I’ve been playing a bunch of Wildermyth recently. I’ve played through almost all of the campaigns on my own, some of them multiple times with different groups of people, and there’s only one left that I haven’t played at all. At this point, I feel like I’ve got a pretty good grasp on the storytelling pieces of this game, even if I don’t always remember the particulars of every encounter. Throw in a general understanding of the strategy behind the game and a nearly complete understanding of how all the abilities synergize (except for Hero Theme abilities, since I’m still working on collecting all of those), and I feel like there are no real secrets left for me. I’m sure there’s plenty of random encounters I haven’t run into, given my penchant for creating specific types of heroes, but I’m working to correct those biases and hopefully I’ll eventually be able to tick through all the achievements as evidence of my gameplaying breadth.
Continue readingMy Journey Through The Pokémon Games Continues
After many long months, I finally finished Pokémon X. I still have a legendary or two to capture, but I’ll admit that I’m happy to be through the game. None of the post-game stuff in this generation is particularly interesting to me and I’m very tired of how cinematic parts of the game are. I’m not there for cutscenes or to watch movies I can’t skip. I’m there to play Pokémon while riding my exercise bike and going to sleep. I don’t want to be actually engaged or entertained, just mildly distracted. Which is a bit of a problem, since I moved from Kalos to Alola. I decided to skip straight to Ultra Sun rather than consider playing Moon since I remembered how painful the first iteration of the game was and how much of that pain they eliminated in the Ultra version of the game, but I completely forgot how frustrating it was to hunt for Pokémon in a world where the Pokémon vary from one grass patch to the next on the various routes.
Continue readingGMing Withdrawal and Melancholic Musings
I haven’t run a tabletop roleplaing game of any kind in a month and a half. As of just this past weekend, I’ve gone from having three regular-ish groups (weekly or at least twice a month on average) and one occasional group (with no pattern to our sessions) to having a weekly-intential group that hasn’t successfully met and might never since we’re now down to three players and me. As far as my tabletop gaming ecosystem goes, I’ve removed one player for picking the dumb wizard game over doing the right thing (along with assigning me blame for making him feel bad about it, amongst many other issues), lost two players to family difficulties that will keep them away for an unknown number of months or years, and two entire groups have dwindled to nonexistence thanks to scheduling difficulties and general burnout. I do not know when my next TTRPG session will be and I do not know what it will look like since my groups have all shrunk or haven’t scheduled a session in two months.
Continue readingInfrared Isolation: Chapter 15
New to the series or certain you’ve missed a chapter? You can find the introduction Here and the table of contents Here.
Continue readingPicking Up the Pieces One Week Later
Content Warning for Harry Potter and JK Rowling again, though this piece is more of a reflection on my experiences talking about that with people over the last two weeks than about those topics themselves.
Continue readingThe Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Has Revived My Enthusiasm
Now that I’ve had a little time to rest, recover, and try to avoid obsessively rewatching the new trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, I think I’m ready to write about just it. I was tempted to do that yesterday, but I was so overwrought from everything going on that I couldn’t handle even just being excited about something. I had to put it out of my mind (and stop trying to preorder the Collector’s Edition) so I could calm down and try to get some rest. I didn’t really get much rest (since every other part of my life is still a stressful mess), but I’ve managed to collect myself enough to say that I’m super excited to see what the game is going to bring to the table. I mean, it looks like Link loses an arm right away and then gets that cool, clawed tech arm that seems to be an expansion on his Sheikah Slate abilities, so I can only hope it will keep getting better from there.
Continue readingI Overstimulated AND Overwhelmed Myself at the Same Time Today
I spent a great deal of today staving off an anxiety attack. A lot has been going on lately, you know? I’ve also got a lot of stuff coming up on the horizon like an international trip, a wedding I’m a part of, job applications, needing to move this summer, and way too much more (mostly work stuff I’m not putting here because that’s transient stress/venting and I want to avoid venting about my job on the internet). Plus, I’ve have had a few long-running relationships begin to crumble over the last couple days thanks to people choosing the dumb wizard game over doing the right thing in support of someone they cared about (me, a non-binary person). It’s been wearing on me, to the point that I am a confused mass of emotions and exhaustion that vascillates between wanting to collapse and feeling mostly fine (which is mostly me coping for work since I need to be at least a little present and presentable while I’m on the clock). I need rest, I need some quiet, I need some love and support from my friends, and I need to not hyperfixate on the latest Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom trailer.
Continue readingBuyer’s Remorse and My Frugal Nature Are the Only Things Keeping Me Playing Fire Emblem: Engage
Even after about forty hours of Fire Emblem: Engage, my opinion of the game hasn’t changed. If anything, I’m starting to feel like I signed up for a task and am personally obligated by my sense of propriety to finish it. Too much of that forty hours is puttering around in chores, trying to do the extra missions, and figuring out the hard way that I’m never going to complete the character support stuff I want to pursue. There’s too much of it and the methods of building support between non-player characters is too frustrating and exhausting to work with. I’ll admit I was pretty spoiled by Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but most of the games before this one also had a huge number of ways to increase inter-character support while the latest entry in the series has battles, meals, and the training stuff that randomly throws another character into a training match with the character you selected. Even thought they’ve added a new support building system since I originally wrote this (more DLC and a free update dropped after last week’s Nintendo Direct), it’s still a very clunky, slow system in a game that gives you a huge number of characters. All in all, it’s a bad system, for a lot of reasons.
Continue readingBuilding Friendships in Minecraft in 2023
In the continuing adventures of my time back in Minecraft, I wound up spending a bunch of last weekend building a mountain to conceal the beginnings of a tower I had painstakingly created; helped a friend create a small lake/large pond; spent hours farming materials for and then building the central portion of the canopy of a massive tree (which is likely going to be scrapped, it sounds like); and then invesitgated a series of underground caverns that were full of resources, eerily silent creepers, and way too much lava for my personal comfort. I dabbled in magic, killed a lot of spiders, engaged in amicable trade, and did my best to save the lives of a bunch of fellow players who kept falling off things (my efforts were largely in vain, unfortunately). All-in-all, it was a busy but fun weekend of construction projects and trying to push myself through the boring but necessary parts of getting the enthusaistic reaction I desire when I eventually unveil my secret project to the rest of the server.
Continue readingTaking A Day To Rest After All That Bullshit
No new Infrared Isolation chapter today. If you want to know why, you can just read yesterday’s post. Dealing with the folks who inspired that post, in the days before writing that post and the days following it, has drained me of pretty much every bit of extra energy and willpower I had. So I’m skipping today and just trying to desperately rest in hopes of breaking out of this continuing spiral of awfulness that has been my experience of 2023 so far. Honestly, there’s not much left that can do sour or bad, so hopefully it’ll stop before much longer. In the meantime, I’m going to play Minecraft, as much Splatoon as I can manage, and then try to enjoy a game of Star Wars 5e with the remaining members of my TTRPG group.