This episode is…not so boring! An improvement! After all the garbage and adventures this crew has had to go through, it’s time for the Grancypher to get some repairs. So they go to Golonzo, where all the best facilities are. This is a Grancypher episode, so it’s a Rackam episode.
We finally get some backstory on Rackam, and a tiny bit more for Eugen. Both were on Golonzo in the past; it seems Eugen was a regular, but Rackam was there when he was a little kid. So of course we get all that “I remember when you were a crybaby milkdrinker” stuff, all the time. I don’t know how everyone remembers that, since it had to be about twenty years ago, and this is a big island with lots of visitors, but whatever. (In the game, Golonzo is a tiny backwater, only notable for the shipyard, and even then only by those in the know, so it made a bit more sense that everyone would remember this one kid.)
We get to meet the mysterious fellow from Rackam’s dreams, Noa, who turns out to be the primal beast…of building skyships. That isn’t much of a combat power, unfortunately, so of course he’s been captured by the Empire for their nefarious experiments. And all he can do, even with a dark essence boost, is make a bit of wind and apply a photoshop filter to the Grancypher (right when she was about done with repairs, too! the nerve!). Oh, and Gran and Lyria get captured too. Turns out all you had to do was hit them on the head!
I really hope this only stays two episodes. If it’s three, like the last over-extended arc, then that will take us to the end of the show. And leave with a cliffhanger, since the end of this is where Lecia and Monica show up, to take us to the first actually good bits of the main story, where things at last finally start to get explained (though it will be another hundred or so chapters before that beginning is over and we finally know a bit about what’s going on!). I don’t want to wait another two years for the first potentially good season to start.
Game Pommern would never be stupid enough to mess with Siero like that.
Another month down. November is probably my favorite month. It’s not quite the end of the year, but almost. Thanksgiving is a great holiday. It’s my birthday month. The weather’s getting cooler, but not actually winter yet (though it may snow). Perfect time to play some video games.
But, did I do what was planned? What I thought I’d do, at the beginning of last month, was:
ESO on “daily” status
Play Atelier Ryza (and possibly finish)
Get Cities: Skylines going
Get maybe a Switch or PS4 on Black Friday; RDR2 too
Not exactly ambitious. So they were easy to accomplish! Which I did. ESO is more or less on “daily” status. It might have fully been so, but I decided randomly to create an alt (OrcSorc tank – I like to live on the edge!), and play a different campaign (didn’t feel like doing the Daggerfall Compact on my main). But most nights, yah, it’s just doing my daily writs and training horsemanship.
Did finish Atelier Ryza. As mentioned before, relatively short. Decided against getting any of the DLC, since it seems to add maybe a half-hour of story, and a single end-game boss per character. Not worth it to me.
This is bad. Don’t do this.
And I did indeed start up Cities: Skylines again. I’ve been watching Youtube videos of people fixing up traffic issues (pretty much most of the game), and I’ve been trying their ideas. Not quite there yet, but every time I get ideas. Also, the game keeps me up at night – “I’ll just add a few more streets,” or “I’ll just fix this one traffic issue”. Fun times, but less fun when you go to bed an hour late and you have to wake up two hours early for a meeting.
As for Black Friday…that was a bust. No deals on Switch, and only one deal for PS4 (Slim, not Pro), and that was sold out long before I got to it. Not too many deals on games, either, though I did get the Elsewyr expansion for ESO – if I finish it before June, when the next expansion comes out and Elsewyr becomes part of the sub, I think I’ll have gotten a good deal. I saw RDR2 on Steam today; thought about it, but I’ll be giving it a pass for now. I’m just not in the right place for it at this point.
December plans? Honestly, I have little idea. In the mobage realm, December means free rolls and Christmas events, so that’s always fun. I’ll keep on keeping on with ESO. One of these times I’ll “beat” C:S, finally figure out how to make a good, big city with nice traffic. Maybe the various Christmas sales will entice me to something, but I doubt much will come of it. And I might give something in my backlog a go (almost did this past weekend, but ESO caught my fancy for that time).
It’s the end of November, which means it’s the end of IntPiPoMo. I said at the beginning that I wouldn’t have any problems making the goal of 50 pictures, since screenshots count. Well, unfortunately I almost never post from the computer where all my screenshots are, so I only count 29 entries in the past! Can I do 21 in one post?
Of course I can. Should I? Probably not! But I will anyways!
I figure most of these will come from Star Trek Online, not only because it’s the game I’ve played the most, but because it’s one of the most screenshot-worthy games I’ve played. Well, at least for the purposes of IntPiPoMo: I have a bunch from, say, ESO, but most of them are just of amusing dialogs, so I don’t really count them.
Just two admirals shooting the breeze…and the poor adjunct that has to stay and watch…
Ah, the good ol’ Placeholder Nebula
Some people have interesting names for their ships.
Found some ERPers on Old Risa, and I decided to have fun too!
The mission creator was pretty limited, but with some creativity could still create good art.
Need a big guy for those big chairs
Don’t talk to me or my son or my son’s spider ever again
Too early to celebrate?!
Revenge on the tentacle monster?
This really deserved to win the screenshot contest, if I might say so myself.
Even little ships look big from down here.
Put in time-out for being bad.
No one could insert any innuendo into this picture at all.
Whew, close fight!
Kinda want to know what happened here, kinda don’t.
There we go, that should make 50, and then some. Kinda sad I had to make a make-up post like this, but on occasion it’s fun to go through the old screenshots to see what I was thinking about back when.
-Black Friday is kinda a disappointment. I was hoping to get a PS4 or Switch on a big sale, but no dice. Still sad I missed them last year. PC game sales seem similarly dire. Though I still got two games: Star Traders: Frontiers, and City State. And I’ve actually given the latter a play (verdict so far: I don’t really get it)
-No Granblue Fantasy anime review this week. Not because I didn’t watch it, or that I don’t feel like reviewing it, but because there’s nothing much there. I didn’t even take a single screenshot. The Ferry arc is finished. Gran falls for the headspace attack despite explicitly being warned (and repeating that warning himself); I think the mirror match should have been Djeeta instead. More Gran/Lyria shipping. We get a tiny bit of backstory to Ferry, and Drang.
-Speaking of GBF, the new event is great. Whoever did the writing for this should really get into sports announcing – it’s very hype. Lyria is cute as usual, but also very, very dumb. I’m glad the new kid wasn’t some miracle wunderkind type. While I think it’s great that events are using more already-established characters, I think they went just slightly overboard this time (like, Cathrine wasn’t strictly needed).
-MegaMan event in Dragalia Lost is really lame. I mean, I get that the early games were rather…limited in the scope of the story, but they could have done a bit more here. And just rehashing the dragon fights is super lame.
-World Flipper is pretty fun. I don’t think it’s worth spending any money on, but it’s a fun diversion. I think it’s the first Cygames mobage that actually fulfills the idea of “spend a few minutes here and there playing”. But it’s definitely the D-team here: no co-op lobbies, no quick-join, not even voiced main stories. And of course, not compatible with my Chromebook. Good thing it has cute girls, or else it wouldn’t be worth even downloading and rerolling. But still, fun gameplay. Though I don’t think mixing pinball and bullet hell is the most obvious choice.
Nothing much to say here, because nothing much happened. Lots of walking around. Not much dialog for all that walking around. And then it ends before anything actually happens.
This is just a filler episode, of the worst sort: making things up without adding anything new to the story, just for the sake of having an episode. Not to say that the actual episode itself was bad or anything, but it was just kinda there. (I suppose “worst sort” is a bit of an exaggeration: it’s not a clip show, or something along that line.). It is not necessary at all: this island was only a short stop in the game, so while fleshing it out makes some sense, I don’t think it needed three episodes, like Vira’s story did.
In fact, it almost seems like this episode is literal filler. A lot – but not all – of the character art looks like CG with cell shading – kinda like the gemstone anime from a year or two ago. Things were a lot more consistent scene-to-scene than the season has been in the last several episodes (which I’ve commented on several times). The shading looks different from what I’ve been used to seeing. But sometimes it’s all normal. Makes me think that they split up the last episode into two, and filled in the rest with CG. Maybe I’m just seeing things though.
I guess they did need to fit in the “Lyria befriends Orchis” stuff in there somewhere. In the game it happened in the Lumacie part, where we meet Rosetta and Yggdrasil, which was in the last season. Except that they completely skipped all that, making that part into some business with Lyria getting mindbroken by Pommern, then fixed with the power of love (and Yggdrasil). (Also, Pommern is less maliciously evil in the game, and more of a “ends justify the means” villain.)
But still, doing it like this wasn’t the way to go about it, I think. And it takes away from Ferry’s development – she’s supposed to be the point (and, as will surprise no one, is Drang’s point in being there). Ferry, in the game, is a lot more hostile and bitter, actively keeping the party away from her (siccing monsters on them while running away), because she thinks thinks the whole situation is her fault – she wished Celeste there, so she takes the blame and everyone hates her, etc. The doctor still is there (as Drang points out, it’s silly to think that a primal beast came because a girl was lonely), but Ferry didn’t know about it, let alone had gone through all his books. As such Lyria also did her thing, trying her utmost to befriend Ferry (since no one else was too inclined to be nice to someone attacking them), eventually getting through to her, and everyone was happy, the end. And I wonder if the show will have Ferry join the crew, or if it’s going to completely make up the ending to the arc: in the game, for various reasons Ferry has no reason to stay on the island, so goes on the Grancypher.
And that’s it. Nothing too exciting, for good or ill. Just a middle episode to fill out time.
(I think from the title you can gather that there be Spoilers here.)
So yah, I finally beat it. Actually it was several days ago, but I’ve only now found time to write this little update. As I said previously, I was really hankering to get back into Cities: Skylines, and I figured I was pretty close to the end (they had that “go meet up with everyone important” that often precedes the end bosses in these games), so I decided to run for it.
My gear at that point was pretty good, I thought. I’d gotten some things to 999 quality, and even if I couldn’t get everything there, I could get pretty high up there. I didn’t bother with reforging my gear though, since a lot of the best stuff is apparently post-game materials, and I didn’t want to have to bother with the entire process of remaking things later. On top of that, I just went with the accessories that I had equipped as I was going through the game: they hadn’t made that much of a difference at that point, so I figured I was strong enough to just use what I had, and went for the final boss.
Well, I was wrong. My weapons were strong enough, but the armor wasn’t good enough. Considering I wasn’t even close to the top tier there, made sense. So I went and made some new armor (at a higher tier, but I didn’t bother min-maxing it, since I was playing on Normal), and then went back and tried again.
Back when I did Atelier Lulua, I had quite the difficulty with the final boss. I think I beat it the first time, but it was by the skin of my teeth, after a significant amount of preparation, I thought. This time, I went in with little direct preparation, and while I didn’t get it the first time, I did get it the second go pretty easily. Well, it was also close. I didn’t anticipate the second form, so that was a fun deflation from the feeling of victory after I defeated the initial form. (And I expected it to get back up after the final victory, the way the camera hovered over the boss for a bit.) I think it was more that the Lulua boss had a bunch of annoying mechanics, and that I wasn’t nearly as effective with alchemy throughout the game as I should have been. But also there was that anticipation I had, reading the guide online. For Ryza, there was (and at the time of writing, still is) no boss guide, so I just went with whatever.
That didn’t take too long, so I was excited to move on to the next game. But we weren’t done yet! I expected that the resolving the last conflict (restoring the island’s power) would be a pretty simple deal, over in just a little bit. But no, there’s actually a whole new quest dealing with that. And, while this wasn’t quite the post-game, the first step to end-game crafting came at this point, with which the unlimited gem engine could begin (duping red stones, then using those to make philosopher’s stones, then reducing those for gems for a very high gem profit).
But, all things must come to an end. And the ending to this is rather sudden, at least for Ryza. Everybody decides that they’re moving on after this, literally. Empel and Lila of course are travelers, and since they’ve accomplished their goal here (sealing the portal), they are off to do the next one. Lent is going out adventuring, which was always his goal. Surprisingly, Tao and Bos are leaving together to go to university, to better understand the ruins and all that. And of course Klaudia is moving on with her dad, now that the business deals have been finalized. Which just leaves Ryza: the one who wanted to leave home the most is the one that ends up staying.
Well, at least for the time being. After all, we have to leave room for DLC, and a sequel. Scuttlebutt is that the next game in the trilogy will be another Ryza game. This game has been, by far, the best-selling Atelier game, and obviously Gust wants to capitalize on it. And unlike all the other protagonists, there is just a lack of finality to this story. A lot of “well, goodbye…until we meet again!” moments in the ending. And while there’s a lot unresolved with the island, which is Ryza’s nominal reason for sticking around, it isn’t anything that couldn’t be resolved off-camera between games. So there’s no story reason to not get another Ryza game.
The game feels pretty short, to be honest. I beat the game with 37 hours of play time, which is less than all of the other Atelier games on my Steam account (the next-shortest, Atelier Sophie, was 42 hours). Granted, I did no DLC content at all (since none had come out until today), but that’s still pretty quick. And I also spent a lot more time (I feel) on alchemy and getting good at that.
I think part of it is that it’s so easy to avoid combat and just go with alchemy – I wasn’t even at the final combat level of 50 when I beat the last boss, which, from what I gather, is not common, since it’s easy to grind combat levels. The new system with the alchemy bottles means that you can get materials from gathering that you would normally only be able to get from monster drops. That just makes things go a lot faster. And combat in general is just faster-paced, with the ATB-like system: turns out a lot of time is spend going through menus in battle in these games, which you can’t really do here.
And in general the story seems a lot more fast-paced than the previous games. Here it almost seems to happen in one season: at the beginning of the game, there’s talk about how it’s almost drought season, and at the end it’s a race to beat the boss before said season (because the enemies hate water). But the events of the game can’t logically fit in that time period. Just Ryza’s growth on its own puts a lie to that notion: she goes from nothing to great alchemist during the course of the game (as usual); unless she’s Alchemy Jesus, there’s no way that’s plausible. (And she’s not – Empel praises her for her talents, but in no way does he indicate that she’s anything particularly special, unlike Sophie or Totori.) I think it’s just that the feeling of urgency in the game makes the game seem to go by faster.
Speaking of DLC (we were?), the first batch dropped today. The standard extended music selection (with music from all the Atelier games, and some of the other recent Gust games), some weapon skins, and Lent’s and Tao’s side stories. Also being sold is a season pass, which gets the above, character stories for the rest of the main cast, a beach episode, a new super-hard zone, and swimsuit costumes. Each of the side stories (except maybe the beach episode) will be $6, so I’m thinking I’ll do that instead of the season pass (which is $55). No sign of new characters yet, and I don’t recall seeing them on the Japanese road map.
Overall, a good game. I’ve said many times that I don’t like paying full-price for a game, or even close to full-price, but this was worth it for me. It was a change to the formula, but I think it was for the better. I look forward to seeing the new games in this series.
Last week there was no review, because the episode was a “rerun” – it’s from last season, but wasn’t showed. Halloween episode, all that. Didn’t really feel the need. But it did spoil Ferry, for the few people that watch this only on TV and don’t play the game.
But this week we’re back to the main plot. Honestly, it was kinda meh to write about, just set-up for the next episode or two. There were some funny moments, some characterization, and slightly moving forward with the plot, but otherwise not much there.
The story starts out with the Grancypher being pursued by an Imperial ship, which has somehow been upgraded to LAYZORS weaponry. Normally this sort have thing has never been a problem – the crew is hunted by the Empire, but the Grandcypher’s whole shtick is that it’s really fast, so as long as they’re traveling, they’re safe from other airships. But whatever, they end up hiding in some misty island, crashing (as one does), but otherwise OK. The Imperials don’t pursue, because it’s CURSED! No one that goes in ever goes out…
The adults in the crew go to fix the ship, while the others go into town to get supplies. Somehow, this isn’t seen as even potentially a bad idea; Katalina feels that Gran is enough to protect Lyria, after all. There is some very small bit of light shipper bait between Rackam and Katalina, like in the game actually, but after the huge yuri bait the last few episodes you’ll not be surprised that this is nothing and goes nowhere. Lyria et. al. end up in the spooky haunted town, which is inhabited entirely by zombies, much to Lyria’s initial dismay.
Turns out the town was experiencing a plague a century ago, but then the ghost ship Celeste showed up and everyone died and became zombies. The island became covered by a mystical mist which makes navigation out impossible – this is what broke the Grancypher, and this is keeping in the other recent arrivals, Sturm, Drang, and Orchis
This is apparently the place Drang wanted to go after the last episode. Well, now we know that it’s because there’s some treasure here that Drang is after, or at least that’s what he claims. How he heard about it, nobody knows. And, he somehow knows that Celeste isn’t a ghost ship, but a primal beast, which makes it pretty fortuitous that Gran and Lyria are on the scene.
Despite the absolute fishiness of Drang’s story, they all go out to look for some doctor who might have a clue about it. Lyria tries to befriend Orchis, just like she always tries with the weirdos, but Orchis isn’t having any of that, putting on her best emotionless doll impression. But then Lyria finds another weird girl, who only she and Orchis can see, who is totally not a ghost (SPOILER: she’s a ghost). As soon as Lyria reaches out to her, everyone can see her, which is apparently quite shocking. This being, who Drang names Ferry, doesn’t remember anything about herself, but has been to the location of the doctor they’re all looking for. The doc isn’t in, but all his books and such are, all of which Ferry has read in the past century.
Turns out this doctor came to the island a hundred years ago to do something with Celeste in the hopes of immortality. As these things tend to go, it involved human sacrifice, and turned out different from how the doctor thought – the spooky ghost ship look for Celeste should have tipped him off. Ferry is on the case – she’s been looking for the human sacrifice – a girl and her father – and won’t stop looking even if it takes a hundred years more! Oh, and all this exposition apparently was boring Celeste, who takes this moment to attack.
As I said, pretty much setup for what’s to come. I don’t know if this arc has enough meat in it for more than one more episode. MAL has this show listed as 13 episodes, but I don’t know if that counts last week’s episode, and I don’t know if it counts the inevitable Djeeta episodes that probably won’t air, but will be in the blurays. But next week we have the big fight with Celeste, and more stuff about Ferry.
I just don’t know what to think anymore. With all the paid shills, bot shills, and blind fans, mixed with blind haters, counter-shills, and general cynicism of the internet in general, I can’t figure out what to think about most any game, but the new Pokemon main games in particular. I wasn’t fixing to get them or anything – I don’t even have a Switch, for starters – but there’s a whole lot of opinions out there, with completely contrasting views. Some are easy to get – Pokemon has been getting more casual lately, which is somehow possible, so I get those complaints with those games. And I get the graphics complaints, and general cut corners complaints seem to be almost universal. But whether those matter, in the end? I can’t figure it out.
It doesn’t help that people in general compare the Pokemon games to other Pokemon games, and not contemporary games in general. Some of that is, again, understandable – people who’ve liked previous games in a series want to know how new ones stack up to what they know. But even general purpose reviews do this too, for their final analyses, which are what the marketers and general audiences actually seem to base their decisions on.
I’ve never actually used her at all.
It greatly amuses me when people get all mixed up between fictional characters (especially cartoon characters) and real life. Recently, GBF got a new playable character, Kou. He showed up in an event last year, and he was pretty popular with certain segments of the fandom, for various reasons. Of course, as an anime boy, he’s portrayed with a certain attractiveness, like 99% of all non-joke anime characters. He even has a somewhat sensual artwork (which I’m not going to link because I don’t have a proper screenshot I made, and it’s an IntPiPoMo post), with a potentially provocative implication behind it. So far so good, right? Well, with these new characters comes a profile, which often includes the age. And Kou is twelve! The twitter/reddit fans got all sorts of indignant, claiming how gross this all is, etc. As if liking this one picture suddenly makes one a pedo or something. And it isn’t as if that hadn’t been Kou was about that age from the first event, let alone this one – his look and actions fit a lad about that age, in both events, even if he is a bit more serious than usual. But no, now it’s unacceptable, as there’s a number.
Get the same sort of reactions, from the same sorts of people, whenever this happens. It’s just a cartoon mate, no problem (especially if there’s no porn). Same thing with any other anime character. Ryza’s age was recently revealed to be 17, and some wag went on /v/ to see if they would react the same (never mind the fact that “she has to be 18 or it’s pedo” is a very California/New York thing, not even true in most of the US, let alone the world). Of course, it being /v/, that bait was not taken, but instead reversed: what an old hag! can’t like her anymore! etc. That’s the proper seriousness with which one should take their animu waifus.
That’s why you wait until you’ve seen them, duh.
Man, I really want a pizza. I’ve had maybe one pizza since my surgery back in September (I can’t actually remember), when I used to have one about once a week. But what I want is a Detroit deep dish, not just any pizza. There aren’t any places around here that do that, at least not that I’ve seen, and not at 10pm for sure. Well, there’s Little Caesars, but that’s it, and understandably not what I’m rally going for here. But I guess it will have to do. There used to be a place right by my house, that was pretty cheap, actually pretty good, and had a good variety, including this style (though I think most people call it “pan” pizza, but that also seems to mean different things to different places). But that place got bought out by a more boutique joint (which I think went under itself, since there’s a new name). What I really would like is a Shakey’s around here – I know people are down on it, but I like that style. Obviously not a pan pizza, but it would be a frequent stop of mine in general, if there happened to be one around here.
One of the things I enjoy in life in general is knowing the scale of things. I’m a pretty visual person, so that allows me to get a better grip on things, and allows me to play with it in my imagination. It’s one thing to know that X ship is Y meters long, but knowing how it looks next to other things helps me to get that picture in my head.
And, when scale is established, in whatever sort of art, I like it to be right. If it’s something that uses an already-established world, I like things to be consistent – one thing I have against all Trek after 2009. Another thing I dislike is how some things are stated, but the visual evidence is counter to it. Mostly what I’m talking today about concerns city stuff, especially in city builders.
When a game has negative achievements.
It grinds my gears more than a little when a place in a game is said to be a great city, a small town, or anything in between, and we don’t see it. Open world games are generally quite guilty of this. Now, I realize that, until fairly recently at least, having a realistically-sized city was practically impossible, for several reasons. A big city, or even a small town, with proper NPC’s, would be very taxing on bad hardware (consoles), and crafting that would be hard on the devs even taking that out of consideration; procedural generation is a possibility, but that’s boring for the player (see Daggerfall). That consolization is a big issue: both Oblivion and Skyrim were heavily impacted by having to fit to X360 and PS3 specs. The Witcher 3 is the best about this, but even there there is some small scaling down in most places.
And then we get to the city builders themselves. Again, there are hardware limitations that we have to consider – for older stuff. But it’s always bugged me that I can’t really make a proper city in something like Cities: Skylines or SimCity 4. I think it might be somewhat possible with SimCity 4, but you have to build it piecemeal, and not have it be one continuous city, with all the gameplay limitations that come with that.
Sounds like a nice place to live.
Cities: Skylines has other issues. Look at the above picture: on the right, there is “low-density” housing: one- or two-story dwellings, with some sort of lawn maybe. On the left, there is high-density housing: skyscrapers and such. If you look closely, those both have the same footprint, generally. That’s crazy. More on that in a bit.
And, if you look on the bottom, with the stats and such, we have 84k people. Obviously, a city of this level of development would have many, many more people. And, if you follow the in-game progression, this is supposed to be a major city; my city irl feels like a mere town, and yet has 100k people. This is something I’m more willing to look past, though: simply add a zero on the end, and it ends up being much more believable and appropriate for the scales the game can reasonably run at.
My bigger problem is with the scaling of space. The devs have given out a scale for this game: 8m per side for a square. That means we can build cities from real life into the game. At least in theory. The above is the main part of my hometown. Each buildable block is 2km x 2km. Thus, the main part of my small town fills almost an entire block, since it is one mile square, which is about 1600m square. Above, you can see the difference between the layout of my irl town, in the right and center, with the normal density of buildings and roads for the game, on the left. Way different. So different, it breaks the game to try to be real.
And, at 8m squares, you get buildings with small footprints. The growable buildings here (the ones the game builds itself) are I believe up to a max of 4×4 squares, maybe 5×5. That gives up to 40m a side, for buildings that are quite tall. Up to, because they tend to have a plot around them. There are plopable buildings (player-placed) that are much bigger, which is ok, but those tend to be limited.
For me, it’s so immersion-breaking to have these huge, hyper-dense cities. I want to be able to rebuild the towns and cities I’m familiar with, to see how traffic breaks, or if the place could survive as it is, in-game. But I can’t. And it bugs me. Oh, how I wish for a city-builder with proper scale! But I doubt it will happen anytime soon, not until the console goes the way of the dodo.
I discovered something about myself lately: I only have the mental energy to be excited for two, maybe 2.5, games at a time. Since I’m currently playing five or six, I have a problem. I mean, I guess four can go into maintenance mode in my heart doing dailies and such, but what really happens is that I can barely handle five of them, and even the dailies get half-hearted. I mean, I don’t even play Dragalia Lost at (or near) reset anymore, GBF has been just login for the login bonus (not even doing the daily hards or arcanum or any of that). Even in ESO, it’s either going full-tilt into adventure, or barely summoning up the will to finish the daily writs; fortunately the weekend is almost here (I get Sunday and Monday off), and I can dedicate more time into this game. Of course, Ryza gets all my love right now.
I wonder who made those.
For some reason a Cities: Skylines video was suggested on Youtube. I started watching. Then another one. Then a challenge series. Man, now I want to play that game. But Ryza isn’t done yet…no, I have to be strong. This is why I never finished Atelier Lydie and Suelle, because I got distracted! I mentioned in one of my previous posts that C:S might be my game after Ryza, and I think that got a lot more sure.
Smaller ones. Maybe Tao’s doing it.
Speaking of Ryza, I think I’m at the point where things start to really open up. Not only are the enemies a lot harder (I’ve started dying to normal mobs sometimes, again), but I’m opening up more and more advanced recipes. I’ve now gotten all of my gathering tools combined, so I can use all at once. I do need more stuff to actually upgrade said tools to usefulness, but it’s a start. It’s slow going though, because now that I have access to everything I need to spend time doing everything. Good place to be.
That RPG feeling.
Some doofus I follow on Twitter got to go to Japan. Looking at some of his pictures, it looks like the kind of place I’d want to go. Not too foreign, but still a bit different from what I’m used to. (I’m more than a bit of a homebody, so the familiarity is comforting.) But then I see all that Japanese writing, and I’m back to being quite content with reading comics. On a scale of 1-5 descending in Japanese fluency, I’m about an 8. That, and I remember that it’s something like 13-hour flight, and I Nope right out.
Having said that, I’m starting to get that wanderlust feeling again. (I’m a deep and complicated fellow.) This summer, I had to go down to SoCal for my brother’s wedding. Going down, it was hell. I hate traffic. I hate getting delayed by cars going the speed limit – or even slower! (Three lanes on major arterial freeways should be mandatory.) I hate having to push the brake pedal for cars going 1mph slower than me! Argh, so impatient. And it was even worse going into California, because that’s when it got dark and boring. Coming back was still hell in California (actual traffic, even in the desert). But after leaving the state I went off the usual route, taking some more minor highways. Talk about a difference in stress! I think I passed maybe, maybe ten people in total (of course I passed them all); there was a stretch of maybe a hundred miles where I saw nobody going in the same direction (and like one or two in the opposite). That changed my whole perspective on travel. Trouble is, travel takes time. Time I don’t have. Well, I do have, but that takes time away from vidya! Oh, what a wretched state I’m in!
Part of the problem of IntPiPoMo right now, for me, is that of all my games I’m playing right now, only one is on Steam. These I have access to wherever I have my laptop, too, because Steam has a Linux client, and Chromebooks can do that. Not so with my non-steam stuff. So that’s why there’s a lot of Ryza pictures, and not much else (though I could have sworn I uploaded a lot of ESO pictures to my google drive recently…but I guess not).
Dating Sims on the Holodeck 