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.

Greed, thy name is Disney

 Right, so, time for a break from my usual rants about the shit state of the world (and a traditional holiday Fuck Off to the major offenders in the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Israel/Hamas thing while I'm thinking of it) - time instead for a rant on the shit state and trend of commercial video streaming currently, with a special nod to Disney+.

If Wikipedia's dates and figures are right, Netflix first launched their stand-alone streaming service in 2011, for just shy of $8 per month.  At the time, it was an amazing value, compared to cable TV subscriptions closer to $40 or $50 a month (if memory serves), especially given its two major features.  Namely, they had a library of titles large enough to practically guarantee you could watch whatever you want, and, whatever you watched, it would be ad-free.

In the intervening years, enshittification has changed that dynamic greatly.  First, the larger owners of most popular films and shows decided that they would rather be making money themselves rather than handing content off to Netflix, so they launched their own streaming services, with varying degrees of success.  Quickly, given the niche nature of their content, some such streamers made "bundle deals" available to get multiple stream sources for a reduced price, echoing the bundling that started cable down its road to ruin.  More recently, most streamers have started splitting their content into tiers, not based on things like how many screens you can have running at once or the audio/visual quality of the streamed content, but on whether they can feed you ads at the same time.  So, now, sticking with Netflix for this example, you can access a greatly-reduced range of content under one of three plans:  "good enough" quality with ads for about $7/month, the same without ads for more than $15/month, or high quality without ads for about $23/month.  In contrast, Curiosity Stream offers their (admittedly niche) content for no more than $5/month for a high-quality stream, which should give a good idea as to how much of other streamers' fees are due to meeting hardware requirements to supply their customers.

But, like I said, I really want to focus on Disney+ for a bit here.  Why?  Well, I had an account a while back (likely when they launched in 2019 at a roughly $7/month price point).  I specifically didn't go for their ESPN and Hulu bundle for about $13/month, for one simple reason:  I take a hard stance against paying for ads, which was part and parcel of any Hulu experience at the time.  So, I watched my fill of Disney fare, Star Wars stuff, and the odd National Geographic content, and let my subscription lapse, ready to wait until more content I cared for had accumulated.

Here we are in 2024, and I caught wind via a YouTube ad - Disney+ is doing a Black Friday sale, $3/month if you sign up for a year up front!  Color me intrigued!  So I go to the Disney+ site and... oh, it's another Hulu bundle, with ads on Disney+ as well.  Normally, something they charge about $11/month for.  And the ad-free version of that bundle isn't on sale at all, and they would want you to pay about $20/month for that.  And there's various other bundles available, but none where you could get everything they have on offer, for up to about $30/month.  And just getting Disney+?  Not even shown in the same area - you have to dig in the FAQ section for it - about $10/month with ads, $16/month without.  And with all those choices, nothing is mentioned about stream quality - it's probably high-quality, but who really knows?

Now, here's the thing... I get Disney's angle on this, they want to push bundles to maintain engagement, and they want to normalize ads, because they can make more money overall that way (otherwise, they wouldn't bother to offer it).  But, in doing such a deep discount on one service option without providing any discount for anything else, their message is, basically, "you would be a sucker to do anything but this."  And, looking at their price structures, and how much everything else costs versus a $5/month ad-free Curiosity Stream subscription (or, for something a little more mass-market, an $8/month ad-free CrunchyRoll subscription), I have to agree.  But, since I won't pay for ads, that's not happening, and there's nothing that's come out from Disney in the past few years that makes me want to bend over and take it, either.

So, congratulations, Disney, you managed to both lure me in the door with one offer, then drive me out again with all your other offers.  Well, I'm sure, eventually, maybe, you'll produce something I'm willing to pay a premium to watch.  But today is not that day.

Day 1000 has come and gone, and the world churns on

 Day 1000 of Russia's invasion of Ukraine came and went last week.  Courtesy of a favored saying of the age, "elections have consequences", our current President took a look at his scheduled replacement, and decided we need to push out as much materiel to Ukraine as we can, while we can, and has also relaxed the restrictions on using our weapons on Russian soil.  Russia responded by updating their stated stance on using nukes to include countries that provide weapons to their opponents, and tried to back up their words by using a ballistic missile (of the sort that could carry nukes) on Ukraine... after letting us know first over the "let's not accidentally start World War III" hotline first.  Putin's not happy, and that's fine by me, especially since he could just stop this whole mess any time he likes - well, maybe that's not an option for him domestically after all this time, but that falls squarely into Not My Problem territory.

Of course, the whole Israel-Hamas fight is still going on as well, and that's still a "pox on both houses" thing.  Seemingly, the International Criminal Court agrees, since they've put out arrest warrants for the leaders of both sides.  Netanyahu responded by calling it "anti-Semitic".  No, this isn't an attack on the Jewish people at random or as a whole, just tagging the people leading both sides of a needlessly brutal conflict to maybe pay for their crimes someday.  I know, consequences for your actions is such an outdated way of thinking, but I'm a little old-fashioned that way.

Speaking of consequences and the lack thereof, the lead-up to the transfer of the Presidency continues apace.  The judge that convicted Trump on multiple state felony counts has apparently decided to lay low a bit, indefinitely postponing his sentencing - so Trump gets to decide how hard he wants to push his appeals process, but that's almost a given, since he really doesn't want to go down as America's first felon President.  Meanwhile, Trump continues to announce the appointments he wants to make, and I can't decide how much of that is "these are people he knows and likes" and how much is just maximum trolling.  At least we won't have the (credibly alleged) pedophile Matt Gaetz around as either the incoming Attorney General, nor as a U.S. Representative, after his multiple withdrawals.  There's still plenty of unpleasant people maybe getting into positions of power, depending on how the Republican Senate handles things.

Locally, things remain reasonably sane for the time being... so long as you're not homeless, at least.  On the plus side, the local/regional "homeless warehouse" got shut down.  On the minus side, that shutdown occurred without much in the way of plans for handling the demand otherwise, from what I can glean.  On the other hand, my local city council just modified and enhanced their "public camping" laws to both eliminate any need for camping equipment to be involved and make it a misdemeanor with potential jail-time attached.  Gotta love that whole "go be homeless somewhere else" vibe... not.  That, and I really don't like laws where application is left to the discretion of law enforcement on the scene, since you know anybody looking to apply this is going to make a value judgment on how "homeless" the target looks or was behaving previously.

So, to quote Cartman, screw you guys, I'm going home. After the disappointment of Starfield's DLC, nothing remotely recent was calling out to me, so I hopped back into Disgaea 2 PC for the first time in a while.  Rather, I started from scratch, and I've made it further than I ever have to date.  Sadly, Steam Deck's sleep mode isn't a panacea for the Item World length problem (I've had actual gameplay problems crop up using it), but setting aside a weekend afternoon I've found to be doable.  Of course, that leaves a lot of time during the week for shorter fare, which I was filling with various smaller games from my Steam backlog.

Then Death Stranding got surprise-dropped on XBox, with a 50% sale to start knocking it down under $20, meeting my cheap-bastard requirements.  I'd heard good things about the game over the years, so I gave it a go.  It's definitely a novel game, both in the gameplay loop and the world building, and it's sufficiently occasionally weird to keep my attention.  The "rebuilding America" theme is a little on-the-nose for current affairs, and it's mentally tricky dealing with them trying to map a much smaller gamespace onto the continental U.S. (likely not a big deal for developers/players in other countries that just don't grasp the scale of this country), but that's the extent of the "bad" that I can really dredge up for this game at the moment.  Long story short, I've found it good for under-an-hour play sessions so far, and I'd recommend it for anybody to check out on XBox.

Two days on, and I'm still shell-shocked

 This shouldn't have been hard, my fellow Americans.  One of the two finalists for the position of President of the United States was not only a well-known terrible example of some of the worst of human behavior, not merely a convicted felon due to his business dealings, but somebody who held the position before, and did such a piss-poor job of it that he was tossed out on his ass, in spite of his best efforts at sedition and thanks to the cover provided by his party faithful... and that was all before adding in recent indicators of mental decline due to advanced age or encroaching dementia.  Still, somehow, among those of us who could be bothered to vote, over half decided that this wasteoid was the better fit for the job!  Not "darn those wiley Republicans for manipulating the voting systems in their states" half either, but full-on winning outright in all of the "swing states" as well!  I mean, to modify the old saying about grand juries, if he'd been running against a ham sandwich, he should have lost.

So, what was it, exactly, that made so many of you run away from his opponent?  The fact that she's on the team of the guy currently in office, and they weren't able to rein in inflation set into motion by her opponent quickly enough?  Or maybe you took umbrage at the way she replaced her current boss on the ticket, and didn't want to reward that behavior?  Felt taken for granted?  Sucked in by his cult, maybe?  Something to do with her race or gender?  Honestly, I'm curious, but that's all I am... the fact is, none of those reasons, or anything else I've heard so far, comes close to excusing trying to bring back the guy who incited a mob to try and overthrow the results of the last election he lost.  I'm not merely disappointed in you all.  Rather, I'm actually disgusted by you.

See, you've not only brought back on the biggest threat to democracy and the Constitution we've seen in our lifetimes, but you've done so after the Supreme Court the Republicans rigged in their favor has shown their willingness to play Calvinball with the law to get the results they want.  You've also given control of the Senate over to the Republicans, and there's fair odds, as of this writing, that you will have also given control of the House of Representatives to them as well.  If that last domino falls, then congratulations, you've likely set the stage for him to make the dictator-for-life play... unless, of course, you seriously believe that there's enough Republicans in either house willing to cross him and thwart his plans, and those of his inner circle as well.  Me, I don't see it.

So, now, we wait for January.  In the meantime, we might get some entertainment value from his sentencing for those felonies he's already been convicted of, but that's about it.  After that, it's at least a couple of years of horror for a fair number of people, I'm sure.  While I'm saddened in general, I'll also admit to looking forward to some schadenfreude to come as well - after all, that joke about "I never thought the leopards would eat my face" is certain to apply here, too.

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.