Avowed - an alright, "gold-plated" RPG

 Before I get into it, let's spare a moment this Easter to think about the various bad actors I routinely harangue on this site.  Those thoughts might not be standard Easter fare, but you'll likely get more mileage from them than the standard thoughts of renewal or salvation would.

Right, that out of the way, Avowed... I rather liked it overall, but, like the title on this article says, I've come to think of it as a "gold-plated" game, meaning it seems very attractive, but scratching below the surface reveals some not-very-attractive elements.  Alternatively, you might think in terms of boxed chocolates - it's still chocolate you're getting, but, fair odds, there's coconut creme inside.  Some of that may be due to pressures to ship in a timely manner, but it's clear that some of that is rather by design.

Let's start with the setting and story.  Avowed is set in the "Pillars of Eternity" world, and I've played a bit of both prior games set there, so I didn't go in totally blind.  You come on the stage as an Imperial Envoy, marked as the favored of an unknown god, tasked with finding and fixing the source of the Dreamscourge affecting the island known as the Living Lands, which your empire has set its eyes on for expansion.  Past that... well, the Living Lands are such a backwater that the current residents are mostly people looking to get away from the major powers in the world, so your empire's advances wouldn't be welcomed at the best of times.  Small wonder, then, that your ship gets fired on and sunk on approach to the harbor.  Things progress from there (and I'll refrain from further details to limit the spoiler potential of this review), with choices to make that can have real and lasting impacts on your game, which is always interesting and usually welcome.  Let's just say, the story isn't lacking in scale.

However, the setting isn't strictly necessary for the story.  Everything happens in what the rest of the world might well consider the "ass end of nowhere".  You could swap out any empire with expansion desires (read, pretty much any empire), and the story wouldn't really budge.  What the setting mainly gets you is a few extra racial types beyond the standard humans/dwarves/elves fantasy routine, and age-of-sail guns.  Plus, when you're building your character, you're pretty well locked down to human or elf, so it's not as if that added variety has a huge impact on your play from the start.

 So, let's switch to the more mechanical aspects of the game.  You get a starting spread of stats based on your chosen background, which you can improve by leveling up... sometimes.  Mainly, your level-ups give you points to spend on skills, be that various combat techniques or spells, separated out into fighter/rogue/wizard archetypes... and you don't get enough of them to cover even all of one archetype in detail, so you can do interesting things like specialize in lightning-based spells, or maybe be more of a generalist, or maybe split between archetypes to make a build suited to a particular style of combat, all of that and more is possible.  And, over the course of the game, you gather companions to your party, and can add their peculiar abilities to your combat mix.

But it's not as useful as it seems at first glance.  For example, I went the generalist-wizard route with my skill build.  Early on, I got some solid use out of things like the Burning Hands equivalent and the Emperor Palpatine sparks-from-the-hands equivalent, but, of course, the spells don't level with you, and continuous spells like those lock down your actions for the duration.  By the end, I was pulling down massive area-of-attack spells, with the full expectation that it was just to inconvenience some enemies for a bit and shave a bit off their health bars.  Stats, likewise, don't seem to have a large impact on anything, outside of gating off certain conversation choices.  And your companions... well, their special abilities can be useful, but you're also artificially limited to having two of them along with you at a time.

Which brings us to combat, gear, and exploring the world around you. When you start, you're literally scavenging from the remains of your shipwreck, limiting your choices.  You're incentivized to check every last nook and cranny you see, and quickly get conditioned to expect that straying from the main path will almost certainly reward you with new loot.  The first couple of levels are reasonably tough, but, as you load up on gear and get companions, things quickly become more easily manageable.  You can also take advantage of catching enemies unaware to deal a bit of extra damage up front, be that with your ranged weapons or your starting "divine backstab" power.

That said, there's more than a few flies in the ointment here.  Start with the stealth - yes, I'm sure there's skills you can take to enhance your stealth play, but, especially early on, there's copious "hidey-grass" surrounding every enemy encounter, enough so that I never felt the need to look into that.  Heck, sometimes, the hidey-grass clued me in to an upcoming combat long before I saw any enemy combatants.  The loot quickly devolves into "meh" once you find out it's a tiered system, just adding a bit of stats to the gear as the tier goes up.  On rare occasion, you'll get something actually unique... and you may well decide to sell it or convert it into upgrade materials because you're already attached to another piece of gear and can upgrade it indefinitely (prime example being the pistol I got early in the game that does area-effect electric damage that I kept to the end).  And your companions... well, you get to choose their skill upgrade paths occasionally (a little weird, but sure), but there is no way to upgrade their gear.  So, late-game, combat is them plinking at enemies, maybe using skills occasionally if you're not explicitly telling them to, and everybody waiting for you to show up and do real damage to enemies one by one with your weapon(s).

So, yeah, it's not a perfect game by any means, and, by the end, I was ready for it to be done.  If you're on Game Pass, I'd say give it a go at least, see if it meets your palate.   Otherwise?  Well, it's a fun story, and it's a pretty game, so I'd say sale-territory for this one.

The hits keep on coming, but gaming keeps me... sane?

 Well, in the Before Times, I never even considered that anybody capable of getting into power at the federal level would do some of the incompetent and stupid shit that I've seen in recent weeks, and certainly not with broad support from either political party, and yet, here we are.  There's too much to recount in detail, but, just to call out a few recent examples:

• High-level officials passing classified data around on Signal, then accidentally inviting a reporter into the chat, then lying about the contents of the chat under oath to Congress.
•  Tanking the market by imposing mass tariffs on the world, including islands without permanent human habitation but excluding Russia.  Compounded by "conservative" voices being unable to decide whether the problem is just a math error by the President's team (!), or even whether these massive tariffs will increase consumer prices.
•  Shipping people to El Salvador to imprison them based on their suspected gang membership, without due process, based on things like "they have a tattoo".  Not a gang tattoo, mind you, just a tattoo.

Meanwhile, the world at large continues to burn, with Russia and Israel both violating cease-fires in their respective fights and playing fast and loose with the truth.

At least there's signs of people getting properly pissed off about the state of things, although we're still at the "let's have a lovely weekend afternoon protest" stage.  There were a lot of people at the various "Hands Off" protests yesterday, so maybe that will help some congresscritters realize that they have an actual problem, and aren't just facing "Soros-funded" protests any longer.  Not that I'm holding my breath.

Well, enough of that unpleasantness for now.  On the games front, I actually finished Disgaea 2 PC!  Well, "finished", in so far as made it through the "main" story... which gives you a choice between restarting the main story line, or doing a side story/prequel involving one of the characters you encounter repeatedly in the main story.  So, yeah, I've got a save there waiting to go, if I want to dive back in for that content... but I'm kind of thinking I might check out the Book of Hours DLC first/instead.

Of course, none of that will take place until I clear out my XBox Game Pass backlog, which, right now, isn't budging because I'm still playing through Avowed.  I'm enjoying the game a lot, but I'm also noticing things that make me question why, exactly, I'm liking the game as much as I do.  Maybe I'll do a proper write-up on it once I'm done - I've worked my way through three of the four major "zones" in the game, so it shouldn't be that much longer before I've finished.

Our long national shit-show continues

 Recently, the 3-year mark of Russia's invasion of Ukraine passed, which obviously isn't ideal for anybody involved, to put it mildly.  Still, Ukraine stands strong, backed by the military hardware they've received from the West.  Unfortunately, we went and elected a president with strong dictator tendencies who, at best, sees a lot to admire in Putin and his governmental setup, and wants to end the conflict soonest, in Russia's favor.

My god, the gall of Trump and company... first, they try to arrange a "peace deal" without Ukraine or any European partners being involved at all.  Then, they try to pass the laughable claim that Ukraine started the war to weaken opposition.  Then, most recently, they lure Zelensky to the White House with the promise of a "trade deal" with no security strings attached, that Ukraine would have likely taken just so the U.S. had some skin in the game... only to ambush him in an Oval Office photo op that, "somehow", Russian state media had somebody present live-streaming.  And after that, many federal-level Republicans start saying things about how Zelensky wasn't very appreciative, and that he'll need to resign.  Honestly, do you people think nobody's watching this farce?

Of course, at the same time, the whole "doge" business continues apace, now with threats that they're going to go after Social Security.  Funny thing, though... in their haste to take an axe to everything they don't like and/or want to steal for themselves later (yes, I'm looking at you Elon), they both neglected to make sure they dotted their Is and crossed their Ts, which is coming back to bite them in court, and made cuts to things that are both visible to and cared about by many of their MAGA faithful, so the Republican enablers in Congress are starting to hear back on that in places like the "town hall" forums they love to hold.  Of course, that means they're doing things like running away mid-forum and canceling future forums... and that's guaranteed to turn out well.  Nothing builds bonds like performatively not listening to your constituents, after all.

So, now we're entering the "race" part of the whole "reshape government to Trump/Musk's will" thing.  Will the bad guys manage to push through their desired changes and consolidate power before the Republican congresscritters decide that they'd rather risk Trump's ire over the heat (and likely much worse to come, historically speaking) they're starting to get from their constituents?  Oh, and I suppose the off chance that the courts find a way to meaningfully interfere that SCOTUS won't overturn, although that process is, by design, slow enough to not likely play a role here.

Yeah, I'm definitely starting to see why Warren Buffet is shifting his investments to alcohol producers at this point.

Everything expected, and more

 Well, it's barely more than two weeks in since President Trump took back the reins, and I'm feeling suitably ill (and not just because I've got the latest seasonal crud, either).  As expected, Trump has been doing plenty of shady shit with questionably-legal orders, either direct to his flunkies or by means of executive orders, while giving no fucks about how that makes the U.S. look.  Well, outside of "looking strong", that is, which is some pretty weak sauce in a world with an active Russian invasion of Ukraine lingering on.

What I didn't expect... well, where to begin.  Trying to start trade wars with our bordering, in-a-free-trade-agreement neighbors, maybe.  Talking about taking back the Panama Canal or taking over Greenland, either of which would, I'm pretty sure, count as casus belli with our allies.  Sending the world's richest Nazi (yes, that was a fucking Nazi salute, you sane-washing media freaks) and his hand-picked tech team to commit Blitzkrieg on various government agencies.

The one I just heard about, though, takes the cake.  Trump wants the U.S. to take over Gaza, and rebuild it as a resort area.  I mean, I get it, from his addled, real-estate developer mindset, it's a fine way to improve the property values of that recently-at-war region.  But that has to totally ignore, well, everything about that region for the past few millennia.  I swear, it's like somebody seeing a recently-kicked hornet's nest, where the hornets are just starting to calm down a bit, and deciding that the hole in the nest would be a great place to stuff their dick.

There are interesting times ahead, to be sure.  Here's hoping they involve some quick push-back and firm limits from those co-equal branches of government, however unlikely that may seem.

Inflection point incoming!

 Change is in the air.  Heck, I only have to call out Russia this time for their continued douchebaggery, since Israel and Hamas have got a ceasefire in place, with hostages getting released and everything.  Between that and Syria's recent changes (which, funnily enough, isn't getting a lot of press coverage here in the U.S., and I haven't heard anything about us lifting any sanctions on them or anything like that), I'd normally say that things are looking up a bit.  Of course, that would ignore what's coming down the pipe tomorrow.

Tomorrow, of course, being, among other things, the re-inauguration of Trump, the once-and-future president.  Sure, he's been credibly shown to have tried to hijack the last election, and he's been convicted of felonies in the meantime (no thanks to the previous head of the Department of Justice there), but the stupid, stupid people have spoken.  Starting tomorrow, the loony wing of the Republican party and their enablers, the rest of the Republican party, will have some measure of control over all three branches of the federal government.  Here's hoping they don't manage to do anything to corrupt or eliminate future elections entirely.

Of course, one thing that will complicate their plans is a good crisis or two.  Right out of the starting blocks, they've got one (for certain values of "crisis", I suppose), and it's of their own making!  Namely, TikTok showed more integrity than they all expected, and, after the Supreme Court told them that the law trying to force them to sell out on supposed "national security" concerns was constitutional, TikTok took everybody at their word and shut down U.S. access to their systems.  Now, they've got a bunch of angry people on their hands, Biden says he's not enforcing the law, and Trump is making noises about using executive orders to bring TikTok back.  Simply put, this isn't what you expect from the success of a well thought-out response to a national security threat.  Me, I've never been on TikTok, so I've got no direct skin in the game, and I look forward to the gymnastics involved in what happens here going forward.

PC gaming stocking stuffers

 Season's Greetings from the House of delRhode to all the good boys and girls of the world that aren't invading their neighbors or trying to use them as human shields.  Between year-end sales and recent Humble Bundle charity bundles, I've come across a few games recently that I thought deserved mention, so, here we go!

First, in the category of "I played through it fully, and it's pretty okay", is Terra Nil.  It's a collection of world-puzzles where each level is set in one of four biomes (Temperate, Tropical, Arctic, or Ruins), and your goal in each is to go in, restore its habitat, then leave with no major physical traces of your having been there.  This goal is handled in three major phases - cleanup/green-up the polluted space, diversify the environment, then extract - each of which has its own set of tools that changes on each level, and are only revealed at the start of each phase.

I enjoyed the game well enough, but that's not to say it's without its sticking points.  One would be its weird difficulty tuning setup, with both an initial difficulty level selection (that sets starting resource levels and building costs for the entire game) and a selection of "optional" goals to meet on each level if you want the game to consider the level 100% cleared.  Another would be building effects that don't strictly make sense.  For example, you have various power-generation buildings like windmills, but on some levels you need to, basically, extend their range using power pylons - but the pylons are treated like power sources themselves, making it possible to power most of a map with only one or two windmills, well in excess of what they could handle on their own.  Still, I enjoyed going through the different maps, for all I won't be going back to get the 100% on most of them.  In short, it's a decent game, but gets a stronger recommendation if it's on sale.

Second, in the category of "I'm midway through, and enjoying it thoroughly", we have CATO: Buttered Cat.  It's an odd platform-puzzler sort of thing, where you control a cat and... well, a sentient piece of buttered toast.  The cat can walk around, climb some things, and fit through some tubing, while the toast... kind of flops around, and can stick to some surfaces.  But the magic happens when you bring them together, as now you get, in line with one version of the old jokes, a form of anti-gravity, played off in the game as basically an infinite aerial multi-jump.

With these simple rules, and a few things in the environment to interact with (like switches that know the difference between cats and toast, icy floors and walls, and a number of toaster-adjacent interfaces), the designers have made many, many levels of actually tricky puzzles to solve, neatly packaged into at least five themed worlds, each of which ends in a non-puzzle final challenge, be that a boss fight, an over-the-shoulder roller-coaster ride with the cat sitting on the toast as a sled, or some other insanity I've yet to see.  If that sounds interesting to you, follow the link and take a look, and I'll tell you it's money well spent.

Finally, in the category of "That's absurd, I like it, but I can't give it the time it needs", we have Mr. Sun's Hatbox.  I got it as part of a charity bundle, and, given its kiddie look, I had zero expectations going in.  Turns out, it's what the developer calls a "slapstick roguelite platformer", and, if I had the time, I'd be all-in on seeing where it goes.

Just to give you some idea of the insanity involved, here's a brief rundown of the opening minutes of the game.  Mr. Sun runs a hat shop, and is getting a delivery from an Amazon-like company.  In the middle of the delivery, a shadowy, crescent-moon-headed fellow and a couple of henchmen steal the package mid-delivery.  Apparently, Mr. Sun paid for a delivery guarantee, so the delivery guy goes in pursuit, entering a tutorial tower where you learn about sneaking about, jumping on peoples' heads like Mario, snapping necks (!), and using balloons to retrieve objects and stunned people a la Metal Gear Solid.  At the end of the tower, you fail to catch the thieves as they take off in a helicopter, but your delivery guarantee says you'll get the package back by Any. Means. Necessary.  So, you commandeer the ground beneath Mr. Sun's shop to build a base, recruit agents (either voluntarily or, later, by brainwashing captured people from the missions you go on), and proceed to build your organization's strength while the search for the culprits continues.

Seriously, from what little I've played so far, this is a great game.  Individual mission runs are short and sweet, which is good, considering your initial batch of recruits all have various issues/traits working against them, traits that can be removed at random (or supplemented with neutral/good traits) with leveling.  However, permadeath is also a thing, so you might not want to risk your best agents on particular missions.  Combined with the slapstick feel of combat when things go wrong, it's an amazing start to a game.  By all means, if you've got the time to give it, give it a go.

Syria is under new management

 It was a little weird, seeing the news that Syria's rebels finally managed to oust their dictator.  On the plus side, one of Russia's clients has likely slipped from their grasp, and it's likely not something they're going to be able to tackle any time soon (another good, concrete reason why you don't go around invading countries like Ukraine - you might lose some of what you already have!).  I can only hope more such instances will follow.

On the meh side, it's not like I know a lot about the rebels involved.  Fair odds though, they won't immediately revert to gassing their populace and establishing secret prisons or anything like that, so it's likely a plus overall.

Of course, now is where we wait for this to turn out to be a "monkey's paw" wish.  Maybe it turns out the rebels are actually Super ISIS?  Maybe Russia decides they need to demonstrate their willingness to use nukes on territory they don't intend to occupy?  Maybe, flush with success, the rebels decide to push south towards Israel for some reason?  Like the old saying goes, hope for the best, expect the worst.