 400 days later.  Getting no traction there, they've gone and arrested a U.S. journalist on spying charges... obviously, I can't say they're wrong, but their past history makes them highly suspect.  Also, this falls under the category of "somebody being somewhere dangerous and knowing the likely consequences", so here's hoping the Russian regime doesn't get the leverage they so obviously desire, this time around.

Right, that out of the way, the big change here is that the Bolt EV came in!  I've spent a fair bit of time familiarizing myself with all the extra features it has, compared to by decidedly bare-bones Yaris of yesteryear, and I've got to say, I could get used to this (which, since most of this stuff is standard on pretty much any new vehicle nowadays, I guess I can let happen).  Setting aside all the ooh and aah of, well, any time you get a new car, here's the bits that I've picked up on that aren't all that:

• Single-pedal drive mode - honestly, this is likely to be more of a "needing to get familiar with it" sort of thing, but, with as strong as the regenerative braking can be on this car, the jerkiness of it all gives me strong "remember when you were learning to drive stick shift?" vibes.
• Storage - one thing I always loved about my Yaris was the copious storage scattered throughout the interior, especially up front, where there were multiple "glove box" enclosures in the dash, cup-holders for driver and passenger near the windows, plus another in the center along with some open-air storage options both in the center and in each of the doors.  In the Bolt, it's one glove box, a pair of cup-holders in the center island, a "storage bucket" under an arm rest, and some smaller open-air storage in the doors.  The downside of all the new tech and controls is the loss of places to put things.
• Steering wheel - another "gotta get used to it" item, the steering wheel feels... small.  How much of that is the actual size, and how much of that is controls embedded in and around the wheel, that I'm not sure.
• Internal rear-view mirror - this piece and its surrounds, I get why they are the way they are, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.  There's two main issues I have so far, first being that the mirror is small, for all its field of view covers the back window fully.  The second issue is that it mounts into a sensor suite for all the techno-wizardry the car supports, which takes up windshield space directly behind the mirror - so, if you have something that needs to hang from the mirror, like a parking pass, good luck getting that to be visible.

However, setting aside those petty grumbles, make no mistake, I'm actually liking the Bolt quite a lot.  Once I've adjusted to the new normal of charging up instead of gassing up, I should be quite happy with it for years to come (assuming, as always, nothing changes drastically due to, say, an over-the-air update of the car's systems or something like that).

Beyond the new-car thing, I did find one more thing to add to my Steam Deck that might be of interest - Tiny Civilization (Compatibility: Unrated). I like Civilization-style games, but they tend to be massive time-sinks, so I'm always on the lookout for Civ-like things that don't take much time.  Tiny Civilization is probably as good an embodiment of that concept as I can imagine, using match-3 mechanics to cover much of what makes a Civ game.  I could say it's been pared down too far, in some respects, but, for the style of game, the choices made in what to keep and what to simplify or eliminate just make sense.  For $2, I'd recommend it to almost anyone to try out.

Small changes, of no great import

 So yeah, Ukraine, the war, Putin's still a bastard, not much new there.

Destiny 2, I did go ahead and spring for the "full year" package.  Basically, my brother's Christmas present (a $100 gift card) paid for it, while I covered the tax.  I'm liking it for now, but I haven't really gotten into any of the repetitive activities as of yet.  Worst case, I'm set to drop in and out of the game at will for the next year, at least.

Steam Deck has had its first casualty of the new game-playing regime - Dragon's Dogma is out.  I gave it the best-to-date play sessions yet, and ran into two main issues.  First, the "pawns" (the rest of your adventuring party, mainly) are played up as having no will of their own... but damned if they're not keen to charge into combat with anything that comes within sight.  That would be bad enough, since that basically dictates your play style for you.  However, on top of that, there's the matter of the enemies in the game - if there's anything worse than palette-swapping your enemies out to make tougher versions, it's making tougher versions of enemies while keeping their visuals unchanged.  Once I've fought wolves/bandits/whatever, and I see another group of the same, it should be reasonable to expect more of the same to be, at least roughly, the same strength/toughness as before, but that's not the case, as demonstrated by the sharp difference between the starting-area wolves and the first wolves you encounter in the Dark Arisen expansion.  Those nuisances, plus the way enemies seem to respawn instantly when going back to already-cleared ares, soured me on the game, so I'm done with it.

That leaves an opening in the RPG niche, which I've decided to fill with Disgaea 2 PC (Compatibility: Playable).  I played Disgaea 3 on the PS3 back in the day (all the way to the "end", no less!), I've played Disgaea, Disgaea 4 and Disgaea 5 a bit, and more editions are coming out as the years pile up.  What can I say, I'm a sucker for the systems in these games, but there's one big issue that tends to hold me back, namely the way you can only save a game out when you're in a "safe area".  Given that part of the grindtastic gameplay involves diving into what's known as the "Item World" to improve your gear, a process that can take untold hours, that's a major problem for anybody with anything resembling a life.  However, this is one place where the Steam Deck really shines - you can put the Deck to sleep at any time, even in the middle of a game, and it will turn back on like nothing happened at all!  I see great possibilities for actually finishing D2PC, and maybe pursuing later editions, assuming I don't just burn out after a while.

Outside of that, there's possible progress on the electric car front.  Got a call from the dealership last month, saying they got word from the factory that they could get my chosen specs into production... if I was willing to drop the lighted charger port from the build.  Says I, by all means!  So, in theory, my car might be ready for me to buy late this month, or maybe sometime next month.  I'm hopeful, but, of course, until it actually happens, I'm not getting my hopes up too high.

A year of war in Ukraine, and more gaming distractions

 I looked back over my old posts, and, sure enough, it really has been a full year since Russia decided to do a surprise invasion on its neighbor Ukraine.  Back then, if somebody had said that this would still be gong on after a full year had passed, I would have been wondering what drugs they were taking.  I'm not proud of our role in doing nothing more than sending select weaponry over for the Ukrainians to use, but, I have to admit, for certain values of the word "works", what we're doing "works", in so far as it's keeping the Russians occupied, at the cost of Ukrainian lives.  Since it doesn't look like Putin is going to back down any time soon, here's hoping for some forced change of leadership taking place - I mean, there's certainly been enough falling-out-of-windows "accidents" over the past year that it seems like a threat they're considering, so I wouldn't mind at all if that threat came to pass.

Well, all that aside, life goes on here at home, and that of course means games.  On the XBox side, Destiny 2 is wrapping up for the season, and for the current expansion, with a new expansion scheduled to launch next week.  Much like last year, I'm thinking I'm not up for feeding that monetization machine any more, but, on the other hand, I do still have a fair bit of Christmas cash in my account, so... maybe?  If I hear something really good about the new expansion, maybe?

Also on the XBox side, Atomic Heart came out recently.  I was going to give it a go, since it's on Game Pass and all... but middling reviews and a collection of controversies, including questions about how Russian the developing studio is, who's funding it, and the message the game, made me decide that I really wasn't that keen to play it after all.

So, if that's XBox, how about that new Steam Deck?  Well, first, the "boring" parts... I did receive the docking station for the deck and gave that a go.  Games work well, mostly (I'll list an exception in a bit), and desktop apps seem to work well enough, although the audio on my Chrome app seems to have stopped working - that app, and only that app.  After poking around a bit, I've pretty much given up on using it as a desktop replacement, though... the default setup relies on Flatpak to add apps to the system, which, while a neat idea, seems to leave you at the mercy of if/when apps ever get updated in that format, and the regular Linux O/S is locked down.  Basically, it's more likely that, when I decide to replace my Windows 10 machine, I would get a box to install a Linux distro on, then add Steam on top, rather than muck about with the handheld/docking station combo.

Outside of that, I'm still mostly playing with the same games I listed before, but I did add a couple more games to fill a couple more niches:

• Dorfromantik (Compatibility: Verified) - a hex-tile-laying puzzle/building game, where you build a land/water mass with villages, forests, plains, rails, and water features, aiming for a high score by completing tasks that crop up and placing your tiles to maximize similarities across tiles.  I really like the game, but I've had problems with getting my Steam Controller to work with the game without it crashing out, so it's handheld-only for now.
• Rogue Legacy (Compatibility: Verified) - a quirky little Rogue-lite platformer, where the hook is that each "run" through the game is being performed by a descendant of the previous heroes, and may have a genetic condition of some sort that will (most likely) hinder their performance.  I actually had to dig in my library a bit to find this one... I think it may have had some issues when I tried streaming it from my gaming PC before, but it works fine on the Steam Deck.

I think that pretty much covers everything for now.  Until next time!

New year, new gear

 So, to get the Russia/Ukraine bit out of the way... yes, Putin's still being a bastard, the invasion tries to continue, not much new there.  Well, I suppose Putin unilaterally declaring (and unilaterally breaking) an Orthodox Christmas cease-fire counts as new, but it's neither particularly unexpected nor particularly effective, so there's that.

Right, well, that out of the way, happier news, in that I got a new toy.  No, not the electric car I put on order back in September, no motion on that as of yet.  Rather, I finally picked up a Steam Deck.  It's early days yet, but I mostly like what I've seen so far.  Once I've got a dock to go along with (currently en route), it might even supplant my old Windows 10 gaming PC as my "main" computer for most tasks.  Here's to maybe escaping the Microsoft tax at home, at least!

Of course, the main point of a Steam Deck is games.  While I've got a decent backlog of PC goodness to explore with the new hardware, I'm not going to go too deep into choices and possibilities here - trying to sort through hundreds of games at one go and determine what works, what doesn't, and why... well, I already did a fair amount of that when I first started playing with my Steam Link to the living room TV, and I'm not eager to repeat that experience.  Rather, I'm going to start with a small selection of games, best described as "whatever jumps out at me", with an eye towards playing individual games of a particular genre until I'm done with it (be that completion or distraction), then remove that game and try the next one.  Here's my initial results so far:

• 7 Grand Steps (Compatibility: Playable) - A turn-based, mainly mouse-driven affair, this game will likely be on my Deck basically forever, being tiny and unique.  The only issue I ran across (which I'm sure I'll hit again and again with some older games) is that the one time I needed to use the keyboard (entering my family name), it wouldn't recognize the virtual keyboard.  I was able to work around that by modifying controller inputs, thankfully.
• Pixel Puzzles Ultimate (Compatibility: Playable) - Maybe it's just my advancing years, but I find it relaxing, every so often, to just work on an old-fashioned jigsaw puzzle.  However, I still don't feel that enough to set aside a space in my house for that purpose, plus cats further complicate matters.  Luckily, this game (and others like it) exist to scratch that itch.  Unfortunately, the "pond" mechanism this game uses for pieces just doesn't work for me on a smaller screen.  I'll likely give it another go when I've got the Deck set up in a dock, but otherwise I'll just have to stick to streaming from a regular PC for this one.
• Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen (Compatibility: Verified) - Fair odds, this will cover the "RPG" niche on my Deck for a while at least.  I've tried streaming it before, but the Steam Controller I have hooked up to my TV lacks a dedicated right analog stick, which is pretty much essential.  That, and the smaller screen has me a bit more forgiving towards the dated graphics involved.

So that's it, a new hardware adventure embarked upon, a backlog to mine... I'm almost hoping that this year's new releases are as generally disappointing as last year's were, so I can truly enjoy going back over older games for a bit.  Not likely, but I guess I basically win, either way.