Shattered Space killed my desire for more Starfield... but Against the Storm was pretty neat!

Ukraine still stands strong against Russia, and the whole Israel-Hamas thing hasn't turned into an open regional war yet.  Take the wins where you can get them!

The Shattered Space DLC for Starfield is an odd duck.  Given the name, and the nature of the base game, you would be forgiven for expecting it to have something to do with, well, space.  Outside of stumbling across a space station in a random star system to start the DLC's main quest, though, it's strictly a planet-bound affair.  That planet happens to be the homeworld of House Va'ruun, the xenophobic political/religious sect that once sought to convert all of humanity by the sword, before declaring peace and withdrawing from all contact.  It's a bold choice by Bethesda, using this as a backdrop for their first DLC, pity it didn't really bear fruit for them.

To give a spolier-light overview of the main quest... you arrive, are treated with suspicion by the xenophobes, then circumstances conspire to mark you as a chosen one, arrived to help with a large, self-inflicted problem.  Since you're an outsider, you have to first go through a ritual to join their religion before they'll let you help, a ritual that has effects that imply there might be more involved than mere mumbo-jumbo.  After that, you meet with a group of councilors that represent the three largest houses (couldn't they have said "clans" or something like that) of the combined houses that form House Va'ruun, and have to do a task for each to set up for getting to fix their problem, interrupted once by the lady who ran your induction ceremony sending you off on a side-quest based on a vision she had.  Finally, you enter their holiest-of-holies, fix their problem, fix the source of their problem (their leader), then, apparently, go back to the council, help them work out what they're doing from now on, and... that's about it.

I said "apparently" there because I couldn't force myself to finish the final "boss fight" of the DLC.  See, in an RPG like Bethesda has made to date, I treat it like a world with rules that are only broken rarely, and then in service to improving the story.  One of the big rules that these sorts of games rely on is "I make you dead, you stay dead, unless necromancy is a thing, and even then there's limits".  Now, that's not the only rule they break here - the whole DLC is littered with teleporting enemies - but at least in that case, they have a decent thematic reason for including those.  Late in the lead-up quests, you run into a couple of "improved" enemies that combine that with a form of rebirth after death, but it's a light-touch thing and, again, fairly thematically justified.  The final fight, though, consists of nothing but infinitely respawning enemies in an enclosed area, where you are expected to trigger some switches and shoot some targets, but some additional respawns are triggered by approaching those switches, including increasingly difficult enemy types.  Honestly, it feels like a desperate attempt to artificially pad out an under-resourced, contractually-obligated DLC, especially compared to the sorts of DLC Bethesda was able to put out for Skyrim (well, setting aside the Hearthfire DLC, which, if memory serves, was the contractually-obligated DLC of its day).  My last save is at the opening of that boss fight, and I don't think I'll be starting that back up until/unless I hear of something amazing (and amazingly well reviewed) coming to Starfield in years to come.

So, doom and gloom aside, while I was waiting for Shattered Space to come out (and not playing any number of games because I didn't want to have to set them aside when it launched), Against the Storm went on sale.  I had my doubts - almost anything approaching real-time strategy just isn't my bag - but it turned out to be a lovely mix of RTS resource-gathering with a city-builder sort of thing, all in a world where your group of humans, beaver-folk, and lizard-folk are trying to help your Scorched Queen expand her influence and reclaim the world from chaos.  My initial play, I expected to run a tutorial mission or two, maybe about an hour or so.  I finished the entire tutorial and, against my better judgement, started in on the game proper, and found 4-5 hours slipping by in the seeming blink of an eye.  Sadly, this is another game that desperately wants to be Your Only Game for an extended period of time, so I'm shelving it for now, but it's high up on the list to come back to, should life permit.

Starving for games, you say? I'm eating fine.

 Russia, Israel, Hamas - as always, top of the shit list.  At least Russia gets the joy of war on their own territory, for a change.

Right, that out of the way, I always hear people this time of year going on about a "game drought" or some such.  Funny thing being, that also makes this the time of year when games get put on deeper and deeper discounts, trying to lure the bored with their no-longer-shiny-new wares.  For cheap bastard gamers like me, it's a veritable cornucopia of entertainment.

So, let's start out on the PC side of things.  First off, Ubuntu's latest long-term stability release has matured a bit, so I started the weekend off updating my install to 24.04.  I had to disable the bleeding-edge Mesa graphics driver package I was using (which I switched to from AMD's official drivers because they jumped the gun early on Ubuntu version support), but everything went through relatively cleanly.  Still had to remind it about my 5.1 speaker setup, but, otherwise, it was quick and painless - and, so far at least, it's let me run games without resorting to third-party driver packages!

As for the games themselves, well, Helldivers 2 has fallen off my radar for the time being, but I finally picked up God of War, and I'm impressed with the level of polish overall, and the "excellent by video game standards" story I've seen so far.  I'd probably be spending the weekend playing that, if ads and industry shows for Ara: History Untold and Civilization VII hadn't rekindled my Civ itch, but, instead, I've got Civilization VI installed now, in part just to see whether the crash-to-desktop issues I had when I played it last year have been fixed (not going to buy a new Civ game from a company that couldn't get their last game up to snuff, after all).  Outside of that, honorable mention goes to Pepper Grinder, which is both unique and entertaining, but isn't suiting my palate at the moment.

Of course, most of my gaming time these days is on the couch, with my Steam Deck and Steam Controller hooked up to the TV.  I've gone through Book of Hours a couple of times at this point (for a couple hundred hours playtime total), and I thought I was going to dive into Cult of the Lamb next (which gets honorable mention along with Feed the Deep), only to get blindsided by a not-much-more-than-a-visual-novel game called I Was a Teenage Exocolonist.  The basic shtick with this game is, you start out as a 10-year-old on a newly-settled colony on the other side of a wormhole, you play through 13-month years until you reach the age of 20, with each month consisting of an action you choose played out through a card-based minigame where the cards are your memories.  Oh, and you have odd memory-flashes of other/previous/alternate versions of what happens to your colony, which, at the very least, tell you that the world you're on isn't entirely peaceful (if the colonists getting knocked off by the local wildlife isn't enough of a clue).

That just leaves the XBox side of things to cover.  Naturally, I'm puttering about in Starfield a bit more, to get in position for the new Shattered Space expansion that's coming next month.  Outside of that, I did pick up a month of Game Pass to clear out my backlog of a score of "looks interesting, but not enough to buy or pick up Game Pass for on its own" games.  Here's the highlights and lowlights, in no particular order:

• Hauntii is likely the best of the bunch, between its interesting pixelated monochrome look, interesting take on the afterlife, and its mix of haunting mechanics and relaxed twin-stick shooter controls.  I'll probably buy this game, eventually.
• Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn is... well, competent is the best I can say about it.  If I wasn't comparing it directly against God of War, I might come up with something better, but every point of comparison I can come up with between the two swings God of War's way.
• Have a Nice Death is great.  It's got clean mechanics and controls, great animation with a sense of humor, and you play as the Grim Reaper dealing with the corporate monstrosity you created to make things easier for yourself, long, long ago.  The game just wants more time than I'm willing to give it, so odds are I won't get it unless it ends up in a Humble Bundle or something like that.
• Senua's Saga: Hellblade II is disappointing.  I forced myself to play through the first chapter (which starts with you barely mustering the strength to climb off of the shore from a stormy shipwreck, and ends with you getting into sword-fights with multiple enemies before capturing a prisoner, all without resting), and it was a monochrome slog.  I loved the original, too bad the sequel couldn't measure up.
• Lightyear Frontier was a pleasant surprise.  It seems to be reasonably scoped for single-player play, and takes care of some of the early-game suspension-of-disbelief issues I have with most survival crafters.  Sure, you can punch trees to get wood, if you've got a mech with a chainsaw attached to its arm, but you'll do better with more sweeping blows!
• Finally, a two-fer of disappointments with similar roots... the whole point of releasing on console is supposed to be that you have a known standard to code and test to!  Flock looked like it could be a fun distraction, but audio issues scuttled that for me.  Space Engineers looked like it could be interesting, but I noped out when I went to the help menus to look up controls and got a mess of keyboard bindings - you know, the keyboard that XBoxen don't usually have.

So, yeah, that's it for now.  Looking forward to the Starfield expansion, resignedly anticipating day 1000 of Russia's stupidity, and watching Israel and Hamas talk wanting a cease-fire but doing their best to not actually get one, each for their own reasons.  Yay games, I guess.

A mixed bag of an update

Russia, Israel, Hamas... something something go fuck yourselves.

Well, it's been an unusually lively couple of weeks in the real world.  War, politics, and the Olympics, all coming together to keep anybody not directly involved entertained.  Here's some of the notable bits in my book:

• After the Trump assassination attempt, there was a brief period of "we need to turn the heat down", "can't we all just get along", that sort of thing.  I think it may have even lasted more than two days.  But, well, Trump, along with the Republican National Convention taking place, pretty well put that out to pasture.  They did manage to get their Vice President candidate pick locked in, though.
• Which is funny, because, shortly thereafter, Biden dropped out of the race, and Harris stepped in, and none of the Republican leadership looks to have anticipated that.  Mind, by "dropped out", I mean to say that Biden was effectively force-retired by his party after a particularly bad showing against Trump at a live debate, but, outside of the optics of all of that, I can't really fault the Democrats there.
• More potential assholes, in the form of Hezbollah and Iran, might be making moves to get involved in the whole Israel-Hamas thing.  Of course, the inciting act being a rocket attack at a soccer field full of not-necessarily-Israelis that Hezbollah denies being behind, well, seems a bit fishy, but we'll see what washes out there.
• In local politics, it's almost time for the state primary election, so the airwaves are packed with ads from the local Trump-humpers and their allies, some of which are almost offensively "this will appeal to those backwoods hicks" in their crafting.  The sad thing, of course, is that they're made by people with experience in this arena, so they've made things they honestly think will work.
• Thankfully(?), the Olympics are also on right now.  No, I'm not really watching or paying attention, but, if I leave them on as background noise, the ad blocks the national players have paid for have effectively squeezed out the local ad traffic.  So, no local political ads, fewer drug ads (especially those damn Jardiance ads), all in all I'll take it.

 In the meantime, there's games to be considered, but the news isn't great there, either:

• I've basically given up on The First Descendant.  It's got decent gun-play, but the story and characters are just bad.  As in, when you "awaken" the AI assistant that ties all of the playable characters together, two characters are left out.  And somebody is leaking intel to the enemy.  And one of them goes off on their own to try and go all Dr. Mengele independent of both sides, after being left alone with a "salvation of humanity" device for no better reason than that he said he was tasked with bringing it back, alone.  I mean, at least before that, I had some question as to whether the two odd men out were working together as moles for the enemy, but that answers that question.
• I've also put No Man's Sky back on the shelf.  The update came through after about a week, and I got several hours of gameplay in.  Saw some changes, some of which were cool, some of which were pretty and not much else... and then the game crashed to desktop (or, well, console user interface screen, same difference).  That was enough to snap me back to evaluating what I'd played so far, and... what's changed, it's either too much or not enough.  What I mean is, compared to last time I played, all that looks to have been added play-wise is the ability to be a part of the "bad-guy" faction (the Voice of Freedom).  But, compared to the first time I played, it's got all this base-building, fleet management, and social gaming stuff that... while, yes, I could just avoid interacting with it, really dims the idea of the vagabond wanderer playstyle that attracted me to the game in the first place.  Doubtless I'll look in again later, maybe after the next patch, but, right now, it's not the game for me.
  

Latest gaming updates

 Per tradition... Russia, Israel, Hamas, all of their leadership, and some of their populace, could really benefit from some horribly painful/itchy STDs in their lives, at a minimum.

Here at home, though, things are mostly more pleasant, if you set aside the obscene heat courtesy of climate change, the similarly-obscene political climate, and the odd assassination attempt.  So... yeah.  Well, focusing on games for a bit, here's a few items in no particular order:

• A bit over 200 hours of playtime later, I've finished two runs through Book of Hours.  Two runs, because there are multiple endings - the "easy ending" (which is likely the most relatable for ordinary, everyday people that would be attracted to this game) and several "true endings" that take significantly more work to get.  I've enjoyed my time with the game, but, at a minimum, I want to take a break from it before I even think about diving back in.  It's one thing to let a game lead you on for hundreds of hours, but quite another to go in knowing that's what it will take, when there are so many other games out there.
• Looks like I never mentioned - I got air conditioning in this year, in the form of a heat pump (and not a moment too soon)!  Once I verified it was able to keep up with the peculiarities of my house, I finally went ahead and upgraded to an XBox Series X.  So, I now have access to all of my XBox One games, DVDs, and Blu-Ray discs on the same machine I use for streaming and current-gen games.  Oh yeah, more power too, theoretically, but it's not like my old Series S demonstrated any issues there.  Side note, Amazon has really gone downhill - I tried being cheap/responsible and buying one of their "in stock" refurbished Series X units from them, only to have them not ship, then try to move the delivery date on me on the day it was supposed to be delivered.  In the meantime, Best Buy put their new units on sale for nearly as cheap, but with a gift card attached as well, so that's where I went.  Yay, capitalism?
• Since I was testing capabilities, I went ahead and put in the disc for my XBox One version of No Man's Sky.  Side note:  Wow, looks like I haven't posted about that game since 2017, and there have been a fair few patches since then.  Good news, it looks to have auto-upgraded to the Series X version, so yay there.  Bad news, the latest patch hasn't gone live on the XBox ecosystem yet, so... I guess I'll give it another proper go, if/when I see it update.
• Well, assuming I'm not still embroiled in The First Descendant, of course.  Saw my brother putting in hours on this game over a couple of weekends, so I figured it was worth giving a go.  Briefly, it's mostly Warframe with a bit of Destiny thrown in for flavor.  It's decent enough for a grinding game, maybe lacks a bit of polish here and there (particularly in the localization department), but easy enough to spend a few hours in at a go.  Naturally, I'm waiting for the free-to-play cash spike to hit... but the battle pass, I'm not seeing anything I care about in the paid section so far, and I was able to negotiate Warframe's monetization to my satisfaction back in the day, so... maybe?
• If not, I've certainly got a list of "not worth picking up Game Pass for this, but I'll check it out when I get Game Pass next" games that's grown large enough that, maybe, I'll just get a month of that to winnow that list down.  Or, I've got backlogs on various systems, or, or...

Well, that's where I'm at games-wise at the moment.  Stay safe, stay sane, stay hydrated!

Sure, let's ramp this hell-in-a-handbasket ride up a notch

 Happy Bastille Day, for those of you who observe it.  Absolutely nothing of note has occurred lately, outside of the ongoing douchebaggery of Russia, Israel, and Hamas.  Nope, nothing at all.

Obviously, that's a lie.  Yesterday, somebody took pot-shots at Trump at one of his rallies.  Current reports indicate it was a 20-year-old kid, registered Republican, who took an "AK-style" rifle to a nearby rooftop and tried to snipe Trump, in spite of wearing glasses, from a couple-hundred feet away.  He's dead now, of course, so everybody has questions about who was he, why did he do it, that sort of thing... and the short answer is, it really doesn't much matter in the end.

On the motivations front, this was eminently foreseeable.  You've got a presidential candidate whose previously shown his lack of aptitude for the job, who talks about being a dictator on day one if he gets re-elected, getting backing from gas-lighting congressional members and a supreme court that, until recently, maintained a facade of impartiality.  Under those conditions, I'd expect at least one young hot-blooded sort to take a shot in any community, given the opportunity, be they military trained riflemen with an oath to uphold or "I'm pretty good at Call of Duty, I could make this work."  The lucky thing for Trump is it looks like he got something closer to the latter here.

But, again, why doesn't matter much here.  More important are the impacts of the act - which, again, immediately aren't much.  Trump got an ear tagged, which shouldn't be in any way debilitating, unless you want to take the very long odds that a man who was wanting to lead an assault on congress is the sort to get spooked by a flesh wound.  We've got a couple of dead people and a few wounded, but, while doubtless tragic for them and their families, only results in the loss of a couple of votes for the Republicans, tops.

Longer term, though?  This guy just created a touchstone for the Republican party.  Anybody who considers themselves a Republican for non-cynical, non-self-serving reasons, has a concrete event to point at and say that they are under attack from a shadowy "THEM".  Doesn't matter that the kid was a registered Republican, any number of excuses, plausible or implausible, can be made for why he was duped, or wasn't really a Republican, or maybe he was acting under orders from Democrats/the Deep State/Joe Biden, that sort of thing.  With the current pile of lies they're operating under, what's one more for the pile?  But this one, it's visceral (almost literally).  You've already got people like the Republican National Convention attendees talking about this strengthening their resolve to do what they were going to do already, and you know that, at a minimum, this will be used as a rallying point as Election Day comes closer to get people out to the polls.  Past that... well, I'm hoping I'm wrong, but this could easily be the start of a spiral of tit-for-tat political violence, all egged on by either Republicans deciding "the gloves are off", or external influence like Russian misinformation campaigns, or both of those and more.

Yeah, I really hope I'm wrong on that last bit.  Election season is bad enough without fighting in the streets over it.

So, I guess we're a nation of vibes now?

 Those fuckers.

Whoops, first things first... yeah, Russia deserves everything they're getting and then some, and both Israel and Hamas can go eat a bowl of dicks.

That out of the way... those fuckers.  Who else could I be talking about today besides the corrupt, regressive wing of the Supreme Court?  Not content to just let their precedent-breaking take-down on abortion rights fester, not even content to rule that bribery is OK, so long as the bribe gets delivered after the fact, they had to go that one step further.  They upended something truly foundational, the concept that nobody is above the law - and they did so without even the barest of cover in the letter of the law or the Constitution, but just based on the insane assertion that, sometimes, presidents need to commit crimes, and it would be an unfair burden on them to have to consider the consequences of those crimes in the heat of the moment.

OK, so, first off, I never want to hear anything coming from any of their pie-holes about "original intent" from the Constitution ever again.  Up until today, it was pretty straightforward - presidents shouldn't be criming, and, if they really had to, any of their successors could pardon them for it after the fact.  Now, it's strictly a question of whether they're using the powers of their office - if so, it's not reviewable, ever.  That's so far beyond the intent of the founders, it's in the realm of what they were actively trying to prevent, the creation of a king.

We are now officially beyond "respect for the rule of law", because this court has demonstrated that the law simply doesn't matter - if they want something, they'll make that something happen, regardless of what the Constitution or the laws actually say.  Something needs to change, soonest.  Impeachments, pack the court, heck... I do my best not to wish ill on others, but, if Biden were to use his newly-granted immunities to create a few openings in the court, well, I might not agree with that, but I'd totally understand.

Book of Hours - careful, you might get sucked in

 The traditional real-world update:  Ukraine aid went through (yay!), but the Israel/Hamas cease-fire didn't.  Well, at least we're starting to make noises about maybe not supplying arms to indiscriminately kill civilians with while Israel pursues their goals... I'd call that progress, but even that suggestion is getting some pretty harsh push-back here in the US, so we'll see what happens there.

Now, as for what brought on the need to post... I've got Helldivers 2 that could be letting me scratch the first-person shooter itch (and, I still do, maybe one or two short sessions a week).  I've got Starfield that could be letting me explore a chunk of the galaxy (however repetitively).  I've got Baldur's Gate 3 that could be letting me push through a fantasy world to save both it and myself.  These, and many, many other good games vie for my attention.  Yet, lately, the main game I've been sinking my time into is a little oddity called Book of Hours.

On its surface, Book of Hours isn't much to look at.  Your actions pretty much all boil down to play card/item in slot (or, if you're lucky, multiple cards/items in multiple slots), wait for result, then claim the proceeds.  How they managed to take that simple mechanism and create "cozy 1920's upper-class British librarian and esoteric knowledge researcher simulator", that I don't know, but I'm glad they did.

So, mechanics aside, what exactly is it that you do in this game?  Well, so the story goes, there's a manor called Hush House, out on an island with a small village, that was a repository of all sorts of esoteric knowledge.  Was, because there was a fire that basically destroyed everything, and the last Librarian has gone missing.  You're hired on by the foundation responsible for the property to take what remains into hand, and get things back in order.  Things start out as well as can be expected, with you washing ashore after a shipwreck at the village, whose populace, due to historical reasons, is extremely distrustful of outsiders.  Of course, you'll need those villagers to help you even get to Hush House, never mind deal with clearing out the place... except, once you get there, there's no sign of a fire, just years of neglect, along with the protections left in place by past Librarians of course.  There's still plenty of books to be found, which you can catalog to get the general gist of what they're about, then study to improve your skills, hopefully, assuming they're not also somehow cursed or infested with something unpleasant.  Then there's various visitors and the like to deal with, some of which are involved with incidents in the outside world like you might find in your random Cthulhu-mythos stories, some just looking for research materials, and some you can use to further your own advancement (for example, you know a great many languages to start with, but not all of them).  Beyond that, well, let's just say there are more systems that (super)naturally come to light while you're playing, all coming together seamlessly to create something special.

I think what makes the game work is the subtle ways they use the simple systems to reinforce the world and your place in it.  Days and seasons pass, and the day's weather can have a significant impact on what it is you decide to do on any given day.  Cataloging the contents of a book is a single mid-length action, but resting outside of what you get back each day is a multi-step process (brew some tea, serve it out so you're not drinking the whole pot, then drink it and take a nap).  Heck, I've got a pile of dirty bedding in the groundskeeper's shack I'm using for home base that kind of drove my initial exploration of the manor, thinking I'd find someplace to do laundry or the like... but Librarians don't do laundry, that's something I'd need to get help from the villagers to handle, somehow, and I'd much rather spend that time trying to solve the mystery of this 15th-century tome to get a new skill or improve one I've already got.  Plus, of course, it's using time-appropriate British currency (pence, shillings, farthings, etc.), which makes keeping track of your mundane money all the trickier (and yes, that does mean there's non-mundane money as well).

I could go on (and on and on) about various details, small and large, that have made Book of Hours entertaining enough to keep me engaged and coming back, night after night, to get a few more days' efforts in, but I think I've said enough to let you decide if you're at all interested.  If so, definitely check out the link I put in earlier. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got some research to get back to.