Dealing with backlog: Borderlands

Toni and I played this game together which is the main reason it has taken us this long to complete; the need to find a time when we both had the time and energy to play. It also meant that it could take months between each session, which kind of disrupted the whole connectivity thing of the quests and NPCs as we had to get to know the people again after a long time away. Because of this I feel like my whole experience is a little disjointed, but despite this I really liked the game and the stupid humour in it.

So we land in Pandora and start exploring. I'm a Hunter and Toni is a Soldier. We do all the quests and meet up with Tannis for the first time and get a first hint of the Vault and the Guardians. Old Haven was probably our least favourite region of the base game. The Crimson Lance was simply just too annoying to fight. I'd take a maniac with a shotgun any day! When we get to the point where we only have three regions left to explore we decide to do the DLCs since none of us were sure whether Borderlands had a hard ending or not. This turned out to be a mistake, which we only discovered later, but first things first.

The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned was probably our favourite DLC, mainly because its spooky theme was right up our alley! Zombies and pumpkinheads and wereskags and lots of stupid humour (way more so than the other DLCs). The only annoying thing is that we discovered Zombie T.K. way too late (after we were otherwise done with the DLC) and his quests to collect zombie brains for him to munch on became so tedious that we just didn't complete them.

 
Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot was a bore. Arenas in any game usually are. We gave it a try nonetheless, but this should probably be done with a four player team. Moxxi is a really cool character in any case, but her arena wasn't.

The Secret Armory of General Knoxx absolutely sucked if you're a completionist like us. We wanted to do every quest in the area whcih resulted in a lot of time spent on the highways going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, to a point where it just wasn't fun anymore. The main questline of the DLC was good though and when we finally found the armory and general Knoxx it was actually hilarious how much he wanted the whole thing to be over... A bit like us tbh!

Claptrap's New Robot Revolution was our second favourite entirely due to the stupid humour in it. Though we got a little sick of the fact that the claptraps were always so many! It was like mowing down a horde of them each time we started shooting!

After we finished all the DLCs we went back to the base game to finish the last of it. This is when we discovered that nothing in the base game had leveled with us and so we got barely any exp at all from doing the last few quests. However the closer we got to the endingthe more we got to tangle with the Crimson Lance and the guardians. In any other game I'd be annoyed that after all this we didn't get to enter the Vault, but with Borderlands it seemed meant to be.

Next game: Borderlands 2

Dealing with backlog: Kingdoms of Amalur Reckoning

It took me way too long to play this game because of mixed reviews. But I finally did and I loved this game! It gave me strong Dragon Age: Origins vibes and as a whole I feel it's a mix between Origins and Oblivion, which is extremely high praise!

The only thing I feel like this game is missing is the opportunity to have deeper relationships with NPCs. I miss having friends and companions. Basically I just want a gang. Romance is secondary, but that would've been great too.

The fighting style is odd for an RPG, but it changes as you improve. I played as a rogue-like character and to begin with my character just did jabs with her daggers/faeblades, but as she progressed and got better at wielding her weapons it turned into launching enemies in the air and ferociously attacking them to ending with amazing jumping finishes.

Unfortunately the game was on the easy side, even for me. I believe it's all due to the fateshifting mechanic. I learned early on that if I save my fateshifting (which is basically an ult in MMO speech) then I can defeat almost any boss in less than a minute or even 30 seconds, which kind of undid the whole "omg it's boss battle time" feeling. The most obvious exceptions being Balor and Tirnoch, who did require something more than just bashing them while fateshifting.

The whole world is fascinating. Instead of having the obvious rifts between humans/dwarves/elves, there's a rift between the old race (the Fae) and the younger races (humans, elves and gnomes). The younger races are mostly scared of the Fae who are eternal beings that can't die, while the Fae mostly find the younger races fascinating - especially the concept of death. The Fae also look down on the younger races for being young, reckless and dumb. Having a much shorter and limited lifespan the younger races don't know and don't learn as much as the Fae.

The game has a wide array of creatures. I adore the cute little Brownies and Boggarts, and Niskaru were always fun to fight. But I hated coming against Banashae and Crudoks, they weren't difficult just annoying. Bolgan, Ettin and Jottun were interesting to begin with but soon just became a hurdle to get past, and Webwood made me permanently sick of spiders.

 Troll, Banashae and Jottun

The story begins with you dying and being brought back to life which causes amnesia. This somehow gives you the ability to fateshift and you're the only person in existence who doesn't have a destiny, which the game's Fateweavers are more than happy to point out. You're recruited to go to war against the Tuatha, a corrupt section of Fae that the younger races have been warring against for a decade. The main reason that the war has been ongoing for ten years is that the Tuatha are Fae and thus won't stay dead when killed. But you can change fate, the only person in existence with this ability, and the hope is that with your power to change fate you can change the tide of the war and actually permanently kill the Tuatha. Along the way you meet up with Alyn Shir, who knows your past from before you were brought back to life but she's reluctant to tell you. As you progress you find out bits and pieces about your past and towards the end you find yourself back where it all began. The game ends with a frickin badass boss battle that's totally epic.

 
The two DLCs were great. I especially loved The Legend of Dead Kel. Give me pirates and I'm happy! But the Teeth of Naros with all of its references to Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire was amazing too.

Kingdoms of Amalur proved one of the most underrated games I've ever played. If you haven't played it, do it.

Dealing with backlog: Three short games

The Silent Age: A classic point-and-click game with a classic sci-fi story. You play as Joe, a janitor from the 1970s, who gets a visit from a dying old man claiming to be from the future. He asks you to get a message to his current self and Joe sets about doing just that, and what unravels is a big plot about time travel, cryogenics, pandemics and the apocalypse, and while you play you slowly start to get the nagging sense that somehow Joe might actually be the cause of the apocalypse he's trying to prevent.

The game was short and straight-forward, but the story more than made up for that. I also really enjoyed the simplicity of the graphics.

A Story About My Uncle: When I first saw this game my thoughts went like this:
"Ooooh this game is pretty."
"But it's a platformer. A first-person platformer. I'm going to hate myself playing this."
"But it's so pretty."
"But I suck at platformers and this is first-person, it's going to be even worse!"
"But it's pretty."
So I bought it. Because it was pretty. And I was right, I did hate myself for putting myself through this game. I didn't finish it. I got too sick of bouncing off the same floating rock several dozen times. But the game is incredibly pretty, and flying over the long distances felt amazing those few times I timed it right.

The story is very sweet. It's about a father telling a bedtime story to his child, and he tells the story of his explorer uncle Fred, and how he (the dad) one time went looking for uncle Fred after he had been gone for a long time, and how he ended up in a mystical land inhabited by frog people and getting on a quest to help them while searching for his uncle.

The gameplay is amazing when timed right, but it never looked as beautiful when I did it as it does in the trailer.

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter: This is a walking simulator with a clever story and beautiful graphics. You play as a private investigator of the supernatural. You're hired via a letter from a boy named Ethan Carter to come and find out what's wrong in a small town. The story takes you down some decidedly Lovecraftian roads (but there's also one part that seems to be taken from 2001: Space Odyssey, and one puzzle that seems almost taken from Amnesia: The Dark Descent). The end of the story was a major wtf moment and I'm not going to say anymore about it. The game is short and it's great. It's worth 3 hours of your life.

Game completed: Fire Emblem Fates (all three paths)

I discovered Fire Emblem Awakening on Tumblr and fell in love with it when I played it. So much so that since then I have collected all games available to me on 3DS, Switch and Android :P

Fates was the next game on my list and it has been an amazing ride. The cassette I got was for the path called Conquest where you play as an ally to the kingdom of Nohr, bent on ending the war by conquering the nearby kingdom of Hoshido. But when the time came to choose paths I decided to side with Hoshido against Nohr and thus began the path called Birthright.

Birthright:
This is the only path where I played the beginning of the story, otherwise I'd just skip ahead to where the paths branched. The darkness and general coldness and strictness of Nohr didn't appeal to me at all, except for Elise who was an almost literal ray of sunshine. I was sad when Gunter was killed by Hans, but so excited when I got to visit Hoshido with my siblings only to be shocked when Mikoto was killed. What followed was a long winding road of Hoshido fighting to suppress the Nohrian forces and finally reaching the Nohrian fortress for the final showdown. Azura was a mystery figure and I soon figured out that she was meant to die. As Birthright was the first path I followed it was also the path where I figured stuff out and Azura was way underlevelled by the time I figured out I could make her useful with a Heart Seal.

Kaze quickly became my favourite character and I was devastated when he died, to the point where I stopped playing for a while just to calm my mind. I kept hoping til the end of the path that he would have miraculously survived, but nothing.

My Avatar married Silas and Kana became my second favourite and I let him come along for everything.

When I finally reached the fortress and was reunited with Elise I was so happy, but that quickly became a tough heartache when Elise stepped in front of my Avatar when Xander took a swing at her and promptly died in his arms. For a second I hoped that Elise's death would be the turning point that would unite the Nohrian and Hoshidan sides in their final assault against King Garon, but no such luck.

The end of Birthright only created more questions. Who's Anankos? What really happened to Takumi? What's up with Azura's song? Who really is Azura? What really happened to King Garon? Is the Bottomless Canyon really bottomless? Where is the Fire Emblem in this story?

Conquest:
After Birthright I decided to play through Conquest too and see if this side offered any answers. But no. This side offered no answers to the previous questions and actually created more, like what was King Garon's motive for kidnapping the Avatar in the first place? What really happened with Azura's mother? I was also really annoyed that neither Birthright nor Conquest offered any sort of explanation to who/what the purple-glowing enemies were, and nobody even mentioned or seemed bothered by the fact that they were glowing purple.

However, the royal siblings of Nohr really grew on me. Where I had previosuly only liked Elise somewhat I now found that Camilla, Leo and Xander all grew on me. Especially Xander.

This was probably the least eventful path as it was pretty much same-same as Birthright just from a different perspective. Only thing different was how happy I was when I was finally able to kill Hans and Iago, especially Iago. That bitch can burn in a fire.

I married Jakob this time and he grew to become one of my favourites. He's such a sweetie ♥

I read a lot about the different characters after I finished the game and I'm a little sad I didn't get to know Laslow, Odin and Selena better - because they are second gen characters from Awakening under false names! Laslow = Inigo, Olivia's son, Odin = Owain, Lissa's son, Selena = Severa, Cordelia's daughter.

Revelation:
Then it was finally time to get answers for all my questions. This last path was frickin epic and apart from having the same characters, it was very different from the first two paths.

First off I get to find out who Azura really is and what happened to her mother and to top it off I get to find out where the purple-glowing people are coming from and why they are glowing. I get to find out who/what Anankos is and what he did and what happened to Garon. And also what's at the bottom of the Bottomless Canyon. That's all basically straight off the bat. Then comes the struggle to convince everyone else that it's true, but amazingly the Avatar manages to bring both the royal families together and they fight to defeat Anankos and restore peace to all three kingdoms without anyone having to die.

This path made me really want to pair off Ryoma with Scarlet because all their interactions together made me think they liked each other, but I had already planned pairings for the royal siblings (Ryoma+Elise, Hinoka+Leo, Takumi+Camilla, Sakura and Xander got pairings outside the family).

My Avatar married Kaze for the last path, because he was still my favourite and I can't have a path without Kana.

The last four or five chapters of Revelation were just epicness upon epicness. First I got to fight Queen Arete (Azura's mother), then Queen Mikoto (the Avatar's mother and at the same time find out about the Avatar's background!), then King Sumeragi (the Hoshidan siblings' father), and then finally Anankos. The fight against Anankos was split into three parts. First the part where you fight his presence in Gunter. Then when you fight his presence in the statue-esque worm-thing. After that the game for a second makes you think you've won, before Anankos is truly awakened and you get an amazingly epic fight against a real dragon (much more epic than the fight on the back of Grima in Awakening).

The end game was extremely satisfying and I was so happy with how everything turned out. Everyone lived! Amazeballs! :D:D:D:D:D And somehow Azura became a favourite this time around ♥

There was just one little thing that bothered me and it's that you never find out what happened to Takumi in the first two paths. I guess Anankos influenced him somehow, or Iago, but how did they get him and why him?

I spent 122 hours on this game and I enjoyed every second (except for the dying). All in all I think I enjoyed Fates far more than Awakening.

Favourite characters:

1). Azura. 2). Kana.

3). Kaze. 4). Xander.

Rollspel: Mutant År Noll - del 6

De påbörjar bygget av en hamn. De får sedan höra om en mystisk ruin. De tar en buss bort till ruinen som visar sig vara Dödsklotet. Resan tar ca 18 timmar. De äter och dricker innan de går ur bussen. När de går ur bussen möts de av en man i grå mössa, Krinnel. Han frågar vad de gör där. Danko svarar att de letar efter krubb.

"Så ni är inte ute efter skatten?"

Jony frågar vilken skatt och killen svarar att sekten i Dödsklotet har en skatt från forntiden. De fick höra det från en tillfångatagen väktare. Jony säger att de vill veta mer och "Take us to your leader". Krinnel tar med dem till Hektor, Gråmössornas ledare. RP lägger märke till att den här gruppen inte är mutanter eller zongastar - de är människor. Hektor ställer samma frågor som Krinnel. Gråmössorna och RP kommer överens om att hjälpas åt med räden mot Dödsväktarna för att komma åt skatten.

Innan de går så vill RP prata med Dödsväktarna. De lämnar Gråmössornas fyra torn och börjar röra sig mot Dödsklotet. På vägen dit kommer något stort flygande mot dem. Det visar sig vara en tjej med vingar, Beata. Hon är inte en del av Dödsväktarna, men hon bor på taket av Dödsklotet. Hon varnar dem från attackera sekten pga Vidundret.

Beata flyger upp till taket med Jony. Jony ser ner till insidan och ser Dödsväktarna tillbe en hög med gamla föremål. Läktarna är fulla med gamla skelett. Beatas bo är fullt av gamla böcker. Beata tar ner Jony till gruppen igen och de närmar sig Dödsklotet med händerna i luften.

RP möts av översteprästinnan Kalixiann. Hon erbjuder krubb och vatten i utbyte mot att de blir lämnade ifred. Dödsväktarna går sen med på att visa RP runt, men under övervakning av två Dödsväktare.

Ett oväder drar fram och Kalixiann bestämmer att det ska hållas en ceremoni och hela sekten hänger sig åt det. RP hör oväsen utifrån och Gråmössorna attackerar. RP rusar ner för att försvara sekten. De attackerar Hektor. Kalixiann väcker Vidundret, en vaktrobot. Roboten attackerar Hektor. Hektor dör och Gråmössorna attackerar gruppen och roboten. Kvark dör nästan och blir vårdad av Index. Med robotens och Beatas hjälp lyckas gruppen mota bort Gråmössorna som flyr när halva styrkan dött.

Ceremonin tar slut lagom till Gråmössorna flyr och Kalixiann anklagar RP för att ha fört dit Gråmössorna och bussar roboten på dem. RP besegrar roboten som kör self-destruct och exploderar. Hela gruppen klarar sig mirakulöst (fummel) men Kalixiann blir skadad. Index boostar Jonys manipulation och han manipulerar Kalixiann att ge dem varsitt föremål ur skatten och krubb.

Beata följer med dem tillbaka till Arken och tar med sig sitt bibliotek. På vägen tillbaka reparerar Kvark allas vapen.

My last 5 books: Sci-fi and classics

1. The Long Earth, by Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter. This was a book selected for our bookclub in my gaming guild. I thoroughly enjoyed the book up until the point where the "threat" was introduced. Probably what they will be fighting against for the next few books, which completely killed my interest in reading further books. This threat or monster is a being, completely unique in itself and it accidentally keeps devouring anything that comes too close, but it never means any harm. So basically this is a thing that just wants a hug but kills anything it touches. This monster seems very Douglas Adams-esque imho. But yes, apart from the monster that showed up towards the end I thoroughly enjoyed the whole concept of The Long Earth, multiple earths from different accidental evolutionary viewpoints. It made me giggle how the British weren't all that interested because everywhere they stepped from Britain they ended up in thick woods on other earths. That was hilarious. But yes, apart from the monster that completely killed the vibe for me I really liked this book!

2. The Walking Dead, vol. 2: Miles Behind Us, by Robert Kirkman. Much, much better than volume one! I don't even remember the things in this volume - were these events even in the TV show? Regardless this volume was really good and now I'm actually looking forward to reading the other volumes!

3. The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells. The original alien invasion story. Throughout reading this I couldn't stop thinking about the fact that this story is about 150 years old. This story was written when the revolver and the train were new inventions. It was written before both world wars. And the aliens have ray guns!!! It just completely blew my mind. Other than that the story was good, albeit a little slow-paced at times and at one point it seemed as if Wells had lost the story before it picked back up again. I remember being annoyed at the ending when seeing the movie because it was so anti-climactic, and it still was in book form. Although a little bit less so, because the pace of the written story was more slow-paced than the movie. It still annoyed me however that the enemy just fell down dead without any kind of victory and then life went back to normal way too quickly.

4. The Once and Future King, by T.H. White. This book killed my pace. After just 20 pages it annoyed me how much the author broke the fourth wall and thus my immersion. I decided to at least read the first part (211 pages) before giving up. Maybe the story would feature less idiotically stupid adult stereotypes and less fourth-wall-breaking when Arthur wasn't a child anymore. 211 pages is usually something I can do in an evening, but for this book just 5 pages took me forever because the immersion breaking the author insisted on doing completely screwed up my pace. I got to 160 pages before I decided to give up. I just couldn't do it anymore. At 160 pages I had been reading this book for over a month and making barely any progress. I love the legends of King Arthur, which is why this book was originally given to me, but this book was just bad.

5. The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde. One of my favourites! I've read it before when I was much younger but I liked it even then. This was a new edition that I bought purely because I loved the cover. I'm not sure why this books speaks to me the way it does. Maybe it's people's desire to always be young and live forever, rather than do what you can with the time you're given. Maybe it's that people are never content with what they have and always have to yearn for more. Why can't we appreciate what we already have? I am not going to go into a lengthy monologue about this book. Just know that I love it.

Dealing with backlog: Cognition - An Erica Reed Thriller

It's been over a month since I finished this game. July was a crazy mess and my work life completely took over my hobby life, and the first week of August wasn't much better. But now things have started to calm down, so here's a post for a game I played a month ago.

Cognition is a point and click detective game in a comic book style. The premise is basically Criminal Minds meets Medium. The story is complicated and through all the twists and turns I didn't figure out who the killer was until the last episode. (Before the actual reveal but it still took me a while).

Erica Reed is a young FBI agent with supernatural cognitive abilities. The first episode brings you immediately into action as she tries to save her brother from the grasp of the Cain Killer. Without spoiling how that goes, the game then fastforwards three years. The investigation into the Cain Killer is closed because nothing has been heard from him for three years. Erica isn't happy with it but still does her job and goes out on a newly assigned case. While this case at first seems to send her in a new direction it soon becomes obvious that it all comes back to the Cain Killer.

This game was hard to get into as it offered no tutorial at all. I didn't even realise that I had an inventory until I looked at a guide to show me how to do things. The game started off exciting and continued to be so but also getting progressively more gory as the story went on. Towards the end the game gave me hope before tearing out my heart, stomping on it and crushing it to pieces.

I really enjoyed this game.