I’m not terribly sad right now but am extremely tired. I managed to get a temporary fix to my bad mattress/back issues that has at least worked for one night but has left me feeling the cumulative weight of not sleeping well for about three weeks in a row. We’ll see if it lasts and doesn’t introduce its own issues [it hasn’t so far, as of the day before this goes up, even if it is clearly not an ideal solution], but right now I’ve spend all my spoons on work stuff (to the degree that I bought takeout rather than spend any time or effort on preparing food for myself) and I don’t have it in me to come up with anything thoughtful or reflective of this moment in my life, so I though I’d formally write down why I liked The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild so much and feel so neutrally about its sequel, Tears of the Kingdom. I can boil it down pretty succinctly, which is why this will be a relatively normal-length blog post, but I want you to know, reader, that there’s another version of this that takes up a week’s worth of posts because I’ve been thinking about this for over a year now and this sort of critical analysis via comparison and contrasting is the core skill forming the ground on which all my media analysis skills have grown. Which is to say that the reason I like BotW more than TotK is because the first one holds your hand long enough to get you up and walking while the second one holds onto your hand throughout the entire run of the game, which often means you have to drag it behind you as you try to experience the game.
Continue readingVideo Gaming
Gaining Steam On The Dragon Age Hype Train
Well, I’m back on the hype train again, but at least I know when my stop is this time. Finally, after what feels like along time but is probably only a couple months at most, we have a release date for Dragon Age: The Veilguard: October 31st. Halloween. Which means that, in my little group of enthusiasts, I won the betting pool for when the game would come out (my guess was mid November and no one guessed earlier than I) and now have Bragging Rights I’m never going to use. It also means that it won’t come out for two and a half months, which might BARELY be enough time to play Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and all of the DLC I’ve apparently owned for nearly a decade and never once played. My “book” club has resigned ourselves to putting all our actual books on hold until sometime this winter as we try to blast through all of these games and then the new one in time for what might not wind up being monthly conversations. After all, that two to three hours of talking is time we could be spending on Dragon Age games. It’s going to be tough to do, if I’m completely honest, since I’m not sure I’m going to really enjoy this kind of focused gaming binge. I might wind up streaming again to help me keep up the pace since that helped immensely with getting through Breath of the Wind in just over a month, but that might be more bother than I can muster. The downside to streaming is that it’s difficult to focus on the game itself (a problem I don’t have in BotW) and it is rather demanding to stay that social and verbally active all the time. I’d probably get more game time in a day if I just played by myself.
Continue readingCrashing Out Of Dragon Age: Origins
I’ve been trying to replay Dragon Age: Origins for my “book” club. Most of the time, I can play it. A lot of the time, it will crash sometime after I’ve launched the game. I’ve figured out some work-arounds, thanks to old forum posts, good old trial-and-error problem solving, and a bit of intuition from my years of testing and working in the software world, but they really only delay the inevitable crash. Sure, I can usually see it coming now and restart my game myself, picking a more opportune time to restart rather than just being randomly kicked out of the game by it crashing on me, but it still feels incredibly frustrating to be limping through this game rather than actually enjoying it. I mean, sure, I’ve figured out the reason for one crash and how to fix work around it, but I’m not sure that it works consistently and, as a result, am still spending all my time quicksaving to make sure that I don’t lose much if the game winds up crashing on me anyway. It’s exhausting to be on guard all the time against the game I’m playing in a way that is definitely negatively impacting my experience of the game, which doesn’t even mention how my gameplay experience is impacted by my workarounds and having to play on the lowest graphics settings just so my game doesn’t crash every fifteen minutes (or instantly in some places).
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 26
Every so often, I get struck by the urge to go replay an old Legend of Zelda. Right now, I really want to go replay The Legend of Zelda: Wink Waker. It’s been a long time since I played through that game and it has been on my mind recently because I lent my younger sister my Wii U, which has a copy of the digital Wind Waker HD game installed on it. I could set up my Wii and play the GameCube version of the game if I really wanted to, rather than wait for my sister to be finished or bother her about getting my console back, but I currently don’t want to play it enough to actually act on the urge. I mean, I’d probably play the game in a couple months if no new games come up (which I already won’t happen) and I finish all the other gaming I’ve recently been putting off to play Palia (which is unlikely to happen, given just how much stuff I’ve still got on my to-play list), but I remember the game well enough that I’m not really feeling compelled to play it again. It’s only been a few years since I last played it, after all. It was part of the franchise replay I was doing with my ex-roommate back when we were living together, so I even have memories of playing the HD remake version with all of its quality-of-life changes (The Swift Sail is a game-changer for a focused player). In looking back on my memories of the game, though, I think I prefer the original version of the game.
Continue readingReopening Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door Twenty Years Later
Content Warning for discussion of childhood trauma in the context of a retrospective about Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. There’s also spoilers for Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door in there, too, but not super specific ones.
Continue readingTripping And Falling Back Into Palia
Well, I meant to spend a bunch of my free time last weekend getting through as much of Dragon Age: Origins as I could, since that is my book club assignment for the month of August (we’ve had to shuffle some things around a bit due to us both being busy). Instead of doing any amount of that, though, I wound up getting back into Palia again. Super heavily. Hours upon hours, most of which was spent blasting through quests, digging back into building and decorating my house, investigating all the fun new features that have been introduced since I last played in April, and spending some real-world money on the game so I could experience a little bit of video game-based gender euphoria (or at least as close as I can get to that, given to my general lack of feelings on the matter). It was a bit more than I probably should have spent, but I decided to just use my July video game budget and take the rest out of my “fun big purchase” account (which is slowly beginning to recover from buying my new gaming PC). Also, I played it for the first time on maximum settings and the game looks so much better when everything is dialed all the way up. It’s a really fun, gorgeous little game. Well, little for now. It has grown a lot in the year since I started playing and all signs point toward it continuing to grow. I’m not sure how fast that growth will happen given that my current sense of it is skewed by being away for four months, but it feels like it has been pretty fast.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 25
Rather than complain about how tired and sad I am, or about how rough work has been this week, I figured I might as well turn my attention toward my favorite gaming franchise and not only avoid my blog becoming a dour place full of only my sourest feelings but also maybe even lift my own spirits. After all, there’s a new Legend of Zelda game coming out soon (Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom) and you get to play as Zelda in this one! Which is a pretty big deal, considering the only other protagonist we’ve even seen in a Legend of Zelda game is Link. Link’s been our only player character this whole time. Sure, the Hyrule Warriors games muddied the waters a bit, but those aren’t really the same thing since they’re even further from “canon” than even the handful of Capcom handheld games. Even if you moved to include them in this accounting of Legend of Zelda protagonists, Link is still the primary protagonist and all the other characters show up to support and fight alongside him, so that argument is iffy at best. All of which is to say that this is a pretty big deal. I know a lot of people are nervous about what looks like a departure from the norm (dungeons and puzzles and relatively clear progression) as the game touts its world being as open to exploration as your imagination allows and shows Zelda committing mostly indirect violence rather than ever truly dirtying her hands like Link does, but I think it’s almost always worth taking a relatively wild swing. Wild swings got us Breath of the Wild and, sure, they also got us Tears of the Kingdom (which was an enjoyable foul ball, but a foul ball all the same and I could probably make a good argument it for being less of a wild swing and more of an attempt to hit a home run again, which doesn’t really make sense in this metaphor but feels like an accurate description of what the game did), but I’m all for trying new things and desperate to play as Zelda, especially after they took the very gender-neutral Link of Breath of the Wild and solidly masculinized him in Tears of the Kingdom. Let’s move the men aside for a bit and let someone else have a turn at the game, you know?
Continue readingWhy I’m Still Struggling Along In Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth
I’ve been steadily chipping away at Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth again and was planning to keep my thoughts to myself until I got further in the game (apparently ending the open world sections of chapter 9 just launches you into an open world section in chapter 10, unlike every other open-world section that got to have a break for some fun story time before heading back to the open world stuff again, which made me so frustrated that I turned my PlayStation off and stared at my ceiling in discontent for fifteen minutes). Instead, I’m writing this post because I saw someone writing about Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth by saying that there might never be another game like it. This was meant as praise and had me wondering if the writer of that post had played the same game I did. As I chewed on this opinion, I realized I’d never really looked at reviews for the game, as it released or in the months since then, because I’d wanted to avoid being spoiled while I finished up some other games before diving into FF7: Rebirth. Uncertain, now, if my opinion was just me being curmudgeonly and unwilling to allow myself to appreciate the game, I decided to spend some time looking at reviews and discussions of the game. Which pretty much all broke down into people either loving or hating the open-world segments of the game, for good and bad reasons on both sides, and doing nothing but shouting down the people who disagreed with them. So, today, as I complained about the game to a friend, I decided I should actually talk about WHY this game doesn’t work for me, why I continue to push myself to play it, and why I feel so emotionally invested in all of this that I’m writing about it multiple times without even finishing it.
Continue readingStarting Up Playthrough 3 of Baldur’s Gate 3
There will be some spoilers for the Dark Urge endings of a Baldur’s Gate 3 character in the latter half of paragraph 3 (this is paragraph 0 and the one below this is paragraph 1).
One of the questions I repeatedly asked myself while ordering the parts for and building my PC was what game I was going to play first. As a bit of a joke, I tossed Stardew Valley and Valheim into the hat for consideration, but the real choice was between Baldur’s Gate 3, the last new and intense game I’d played on my PC that had possibly shortened the life span of my PC by pushing it harder than it could reliably handle, and Cyberpunk 2077, the first game I wanted to play but couldn’t because the major update they did in 2023 changed the minimum specifics into something my computer couldn’t handle anymore. Rather than really try to choose, I opted to play both. Technically Cyberpunk 2077 first, but since all I was doing was making a character in both games, I technically played Baldur’s Gate 3 first since that was the one that I played beyond my first chance to save and quit after completing character creation.
Continue readingBack To Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth Posting
One interesting factoid about social media is that far more accounts are created than are active at any given time. Most accounts will never post more than once or twice and most posts on social media are created by a relatively small number of uses. Something similar is true about video games, even if it’s often more difficult to observe or discover (or maybe I’m just following weird people on social media who talk about that stuff a lot and can get the numbers to back their assertion up): lots of people start but don’t finish video games. These days, that information is, if available at all, pretty easy to find since a lot of video games will have achievements of some kind (achievements, trophies, etc.) and a subset of achievements that are unlocked for completing sections of the game. You can go to your Steam profile and look at the global achievement numbers for a game you’ve played and while it absolutely doesn’t count every singe person who has played that game thanks to the proliferation of other sources for games, it still gives some interesting statistics about the people on the platform you’re using. Since useless statistics are one of my favorite things, if I get bored while I’m waiting for a Steam game to update or for a friend to come online so we can play a game together, I’ll spend some time looking into what achievements I’ve got that are rare according to Steam. Recently, as I’ve been playing more and more games on my PS5, I’ve taken to doing the same thing while winding down for the evening, once I’ve shut the game off. Which is how I found out that almost half of players never finished Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth.
Continue reading