So I was pretty disappointed to find out that the autumn DLC wouldn't be the usual small zone DLC, but rather something akin to a roguelite arena added as a location in Apocrypha. I'm not a big fan of roguelites, but as usual I decided to give it a go anyway. Never say I didn't try.
So I logged on with my main, which is a healer build with decent dps and the only character I have who's got a companion, and off we went to the Archive. Things went fast and easy until the fifth boss, which is the last one of an arc. The bosses are all randomized nerfed dungeon, trial and world bosses. The fifth one I got for my very first arc was Z'Baza, The Sload secret boss from the Coral Aerie dungeon, which I haven't actually done. This boss summoned lots of adds, covered most of the fighting area in AoEs and also teleported around which made the boss very hard to properly attack while also dodging everything all at once.
You get three attempts in one arc. After you've died the third time it's off to the start with you and start over. I got Z'Baza down to 50% HP every time, but never further.
After every boss you get to pick an effect which lasts you either specific amount of time or until the arc is over. The effects are typically extra damage, extra defense or extra healing, and it works well. I think my favourite effect I got that first arc was the summons of plague rats which would help fight the enemies and once they died they'd turn into plague blobs that could be picked up and thrown at the enemies doing poison damage. Pretty neat. Another great effect I got was the ability to summon a decoy which would distract the enemies and effectively make them stand still in one spot attacking this decoy with a huge health pool, making them easy to kill all at once.
The Tho'at stuff could prove interesting though. New Daedra Lord! :)
All in all, not very impressed with this, but I'll keep at it for a while longer.
Fast-forward to November 2023. I receive Phantom Liberty as a birthday gift and get playing. I resolve to play through the entire game from start to finish and not just do the DLC. That turned out to be a good thing because they have changed so much since my original playthrough. Especially the levelling system, which was a lot more extensive and a lot quicker. There seem to be less NCPD scanner things and less gigs in each zone, which makes completing each zone less of a hassle. I'm disappointed there still isn't any follow-up to Regina's cyberpsychosis research.
Ironically, now that everyone is praising the game for being good I'm starting to experience all the bugs people complained about the last time around. I've had CTDs, I've fallen through the map, I've had loot fall through the ground and vanish, quest NPCs getting stuck, calling the car simply not working and being stranded in the Badlands after a gig, having to reload the game to get quest prompts to work, and with a better GPU I could have larger crowds which meant I got to see first hand people's complaints about duplicate NPCs - hell I even had quadruplets attending the Samurai concert:
Complaining done, let's get into the good stuff.
I loved all the hints to Edgerunners that they've added to the game and until I got Johnny's jacket I ran around in David's. Once I got Johnny's I put David's jacket in my stash because I'm holding on to that ♥
I wanted to do all the side content available before I did any main story so I completed Watson before I even got the biochip, and then I did each zone before I moved on with the main quest. Which ended up meaning that I was almost level 50 by the time I started Phantom Liberty and got inside Dogtown.
The Phantom Liberty story was overall really great. Starting with a bang (literally), mellowing out as a multitude of questions rose up, before all hell broke loose at the conclusion. I made sure to make several separate saves so that I could unlock and see all the endings, just like I did with the base game back in 2021. The King of Wands and King of Swords endings were less dramatic and chaotic than the King of Cups and King of Pentacles endings. Those last two... My adrenaline was so high my hands were shaking by the time I got to make my final choice. That damn robot piece of shit junk... The new ending to the whole game made me super sad.
Another thing I really liked about Dogtown was that the gigs there always came with a twist and they were never as cut and dry as the ones from the base game. Always a choice would pop up around the middle that could give the gig an entirely different outcome than you would originally think, sometimes for the better and sometimes the fixer would call afterwards and scold you. But that twist and choice & consequence really made those gig a lot more memorable. Run This Town is probably one of my favourite side quests in the DLC.
Last time I played I missed out on saving Takemura so this I made sure of that and then followed through on his ending so I could get that last achievement.
Speaking of achievements, some of them don't seem to work. I know for sure I affected 3+ enemies with one single Detonate Grenade quickhack more than once, but that achi never popped for me. I know I hit 2 enemies with the sname sniper rifle shot more than once, but that achi never popped either. And I rigorously used the Distract Enemy quickhack to get that achi, but that never popped either.
Towards the end of this playthrough they dropped Update 2.1 which added hangouts with your love interest, radio for walking, being able to take the metro around the city (sightseeing woooo!) and repeatable car races. I made sure to do everything.
I had a really great time with Cyberpunk this time around as well, despite this buggier experience!
From the creators of The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor, still this show came completely out of left field since neither of us had even heard about it. Yet after two great shows ofc we had to watch it and it didn't disappoint.
Because each of the other two shows were based on one book each, I originally thought this would be a show based entirely on the eponymous work by Edgar Allan Poe, but I soon discovered that each episode was named after a Poe text, and each of the episodes was a retelling of a Poe story with the House of Usher as the overarching plot. It was brilliant.
I love Poe and I've read a bunch of his work so it was great to see how they transferred the plots of those stories into the overarching plot of the show and make it work.
There's very little of the "spot the ghost" game from Hill House, but it does happen. There are a few jumpscares, but nothing too bad and usually you can see them coming from a mile away.
I really, really, really enjoyed the original animated Castlevania show, so when this finally dropped on Netflix I couldn't wait to get into it!
Setting it in revolutionary France is interesting, but it works out. Richter and Maria aren't as fun and interesting as Sypha and Trevor and I can't really bring myself to care about Annette. But Edouard's fate and plight are both extremely interesting to me (although whenever he bursts into song it feels mostly like filler), and I absolutely loved both Olrox and Drolta. Especially Olrox.
The art style of the Vampire Messiah reminds me of Sailor Moon villains though.
It's only got this one season so far, but after that ending how can I not look forward to the next season?
Comparing it with the original show when this one only has one season seems unfair so I won't do that.
The last three episodes of the season were a hell of a lot better than the first five episodes, though.
1. Troubled Blood, by Robert Galbraith. This book was brilliant in so many ways. Exploring Strike's feelings for his family, but also for Robin, and Robin exploring her feelings towards her job, her future and for Strike, as well as dealing with a nasty divorce from Matthew. The agency is doing great and they're handed their first cold case: the disappearance of Margot Bamborough back in 1974. This book takes place in 2013-2014 and it's almost 40 years since she disappeared. Strike and Robin are given a year to try to find out what happened to Margot, and it becomes a case that has them delving deep into astrology and psychopathy, with lots of unsavoury men and women who aren't what they seem. There are so many plot points, so many side plots and all of them come together brilliantly in the end. It's extremely satisfying to see the author tie together everything in a way that makes complete sense. The only thing that brings the overall rating down is the fact that it sometimes gets a bit too preachy with the feminist stuff.
2. Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood, by James Malcolm Rymer. This is a compilation of a penny dreadful, so it's trash literature, but it's trash literature that has somehow lasted almost 200 years so that's got to count for something. This penny dreadful predates Dracula by half a century and I was so excited to get into another gothic vampire tale. But penny dreadful authors were paid by the word and damn it shows. After 210 pages I just couldn't anymore. In those 210 pages we've had the initial vampire attack and then just 200 pages of reiterated dialogue and back-and-forth actions that didn't lead anywhere. 200 pages in and we're still in the same situation we were 200 pages ago. And it isn't even halfway. As to not completely kill my reading mood I decided to DNF this and potentially come back to it at a later time. There are glimpses of a complicated and interesting character in Varney, but it's all so densely buried in all the useless dialogue and non-actions. The editor's footnotes in this edition are a highlight though, as it seems they might've been a bit passive-aggressive towards Rymer and the Victorian society overall. It's so frustrating because I can see there's a story underneath all the useless words, it just takes an age to get through all the words to find the story.
3. The Ink Black Heart, by Robert Galbraith. These two characters has to be the slowest slow-burn in the history of slow-burns. I need them to stop being so goddamn polite and considerate and just talk to one another! The story in this one revolves around the dark side of fandom, and it's eerily accurate sometimes. Honestly, the most unbelievable thing is that Robin didn't know tumblr or Twitter before she started working on this case. It's 2015, she just turned 30, which makes her only five years older than me, she would've known about both of those sites. Or it's just implied she has spent the last 12 or so years living under a rock while social media evolved online. I get Strike not knowing, but not Robin. I had all sorts of theories throughout reading this as to who the killer was, and once or twice those theories touched upon the truth, but I could always find reasons why someone else was more probable. As someone who spends a great amount of time chatting online while staying mostly anonymous, this was a great and pretty chilling story. One of the best ones in the series!
4. The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. A few years ago everybody talked about this book so I decided to read it. It started out interesting enough, but within 100 pages it was getting obvious that this was all there was to it. This is the story of their lives which are absolutely ordinary aside from the little thing that Henry is so-called chrono-impaired, meaning he sometimes just time travels for no reason at all. Sometimes just for minutes, sometimes for days. It never becomes a conflict and the only major issue it presents is that it makes it difficult for them to have a baby. Throughout the story there's this looming shadow of something that's going to happen when Henry is 43, but when it does happen it's completely underwhelming and I just face-palmed when I read it. It was a very disappointing end to an otherwise bland book. Not my thing.
5.Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, by Rick Riordan. I've been meaning to read this series for years. I love Greek mythology. This book was just as fun as I expected, albeit a bit predictable. I didn't expect Percy to be twelve though, I thought he'd be at least fifteen, but it ended up not being such a big deal. Despite the book being a lot of me figuring things out way ahead of time and me just waiting for the characters to catch up, I had a lot of fun reading it and I'm excited to keep going with this series. Despite having heard of this series I knew nothing about it going in. I knew there was Greek mythology and that was about it, really. I figured out Percy's father long before the rest of the characters. I figured out who was going to betray Percy as soon as the Oracle told him the prophecy. I figured out who the ultimate bad guy was long before they started speculating, but it's a kids book so it was fine. I love all the characters and the story was fast-paced and fun. I'm into it.
This is like the fifth post of mine that's related to Valhalla... This game... it feels good to finally have completed it.
After I finished with Starfield I decided to do the last few things of Valhalla before I started up Mirage. So I started out doing the last few Tombs of the Fallen and finished that little thing and then I dove into The Forgotten Saga, which is a roguelite and I'm not the biggest fan of those. But I gave it my best effort. I managed to get all the way to Nidhogg, the poison dragon, and the last boss before the last area and Hel herself. At that point I was breezing through everything up to Nidhogg, and he thoroughly put me in my place and told me to not think so highly of myself in the most detailed way possible - his adds beating me to a pulp while he solemnly watched. The fight was just a whole bunch of AoEs to dodge or I'd get a DoT (which stacked) and there were no healing items in the area - not equipped, not lying around, just nada. I was so done with The Forgotten Saga after that, and decided to just do The Last Chapter update and then move on to Mirage.
The Last Chapter was a nice little ending to Valhalla, which probably would have had a bigger impact if I hadn't played the base game in late 2020 when it was new, and barely remembered half the characters on the goodbye tour. The Basim stuff was a lot more interesting than Eivor's goodbye tour and half-assed footnote as to how she ended up in North America. The Basim stuff explains how he's still alive over 1000 years later and how they got their hands on his DNA so they could view his memories. It was a pretty decent connection/bridge over to Mirage.
I don't like sand. Every time a game asks me to play through a desert I'm instantly bored. Sand is just boring. I don't like it. And I knew the landscape of Mirage would bore me even before I went in, which was a contributing reason for why I shelved the game for two weeks before I finished it.
That said I did enjoy the game overall. They were hitting people's nostalgia as hard as they could but implementing a lot of polished up mechanics from the earliest AC games. I hated pickpocketing in AC2, but in Mirage it was a lot of fun, especially Darvish's collectables. Being at Alamut made me half expect Altaïr to show up, except it would be a few more centuries before he's even around. That tutorial climbing scene with Basim is a direct translation of the tutorial climbing scene in the original Assassin's Creed with Altaïr :3 And those are just two examples, there are many more ways that Mirage attempts to throwback to the earliest games of the franchise. It's great fun.
As always I made sure to get every single collectable and do every bit of side content and uncovering the entire map before I completed the story.
As for the story itself, I feel like it was pretty predictable. I had figured out Nehal's circumstances way before that reveal even came. The only thing I hadn't figured out was the purpose of the djinni and I was dreading it as a final boss of the game, instead... nothing. So that was a bit disappointing. I also feel like they established the characters of Roshan and Basim in the early stages of the story only to throw it all out in the end scenes and have them become complete stereotypical tropes, which kinda ruined the end a bit. And as much as the current time portions of any AC game kind of feels like filler, I did miss having it in Mirage. Even as filler it's an integral part of the games' universe.
But all in all it was a good game and as much as I love massive open world RPGs it was nice to play something smaller for a change.
And I forgot to take a single screenshot.
And young Basim just reminds me of Disney's Aladdin.
I don't know why we didn't watch this season sooner considering we both loved the first season (which I know realise I never wrote a post about, oops).
So the script for this season was allegedly based on an unfinished-but-practically-finished manuscript that Gaiman and Pratchett had written as a sequel to the novel.
I feel like the original will always be the best version in terms of sequels etc, but this season was really damn funny. Shax was great (who knew Rita Skeeter could be that funny?) Jon Hamm was fabulous as a confused and blundering dude and then as hopelessly in love. Every role I've seen of him he either plays stoically handsome or strong-but-sad (strong man refuses to accept he is currently broken, i.e. still stoic), so it was very nice to see him in something more comedic :3
We're both fans of The Big Bang Theory so when we saw that Young Sheldon had come to Netflix we decided to watch it.
Sheldon himself is great as usual and so dimwitted despite being so smart. It's great :3 Missy, Connie and Paige are amazing characters, whereas Mary is just a big facepalm for me, but she means well. Georgie is dumb but street smart. And George is just always trying so hard and it never gets him anywhere.
Paige's storyline alongside Sheldon's storyline shows two different sides of the same coin and I always enjoy the episodes with Paige in them, because it shows just how damn lucky Sheldon is throughout his whole childhood.
Season 6 ended at a bit of a cliffhanger and season 7 keeps being delayed due to the strike shenanigans going on, but I really can't wait for season 7 :3
After Grounded we discovered that there was a new We Were Here that just released and it was free. We jumped on that and immediately got it downloaded and started to play. It was really nostalgic to be back in the roles of our Arctic explorers/rescuers even though it wasn't all that long ago we played through the series.
This time the setting was more piratey than the medieval/castle/knights/royalty/magic kind of theme the rest of the series had going, but there is a tiny reference to previous games in the very beginning, in the intro, so that's cool.
Just like the original We Were Here our only complaint is that this game is too short. It took us just over two hours to complete and that's with us redoing several of the puzzles just for fun and to try to get better results. Why is it that a puzzle always goes better before we're really sure of what we're doing and when we know what we're doing we somehow end up doing worse?
The puzzle where one player is drugged to see paths that aren't there or paths that are there have turned invisible, and the other player watches from above, mind unmuddled, and guides them through what's real or not was a really cool puzzle and we had a lot of fun with it.
I also really liked the puzzle where you had to coordinate between each other to make the best and most color combinations.
We did both of those puzzles so many times xD Which the short little shareable/downloadable clip at the end showcased xD
All in all, this was a really fun adventure. Could've been longer, but that's honestly the only nitpick and for a free game it's negligible.
Alongside Hogwarts Legacy this was my most anticipated game of the year. So when September 1st rolled around I immediately started to play even if the time was 2am. I didn't do much aside from creating my character that night, but at least the game worked and for me it has been mostly smooth sailing throughout all of my 174 hours.
I'll keep this post very vague so as to avoid spoilers and you'll mostly be getting my overall thoughts and feelings rather than any details of companions or quests.
I put off doing the main quest for so long, which I realise now was a bit of a disservice to the game. I was probably level 30 before I even encountered the main antagonist. That first encounter adds a lot more to exploration and I recommend getting to at least that point in the main quest before heading off whichever way to explore.
So for my first character I chose traits that were pretty much all useless to me, but that I thought sounded cool. Neon Street Rat was very useful, but Alien DNA I had removed with a doctor almost immediately. I chose the Adoring Fan perk because of nostalgia and then I never used him because he was just as annoying as I remembered. I just stuck him at an outpost in the middle of nowhere and never saw him again.
Surveying planets became tedious if it was done too much and too often, but as someone who enjoys ticking boxes it was very much my thing - if done sparingly. Every time I visited Earth I got sad.
As for the side quest lines, my favourite was easily the Crimson Fleet. I always try to do a good character so navigating the Fleet questline via Persuasion and Bribery instead of murder and robbery was a lot of fun and actually made me think more specifically how I would get through a quest.
I also enjoyed the UC questline for the sheer amount of wow moments. Revelation after revelation, it was great! I really liked Hadrian when she was part of her questline. Too bad she lost all her personality afterwards when she became just another follower.
The Ryujin questline was a slog to start with, but once I gained access to the Executive floor things became really interesting and the last few quests were pretty cool. I ended up having more fun with this one than I initially thought. Unfortunately those early quests are indicative of the kind of missions you get from their mission board post-questline, and they aren't very engaging. Still a lot of easy credits though.
Finally, the Freestar Collective questline wasn't my thing at all. I struggle to remember what it was even about and had to look it up to even write this post. The final confronation was kinda cool I suppose. Unfortunately the final confrontation of this questline was at the same place I had a Ryujin stealth mission at and it wouldn't let me sneak past the final confrontation to complete the Ryujin mission before going back to do the final Freetstar quest... So I ended up getting a pay deduction from my Ryujin mission -.-
The main quest proved a lot more interesting than I normally expect from a Bethesda game and at one point even heartbreaking. Literally sat crying in front of my PC until I could reload an earlier save so I could change the outcome because I was not ok with that! It didn't hurt that the main quest had some of the most beautiful visuals in the entire game. Temples did get slightly repetitive though.
As for the companions, I adored Sam. He became my best friend and my husband (and he made me smile like a doofus every time I talked to him after we got married). Andreja, despite being the last Constellation member I picked up, quickly became my favourite after Sam. Both Barrett and Sarah annoy me. Barrett is too silly and Sarah is too high and mighty. That said, I still got a ship that could fit all of the Constellation followers at once and they all became sort of like a family. I also made sure to do all of their companion quests. Everybody's except for Barrett's were pretty interesting tbh. I liked Sarah's and I hope there'll be more to Andreja's at some point. Sam's felt oddly high-stakes but that's probably due to Cora's presence.
I'll end this by addressing some of the complaints I've seen regarding the game. Some of them are just too stupid to address though, so I'll just leave this here:
Complaints about graphics and crashes and optimization, I can't do much about. The game worked well for me (rtx 3060). I had two CTDs in all my 174 hours. The game didn't like when a download was running in the background and became laggy whenever Windows Update decided it was time to download an update, otherwise it worked great.
People complain about desolate worlds and I can't help but wonder if they only ever landed on moons or planets without an atmosphere. There was an abundance of planets that had all sorts of life and were beautiful to just wander through.I have so many screenshots from both desolate and vibrant moons and planets.
The achievement disabler was buggy, though. Which is probably the only major issue I had with this game. I had to use the console to no clip through a door that remained [INACCESSIBLE] even though the quest was supposed to open it to be able to progress a quest. I was hoping that achievements would only be disabled for that session (like in New Vegas) and then be enabled once I restarted my game. No such luck though. I wasn't too far in so I figured I'd make a new character and start over. It wasn't too bad. Except the game marked my brand new character and saves as modded too. Despite me never touching the console on that character. It's supposed to not do that on new characters :P So I downloaded the mod that make achievements work even on modded/console playthroughs. Problem solved.
Another complaint is that locations are copypaste. Unless you do a lot of mission board bounty quests you probably won't even notice this much. But every single Abandoned [...] on planets are the exact same. So when I was running through my probably 50th Abandoned Cryo Lab to get that outlaw bounty I was pretty sick of them. All Cryo Labs look the same, all Relay Stations look the same, all Robotics Labs look the same... Which I can kinda, sorta justify by them all being UC and UC probably had a model they built things after, but damn it gets tedious.
Finally, the end of the main quest leads you right into NG+, but you can choose to not play through the main quest in the exact same way all over again. So now I'm kinda excited to play through it once more just to see how much will be different. Probably not a lot though, so I'll be moving on to other games, but keeping a lookout for DLCs because I really don't feel done with this game.
The final season! Time for all the loose ends to come together and for Bean to say goodbye! We've both really enjoyed this show and this last season was no exception.
Mop Girl was a welcome addition to the team and I love her with Elfo.
I enjoyed seeing Luci embrace his goodness when he was with Jerry visiting God.
The shenanigans with bad Bean alongside Bean's relationship with Moira, and Bean finally embracing her weird-ass family were all highlights of the season.
The ending gave a sense of finality, but also left things slightly open-ended should they wish to make more Disenchantment.
Our next co-op game after the We Were Here series became Grounded. It's a survival crafting RPG and we had a lot of fun with it.
Storywise this game takes place in the late 80s and you play as 1-4 school kids who mysteriously get shrunken to ant size and find themselves in a garden. Your job is to find out how you ended up there (because you can't remember) and how to get back to normal size, all the while exploring the garden, fighting insects and figuring out how to better survive.
You start out with nothing, but as soon as you get your first axe things start to move along. Berry leather became the first hurdle, but via exploration we found out where there was a bunch of berries and I could easily shoot them down with my bow and arrows while climbing around inside the berry bushes and Toni picked them up as they fell. The next hurdle was underwater exploration which took a fair bit of time to overcome and in that time I expanded our modest shelter into a grass fortress with the help of Toni cutting grass and weeds.
Eventually we had ziplines across the entire yard to easily traverse it.
The most annoying boss fight was easily the robot assistant manager in one of the labs. Took us three attempts and a guide to defeat it, but otherwise we managed the game well and there were no hurdles too big so as to not overcome them.
Spiders were very scary in the beginning, but in late game they were easy enough. Except that one scary infected wolf spider by the oak, that one was still scary even though we defeated it. And the black widow never stopped being scary.
MIX.Rs ended up being simultaneously annoying and fun to me. They're like tower defense things spread throughout the yard and once you activate it you have to protect it from insects trying to attack it until it's done. Towards the end we had so much crafting mats that we just brought a bunch of stuff with us to the MIX.R and built walls and roofs around it to keep the insects from even reaching it while we fought them. Mushroom brick walls and feather roofs are great.
So while we finished the game storywise and decided to move on from it, I kept it installed on my computer because I can really see myself playing around with crafting and building some more at some point.
This season was very morbid. It wasn’t futuristically dark like the previous seasons, but rather it explored darkness in other settings aside from dystopian futures.
Joan Is Awful is about people signing the rights to their lives away via the Terms & Conditions nobody reads before signing up to a service. In this story a Netflix equivalent has taken over Joan's life and an AI produces episodes of her life as they happen. As a result she loses her relationship, her friends, her family and her job.
Loch Henry is about a couple studying movie-making, returning to the small seaside town where the guy grew up to make a documentary. The girlfriend discovers the dark past of the town and convinces the guy that they should do a documentary on that instead. So they start digging and discover something really dark. I enjoyed this one.
Beyond the Sea is a futuristic story about two astronauts living in space, but they can transfer their consciousness to body-doubles (androids made to look like them). When one boyd-double is destroyed by cult activists along with his entire family getting murdered, his colleague agrees to let him borrow his body-double so as to not go crazy from the isolation of being alone in space all the time. It starts out as a nice gesture and ends up going very, very wrong.
Mazey Day is about a paparazzi photographer in 2005 always on the lookout for the next big scoop to sell to the magazines. She finds out about an actress called Mazey Day who has quit acting and is hiding out at a secret rehab facility in the mountains and along with her friend she goes to investigate. What they find is incredibly dangerous and life-altering.
Demon 79 is about a mousey immigrant girl in 1979 Britain who accidentally summons a demon and now has three days to kill three people to stop the world from ending. It's really interesting to see this girl embrace her inner rage and attempt to fulfill her contract. The character growth is immense in this one.
All in all we had a good time with this. My favourites being Loch Henry and Demon 79. All of the stories were really dark in true Black Mirror spirit, while still taking a step away from the usual theme of slightly futuristic but still oh so relatable.
Last time I was this excited for a chapter was Greymoor, and before that Morrowind. We're back in Morrowind and it’s all about my beloved Hermaeus Mora.
I didn't like Leramil in the prologue, but she really grew on me as the chapter went on. I loved Scruut! Gadayn is super cute.
The story offers some pretty strong implications for the entire lore with Torvesard and Ithelia, and if Mora could do that, then what else has he covered up in his endless pursuit of hoarding knowledge?
Peryite never gets to take much space in the games so it was pretty interesting to see more of him.
I originally played through the chapter with my main and then I created a new character in the new Arcanist class and played through the chapter once more. The Arcanist class has potential to be one of my favourites, so much fun to play!
As for the zone(s), it was pretty much the same deal as usual: world bosses, skyshards, tiny little things discoverable in the world that count towards exploration achiecements... The Bastion Nymic daily quest was entirely too much work for a daily and probably the one thing I wasn’t a fan of. To start with you have to run around the map looking for 3-4 world boss level Seekers, defeat them one after the other and then bring their ichor to specfic locations where you can open a portal to Mora's Bastion Nymic. Which is sort of like a weaker group dungeon set up like the public dungeons in Blackwood/The Deadlands in that you enter from different places each time and get different bosses. I entered my first one by myself and managed to get all the way to the last boss on my own, which I then constistently got to 50% HP but then couldn’t get any lower. I continued to be in groups consisting purely of DDs every time I did this, and once I did it just me and another guy when we couldn’t find any others to join. Nymics are too much work and so not worth it. I did it four times while I was playing the chapter as my main, comparatively I did the delve and boss dailies six times each in the same time frame.
I loved the look of Apocrypha. First time you enter as part of the story Scruut tells you to not lool up as their sky can be disconcerting. So ofc I had to look up and that sky was beautiful ♡
As for side quests, my favourite was probably the one with Ysgild and Vorm, and the one with Morian Zenas, and the one referencing Sotha Sil's past. But I really loved exploring every place in Apocrypha. Azandar is an Arcanist so cool by default, but I can’t stand his personality. Sharp on the other hand quickly gained my approval and he became my Arcanist's steadfast companion.
The story played out pretty expectedly, but I’m still happy with it and I can’t wait to see what will happen next! This one had some pretty cool fights at the end :D
I watched Toni play it when it was first released because it wasn't announced for PC at first. So I wasn't sure I'd get to play it. With the result that I knew the broad strokes of the story going in.
Being mostly used to RPG games, this game offered a few initial challenges. Like I couldn't find anywhere in the game (even in the help section) that told me how specifically to raise my HP and so struggled for a while with Arthur dying every time he met an enemy... Until I properly figured out the take cover mechanic and the dead eye.
Aside from the initial hiccup in learning mechanics, the most continuously annoying thing was steering the goddamn horse, and I don't know if it's just poorly implemented on PC or what. But usually the horse was steered by moving the mouse (similar to the stick on a controller I assume), with nudges in either direction being possible with the A and D keys. All okay. Except if I entered the map while the horse was moving or otherwise paused the game, when I'd return to the game the A and D keys wouldn't nudge in any direction but just cause the horse to do full 90 degree turns, which more than once caused me to fall off a mountain or off a bridge. And if I was driving a coach or a wagon the mouse wouldn't steer at all, but it was exclusively the WASD. After spending so many hours on horseback steering with the mouse, it was always jarring to suddenly not be able to do that.
I decided early on that I'd do my best to 100% the game, and not just what the game considered 100%, but what I considered 100%. So I did all the camp upgrades and all the trapper clothing. I completed the compendium and every entry in the compendium is at 100%, including horses, fish and plants. I did every treasure trail and every challenge, every stranger quest and every honor mission. And most of the time I had a blast.
Some animals have a really unfair spawn rate though. I struggled for ages to find a moose with horns until one time I was at Wallace Station paying off a bounty and then just turned around the the moose was just standing there behind me. I've never pulled out my rifle so quickly. The American Robin for the Hunting Delivery was a bastard to find too, until I found a guaranteed spawn point at Ringneck Creek in Lemoyne. The Guarma-specific animals were surprisingly not too difficult, but nothing had me tear my hair out like the Carolina Parakeet. omg I wanted to call it quits so many times, but my stubbornness won out every time and I reloaded my save just one more time, just one more time, just one more time... Until I finally found the goddamn green bird so I could study it and then shoot the fucker to oblivion. Nothing was as annoying as the parakeet. Not the hunting deliveries, not the gambling challenges, not even Algernon's exotics quests. Fuck those birds.
I had a lot of fun trying to find all the secrets and easter eggs in the game. Two of my favourites were the vampire in Saint Denis and the Witches' Cauldron up in Ambarino :3
I hated Micah from the start. That first line out of his mouth and I wanted the game to give me a reason to hurt him. My feelings toward Dutch were more chaotic. The first two chapters I believed he was trying his best, but from chapter three onwards it gradually became obvious that he had no idea what he was doing and was just making it up as he went along. "I got a plan", sure you do, buddy. I've read fan theories that Dutch lost his marbles when he hit his head in chapter four, but the more I played the more I came to believe what John says in the epilogue to be true; which is that Dutch's real character was coming out after years of carefully hiding it. He's a narcissistic egotistical asshole and always has been.
I cried a bit at the end of chapter six, even though I knew it was coming.
Building a home with John in the epilogue was a nice change of pace from the rest of the game and I really enjoyed it.
Still kinda pissed the rdr1 remaster wasn't ported to PC.
This show has been one hell of a ride. A ride that concluded only in recent months and it's been so worth it.
The show revolves around the passengers of a plane that simply vanished out of thin air, only to return five years later. The passengers haven't experienced any time passing, but they returned to a world that had written them all off as dead.
As they all struggle to return to the lives they had left behind five years ago, they also start experiencing Callings. Visions and/or sounds that won't let them rest until what it asks for has been resolved.
Naturally people become suspicious of how these passengers always end up being somewhere at the right moment and it isn't long before hate-groups emerge. As time goes on the passengers get increasingly persecuted.
History and mythology get involed in trying to figure out what happened and why to them and the plane. Turns out mythology is intricately and intimately related to what happened to them, and this isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened.
To raise the stakes... If they don't figure out what, why and how before the time is up, the entire world will come to an end.
Going into this season felt kind of bittersweet, knowing it would be Henry Cavill's last.
Just like previous seasons it was pretty slow going up until the last couple episodes. As much as I enjoyed seeing the family stuff between Geralt, Yennefer and Ciri, most of it wasn't very exciting.
As much as this season tried to be all about Ciri, the story revolved more around the mages. Tissaia pays the ultimate price for their involvement in everything. Fringilla's character arc in this season is one of the most interesting things to watch unfold.
I loved watching Ciri grow as a person and more as a witcher than as a mage.
The fight against the Experiment was easily the most disgusting horrific fight of the season.
Half of me wants to continue watching season 4, the other half wants to boycott the entire thing. We'll see how it goes...
I had been recommended this show by several friends and I started watching it on my own, but nowadays I suck at watching shows on my own and only got to S01E06 before I roped Toni in to watching it with me.
Needless to say, we both had a blast watching it.
The first season sets the theme and builds the base of the story pretty well. Butcher's wife, Compound V, Starlight's disillusionment, Homelander's behaviour... These are all themes that continue throughout the seasons and pop up in every season.
Stormfront rubbed me the wrong way even before we knew about her past.
Deep just can't catch a break. Ever.
Maeve is used, abused, and tossed aside and I LOVE HER.
Noir is cray-cray.
Kimiko and Starlight are absolute badasses.
I hate A-Train.
Hughie looks like a cinnamon roll, but could actually kill you.
Frenchie looks like he'd kill you, but is actually a cinnamon roll.
I'm really excited for the fourth season! So much going on! Shit's about to implode! Can't wait!
When we picked up this show we didn't expect it to be a post-apoc show, but post-covid it hit really hard and just drove home the point that covid could have been so much worse.
The show is a story about Gus, who's a human-animal hybrid. At around the same time that the virus started, human-animal hybrid babies were the only babies being born. Nobody knows why or how, only that suddenly no more human babies were born, only hybrids.
The virus subsequently wipes out around 80% of the human population worldwide.
Fast-forward 10 years and we have Gus leaving the confines of his home to explore the world and trying to find his mother. The US no longer exists and what's left is broken up into tribes. The militaristic Last Men are desperately looking for a cure for the virus, which is still around, while also trying to round up and wipe out any and all hybrids in an attempt to save humanity.
On the other side we have Aimee who takes in every hybrid child she can find and raises them in an old zoo (ironic) until the Last Men move in.
The second season is a prolonged battle on several fronts. We have the kids trying to break out. We have Aimee trying to break in to free them. We have Dr Singh fighting himself while trying to save his wife and subtly oppose General Abbott, and we have General Abbott fighting for control and trying to emerge as the leader of all of the tribes, not just the Last Men.
Through the course of the second season a lot is revealed about the origin of the virus and the hybrids and a lot is resolved in the end, but not everything.
Bobby is best boi.
The third season will also be the last and it promises to be very interesting.
As usual I'm the last one to the party. When this game got released for PC back in 2020 I immediately bought it because I knew I wanted to play it, even though I knew the broad strokes of the story from having watched Toni play it. But it had a rough PC release so I waited before playing it and then other things got in the way.
Finally I decided it was time and it was an amazing ride!
As usual I wanted to do all the side content in a region before I moved on, but I soon realized that the Hunting Grounds were very difficult on a low level. So I left those and endeavoured to do them as the last thing in the game. I went on to do literally everything else. All the collectables, all the bandit camps, all the tallnecks and all the sidequests. Even all the weapon tutorials.
The main story was just as amazing as I remembered, even more so now that I got all the details.
I wish the game had had romance options and I wouldn't have had to kill Nil. I saw it coming. I just wish I didn't have to. I liked him. I also wished there had been more interactions with the Sun King and with Erend. And Petra was great. Just so many cool characters.
The tallnecks were always an experience and I had a lot of fun climbing them.
Interestingly the machines that scared me the most for the longest time were the bellowbacks. Not even fireclaws in the DLC were as scary.
I left the DLC until after I had finished the main story of the base game. Frozen Wilds was really cool and Aratak is big brother material. Finding out some backgroun for Sylens was interesting too. He's a really interesting character, morally grey and incredibly shrewd.
After I had 100%ed Frozen Wilds I went back to the base game and collected some last achievements and did all the hunting grounds and with that 100%ed the base game too. I wanted to try to collect all the datapoints I had missed, but some were in side rooms in main story locations that seemed to have become inaccessible once that story quest was completed. So I gave up that idea pretty soon.
This game gave me a huge post-game hangover and even if I've started another game now I still think about HZD every day. I can't wait for Forbidden West to drop on PC!
It's the end of an era for Grey's Anatomy with Ellen Pompeo leaving the show. How can we have Grey's without Grey? Turns out pretty well. They're doing a good job of establishing the new interns. I really enjoyed seeing the social commentary on the abortion issue in the US and with it a reintroduction of Addison Montgomery.
I don't approve of the hint that Richard is going to fall off the wagon or whatever's going on with Teddy. Things were finally looking up for Teddy and Owen T_T Taryn and Levi are the best and I want everything good for them. Yasuda is probably my favourite new intern. Simone needs to learn to follow her heart. Lucas is a fuck-up, but an adorable fuck-up.
All in all I really enjoyed this season and I'm excited for whatever comes next, with or without Meredith.
As for Station 19 we have Maya trying to be better and trying to fix her relationship with Carina, but not before getting seriously close to the edge. We have Jack trying to form a relationship with his biological family as well as trying to find his foster siblings. We have Travis running for mayor. The relationship between Sully and the Chief is reaching make or break. (I really just want Sully back with Andy, please). Theo is on a mission that becomes all-consuming to the point of destroying every single relationship he has.
I don't like the new girl. And Dixon is reaching new heights on his assholery.
We've been home for two days now and reality is starting to settle back in. Although my voice is still gone. This year I shared the whole thing on Instagram as well so I recommend going there for pictures :)
On Tuesday last week we got in the car at 5am and after having picked up the last person of our roadtrip gang, we finally got on the road around 5:30am. Amazingly we didn't stop for bathroom breaks or snack breaks as many times as earlier years and we arrived at the camp ground just after 11:30am. Made incredibly good time on that journey! Got the tents up and for the rest of that day it was all party.
The next morning most of us crawled out of our tents around 8am and went to find breakfast, which turned into way more of a quest than any of us wanted first thing in the morning. The regular ready-to-go breakfast bags from earlier years were nowhere to be seen and so we begrudgingly half-assed our own. At least I got morning coffee.
My first concert of this year was Soilwork. They were the band that got me into death metal as a teenager and I used to love them, but now I haven't really listened to them much in the last ten years or so. After this concert I'll definitely pick them up again! The entire front row became a mosh-pit during their concert. It was glorious!
Airbourne was playing around dinner time and so we decided to go in and half-watch them while eating. We then returned to the camp for a short while, until it was time to go back and see Def Leppard, Avatar and Mötley Crüe. Avatar easily wins best concert of the year for me ♥
The second day started out strong with Korpiklaani and then we returned to camp until evening when it was time for Kamelot. I don't really listen to Kamelot (I've heard like two songs), but I've liked what I heard so I decided to tag along to see them. It was a really cool show! After that concert we spent the rest of the day at the camp until it was time for Deep Purple and Europe. Neither of which I was super excited about, but they both seemed like bands I shoudl take the chance to see while I still can. Deep Purple was too psychedelic experimental instrumental solo jam session for me. After every song there was a solo jam session for each band member (probably to allow the singer to catch a break). But aside from that it struck all of us how damned polite and sweet they were. All of us were just standing there like awwwwwh. Europe, being Swedish, has a huge following and it was very clear whenever one of the mor well-known songs were played.
The third day is when my voice went to shit. This year the festival area was super dusty. I don't know what they did different earlier years, but it has never been this dusty. I saw several people walking around with scarves/bandanas/masks covering their mouths and noses, and for me that's a lesson learned for next year. More than one person in our camp got red and irritated eyes from all the dust. But anyway... I had only two concerts planned for Friday and they were in the evening so most of the day was spent partying in the camp. We then finished the day with Powerwolf (amazing as usual) and Iron Maiden. Iron Maiden mainly played lesser known songs for the first half-hour and with none of us being big fans, we decided to leave after that. Once we had returned to the camp and it had been maybe forty minutes since they started playing we heard Fear of the Dark. First well-known song of that gig.
Last day, Saturday, and I could barely speak. We had only two concerts planned for Saturday as well, which was just as well because traditionally everybody is completely beat and ready to leave and still trying their hardest to keep the party and energy levels up. To mixed results. The first concert was early, Joddla med Siv, they're a Swedish folk rock band from Skåne and they have a MASSIVELY HUGE following in Skåne, which the organizors seem to have missed or underappreciated. They were on one of the smaller stages, when they could easily have filled the second to largest stage or maybe even the largest one. People crowded in front of the stage, spilling out through the entrances and exits on either side trying to squeeze in to see them. And they delivered. It was amazing! I've seen the number 35k people in the audience thrown around...
After Joddla was done we returned to camp and started to slowly pack our things together while continuing the party. Before going in to see Ghost as the final act of the festival we made sure all our things were gathered up and then we went back inside. Ghost was really great, but Avatar still wins best concert of the year.
After the concert there was a small celebration of the ferstival's 30th anniversary with small clips from every festival playing on the big picture screens on the biggest stage and fireworks. We then went back to camp to grab our things and head for the car. We packed our stuff and ourselves in the car and after a clusterfuck traffic jam of everybody else having the same brilliant idea, we finally got out onto the road at 00:40am. Because it was so late we ended up taking several more stretch-your-legs breaks and we arrived home at around 8am on Sunday morning. We showered, unpacked, and then fell into bed until around 2pm.
It's now 1am on the Wednesday after and my voice is still terrible, but slowly getting better.
