Redwolf's Journal (continued)

Thanksgiving was... muted this year. That's natural with everything that's going on. While I've had a couple Thanksgivings/Christmases during which my parents were unreasonably far away (thus I was by myself), this is the first to be interrupted by other factors. If we hadn't had someone in the office here test positive, we probably still would have gotten together for a porch-based meal, but that one incident was enough to push things over the edge and call off gathering. Bit of a bummer, but so it goes. - I've been playing through Assassin's Creed Valhalla of late. It's satisfying, though I can totally understand complaints like combat being mediocre at best and the game being stretched out too much. Still, I'm enjoying most of it and I'm reasonably involved in the story being told. Though I must say, there are some times I really wish I could project into the game more and take some specific action or say something. I certainly could have headed ...

 Feh. Tired this morning. Must stay awake... - I started Assassin's Creed Valhalla over the weekend. It certainly has a different feel to me from the rest of the series. Several hours in I only have a handful of different weapon types with several still unseen and 2-3 armor options. I'm not sure what I think about that overall, but I do feel the game would benefit from some ability to at least loosely target weapons/armor that suit your build within consulting outside sources. Combat feels a bit "floatier" than Odyssey. And I've hit a couple bugs that very oddly had workarounds that involved changing graphics settings. How graphical FPS setting is connected to passing beyond a particular spot in a cave is beyond me. - In our Sunday D&D game, we came fairly close to a party wipe. In the previous session, when our stealth character was discovered we jumped out of his cloak-with-dimensional-resting-space and totally stomped what appeared to be a high-level assas...

 I sort of figured I'd just be playing some casual Long Dark runs while waiting for the Assassin's Creed Valhalla release, but I noticed a Steam sale of Phantom Doctrine marked down to $6. That game had never really made my must-play list or even attracted much attention, but that price is a really low level of buy-in for some Cold War tactical spy stuff, so I figured I'd try it out. It's definitely been worth it so far. I mean, that's not saying a whole lot, but it's a reasonably good game, at least. Both the strategic and tactical layers are fairly interesting. I like that most tactical missions can be completed without guns ever coming out. If doing a strategic recon mission first, you can hit the tactical map with one agent in disguise (plus another 1-5 not disguised, depending on the scenario) and that can make most missions extremely easy with some patience. Not that everything is awesome about the game. Maps are largely recycled, so other than shuffling ...

 I think I'm nearing my fatigue point with Remnant: From the Ashes . The experience has been about what I expected - decently entertaining for a while, but not really compelling to me in repetition. Fine for a discounted purchase. It can be described as a Soulsborne game with guns, but that's a very superficial classification and I find a lot more differences than similarities in the details. While it's a third-person action game set in a dark, post-apocalyptic world that relies more on unspoken lore than active story, so much of the design feels not-Dark-Souls to me. The game is designed a bit more like Diablo, with procedural semi-random bosses and encounter zones strung together. There are a couple story-centric encounters, but most of the time you get one of two 'dungeon' zones at each particular step in one run. So a run through the campaign will not show you all the bosses and similar encounters - that'll take at least two runs, maybe more. Perhaps due to ...

Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2 (Deadfire) are not new games, but I found myself going back to them recently. I'd played, but never finished, the first one. PoE (not to be confused with other PoE's) fits neatly into the mold of isometric Western RPG. It plays much like the old Baldur's Gate games and such. Unfortunately, it's a bit weighed down by those conventions too. Maybe I'm "spoiled" by modern game design, but the heavy reliance on text over spoken dialog feels like a drawback these days. It's felt more strongly here because there is so much lore presented.  It's a fantasy world set in the wake of a war caused by one of the gods taking an avatar and striding around the region before getting blown up. There are curses and lots of things going on with souls. One of the core threads is the PC awaking as a Watcher (who can see souls and read past lives) awakening to seeing fragments of a past live of their own that ties into the schemes of the ...

 Too many thoughts, too disjointed and generally not very positive... State of the World I've never been much of an optimist, but damn the world feels bleak. Technology progresses - we've got these ubiquitous and amazing smart phones - but that feels like about it. The economy is increasingly divided between the few who have and the masses who have not. Society is turning in on itself, perhaps for lack of a clear outside threat and the ease of blaming "them" for problems rather than looking for a solution. This year's pandemic has been a boost to the very ills already assailing us. Perhaps "us" is only the USA, but it feels even more widespread than that (perception bias?). Personally, I'm fortunate on most of the points by not ending up at the bottom of the barrel. We've gotten off lightly here as far as infections. We're not locally plagued by wildfires or natural disasters. I've avoided the most divisive of political demonstrations or ...

Let's see, I did get through some series on Netflix recently... I finished She-ra . It was enjoyable overall. Catra remains my favorite character even though her "redemption" (and really all the relationships) felt a bit over-simplified. Entrapta's up there, though, with her quirky lack of focus. And Double Trouble pretty much carried a season on his/her own. The overall story worked fine for me even if certain aspects lacked any depth and the Eternia/Greyskull stuff leaves a massive, unresolved mystery to the universe. I do have to say Adora and Catra being a "thing" at the end felt a little... hmm... "incestuous?" Sure, it's clear through the series they love one another, if in some muddled ways, but their shared background and youth painted that as more sisterly than romantic to my eyes. I also thoroughly enjoyed Aggretsuko season 3. The OTMGirls storyline worked so well and was so largely positive for Retsuko I was sad to see it end. The H...