Wind's Goings On

 

 I decided to play some of the demos from Steam's Summer Game fest! 

Cuisineer
This game was one of those, "it looks pretty samey on paper" types.. I've seen so many cooking games and I've seen the concept of doing little dungeons to get ingredients to cook before, but this game felt exciting and polished with a clear (adorable) sense of aesthetic. I'm going to have a lot of fun with it when it comes out.

Wrap-up
That was a fun day of trying out games! I look forward to checking out the others I downloaded when I get the chance.

I didn't think I'd have a lot of feelings here. Waypoint isn't something I really engage with anymore. But the news today of its end really got to me.

Waypoint was something that was so important to me. A space to understand myself and what I wanted out of the media I consume. A space to understand how to leverage my voice in a way that sounded interesting and a place that looked at things with a kind of critical analysis that I don't know I'll ever find again in games journalism. For me, Waypoint was the last bastion of Games Journalism.

I know it's probably not true. I know there are places, but for these people to come out of it and for Austin to come out of it earlier and say things like, "I'm looking to get into games. Games Journalism may not be it for me anymore." And for them to proceed so many other video game journalist layoffs and publication closures. It just. It feels like we are far afield of its golden era. Dark Souls age of fire.

I don't really have the space to write a whole thing. Consider this a space I'll be revisiting for awhile. But for now I'm just going to link to a few articles I found from this thread as a place to store them. Maybe I'll cross them off like a list as I go. I don't know.

The 63 Year Old Retiree Who Broke a Game Looking for the End of the World
Road Tripping Through Final Fantasy XV With My Dad
The Dying Man Who Found Hope in Breath of the Wild
Detroit Become Human Review
The Gaming Library That Helped a Neglected Neighborhood Find a New Identity
The Near Impossible 20 Year Journey to Translate Fire Emblem Thracia 766
Black Skin is Still a Radical Concept in Games
Why Do WE Talk about Mass Effect Asari As If They Are Women?
Years later the Ending of Dragon's Dogma REmains Wonderfully Weird and Subversive
Yakuza 0 is a Postcard From Another Time
Kentucky Route Zero Pays off Nine Years of Hope and Doubt
My Last Night with the Tomorrow Children

 Well, I could go through the whole rigmarole comparing all the movies, but that truly doesn't interest me. This is just going to be my feelings about the series as a whole, I suppose! I don't really know how to make this interesting without spoiling so I'm just going to Cut the gordian knot and put it in a cut.

( John Wick Franchise Spoilers )gonna give john wick 4 Two John Wick 2's out of Four. 

Hey! It's the 15th week of the Year! I'm starting a new thing! Listing out the games I played this week and giving a little thing about how I felt. Let's go!

Merge & Blade
 I needed something idle to take my time as I listened/watched things and this game on gamepass looked like it might be fun. Essentially, it's one of those matching games where you combine units of a kind into stronger units and combine those into-- etc etc. You can upgrade things like you can in a roguelite, spending money you earn on things like, "make the archer stronger" or "add a new unit at the end of the merge tree." 

However, the method for getting units on the board kind of grated on me after awhile.  The board is a grid, however when you place units you're given two bound together at random like Puyo Puyo (or Dr. Mario) and you drop them in from the top of the screen. You only have hard drops available. The result, in my experience, is a deeply cluttered board. Maybe I'm just bad at puyo puyo (true) but I could never get enough matches. And then I ran out of turns, the actual game started, and my units would die to the enemies down to a tenth (decimated, hey) and I'd have to match the scraps. Which, sure, the horrors of war, but it really didn't make it fun to play. 

American Truck Simulator
I've owned this game since 2017 but I've never managed to see the mid-game. I drove a bus on a resort property for several years and driving has always been pretty calming for me. ATS is able to simulate the road and environment in a way that gets my brain saying, "yeah this is driving." 

The problem is that hauling freight across the country will invariably feel like work? Which is a weird thing to say as a big fan of simulation games! I love hauling freight conceptually. I played a lot of Elite Dangerous, which is ATS in space. (Alien Truck Spaceulator) and I think the thing is appealing. But once again I got decently far into the opening of the game and was on my 20th trip or so and just went, "God I need to not be driving anymore."

I was also very tired at the time. Something in my bones is telling me to come back to this, so maybe I will. Or maybe this is the last time you see me talk about this.

Ghostwire: Tokyo
So, I have been circling this game and sniffing it like an animal for awhile now. It's on gamepass! It could be neat! And conceptually there's a lot to like here. The Ghost and the Wire in this title are both pretty literal. There's a heavy intersection of Digital and Ghost themes in this game, things like saving ghosts from an evil entity and then sending them over the phone line like it's the Matrix. Things like exorcising a ghost by doing what looks like sick yoyo tricks with a string from its "core." The magic is a lot of hand symbols and every so often they humor you by letting you draw one yourself. 

However, I just couldn't feel satisfied. The skill trees aren't interesting, which is the major thing that got me to download it. I looked up "games with good skill trees 2023" and found all the links purple because it's the third time I've done this. Ghostwire: Tokyo was on this list, however. But, all the stuff on the trees is either numeric "hold 3 extra arrows" or gated behind a currency you can only get by progressing through the city and doing side quests. 

The combat is kind of neat. You charge your magic attack and you do a bunch of hand signs in the air to amp up the magic, then you launch a stronger version (the default magic's strong version is, "you shoot two at once" and I think they're more powerful but??). I got an upgrade that lets me basically perfect guard with parry timing to knock enemies down, then I got a quick exorcise on downed enemies. It's fun to execute! It does get weighed down by the fact that enemies sometimes just don't fall, sometimes they get knocked far enough away that you can't reach them in time, etc. 

It's a neat game conceptually, but the loop just doesn't give me a lot. And, after six hours, I think I have enough of an understanding to say it might just not be for me. I may come back to it if I really need to scratch an open world itch, but I can't be sure. 

Oh, the story also just washed over me, honestly. The tutorial takes way too long, the protagonist is insufferable to me personally. I could ignore all of that if the gameplay felt good though.

Cultist Simulator
So, I finally looked at how this game is played and realized it's a card game in the way one of my favorite games this year, Stacklands, plays. You have cards performing intense functions and in this game you have slots to put cards into like, "work" where you can put a job or a ritual, perhaps. 

The themes of the game are pretty interesting in that occult space. The concept of making a cult, gaining followers,  upgrading them, sending them on missions. That was all kind of fun, but honestly I think I'm more interested in trying Cult of the Lamb. 

My favorite thing this game did was let me go to the auction house to buy books, then when those books were invariably in Latin or Greek, find a way to become a scholar, either by tutor or by teaching myself with another book). I could then translate them! And then read them after. This loop generates Knowledge Fragments, which are the main currency of the game. Though, as I'm saying all of this I am realizing that maybe I could just do a knowledge only run, at least until I've ammassed a great deal of it... 

See, the problem I have with this game is that the things it wants me to do aren't so far satisfying to me. It wants me to start a cult and then to use that cult to recruit followers. All the methods of doing this gain suspicion by the police and I have neither dealt with the police or hit a loss condition for not dealing with them, but I'm sure bad things happen. Then to upgrade followers or do anything of note I need to provide more esoteric fragments, which are hard to accrue when things get rolling. Mostly because advancing your knowledge is a matching game and the pieces are random. They interact with one another in upgrading, which I haven't done much of, but it's a lot to manage when you're also trying to get followers etc.

okay. I might try that run. Maybe now. It sounds interesting. OH I was going to watch something though, shit. hm. my problem with subbed anime is multitasking (T_T)

anyway, that's me for this last week! 

 Okay I'm going to explore using cuts!! are you ready??

( Not Spoiler )

Okay, that seems successful. For the uninitiated, if you view this post from my main page and not click into it, the spoilers will be hidden behind a tumblr-like cut. (I'm not sure on the timeline but it's my reference point sry) If you cannot see the spoiler warning here, make sure you can see it before proceeding. 

So, overall I didn't like this season as much as the first, but the Crows content was enough for me to see it through to the end. And, by the end of the season, I decided that if there IS a spinoff show about the crows I'll watch it. Hell, even if there's a Shadow and Bone 3 with them I'll watch it. 

Now, for the nitty gritty spoiler stuff.

( Shadow and Bone Spoilers )

Ultimately this isn't REALLY a review, but I don't have another thing to tag these so shrug.

Anyway! more of these when I finish Things.

I want to use this space to start journaling because I think it would be fun! And this whole site makes me feel nostalgic. I don't know that I had a lot of people who would've read anything back in the era where I was doing LJ/Xanga stuff, but I'm gonna do it now and people may look if they like!

So! I need to get back into learning Korean. I got hung up on wanting paper notes and then I got caught in the trap of Textbook Designing where I wanted my notes to make sense and be easy to reference. I think, though, I'm going to try and be less precious about that and start getting back into it. Which is really exciting. I love learning it.

Let's see... well! I was going to make a whole post about my writing and everything, but I can just do it here! Let's be fast and LOOSE. (related to loose, I found a loose pizza roll on my counter today and it did not belong to me, you see. I left it there so as not to unhouse it)

So! Currently I'm working on five-ish writing projects, probably novels! These will be labelled as their working titles as I discuss them because uhhh that's how it is y'know.

Hardwire: So, this is a cyberpunk story with digital ghosts about the concept of legacy in a world where class-mobility does not exist and so the lowest classes deify people who go out in blazes of glory. This is a story about vengeance and community.

Transfiguration: This is a story I started when I wanted to write an assassin! The general idea for this is an assassin and a knight (who insists on a bow as a main weapon) are entangled in a plot, the knight trying to chase and apprehend the assassin before she can do harm. both POV characters. I'll summarize this better later.

Startide 4: This is my world with psychopomps tasked with taking willful ghosts peacefully into death. In this fourth novel of it, we meet Harbor, a new trans-transplant in a small town in the PNW. She is all alone and in a state of mourning her former life and is dunked into a new position she is chosen for, to be one of the psychopomps, a Startide. It's a story of her trying to find a place in the world and trying to work out what she's meant to do in it.

Coyote's Bounty: This is a sci-fi story with space royalty! That's all I can talk about right now :D

Archimedes: This is my 3rd take on this story, but you can find info about Archimedes herself here! She's a hacker character I've been trying to write about for years now but I haven't gotten the story right. THIS version has her as someone whose ideology consists of exposing the truth to conspiracies by hacking sensitive information and leaking it to various news places and, if she can't help it, news influencers. The big picture pitch of this for me right now is, "what if a derelict space ship was a haunted house?" so! We're goin' somewhere!

And ta-dah! That's where we are lately. And I FINALLY wrote this blog post yaayyyyy!!! Okay, I'll think about more stuff to do later. Thanks for coming bye!

I love making characters and documenting them is sort of what drew me here to using dreamwidth for real.

This is going to be a list of my character pages! Some of them will be single entry posts on this blog, some will be on their own blogs. We'll be having fun here!

The List
Sig - My dear witch from a fresh campaign I'm playing in! This one's a full-ass page, so dive in and enjoy.
Archimedes - One of my top two hackers I've written! No seriously she's cool, check her out.