Overwatch! It's... still fun!

Played through the early Hive section, up to Pharod's Court.

Kind of speeding through on the critical path, as I've decided that part of the thing that killed my run-through of Baldur's Gate earlier this year was the desire/necessity of a completionist playstyle.

Also loving the density of this, after the sparsity of BG. Every named NPC, even random shopkeepers and layabouts, have interesting things to say.

Still more fights than I remember, but fortunately the random unavoidable ones (the thugs that jump you in the Hive, for instance) are really easy.

Picked up the Switch version today. I already bought this game full-price on two different platforms (PS4 & Oculus), so I wanted to wait for a sale.

Wish I’d done it earlier tho. The Switch version feels like the ultimate version of an already top-notch game.

The Sunday Session
Fallout 2, session 2

Oof. Coming back to Fallout 2 twenty years later is ruff, y’all

This feels like the devs had 11 months to take their existing assets and turn out a bigger, better sequel to one of the most influential RPGs of all time. It feels like that because this is exactly what happened.

Honestly, I don’t get why folks prefer FO2 to the original. Even on my first playthrough in the 90s, I remember thinking FO2 felt twice as big and twice as empty. It’s the proto-version of the Assassin’s Creed Odyssey problem.

Played through the second section of the game, in the very boring Den. Rescued Vic, and you have the option from there to go to Vault City or Redding.

I opted to go to Vault City, which in fact sneakily steers you discovering Modoc instead. The trouble with Modoc is…. It’s super boring! Not even counting Arroyo, it’s the third boring farm town in a row that you end up having to save in the first act of the game.

In Modoc, I got eaten by wild dogs in a poorly constructed sidequest, and had zero desire to reload.

Thinking I’m gonna abandon FO2 and gonna skip ahead down the list again. Just not feelin’ this.

Next up: Planescape Torment!

The Sunday Session

Let's go! I like to play pre-gens in these old RPGs whenever they're available, and Fallout 2 has one for each of its main pillars: a fighter, a talker, or a sneaker.

I've only finished FO2 once before, 20 years ago, and I remember playing as Chitsa (the sneaky one). This time, after struggling through the janky combat in Baldur's Gate all summer, I'm kind of in the mood to get in some decent, turn-based fights in FO2 tbh, just to wash that rancid RTWP stink off me.

So, I decided to ride out with the default Chosen One-- the hard-hitting basic himbo Narg. Small Guns, Melee, Throwing. High strength & max endurance, and with the Gifted trait, so he's pretty decent at everything in the early game.

In these first few hours, I finished the temple of trials, and the first couple mini-quests around Arroyo and Klamath, in order to scratch together the $350 to free Sulik.

sidenote: I like how Sulik's mission dovetails with your main quest. He's also looking for Trader Vic, searching for his sister who was captured by the Enclave. So, teaming up with him makes sense. Kind of obvious, but it's just nice to be back in the world of smart, competent game design again.

The Sunday Session

Played the first couple hours of SoD, then made a new game and replayed a bit with the default party (Minsc & co) just out of curiosity.

This is.... okay-ish. But... nah, I'm done with this. Maybe I'll circle back to Siege of Dragonspear and Shadows of Amn sometime in the future, but for now there are SO MANY better games on this list that I'd rather be playing, and I am so sick of real-time-with-pause.

Onward to Fallout 2 (a better rpg!)

aaaaaaaaa the last chapter of this game is so baaaaaaaaaad

Up until this point I had been doing a pretty completionist playthrough, so I'm fairly certain I'm not underleveled anymore. No, my strong suspicion is that the RTwP combat system just falls the fuck apart whenever these games thrust you into any semi-complicate tactical scenario.

Towards the end of the return-to-Candlekeep chapter, I dialed it all the way down to Story Mode Easy and just went into speedrun mode to get to an ending. And even then I died a few times in that ridonkulous final boss fight with Sarevok.

Despite it all, I still kinda perked up when it rolled straight into the Siege of Dragonspear afterward. Seeing something brand new happen in this engine is... well, novel, obviously. We'll see if it's any fun.

But, I'll say this: This has me considering the notion of dumping ALL of the non-turn-based games off this Sunday Session list. Or at least, giving myself permission to dump each one early instead of slogging through 60+ hours in hopes of it clicking eventually. Call it the Baldur's Gate Clause in the social contract.

I remember the combat in Planescape being mostly avoidable, so that I'll probably stick with. Weirdly, I also remember enjoying Icewind Dale though, so I'm curious to see if its just that the later Infinity Engine games had better encounter design, and that helped to smooth out these jagged difficulty spikes.

Ditto SoD, honestly. I'm going to continue on with SoD next Sunday, but I can also see myself bailing on that if these same frustrations keep cropping up there.

The Sunday Session

Gosh, I'm still playing this game? For some reason?

Finished the Cloakwood chapter. Kind of the same ol' story of the rest of the game: Has some surprisingly good ideas, but then some of the details are so utterly effed up that it makes me want to ragequit at least once per hour.

The interesting idea about Cloakwood is that it takes days of in-game time to travel in and out of the deep woods, and the random encounters on your way out are really tough. So, the map-travel mechanics subtly encourage you to keep pushing forward instead of turning back to resupply.

The effed-up thing about Cloakwood is that the overall enemy theme is POISON, and the poison (esp. from Ettercaps) is so fast-acting and damaging that it's basically an instant death sentence. Most of the time you can't even get your cleric across the screen in time to save somebody.

So instead every fight breaks down to: did you bring enough antidote vials so that every party member can use one every single time they get hit? No? Well, you're boned then, because it's a loooooong way back to town.

(Minor aside: I kind of like all the new companions you meet in Cloakwood. Coran in particular is an arrow-shootin' motherfucker with his 20 Dex. IIRC in the original version these guys were all so low-level that they were totally unusable. Maybe in the Enhanced Edition they start with their XP set to your current party average? If so: good job Beamdog.)

(Also: LOL, oh yeah, the Boots of the Cheetah basically break the last third of this game but they're silly fun anyway.)

Finally cleared the sidequest-a-palooza section of the game, and thus leveled up enough to plow through the rough series of archery battles in the Bandit Camp at the end of Chapter 4.

IIRC it’s smooth-sailing from here through the end of the game now. A clear plot-thread to follow, and fewer jarring bumps of difficulty along the road.

Another surprising thing that happened this session: a random event triggered where my squad’s healer (the drow cleric Viconia) picked a fight with my MVP archer Kivan, and they went straight into a duel to the death! I had to side with Kivan just because his DPS is way too useful to lose, but Viconia is a more interesting character. Or was, I guess, cuz she dead now!

I’m pretty sure she comes back in BG2 regardless of what happens in 1, but it’s still kind of a bananas thing to have happen out of the blue.

In later games Bioware obv figured out clearer and less jarring ways to handle those kinds of story events, but I gotta respect them for going for it here.

The Sunday Session:

God this game is so janky. I don't think I could in good conscience rate even the EE version above a 2.5, but I'm still having fun. It's very much a thing you have to bring your own fun to.

The #1 way that I've found to have fun with the game is to treat each Sunday's session like a series of XCOM missions. I start every time in the Friendly Arm, I pick a squad of companions, then head out into the realm to complete a quest and make some coin.

I'm level 5ish now, have been a mercenary on the Sword Coast for about 3 in-game months and have made about 10,000 gold. (Come to think of it, I've been playing once a week for about 3 irl months too. Huh, neat.)

This sesh: Still cleaning up some sidequests in the southern part of the map. Firewine Ruins, Captain Brahe, the Xvart Village, Seawatcher Tower, etc. I do like how each wilderness area-- though visually samey-- still has little touches of uniqueness, enough that revealing each square of the map feels like it's own little sidequest in itself.

I do like this game even though in modern terms it's real rickety and badly designed.

Sidequesting around in Chapter 3 (the bandit-clearing chapter) and just hit level 5.

Switched it up by taking Imoen, Minsc & Dynaheir along this time. Even though you don’t need to— and in fact, it makes it harder— I enjoy playing this game like XCOM. Taking a different handpicked team each quest, with a mix of veterans and rookies so that you can train up the lower-tier recruits.

It’d be kinda neat if the fatigue mechanic in BG worked like XCOM EU, where injured people take days to recover instead of 8 hours, forcing you to rotate through all your characters.

My initial bad impression is starting to wear off. I still don’t see myself giving this more than a 3/5 but I admit there are parts to this story that have some heart.

Love the true or dare bit at the Mega Christmas party

Hit day 7, the Sunday bit where Jill takes a day off and just has a few beers on the balcony with Dana (her boss), and my opinion of the game has risen quite a bit just from that sequence.

I love the two custom bits of UI that it introduces: first the MGS homage conversation screen, and then the balcony screen with its cheeky "beers had, beers remaining, current beer %" meter.

Writing in this section is pretty good! I'm still skeptical but I could see this getting interesting.

The Sunday Session

Still groovin'. Now that I've done a bunch of thorough exploring and side-questing in the wilderness areas around the southern Sword Coast, I was OVER-leveled for the Nashkell Mines on this playthrough.

Also discovered that if you cast Silence on Mulahey while he's still neutral, then he won't be able to call for backup during his sudden-but-inevitable betrayal and that fight becomes a pushover. Still feels cheesy, but w/e.

Rescued Xan, dumped him off at the Friendly Arm, and went into Chapter 3.

From here, the timing gets a bit annoying, because I want recruit Kivan into my party, but his impatience to kill Tazok is represented mechanically as an invisible, 10-day ticking clock. If you don't complete chapter 3 within that period, the best archer in the game just effs off into nothingness. Not the best game design, but I respect that Bioware was experimenting with a different kind of trade-off than the usual "gets mad when you kick puppies" routine.

Right now my core crew is my sorceror Tarmigan, plus Dorn (the heavy), Branwen (the medic) and Montaron (the scout).

Adding Kivan will, I think, make the back half of the game a cakewalk, since bows are so OP in BGEE.

Maybe instead, just for fun and a bit of challenge, I'll keep rotating the #5 and #6 slot every session, build up sort of a bullpen of these lower-tier dudes a la XCOM.

Having fun, finally, now that I've restarted with a new guy and a new approach to the game.

BG really pushes you to focus on the main story quest at first. All of the people you meet early on are all "Hey, did you hear about the Nashkell Mines? Are you going to Nashkell? When are we going to Nashkell?"

Following that thread, though, runs you into a gauntlet of unexpectedly brutal fights that immediately reveal all the game's worst design flaws.

This time, I remembered that this game let's you wander waaaay off the beaten path in the early chapters. I'm doing that now, with this new run, and exploring all these weird, low-stakes side areas turns out to be a much better way to get back into the BG groove and relearn how all this is supposed to work.

I succumbed to restartitis and rerolled a new character, a sorcerer this time. Considered installing the Sword Coast Stratagem mod and may still do that at some point to help fix this game’s wack AI if nothing else.

Will post more deets next Sunday, I’m in a spot with sketchy internet tonight.

Making a fruitless search on the forums for the perfect custom character portrait still counts as playing the game, right? …no? Hmmm.

Went back, recruited Kivan, leveled Branwen so that she could silence Mulahey, and finally cheesed my way through that boss fight at the end of the Mines.

That fight is a clustercuss y’all. The rooms are waaaay too small for that many minions, and the rounded corners make it hard to judge LOS in the hall, so I spent the whole fight having no idea who could even attack whom.

The Sunday Session

Did not make it through the boss fight at the end of Nashkell mines. Think I am under-leveled.

All the little kobold encounters in the mines make me remember the power of archery in this game. You can basically cruise through every encounter by having one tank and everyone else lobbing arrows.

Sunday Session continued. After the last sesh, I got the idea that I could meet the game halfway by ferrying some of these excess companions to the Friendly Arm, instead of just leaving them stranded in the wilderness.

So, I did a bit of sidequesting today and accomplished that, ferrying Minsc, Dynaheir and Kivan to the Friendly Arm, and parking Edwin, Jaheira and Khalid at the inn in Nashkell.

Also-- now that I've got a serious business frontline in Dorn and Branwen-- I was able to complete that early quest to clear out the giant spiders from Landrin's house in Beregost. That one awards a shocking amount of XP, seeming tailormade to boost you up to level 2.

(So I did! Woohoo, level two!)

Kind of a fiddly session, but I'm now-- absolutely swear to god-- gonna get right on clearing those pesky kobolds out of the Nashkell Mines.

Got a Saturday night jump on The Sunday Session this week, since I’ll be going out of town for Labor Day.

I had forgotten that you meet a bunch of NPCs in the town of Nashkell before you make it to the Mines. Including Minsc, who immediately sends you on a time-limited quest to rescue the witch Jaheira from a gnoll stronghold. That’s a great little sidequest.

You also meet two more new-in-the-EE companions— Rasaad the monk and Dorn the blackguard. Rasaad sadly got obliterated by a critical hit from the Gnoll Chieftain, and I didn’t like him well enough to raise him. So, my first casualty. RIP to you, kickpuncher.

One of BG1’s biggest flaws is that, once you max out your party at 6, meeting new companions becomes kind of a pain in the ass. The old companions that you dismiss don’t return to any central location, they just stand forever in the spot where you left them.

For that reason, I’m planning to stick with a party of 5 for this run: me and Imoen, plus Neera, Branwen, and Dorn. That’ll leave a swing space open for any others we meet along the way. (Plus, you level up a bit faster with 5)

OK, so: NOW we’re on to the Nashkell Mines. For real, I can see them, they’re right over there.

Bluhhh I can’t believe I’m still playing this game. The writing is so bland and lowkey toxic. The neighborhood intrigue is so contrived and uninteresting.

I’m on day 6… I think that’s only halfway through? Goddammit.