When I finished Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and wanted to relax with an older, more simple favorite, I decided to replay Spider-Man: Remastered. Since I bought a PS5 just a couple months ago and opted not to transfer my save files, I wanted to make sure I had a finished file on my console before the sequel comes out (well, besides Spider-Man: Miles Morales, which I bought and am excited to play once I’m finished with SM:R). I figured this would be a great opportunity for it, since I also wanted to catch up on my podcasts a bit and the storytelling of the game isn’t strong enough that I feel terribly compelled to follow it on a replay. Plus, I love Spider-Man. I’m a big fan and I’ve always enjoyed swinging around New York in every Spider-Man game I’ve ever played. For the most part, I’m having a great time. I’m much better at fighting enemies than I was the first time I played it (so much so that I can’t even comprehend why I used to struggle in battles since now I can handle everything with ease unless I’m going for style points and focus too much on gimmicks rather than effective combat strategy), so the main source of mild frustration I used to feel is now entirely gone. However, I have a new one and it’s odd because I think it is pointing to a change in my gaming preferences rather than a change in games as a whole.
Continue readingMonth: August 2023
No New Chapter This Week
Maybe I should just make the “every other week” schedule thing permanent. I’ve fallen into that pattern these last few weeks, so it would be a bit of a relief if I removed that pressure from my shoulders. That said, I’ve also fallen into the habit of not working out in the morning and not getting out of bed until eight in the morning on work days, so maybe accepting the habits I’ve formed due to stress and on-going exhaustion isn’t a good idea. Maybe I should keep trying to fix my habits and regain full control of my life. I really think getting my sleep and waking cycles into a more healthy pattern will help with all the other stuff since this constant lack of sleep is my primary source of exhaustion these days. Not my only one, unfortunately, but being able to remove this source should make everything else manageable. After all, it’s not like I don’t want to write. It’s not like I’m not interested in finishing this story. I want to do it, I’m just either too busy with work or too absolutely exhausted to push myself to do more than a couple lines of story writing at a time.
So yeah, no new chapter this week but there should be one for next week. I’m going to keep trying for weekly updates, but I guess we’ll just have to see if I can swing it.
Today Marks Two Years of Updates
Today, when this blog post goes up, is the two-year anniversary of my return to updating this blog on a regular basis. The day I wrote this is the two-year anniversary of my return to writing regular blog posts. I started this period of blogging with a one-week buffer and, with a couple small exceptions, have maintained this lead-time ever since. I am incredibly proud of the work I’ve done over these past two years, the growth I’ve made as a writer (since this project and the one-week buffer was intended to give me a means to practice editing my own work and to improve my drafting abilities), and the discipline I’ve shown by sticking to it as much as possible without damaging my health or well-being. Turns out it is more difficult for me to do something on a limited scale than it is for me to do something more extreme. Updating this blog every day for over a year, like I did when I first started out, was mentally easy. I just had to do a thing every day. It became a daily habit, just like brushing your teeth or showering. Doing this five days a week with a single weekend update if I can manage it is much more difficult, since I actually need to plan my time out. After all, it’s easy to take a day off if you’ve got a buffer before you run out of blog posts. It takes way more work to keep the buffer in place.
Continue readingThere’s a Lot of Creative Heart in My Heart: The City Beneath Group
Session 0 of the Heart: The City Beneath game went pretty well, I’d say. We got through the initial stages of character building, which has gotten us all pretty much on the same page as to what we’re expecting to see in-game. We talked through a bunch more stuff that might have made it into the Line and Veils list, since everyone now knows the sort of stuff that this game might introduce, but wound up not adding anything. I think I did a pretty good job, through my (just for the vibes, since they were originally produced for a very different game system) setting documents and explanation of the game, of setting the expectations for the group when we picked the game, since no one was surprised by what they found in the book. After that, we talked through our characters a bit more specifically, did a little bit of work to figure out what they’re all about, and then talked through the kind of game we want to play, the stories we want to tell, and what world we want to explore. It was a pretty thorough Session 0, if I do say so myself.
Continue readingDemon Slayer is a Cut Above the Rest
In my on-going quest to actually watch TV shows and movies on my own, rather than wait for the opportunity to watch them with someone, I did a full re-watch of the first two seasons of Demon Slayer and then watched season 3 (called the Swordsmith Village arc). The whole show is visually stunning, and not just in the quality of the animation (which is consistently high, a fact made possible by the lengthy time between each season or arc’s release). Every visual is gorgeous, from the various moves performed by the titular Demon Slayers to the flashy, powerful maneauvers of the more powerful demons. The whole series does a great job of balancing interesting, unique characters, absolutely killer fight scenes, and plot progression, even if the pacing of individual episodes frequently feels off to me. Specifically, some of the episodes hit their mid-episode break with a scene that I feel should have been the end of an episode and sometimes an episode ends at a point where I’d expect to find a quick commercial break. The beat-to-beat pacing is absolutely stellar, though, so I’m not sure there’s much they could do to fix the episode thing and I’m pretty sure it’s just me and my mind’s desire to find patterns in everything.
Continue readingStar Wars Jedi: Survivor Was a Great Sequel
After almost two months of intermittent playing, I’ve finally finished Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. It was a lot of fun, even if I struggled with just how many collectibles there are (though the game gets points for giving you the ability to eventually unlock map icons for all of them) that I just did not care about. Honestly, the thing I was most-consumed with hunting down was enemies, so I could unlock the extensive collection of skills that were made available to me over the course of the game (and I’ve still got about a third of them to unlock despite having run through as much of the game as I care to at this point). The variations in combat options was incredibly refreshing, as was the variation in enemy combatants. Sure, it could be frustrating at times if my loadout was absolutely not the right set of powers and moves to be using in a given combat situation, but the number of options available within those loadouts meant only that I’d need to be a little creative to overcome these limitations. Throw in an interesting plot, some fun references to the greater Star Wars universe, a cast of great characters, and I’m willing to overlook the buggy and visually lackluster experience I had playing the game.
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