A month closer to elections, plus Kotamon

 Yet another month of "I wouldn't have believed you if you said this was going to happen in the before times" down, another month closer to elections to maybe, possibly put a damper on our national insanity and embarrassment.  Of course, team Trump is doing what they can to try and shape that election to their liking (unconstitutionally, as is on-brand for these assholes), but, so far, so good.

Of course, it hurts nothing to remember a few reasons why they feel the need to corrupt elections.  You've always got Epsteinapalooza burbling in the background, so they're always needing to have a distraction going.  Their last big one, attacking Iran, hasn't turned out so well, and the only escalation they could really do there to make an impact would be an invasion of some magnitude (which would drive their favorability with voters even lower than it already is), so they're trying the "declare victory and move on" approach, which only works if your audience is willing to buy in to your bullshit.  

Meanwhile, they've moved on to trying to bully Canada into new trade terms... and might have gotten away with it too, if, by reports, they hadn't attempted to include terms like "no more French speaking" in the bargain.  Instead, they've got a new trade war on their hands, and Trump has, unilaterally, decided to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America (not to be confused with the Gulf of America, better known as the Gulf of Mexico).  Piled on top of all the other crap they've pulled, both internationally and domestically, I'll be more than happy to see some checks and balances get reinstated.

Well, latest mini-rant out of the way, let's move on to games.   I'm still loving my Steam Machine, and I've only thrown a few more games on since last I wrote.  That started with the demo for the upcoming Travelling at Night, which is shaping up to be an RPG in the same world as Cultist Simulator and Book of Hours, but a bit further down the timeline, with more of a post-WWII bent.  That got me thirsting for more, but I couldn't justify another run through Book of Hours just yet, so I put Cultist Simulator back on, and learned a bit more on how to make that game work for a later play-date.

The one that actually holds my attention though... I'll give it the full title just this once.  KOTAMON: My Sis Found A Super-Rare Card In Her Cereal Box, So I Became A Garbage Man To Find The Entire Collection And Earn $1,000,000 is really barely a game at all.  It's a cartoonish mockery of Pokemon card collecting, where the artwork stays on the safe side of suggestive, while there's no such guarantee for anything else (for example, a safety sticker on a trash compacter shows the standard "don't put your hands in here" image of a hand running through gears, but the accompanying text is something along the lines of "don't fist robot girls").  The story, such as it is, involves an ultra-rare card that's the key to collecting a million-dollar prize getting found and tossed by your sister, so you take on work at your local dump sorting through trash piles, bagging most of it to feed to the trash compacter and get paid for, while picking out stray cards and bits of cards (that you can reassemble), along with other "interesting" collectibles.  Oh, and tossing trash bags at the compacter if you don't feel like walking all the way over, and drinking beer from the on-site vending machine if you need to recharge your energy... or just because.  It's light-hearted stupid fun, good to eat up some time if you've got a few minutes to spare, and it's on sale for about $5.

A few small items, while things are relatively quiet

 Weird that I can think of "at war with Iran and shooting up boats in both the Atlantic and Pacific" as relatively quiet, but here we are.  Everybody's fussed about the entirely-foreseeable after effects of the US attacking Iran jointly with Israel, so nobody's actively looking to rock the boat any further - assuming you don't include Trump "joking" about Pearl Harbor with the Japanese prime minister, of course.  Otherwise, Epsteinapalooza continues to simmer, alongside the many, many other problems Trump and company have brought down upon us.

Side note, did you know there's another No Kings protest scheduled for next week?

Anyways, the main bug in my bonnet today isn't the big picture, but a smaller piece of corruption and control.  Turns out, yesterday, the Nexstar acquisition of Tegna was approved.  You know, one of the companies that tried to support the FCC head in his attempt to get Jimmy Kimmel kicked off the air back in September, getting special dispensation from that head to bypass the law (under what authority?) to extend their empire further.  Some states have filed a lawsuit to try and stop it, but, in my mind, Tegna is already tainted.  So, as promised, I've dropped their local stations from my tuner's channel list.  Mind, the local Tegna station's main channel was the CBS affiliate, so it's just their also-ran UHF channel (CW affiliate, maybe?) and all the filler sub-channels for both that went away.  Kind of a wash all around, really, but I might miss getting tempted to watch some Svengoolie thing on a random Saturday night in the future, I guess.

 All the more time for games then, yeah?  Let's start with PowerWash Simulator 2 - I finished that the other night.  No major surprises, up to the end credits, which suffered a crash-to-"desktop" on my XBox.  Ah well, I had my fun, but I'm not champing at the bit to get any DLC for it, so take that for what it's worth.

Outside of that, I've added a couple more programs to my "games that have my attention" list.  Trash Goblin is a fairly simple game (barely more than a visual novel, really) where your young goblin self sets up a shop where he takes bits of trash sourced by his Auntie, chips away the worst of the encrustation on them, (usually) cleans them up, and (sometimes) pieces things together before selling them off to the townsfolk that stop by.  Most of the mechanics are forgettable at best (although the cleaning sponge you start with is absolutely wretched), but the chiseling part does a really good job at hitting the same puzzle-solving notes as manually examining an object you're trying to uncover/decipher.  It's got my attention for now, but we'll see how the story holds up.

There's also Dawnfolk, which I'm playing on my PC due to the controller setup, mainly (anything d-pad related on the first-gen Steam Controller is not a good time).  It's a minimalist town-builder with a Commodore-64 aesthetic, including very simple mini-games for some tasks.  It hasn't proven to be "hard" (at the normal difficulty level at least), but it's both engaging and charming.  I'd say take a look, while the Steam Spring Sale is on, maybe it'll grab your attention too.

Coming up for air

 So, what, a month-and-a-half since my last post?  Sure feels longer than that.  The world at large is fairly quiet, maybe in part thanks to the Winter Olympics going on.  The AI bubble may not have popped quite yet, but it sure is looking wobbly.  Best of all, the U.S. hasn't started any new shit in the world at large as of yet, although we're definitely making moves that say beating on Iran a bit is a matter of when, not if.

Why might that be?  Well, it's because things inside the country have taken enough turns to keep the baddies occupied.  ICE did their best "occupying power" imitation in their Minnesota surge, up to and including executing citizens, but, amazingly, the citizenry neither cowered nor exploded into the violence needed to act as an excuse to impose martial law.  Things got bad enough on that front (for the baddies) that they had to replace the guy in charge on the ground, who eventually announced that they're going to pull back.  Of course, given the track record of truth in announcements from this group, that's a definite wait and see.

Meanwhile, Epsteinapalooza continues apace.  Having released about half of the total documents, with significant mis-redactions,  the Department of Justice (hah!) wanted to declare everything required by law to be released as released and move on.  Funny enough, Congress didn't see it that way.  The most recent visual stuck in my head on that is the head of the DoJ in a Congressional hearing doing three things:  contemptuously attacking congresscritters from a cheat-sheet, refusing to look at the victims seated behind her, and ranting about the Dow Jones Industrial Average hitting an all-time high (as if that had any bearing on her performance of her job).

Of course, those are just the headline items.  There's plenty of other smaller-but-not-less-important items, like the baddies trying to find a way to nationalize the next elections, because they're projected to do so poorly in them that they're willing to try and strip that Constitutionally-protected function from the states to protect themselves.  The clock is ticking, and I think it's sinking in that their New Reich plan is coming apart at the seams.

On the topic of waiting for things to come apart, can that AI bubble finally pop, or at least significantly deflate?  It's interfering (in a definitely first-world-problem sort of way) with me getting a Steam Machine and revamped Steam Controller!  The controller's the most important part of that batch, since it would let me play a few games I've been itching to play from my couch (I could make something work for the rest of the gear).  But Steam is apparently waiting on some clarity or stability on things like memory prices before they launch their latest batch of hardware, something I honestly don't expect to see this year.  But I wants them!

 While I wait, I'll mention that I've gotten some good mileage lately out of Reus 2.  It's really more of a re-imagining of the original game (which I wrote about back in 2013) than a sequel, but whether that's an improvement or not will be mainly a matter of personal preference.  I do like that it's no longer a timer-driven affair and a fair bit less fiddly, but you lose things I liked from the original like biomes interacting with each other.  All in all, I think I like it better myself, although there is a fair bit of "min-max your way to victory", as I put it in my original writeup.

Winding down another year

 ...and, just to get the necessaries out of the way, a happy holiday fuck-off to Russia and Israel.  Hamas, I'm going to stop worrying about for a bit at least - with their leadership getting assassinated in spite of the cease-fire that's supposedly still in place, I think Israel can bear their share of fuck-offitude for a while.

Here in the US, Epsteinapalooza has kicked off, with Trump's Department of Justice attempting to slow-walk and over-redact document releases.  Luckily, whether by ineptitude or sabotage, some of those redactions were apparently done by "highlighting in black", making them trivial to undo, so that's nice.  Between that and the upcoming expiration of Affordable Care Act health-care subsidies, the coming month could be entertaining, at least.  Now, if we can just keep them from unconstitutionally embedding federal controls into state-run elections, we might be getting somewhere.

On the games front... I did manage to finish categorizing and organizing my Steam library.  For a library of several hundred games, at about 1-2 hours a day, it took me about a month to finish.  About 44% of titles ended up being "I'm done with this" (for either possible meaning of that phrase), a further 4% are unsupported by Steam Deck, and 2% are buggy enough to not bother playing until/unless they get fixed.  That'll simplify finding things I actually want to play, especially once the Steam Machine launches (assuming a reasonable price-point there, of course).

Beyond that, it's Steam Winter Sale time, so I've got a few new toys to peruse there... but of course there was a gap between ending my categorization and the sale starting, and I didn't want to play nothing but PowerWash Simulator 2 for hours on end... so I reinstalled Warframe.  Let me tell you, it is nothing but amazing how well that game has held up over the years, as well as what they've managed to do to expand on its basic formula.  If you've never played it, I'd recommend it... and that's about the one free-to-play game that I can say that about.

Once more in the holidays' midst

 Halloween has long since come and gone (although leftover candy still lingers), veterans got their brief nod, Thanksgiving has waddled off for another year (although leftover pie still lingers, but not for long), and Christmas is on the horizon.  And still, Russia and Israel (and why not, likely Hamas as well) can keep fucking off.

Internationally, it's mostly status quo shit show.  Apparently, we're back to trying to carry Russia's water for them when it comes to talks about stopping their invasion (which, of course, they could stop single-handedly by just... stopping).  Israel has its ceasefire with Hamas, so apparently decided that meant attacks in the West Bank and Lebanon were fine (insert Inigo Montoya "that word you keep using" meme here).  We're still blowing up small boats in the Caribbean, apparently using "no survivors" orders that will hopefully find a suitable courtroom one day.  All that, and our president is now declaring the entire airspace of other countries as "closed", seemingly preparing to launch a war with no say-so from Congress (you know, like the Constitution demands).

Here at home, it's a little more interesting.  People are noticing things like groceries costing more, in spite of the gaslighting from Trump's team, and some of those people are starting to figure out that it's not the only thing they've been lied to about.  It's a similar story for people with ties to the immigrant community, noticing the whole "we're only after the violent criminal illegals" line means more like "if you're not white enough, be prepared to have a bad day".  The surprise from this is that, apparently, some Republicans in Congress have had enough, to the point of "retiring early" so they don't have to try and defend all this bullshit through the midterm election cycle... and actually retiring early enough that off-cycle elections could, theoretically, alter the balance in the House at least.  It's not time to be dancing in the streets yet (except maybe as part of a No Kings rally or the like), but big cracks start small and all that.

 So, real-world stuff out of the way, what's up in play-land?  I gave The Outer Worlds 2 a go, and enjoyed it well enough... for a time.  Honestly, it brought to mind a lot of the issues I had with Avowed (see my thoughts on that here), but the world presented isn't as focused (they looked to draw inspiration from a lot of different things, games especially, that I've seen before), and the skill/perk system all but demands a more specialized build to be effective.  On the plus side, it doesn't have the "tiered loot" system Avowed did, they found a way to handle healing with food/chems that isn't a massive chore, and earning character "quirks" through actual gameplay activity was a breath of fresh air.  I didn't like it enough to pay more for it right now, but, like Avowed, it's likely good enough for a sale-price pickup eventually.

Outside of that game, well... Herdling was a nice evening's worth of game, not too complex and very what-you-see-is-what-you-get.  Stellaris certainly looked like a good way to consume your life with 4x space-empire building, if that's your thing.  But my main takeaway (as in I was willing to buy it to keep playing after Game Pass expires) is PowerWash Simulator 2, a follow-on to the 2022 game I briefly mentioned here - it's basically the same game as before (maybe slightly easier?), making it perfect for an hour or so here and there, and it's been long enough since the last one that the sting of that one's last level has faded a bit.

So now what?  Well, I'm in my annual "buy for others, not for me" phase, and I've come up with a mad scheme.  I found the "list games by playtime" section of my Steam profile, and I'm going to work my way up from the bottom, trying out and categorizing old games in preparation for the launch of the new version of the Steam Machine.  No, I'm not going to do detailed reviews or anything like that... but, the first game of any substance I found this way was a copy of Fallout that I got who-knows-when and never played... or before Steam started doing play-time tracking (yet more proof that I've become Old).  I'll just say that it both works surprisingly well on my Ubuntu box, and still seems surprisingly fun to play nearly 30 years later (it released in 1997!), just don't try to run it windowed on a modern screen.

Stopped clocks, lowered expectations, and all that

 Never let it be said that I won't give credit where credit is due.  Somehow, since last I wrote, team Trump has managed to get a (technical) ceasefire going between Israel and Hamas that hasn't fully fallen apart yet.  Also, in the Russian invasion of Ukraine matter, they've managed to not swing back to their earlier stance of fellating Putin yet, so good job there.  Still, the fuck-off tally for Russia, Israel, and Hamas keeps going up for now, although the last two could be coming to an end if things keep improving rather than falling apart.

Of course, things holding steady or marginally improving overseas doesn't mean the same is happening closer to home.  There's more bonkers pardons (including a Bitcoin mogul) and sentence commutations (including George fucking Santos), more attempts at installing federalized troops in various predominantly-Democratic cities (thankfully mostly held in check by the courts so far), and more trade/tariff insanity (like cutting off trade talks with Canada over the airing of a commercial including Ronald Regan's thoughts on tariffs, of all things).  I'm sure there would be a lot more, but, currently, the government is "shut down" because the Republicans tried to force a funding bill down the throats of the Democrats in the Senate, and they didn't take kindly to that, but the Republicans won't back down - something about the bill allowing tax cuts to expire and make health care significantly more expensive for average Americans, but they're not wealthy donors, or something like that.  The end result of which is that there's a lot of "non-essential" spending that, legally, can't be done right now.

Of course, that doesn't stop team Trump from plowing forward.  Sometimes, that's in readily-defensible ways like trying to reroute existing Department of Defense funds to pay military paychecks (because unpaid troops are one path to a revolution nobody wants to see).  Others, not so much, like tearing down a wing of the White House (!) to make room for a ballroom funded by private donors.  Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I'd see the day where the "Epstein memorial ballroom, sponsored by Amazon" could possibly be a thing.

Well, enough about that real-world bother.  Last I wrote, I was getting into Visions of Mana, and I can happily report that I liked... the first half of the game.  Finding out that the whole villager sacrifice thing was basically an emergency response to changing world(s) conditions that just gradually became "that's how it's always been done" was a bit more true-to-life than I've come to expect from this genre of game.  Then, I hit the "betrayed former hero" trope, which could have been something interesting, about the same time I got reminded that this is a NetEase game, a company that's been doing questionable things to Western developers in recent years, and I went from "let's play it through" to "let's see what Wikipedia has to say about the story going forward".  Simply put, it didn't really resonate with me (especially bits about people getting a happy ending "in their next life"), so I stopped.

Since then, well, more No Man's Sky, and I had enough "play later" entries in my Game Pass queue that, since Outer Worlds 2 is getting good press and coming to the service later this week, I upgraded to the new-and-more-expensive Ultimate tier a bit early.  The only backlog game that's stood out positively to me so far is Wheel World, a bicycle racing game with some bike crafting and world-saving thrown in for flavor.  Definitely a "look at a video, you'll know if it's for you" sort of game.

I'll try to let you all know what I think about Outer Worlds 2 next time, as well as other good Game Pass backlog titles I get to.  I'd say the same about improvements in real-world conditions as well, but that's not the trend-line I'm seeing right now.

What a month

 For starters, Russia, Israel, and Hamas, kindly fuck off, keep on fucking off... you know the drill by now.

You know, I remember a time when I'd hear some government pronouncement or other, and, at worst, my reaction would be "well, I don't like it, but I can see what they're trying to handle."  These days, it seems like every time I hear something, it elicits a "fuck off" or "fuck you" reflexive response, and that's just plain not healthy.  But what else am I supposed to say, when the Supreme Court says racial profiling is OK when ICE does it, Congress is delaying swearing in a newly-elected member for nakedly partisan (Epstein files) reasons, and the President and his team are a non-stop shit show?

Of course, that's all the expected fun of the current (hopefully to continue without shenanigans) election cycle.  Then, you get wildcards like the Charlie Kirk killing coming into play to add spice to everything.  For anybody blissfully unaware, Mr. Kirk was a rabble-rouser whose shtick was going to college campuses to try and get people to "prove him wrong" on topics of his choosing, where he came prepared with cherry-picked data and a willingness to say pretty much anything to defend his chosen ground.  Because of that, he's got a wealth of quotes about things like (to paraphrase) empathy being a made-up term that does damage, and gun deaths being an acceptable cost for the Second Amendment.  That alone makes me feel justified in finding it fitting that he died from a gunshot at a rally he was holding while trying to shape a gun-violence argument in terms of gang violence.  Frankly, for all it came at the hands of a gent of questionable stability, the fact that he won't get to profit from the world he was trying to create pleases me greatly.

Naturally, that's not how Mr. Kirk's allies see things.  Rather, he gets called a hero and a martyr, while bringing up a shadowy "them" as being responsible, with revenge needing to be taken - and that's just from the President and his team!  No surprise then that when the late-night comedians started weighing in, Trump's head of the FCC decided to take the opportunity to try and force one off the air, in this case Jimmy Kimmel.  A couple of the larger station-owners (Sinclair and Nexstar) played along, performatively scheduling a Kirk memorial in place of Kimmel's ABC show, and Disney got the message, "indefinitely suspending" the show.

Amazingly, given this timeline, people at large decided this was a step too far, and responded by canceling their Disney+ memberships.  Long story short, Disney relented, the station owners relented, the FCC head is making noises about how he really wasn't trying to censor anybody, and Disney's shareholders are now demanding info on how Disney's actions were in their best interest, which is all lovely to see.  As for me, I don't own Disney stock and didn't have Disney+ to cancel, so it's purely spectator sport for now.  Of course, if Nexstar's attempted acquisition of Tegna (which owns my local CBS affiliate) goes through, I'll have to delete those channels from my over-the-air channel list, but that's about it.

Whew.  Well, that's enough about the shit state of the real world, how about a game? I've been tooling around in No Man's Sky, but I decided to give Visions of Mana a shot, since it came onto Game Pass.  I like what I've played so far, although the background theme of "villages cheerfully offering up sacrifices to keep things stable" is more than a little jarring - I really want to see how things play out there.  Well, that, and getting a cat-folk party member that's not a cat-girl (with all the baggage that comes with that) is kind of entertaining, although seeing him triple-wield daggers by involving his tail is a bit over the top, really.

Summer doldrums time again

 Yeah, the world's still shit, and the nation's going to hell in a handbasket, so the traditional hearty "fuck all y'all" to the major players there.

That out of the way... summer is winding down (for all the weather hasn't gotten the memo yet), and there's no rioting in the streets yet, so I find myself with disturbingly little to do with myself.  It's Labor Day tomorrow, which, in my case, means I'll actually do some labor (housecleaning, likely), and past that work will be ramping back up a bit, but there's all that other time to be filled, and I can only watch so much anime.  Which brings us to games.

I've effectively finished Monster Sanctuary (as in, I hit an end-game difficulty spike that says "casual players need not apply").  Civ VII isn't striking me as something I want to play right now, and Baldur's Gate 3, well, I've played a bit, but it's not sticking either.  I'm still plinking away at Balatro and Spelunky in short bursts.  I've got Dorfromantik and Islanders: New Shores set up on the Steam Deck (think world- and city-builder puzzle titles respectively, I like 'em!), but anything more than an hour of either tends to put me to sleep, especially later at night.  Basically, I need something more engaging-in-the-moment to hold my attention right now.

For now, I've hopped back into No Man's Sky, which just released an update with ship-building (and yet another free update, at that!).  Will it hold my attention long enough for the Outer Worlds 2 to come out in October, or will my attention inevitably rotate to something else in the meantime?  Time will tell!

Another month of crap... but then, there's Monster Sanctuary

 There's just so, so much wrong with the world today.  On the global scale, of course there's Russia's invasion of Ukraine (fuck off, Russia), and the whole Israel-Hamas thing (a pox on both your houses), which has, naturally, evolved into Israel fucking with humanitarian aid to Gaza to the extent of kids dying from malnutrition.  Nothing new from Iran, India, or Pakistan lately, but Thailand and Cambodia are looking to step up to the plate.  Meanwhile, Trump is back to his tariff-bullying ways, and, whichever help us, some countries are falling in line, signing trade deals in exchange for reduced pain.

That brings us to the national issues, things like "Alligator Auschwitz" for the concentration of illegal immigrants rounded up by ICE's masked miscreants, and new executive orders looking to target the homeless, among other governmental endeavors.  Now they're working their way down to mass media, between pulling funding from public broadcasting (because they don't like what they're saying) and forcing CBS to accept a political officer (sorry, "ombudsman") to approve a merger between Paramount and Skydance (to ensure they like what CBS is saying).  There, I'm kind of sorry that all I can do is remove my local CBS channel from my TV's channel lineup - I don't have any goods or services that are part of the larger picture, and I refuse to consume media from any outlet with a political officer involved.

It's not all bad, though... Trump and company have been fighting hard to get the whole "Epstein Files" issue out of the headlines, but they're finding that's not easy when they brought on a large part of their base with promises to release everything related to that pre-election.  Funny thing, people viscerally care about pedophiles running about free, especially when it's arguably/demonstrably the rich and powerful that are tied into the whole mess.  Will any of this bear fruit?  Tune in next month!

Well, enough of the shit state of the world, how about a game recommendation instead?  Monster Sanctuary is best described as a pixel-art Metroidvania Pokemon game.  You collect a team of monsters that levels up with you as you go along, each with their own skill tree.  You use those monsters in various kinds of fights with other monsters, as well as using their powers while traversing the game world to let you find treasures and traverse areas that would otherwise be impassable.  I picked it up for $5 in the last Steam sale, and, somewhere around halfway through, I'd say it's worth full price, if a game like this appeals to you at all.  My Steam Deck gaming routine now is to get an in-game day of Book of Hours played, then spend the rest of the night playing Monster Sanctuary.

Meanwhile, my XBox Series X is mainly my Crunchyroll streaming box at the moment, with the odd bit of Balatro or Spelunky thrown in for flavor.  Civ VII, well, I finished a playthrough, and started another one, but, well, for all its differences, it's still Civ at its base... I'll still plink about with it on occasion, but, right now, I'd be hard-pressed to say I'd jump back into it whole-heartedly once I've dealt with Monster Hunter and Book of Hours.  I'm thinking it's more likely I'll give Baldur's Gate 3 another go, when that time comes, assuming some other new shiny hasn't come along to demand my attention.

Given the state of this world... yeah, Civ VII works for me

 So, in addition to all the crap otherwise happening in the world, Israel decided to turn it up a notch by turning their bombing attentions to Iran.  How much of the why of that is the stated "we can't let Iran have nuclear weapons", and how much is Israeli leadership looking to keep a war footing at home so they don't have to face personal consequences for their actions, I have no way of knowing.  Funny thing, though... Iran has some continuing capacity to fight back, and Israel has the gall to complain about some of their targeting choices, which mirror what Israel was just doing to Gaza a little while ago.

Oh well, no worries, regional conflicts, minor powers, and all that, right?  Of course not, not when we've got our supposedly America First president in play.  See, there was at least one site in Iran that Israel didn't have the tools to destroy properly, but we do, in the form of a "bunker buster" bomb.  So, after a degree of waffling (and, doubtless, wanting to distract from his current issues and offset the "TACO" reputation he's built of late), Trump orders a strike on Iran.

Now, for those of you who don't keep up on that whole international relations thing, that would be an act of war.  As in, before you go bombing the bejeezus out of a country, you're supposed to declare war first (and yes, we've done plenty of this in the past, which doesn't make it right).  The ones who get to declare war around here are the members of Congress, not the President (although, if you want a more nuanced description of that, here's a link).  At least, that's what the Constitution says.  Of course, I'm sure Congress will get right on that, especially after The Onion put out an editorial declaring how now, more than ever, we need their cowardice.

While I wait with not-bated breath for that, a few words about Civilization VII.  Yes, I'm playing that at the same time as I'm playing Book of Hours, and the easy explanation on that is that, mid-week, Book of Hours is easier to put down as bedtime approaches.

Civ VII still has the one-more-turn stickiness of past entries, but the structure has changed more than a little, with the full game getting broken down into "ages", with major events/calamities to close out each age before a partial reset to start the next age.  It's a structure that has more than its share of critics, but I happen to like it.  After I finish my current game, and maybe one or two at higher difficulty (I'm basically curb-stomping the AI on this run), maybe I'll do a proper write-up on it.  For now, it's enough to say I'm liking it more than Civ VI, and I'm liking it more than some of the off-brand alternatives out there right now - for example, I picked up Old World through a Humble Bundle recently, and the reliance on "workers" a la older versions of Civ there, among other dated/limiting mechanics, sent me packing.

Welcome back to Hush House

 So, the world hasn't fallen completely to shit yet... at least, I haven't heard anything more from the India/Pakistan spat lately, so we'll call that progress.  The rest of you habitual bad actors, kindly keep fucking off.

That said... I can't help but wonder, if the current unsettled state of the world didn't play a factor in my deciding to hop back into Book of Hours again.  I mean, sure there was the new DLC "House of Light", and a wad of unspent Christmas Steam-cash involved as well, but the vibe of "things are no longer fully under control, if ever they were" just gels so well with that game.

Since we all know I like the game, how about the DLC?  Well, honestly, I don't really know yet.  In truth, I've only used one feature of the DLC at all so far, which lets you collect the addresses of visitors you've serviced previously, the better to invite them back at time(s) of your choosing... which I've mainly used so I don't have to choose between meeting their needs and demanding they teach me that juicy language I'm currently missing.  I fully intend to do the whole cooking and hosting salons thing, when I can figure out cooking and/or have spare cash to spend on ingredients.  Hopefully, I'll also stumble across the "further stories" mechanic at some point as well.  All in all, it doesn't significantly alter the base game, from what I can see so far, but does provide at least one quality-of-life improvement.  Is it worth full price?  Normally, I'd say no, but if the game itself has bitten you well enough that you'll come back to it again and again, the extra texture it provides is certainly nice.

EDIT:  A week on, and I've worked out cooking, hosting, and further stories.  Cooking, well, newer ingredients list hints in their descriptions, while older ingredients often work on their own (for example, grapes can be made into a grape salad at the oven).

Hosting is a bit more complex - different hosting areas have differing requirements (you're not holding a picnic in the ballroom, nor a formal dinner in the garden), and the guests all have their food and drink preferences.  Meet those requirements, and you can start the salon, which you have to watch over and feed cards to progress successfully.  It's a bit of a nuisance, but the rewards (in the form of Lessons) are good enough that it's limited to once a season.

Further stories... well, it's thematically strong, but mechanically weak.  Basically, each Incident involves a number of major players, and further stories asks you to bring one back to ask how it all turned out.  They'll tell you, then, oh by the way, some unintended consequences of that action are running amok, and they'd like your assistance in addressing that, either using your Skills or providing a specific reference book.  Unfortunately, they don't tell you what book you need by title or anything like that, but by a description of its contents.  Unless you're seriously internalizing the bits of story the books provide, you're likely to be left with an "I think I remember something like that" feeling as you sift through all your collected books.  Very librarian, but very annoying in-game.

Does any of this change my mind about the DLC as a whole?  Nope, still a "nice to have" for people already obsessed with the main game, and that's it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

First new game on Ubuntu: Helldivers 2

 Starting with today's "shit state of the world" report... wait a minute, Ukraine aid has gotten through Congress, and Israel is making offers for a cease-fire in Gaza?  Well, it's a bit early to be calling either truly "good news", but one can hope, right?

Before I get into the main meat of this post, gotta give my updated take on Steam on Ubuntu in general.  The big thing being that, as of right now, anybody wanting to use Steam on Ubuntu should not use the "snap" version that Ubuntu offers as the "safe" version.  That's because at least one game, and likely more, misbehaves if you have that version of Steam installed, but works fine if you have Valve's official version installed - and since that game is No Man's Sky, that's kind of a big deal.  Other games I've tested include Bridge Constructor Portal and Everspace (both of which have Linux-native versions), as well as Skyrim, all without major issues beyond some graphics glitches when I try to push my APU a bit too hard.  Proton is a beautiful thing, and ProtonDB is a wonderful resource.

With a little experience under my belt, I felt safe enough to actually spend money on a new game, in this case Helldivers 2.  Yeah, I'm a little late to the party, but between making the move to a new PC and overcoming my resistance to having anything to do with Sony anything (see my earlier posts as to how I came to leave Playstation for XBox back in the day, if you're interested), I'm not feeling too bad about it.  Early is nice, but seeing how a business runs a game is nice too.

For those not in the know, Helldivers 2 is a futuristic third-person shooter set in a galaxy where you are fighting for "managed democracy" (read space-fascists) against hordes of alien creatures and automatons, in various missions with up to three other players.  Tonally, it's a weird sort of playing-it-straight-for-laughs setup, which is helped by two mechanical aspects of the game: all the missions are Player-versus-environment (PvE), and friendly fire is always on.  Part of the fun is just in avoiding (or not) taking out other players with some of the ludicrously powerful options at hand (think orbital strikes, auto-turrets, flamethrowers, that sort of thing).  And unlike most shooters, when you die, you don't magically respawn (or get brought back to life a la Destiny's space-zombie Guardians), but your replacement dives down onto the planet's surface... they may look a lot like your previous guy did, but the voice change and different patriotic "barks" make it clear that this is somebody entirely new.  The obvious reference point for all this madness is Starship Troopers, but it wouldn't surprise me if there wasn't some Paranoia in the mix as well.

So, how's it play on Ubuntu?  Pretty good, or, as one of the ProtonDB entries put it, it doesn't crash any more often here than on Windows.  I'm enjoying it quite a bit, but the whole at-my-computer-desk thing makes it harder to play for extended sessions, especially once cats get added to the equation.  If it ever comes to the XBox side of the console space, I might just buy it again for $40, just to play it over there... but I'm not holding my breath, and I'm damn well not buying any PlayStation console to play it on now - bad enough that I had to set up an account.  Overall, I'd generally recommend this, outside of those people I know that just wouldn't enjoy anything shooter-y.