Redwolf's Journal (continued)

My simple verdict at the moment is: Needs work. I've entered a total of three matches with others so far. From worst to best: - I entered a match to find almost everyone down and after about ten seconds, I realized it was the final (extraction) wave and I had no clue where I was going. About one second later, the match ended in failure. - I entered a match in progress somewhere earlier with a ton of lag, and actually got disconnected after a minute or so. - I got in a match from the beginning. Everything performed well (except us new, low-geared players) and we got through several waves before all dying. One out of three is not so good in this sort of situation. I understand there aren't dedicated servers for multiplayer, so it's all peer-to-peer, but if there can't be some reasonable expectation of better performance, it's really not going to be worth playing.

I've been enjoying the game over the last week or so. I think I'm a bit over halfway through the story, though it's hard to tell without looking it up - and I don't want to do that. Hmm. Actually, I think I've managed to not look up and spoil myself on story or puzzles thus far. I've tried with a couple decisions, but failed to find immediate repercussion answers, so just made a call. The major critiques I've seen (buggy/bad animations and weak writing) have not been so prominent in my experience to bother me. Yes, there are some bad facial animations. Yes, I have seen enemies standing twenty feet in the air. Yes, there are a few cringe-worthy lines. But in my play, those have been infrequent and overlookable. A majority of the lines and animation are just fine. I've only hit one game-stopping bug, where the game got stuck in a transition after a dialog scene, but reloading and going through it again worked. The one criticism that I can agree fully wi...

Mass Effect Andromeda unlocks for regular play tonight at midnight (eastern). That's probably just enough time to create a character before I go to bed. Whee! Well, regardless, it has been on my mind of late. Heck, thanks to the commercials, I have Rag'n'Bone Man's Human in my head. While I've seen it said that Mass Effect is like a more recent Star Wars in terms of genre impact, I don't think I can go so far. Still, it is a pretty major series. Andromeda has caught a good bit of pre-release flack for wonky animations and iffy dialogue. Most of the time, this seems to be mentioned in the context of "sometimes it's good, sometimes it's fine, sometimes it's ridiculously bad." It's a presumably-valid criticism that I think I can live with. I'm still looking forward to the game and to seeing what they make of the setting and story with a new direction. I still don't really like the way the original trilogy closed out. ME3 as ...

After much waffling, I picked up Foundation for reading material. It's another one of those "classic sci-fi books" from before my time that I never read when it would have made more sense to do so. I think if I'd read it in high school or thereabouts, it would have felt insightful rather than just observational. In a general sense, it's about the fall of a massive galactic Empire and the attempt to minimize/rebuild society in the wake of that. So the several smaller stories in the book (scattered over about 150 years) take a look at things like politics, religion, technology, and the flow of human development/psychology on a grand (rather than individual) scale. I applaud some of the ideas there and the thinking they encourage. It's not the general sort of story I want to read, though. Not because I find the thoughts distasteful, but because I crave more depth to characters and events. It feels to me like there was a shift in the 80's or 90's for ...

I've been interested in the idea since it was announced. A spiritual successor to one of my favorite games of all time, Planescape: Torment ? Yes please. I didn't back it, though, out of wary skepticism. But with its release, I did pick it up to play, as most reviews seemed positive. So as a "spiritual successor," it mostly works. It's dialog-heavy. There's a lot of "weird" to the world. There's a reasonable examination of self and consciousness with internal demons of a sort made manifest and an essentially-immortal protagonist discovering and dealing with a history spanning multiple lifetimes. So yeah, it's good in that respect and mostly lives up to what it was trying to do. Mostly. The world of Numenera has a weird sci-fi-fantasy mix of stuff going on, but (and this could just be me) it seems to lack some of the charm of Planescape. There are some interesting concepts to the companion characters, but only one of them approached being ...

Dragon's Dogma slid below my radar when it came out - just not quite "big" enough. And coming back and playing it now, I can see why. It isn't bad, but it's not quite good in the field of action-RPGs either. For me, at least, there's a pervading sense of almost-good throughout, as if it really could have been a first-tier title with some more money and polish. It plays like... perhaps the Witcher games - real time combat with light/heavy attacks and modifiers (ctrl+clicks give you special abilities with primary weapon, alt+ gives them with secondary/shield). And you have a group of up to three AI companions - one you can set primary/secondary abilities for and two others you can recruit from those other players have created. It's interesting that these AI "pawns" are woven into the lore of the setting as summonable not-quite-humans drawn to aid the "arisen." The silent protagonist feels like a throwback these days - even conversati...

Woke this morning from a dream in which I had gone back to college. Somehow, my dad and stepmom had come with me and we were living together in a tent. Note that this didn't strike me as unusual in a financially-strapped sense or anything. To me, it more represented their support of me. But... I had been consistently skipping classes. I knew there was no way I was going to graduate. So when my stepmom was all excited that graduation was coming up and talking about where they were going to sit for the best view and such, I felt this deep, gut-churning guilt that I was going to have to tell them that wasn't happening. Not. Pleasant.