Mera'din

Okay, so this controller is pretty fucking nice I have to say. I am a fan. Also, apparently Bugsnax isn't as bad as it looks. My wife wanted to try out the controller but didn't want to play Spider-man so she tried that instead and actually enjoyed herself. Still not sure I want to play it. XD

Our high school is now going full stay at home. Enough staff got it that they don't have enough teachers to keep it going as is. Don't think the elementary school is far behind at this point since there have been like 4 confirmed staff cases at this point. Also have 5 confirmed cases at work that have all happened in the past week or so. Nobody on my shift luckily and all are people that we don't interact with so we'll probably be alright which is good. I've had to quarantine enough times for testing purposes that I've burned all of my "COVID PTO" and I'd really rather not have to burn my real PTO if I can avoid it. >_> Lo and behold, a few of them were part of an outbreak that happened via the local bar (in one case likely unavoidable as she WORKS at said bar, but still).

Just shy of 6ft.

I'm getting it. Have been enjoying myself again and the story is finally getting to the point where I wanted it to be at the beginning of D2 so I'm looking forward to it. Have almost completely caught up on everything I missed now too. Only one raid I haven't done but that one of the ones not going away so got the others taken care of first. Literally just finished my last one I needed for the moments of triumph thing just an hour or so ago.

22.) The Talos Principle Fun puzzle game. The "main" stuff was relatively straight forward, but the extra stuff for the "real" ending and bonus stuff for the extra ending got pretty hard in a few places. Nice balance overall it felt like. Relatively interesting premise as far as this sort of game goes though exceptionally typical for the genre as well (crank the "mystery" and philosophical themes up to 20 and let it ride). I still enjoyed it though and sought out the collectibles to find out more about the world. Finished the last ending earlier tonight and am playing through the DLC now since it came with it. MUCH harder puzzles and a lot stronger in the story/world building department so far. Still enjoying it, but I am starting to feel that edge of "That's about enough of this, thanks" so the DLC might have been a tad unnecessary overall.

Saw that and thought "Well at least they realized the only way they were going to get any significant number of people to play that game is to make it free". XD

21.) Werewolf the Apocalypse: Heart of the Forest This is more of what I was looking for from the above game. REALLY felt like playing a TTRPG. Some really cool art too here and there. A bit more abstract than this kind of game usually has, but it was nice and really fit the tone of the game. Also made use of music and sound effects really nicely. Choices felt like they mattered and you had a character sheet that was constantly being updated based on your choices which was interesting. Never been super into WtA, but I've always been interested in learning more about the other World of Darkness stuff outside of VtM so this was a nice introduction. There's a full on Werewolf the Apocalypse game coming out early next year so this was a nice primer. Only complaint is that it was pretty short. Got through it in like 4 hours, though there seems to be a pretty solid amount of replay value and I got it for like $10 since I owned the Vampire games that have come out recently so it still felt relatively worthwhile.

Been wanting to get it, but I've fallen behind on Supergiant's games so will probably wait for a sale. Still need to get Pyre and play that first. Bastion and Transistor were both incredibly fun and well put together. I've heard Hades is worth it for the music alone.

Finally running out of content on Destiny 2 and have mostly been getting on to see if I can get into the raids I have left to do to see those. Also slowing down on Avengers since I have all my characters leveled and their challenge cards done so just waiting until they throw some new content out. Has given me a chance to focus on some other stuff. Started playing 'Werewolf the Apocalypse: Heart of the Forest' THIS is the kind of thing I was hoping for with the Vampire games that came out recently. It's basically a visual novel style game, but runs a character sheet like a tabletop game that effects the kind of choices you can make and responses you can give based on your stats. My wife was watching me play after she had gone through it and she kept commenting on how responses I had to give were COMPLETELY different from the options she had and how different some of the story events were because of it. Think I'm most of the way through now so it's not terribly long but interested in going through it another time or two. Also have been playing the early access of Baldur's Gate 3. They did a really good job with this overall. It's very much early access though. Lots of bugs and wonky animations and other such issues, but this is going to be a hell of a game when its done. I'm already amazed at how open ended your options are. There is not set path to take it seems like. Even off the bat after the prologue I appear to have the option to opt out of helping the defacto "good guys" and just massacre an entire druid enclave and join a goblin horde. The visual dice rolls on making choices is interesting too. In games of this sort before I'd always push to get the 'right' answer but even the right answer can "fail" here and cause some wild shit to happen and you just kind of have to roll with it (lol). Makes for a more interesting and dynamic story already even if it can be infuriating at times too. Combat is pretty difficult for me thus far but not insurmountable. No difficulty options yet. Really interested in seeing where they take this game. Despite a lot of the bitching I see online, this definitely reminds me of the original Baldur's Gate in spirit. On the console side of things, I've been trying to catch up on some of my backlog and started playing 'The Talos Principal'. Interesting "puzzle game with mysterious and philosophically bent story" du jour. Puzzles have been mostly straight forward but a lot of the optional stuff can get pretty wild and interesting to figure out. Story is fun if a little blatant in its subject matter. Enjoying it overall.

Yeah, only way to know for sure is with the anti-body test, and apparently that isn't even necessarily going to be 100% at this point as I've seen some articles saying that a lot of people they tested that had it in Wuhan aren't showing anti-bodies (which also throws the whole 'LOL HERD IMMUNITY' argument I kept hearing for a while right out the fucking window, not that it was terribly intelligent to begin with). Hardest part is even if you're sick you can't fucking tell if it's that or not. There's so many damn potential symptoms and so much variance on how severely (or if at all) and how long people are affected that all you can really do is just keep being as careful as you can.

Mother in law is starting to recover. We had a bit of a scare when about a week in she informed my wife that she hadn't eaten since getting sick but is doing better now. Still has a nasty cough, but no fever and other symptoms she had are gone. Thought I had it for a bit. Started feeling off about a week after last contact with her but thought it was allergies at first, but woke up last Sunday having trouble breathing and had a number of other symptoms. Notified work and got tested Monday and was home until Thursday when the test came back negative. Guessing it was some kind of respiratory infection, or a nasty bout of the flu since that's been starting to rear its head again. Kicked my ass pretty good for a few days there. Getting tested was incredibly unpleasant as well. X_x

20.) Vampire the Masquerade: Night Road Basically a full on 'chose your own adventure' novel with stats that influence choices/success of choices. Straight up text with very few images. I enjoyed it well enough, but it was kind of hard to play sitting at my computer. Would have been better going with a mobile format I think. Had to put on background music from a different game to stay engaged too. Not sure this is quite my kind of thing. I can do visual novels since they tend to have regular images and music and what not. Mechanically, the game was pretty solid. Was basically like playing a TTRPG with limited choices with the way it worked. Seems like solid replayability too compared to similar games. Just hard for me to stay into it. Something with this writing quality/depth with more of the visual novel type of feel would probably be pretty good but this was definitely too bare bones for my tastes.

I finally bit the bullet on Audible a couple years ago. Have been doing audio books for a while longer than that but the convenience of audible and their selection of free stuff (especially now) was too good to pass up on Red Rising (and the rest of the series) by Pierce Brown. Probably my favorite books of all time at this point, and the narrator is ridiculously good. I never tire of listening to them and each time a new book comes out I usually end up listening to the entire series again. The narrator is so good that I've actually sought out other books specifically because he reads them, which led me to the Riyria books by Michael J. Sullivan, also fantastic so far. For the latter, there are two short stories that are free on Audible if you want to get a taste of the writing/narration style therein. They are titled "The Jester" and "Professional Integrity" and are pretty good standalone stories that don't require you to know the characters. I also second h2o's recommendation of Brandon Sanderson. He's one of my favorite authors and almost all of his books are a shared universe with an interesting backdrop. Especially if you go for a "more bang for your buck" approach like I do and try to get the most time out of your credits, his Stormlight Archive series books tend to time in at 45+ hours each and the next one comes out next month I believe. If you enjoy the "full cast" approach, they just recently did an audio drama version of 'The Sandman' by Neil Gaiman that I really enjoyed. Dream is played by James McAvoy and did an amazing job of it. The 'Locke & Key' audio drama is also very good. Other's that I found really enjoyable: 'The Rook' by Daniel O'Malley, 'A City Dreaming' by Daniel Polansky and 'Differently Morphous' by Yahtzee Croshaw (of Zero Punctuation fame, it's also read by him which was part of the draw for me). All of these are "Urban Fantasy" style books (magic/supernatural/fantasy elements in modern setting) and are relatively humorous/sardonic and are wonderful reads. If you've had the misfortune of seeing the TV show they did based on 'The Rook', please don't let it put you off of the book. That thing was a travesty and not a day goes by that I'm not still mad about how bad they ruined that story. 'The Traitor Baru Cormorant' by Seth Dickinson This one is more of a period fantasy (or "hard fantasy" as I've seen it described) dealing with colonialism and imperialism, but gets super interesting and has a lot of (for lack of a better descriptor) Death Note-like mind games played out on a national scale. There are two sequels (the 2nd of which just came out last month) that are also good, but are not nearly as stand out as the first and change the tone up a bit and bring magic into it. Audible is currently doing a sale too for Prime Day (so only goes through the rest of today) with a bunch of titles going for $6. I mention this, because Red Rising is on there and it is WELL worth that price if you don't want to use/don't have any credits available at the moment. Differently Morphous is also on there I believe if you're looking for something a little lighter.

Have a similar situation going on here now. My wife's sister-in-law has it. They live in South Dakota (so basically NO restrictions what-so-ever) and she has been going out drinking/partying with her friends every weekend like a jackass. Normally I would silently laugh from a distance for her getting what she deserves at that point, except my wife's parents are regularly over there watching their kids for them. Needless to say, we found out she had it, and within like 3 days my mother-in-law fell ill and she had been here just a couple days before that. Test came back positive today so now we've got our fingers crossed that none of us have it. I've already had to take about 5 days off work awaiting test results for false alarms over the past few months, so this is going to get pretty rough if it goes the wrong way. Mostly just worried about my wife's mom though. Her parents are well into their 60's so it could easily go worst case scenario with them. So far she seems to be handling it well though so maybe we'll get lucky.

At least Kasumi got more interesting near the end. Initially she just felt a bit like a sportsy Makoto clone.

That was actually kind of cool. That fan and heatsink are fucking enormous. XD It looks like it should be a fuck ton easier to clean out if it gets really dusty, at least at the surface level which is nice. The PS4 was a bit annoying to do that with (the PS4 Pro was pretty straight forward though so I guess they're learning?)

Early Access started for the game today. Has 6 classes, 8 races (with a variety of sub-races for each) and consists of the first act of the game. I got it but haven't played it yet. Was like 60GB and the wife wanted it on her computer first (she is the bigger D&D person so it only made sense) and our internet can barely be called "high speed" at this point so I had to wait. Character creator seems pretty damn impressive from what I saw of her making a character.

Apparently, as much as I dislike PvP, once in a while I'm still pretty damn good at it. XD

19.) Untitled Goose Game This was a fun little distraction. Good for a laugh. They just added a 2-player co-op mode so decided to grab it on sale and played it with the wife. Had a lot of fun though it was pretty short (beat it in a couple 2-hour (at most) sessions). Looks like there's more to do after you "beat" it which is nice since it seemed like there was a lot more you could do to fuck around in the game so will probably play it some more when we both have time to see what else there is to it.

I'd say it would definitely be worth a discount buy. Especially since by then there should be more to the story. XD There is a lot of love that went into this buried under the 'live service' bs. Even the "loading" elevators inside AIM instillations have great (and hilarious) conversations that I rarely hear repeat and still hear new ones despite the time I've put into it. Everything from discussions about their "hero" names, to Widow accusing Thor of stealing her hair ties. Really makes me wish this game could have been more like Spider-man.

18.) Marvel's Avengers Finally finished. Technically I finished a while ago, as the campaign wasn't overly long, but after the main campaign they had a bunch of side objectives that actually continue the story a bit so I waited until I finished that stuff. Last mission thing was actually pretty hard which was nice, but most of the post campaign stuff was a grind fest so it too a while. This game needs a LOT of work. They did some stuff right, but a lot of it is just uninspired. I can't help but think that two completely different teams worked on the game. One for the campaign and one for the "live service" multi-player shit because they are two entirely different levels of quality. Campaign was really solid if a bit short and had a lot of good stuff in it. The lore collectibles add a lot to it too. You can tell the people that worked on it cared a lot about the comics. There are even a number of individual SHIELD agents that have names and are actually established characters from the comics that appear a handful of times. They laid a lot of ground work for where they can take it next too which I liked and I'm actually interested in seeing what they do with it. The other half though is a ridiculous grind fest and what you're grinding for isn't even overly interesting. There's a few good character skins but most of them are ridiculously uninspired which is utterly mind boggling considering they have up to 60 years of comics to pull from for some of these characters. I get that Ms. Marvel has only been around for like 6 years, but making all of her "Legendary" skins be her in different super hero t-shirts is kind of a cop out. A lot of the others too are just one or two decent skins for their Legendary one that is then pallet swapped 4 or 5 times. FUCKING WHY? Granted, I haven't seen all of them yet, but I've seen enough to be annoyed. Thor seems like the one with the best options. At this point, I spend most of the currency I earn on the fucking nameplates because at least those have a lot of variance and stand out. Emotes are pointless since you can only equip one and probably the best thing, the takedowns, are only in the "hard currency" store (outside of ONE you can earn on the challenge card thing) and cost the equivalent of $12 so fuuuuuuuuck that. Once you hit max level too, the gear grind is one of the most ridiculous things I've seen in a game like this. It would be decently balanced if you could focus on one character, but to do the hardest thing in the game, you literally need to max out everyone or you're going to have a bad time because if you get downed by something during it, you have to swap characters and can't if they're not a high enough power level. I also find it kind of ridiculous that the current end game content is something you HAVE to do by yourself. So much for the multiplayer I guess? Not that I mind not having to play with people, but they seem to have their wires crossed with what they want from this game.

17.) Vampire the Masquerade: Shadows of New York This is a standalone expansion for Vampire the Masquerade: Coteries of New York. Basically a visual novel style of game with some slightly stronger gameplay elements than some have. I actually enjoyed it more than the first game. This picks up a few months after the original, from a different characters perspective and there's a set character you play as instead of picking one of 3. It's a Vampire from clan Lasombra which is one of the ones I find more interesting. It still had some of the same issues the first game had, but felt like it had a stronger ending that didn't jump at you out of nowhere. I apparently got the 'bad' ending though I thought it was a solid way to end it. Might actually play through again to see what the 'good' ending is supposed to be since it wasn't terribly long.

Been playing Avengers mostly. Campaign was legit fun, but shorter than I was hoping for. There's a ton of little stuff in the game that shows the effort they put in to get the characters right and all the little references and stuff haven been a lot of fun to find. Everything but Tony's combat quips anyway. XD On the other side of things though the game has TONS of bugs and is just all around iffy with the systems they have in place. The grind is real, and it might be too much even for me. Which is honestly worrying, because I LIKE the grind in games like this usually. They just put out a massive bug fix patch (which in turn created a bunch of new bugs -_- ) and said they're going to do some QoL stuff next so we'll see how that goes. Not sure how long I'll stick with this one, but I feel like I'll have got my money's worth from it by the time I'm done so it's fine. Also started up Vampire the Masquerade: Shadows of New York. It's a standalone expansion to the one that came out last year, 'Coteries of New York'. Basically just a visual novel sort of thing, but I enjoyed the story in the first one (despite the ending that came out of nowhere and felt like it cut the story short before it was supposed to) and this one has been even better thus far for what it is.

They've already announced that they're overhauling their game engine. Thank god. I'm sure this was in the works well before sale talks started, but the timing couldn't be more amusing. They've been needing to give that thing a full blown overhaul for years.