Redwolf's Journal (continued)

I started watching Altered Carbon a while back and ended up taking a break partway through because... hmm... perhaps because the episodes are an "hour" long plus general seriousness. But I came back and finished it, and I don't mean any of that as a knock against the series. It's set much more in the future than what I typically think of as "cyberpunk" but it very much holds true to the themes of the genre - AI, gentrification, questioning humanity. There's a mystery for the main character is hired to unravel that turns into much more along the way. It does all that well and looks good. The characters are generally solid. There are some truly great moments of acting when certain characters are dealing with their consciousness being loaded into very different bodies. I think the series leans a bit heavily into unveiling new things to open up more questions every episode or two. Whether that's a good or bad thing may be up for interpretation, but I c...

The game was enjoyable to play. I have a lot of little nitpicks and criticisms, but really I've had fun with the recent Tomb Raider trilogy and this works okay as an ending or a break point in a larger story. The game looks good. It (mostly) plays well. I might revisit it if there is some story-ish DLC in the future. So what would I criticize about the game? Well, I ran into a few technical issues where the game slowed to a crawl - primarily in cut scenes or interactive sequences. Maybe my hardware is starting to show its age, but that's a drag. Also, it's one of those games where you might die a couple times in combat situations over the course of the game... but half a dozen times or more in sequence during an interactive/QTE scene because something comes up after 20+ seconds of quick reactions and you may not have time to process what you're doing wrong that causes Lara to miss a jump. I'd also say the pacing feels a bit off overall and I wish the scenes of bei...

Y'know, the more I read the cheeky little comments on the internet about introverts , the more I feel like they explain my life (even if they're regularly oversimplifications). Lately, I've often thought "I need a hug" while also acknowledging consciously that an actual hug would probably be more awkward than comforting. So... on the entertainment front, let's see... I played through Vampyr . That was one that was on my radar, but the timing of it made it slip below the level of "must buy upon release." In general, it pretty much matched my expectations - one of those games that's fairly good, but distinctly on a tier below the top. Combat is sort of Soulsy (is that a word yet?), but doesn't quite have the responsiveness or feeling of deptch Dark Souls did. And with no fast travel, there's a lot of combat to wade through just while getting around, which felt a bit of a drag in the second half of the game. Some of the bosses can be ve...

The Battle for Azeroth continues! Over the weekend, I've run a bunch of world quests, managed to get blacksmithing to a half-useful level (unlocking all current patterns), and run three of the four leveling dungeons for Alliance while pursing the Pride of Kul Tiras quest line to get Jaina back. For all that, I've got an average item level of 320 now, which appears to be sufficient for mythic dungeons and probably the not-yet-released raid. Island Expeditions: Meh. You need to run at least 5 different maps (three of which available every week) to advance some war (? not garrison or order, but same sort of thing) benefits. Beyond that, they reward some azerite and there may be some possible cosmetic rewards, but they don't seem very rewarding. Maybe on higher difficulties? I did, at least, experience some victories. The leveling dungeons are pretty easy if you run them in normal mode at 120. I'm sure I'll have to try harder modes at some point. I'm a little ...

So, prior to BfA's release, I picked up a half-priced No Man's Sky and decided to explore the "Next" update/version of the game. I'm still a little bitter are the creator(s) for the state in which the game originally released versus what was promised, but it sounded like it might be worth trying at this point. Verdict? I suppose it is, but probably not at full price. It's a fine space survival/exploration/building game in that it offers a fair amount to do. The procedural generation is the big feature and it's... okay? The exotic worlds don't make the best use of this system, but they sort of epitomize the game to me: - You scan it from orbit and see a "forsaken" or "glass" world or some other descriptor that makes you curious. - You fly down to the surface and see a landscape strewn with bunches of something, perhaps floating monoliths or chromatic bubbles as far as the eye can see. - You land and start scanning these featur...

So, what's it been like working through levels and zones in BfA? Not that unlike other expansions, really. Story-wise, it seems my totally-uninformed choices made the faction conflict drop almost completely off the map for my leveling play. The Alliance has three zones to quest through. The Horde only really makes an appearance in about a quarter of one of those zones. It just so happens I didn't hit that area until after reaching level 120 (even without any XP boosting tricks beyond some rested XP here and there). Along the way, you open up three excursions to establish beachheads on the Horde island. Only one of those really deals with confronting Horde soldiers (the others deal with native snake-folk and some serious cannibal trolls that I don't think are specifically Horde-aligned), and guess which one I happened to do last? So, while other players may well see things differently, I hit Kul Tiras and promptly didn't worry much about the big, central conflict for a...

It's odd to have a WoW expansion release on a Monday afternoon. I'd have to say it was relatively smooth for me. I did get disconnected two or three times over the course of the evening - each time, the game remained for maybe a minute or so, but mobs stopped spawning or responding, leading to an empty area before I got dropped back to the launcher, watched the download process appear to download a small update, then I was able to get back in. That's not remotely as bad as queue times in Burning Crusade or total server failures some expansions have seen. The experience was also strangely uncrowded. Whether it's phasing or sharding tech or just luck, the mobs of advancing players felt less mobby than previous expansions. I wasn't alone by any means, but it wasn't overwhelming either. And many major NPCs/questgivers seemed to have a small area around them that disabled the ability to mount - probably to prevent people from blocking them with mammoths and the l...