Uggh. A scripted-story level where you can’t build new units. Sucked in Starcraft, sucks here.

Dear strategy game designers, please just make these a cutscene that autoplays kthx. I don’t need to be involved.

Replayed chapter 2.

These fog-of-war maps are interesting in theory, but in practice the high movement speed of some hard-hitting units plus no "undo" mechanic just makes them feel random and irritating.

Tried to do a couple of the sidequests around the Friendly Arm, but found the vague directions (“just north of the Inn” uh ok) kind of frustrating.

Met & recruited Ajantis the paladin and he’s level 2 to our 1, so he’ll be useful up front.

Headed south to Beregost and dang, the wizard fight when you meet Neera is a nailbiter at level 1. I love being low level in D&D, you’ll gotta use every scrap of resources you’ve got. (In this case, Imoen was the only one to save against the Sleep spell, but her basic dagger plus a potion of speed let her turn into a blur of stabbiness and save the day.

Good stuff :D

Nashkell and the game’s first dungeon (the mines) are next.

Started the campaign a while ago and fell off around chapter 3. Picked it up again today and started over from the beginning again, just to brush up on the mechanics and (slight) plot

The game seems okay-to-good but takes a long while to get rolling

works great on iPad on with a controller too

Played another hour and change today. A thing that only occurred to me this morning, after writing that whole big thing before: While the game stops you from serving just random-garbage drinks to customers, you can assert some agency by intentionally giving people the wrong order.

I’m wondering now, if you were to persistently give Mr Donovan “girly” drinks instead of beers, would he go the hell away forever?

Tried that today, we’ll see if the strategy actually works. If it does, though, then maybe I judged the opening hours too harshly.

Tap mode is pretty fun. A smarter twist on Tetris than I’d’ve given them credit for.

Great soundtrack, though not enough songs. This Dru Flecha track whips.

When I loaded this up, I noticed that I had a save file from when I first bought it in a Steam summer sale in 2019. I had played up to the first save point, and then shelved it immediately after. Now I remember why.

Yo, this visual novel does not make a great first impression. So far, the only two messages that it seems to be transmitting are
1: being a bartender sucks
2: the future is going to suck, generally

The first couple people that you meet on day 1 are BOTH skeevy men who within their first dozen lines call women "bitches", call your bar a "hellhole"/"crackhouse", and then ask you gross sexual questions out of nowhere.

Your third patron is a demure, slightly airheaded anime super-nurse-- a character who may as well have been circled in neon yellow by the author with the note "this is my exact fetish". But nevertheless, she is a breath of fresh air after the first two.

The fourth patron is a woman who immediately freaks out and believes that you're trying to drug, rape & murder her. [eye roll. I'm sure this is a real thing that happens to bartenders, but jesus christ]

On day 2, your first patron is a cheerful sex worker (your character, Jill, responds to her sex-positive comments with an "eww, TMI" kind of reaction). The next is a cyborg assassin named Jamie, who is just... kind of a blank, "sensitive tough guy" type.

An hour and a half in, I kind of hate this game. And it's what.... a dozen hours long?

My hope is that there will be a turn here, at some point, where Jill starts showing a bit more agency and is able to tell off or kick out all of these douchey assholes. But instead, I've got the sinking suspicion that the writer is a straight white guy who surfs weeb reddit, jerks it to the most vanilla hentai, and who thinks this is just the coolest cast of edgy cyberpunk characters (narrator: they're not) and thinks I'm going to love them (I don't).

Jill's neutral, just-doing-my-job, thank-you-come-again attitude about it all is just so irritating. Here's hoping that's intentional. I'll let it play out some more, and see.

It's another classic RPG Sunday.

After finishing Fallout last week, I'm moving on to the year 1998 with Baldur's Gate (though I'll be playing the Enhanced Edition, including the Siege of Dragonspear expansion that was only added much much later).

This will be my third BG playthrough altogether. Decided to roll a Shaman this time, a new class added in the EE. They're like sorcerors but for druid spells, plus instead of shapeshifting they have a bard-like dance that summons spirit creatures to fight for you. (Yes I recognize that'll make zero sense if you don't know anything about D&D. Prepare for a lot of that over these next weeks and months.)

Played the new tutorial and the good old prologue up through meeting Jaheira & Khalid at the Friendly Arm.

Imoen got killed twice on the stairs going up there. That's probably the most deadly fight in the entire game, and it immediately illustrates the difference in design ethos between this & Fallout. In Fallout, there would be a locked back door you could sneak through, plus some way to smooth-talk past the assassin, bare minimum. Instead, Bioware makes it a mandatory fight against a guy that can cast Magic Missile at level 3... generally instant death for someone with <10 hp. I'm grateful for the quick-save & quick-load there.

But now, with our little party-of-four gathered, we'll venture forth to Nashkell and the mines, next time.

Okay, so the final section of this game is rougher than I remember. I still admire the way they let each player figure out their own solution, but it ended up feeling a bit anticlimactic for me this time.

Became an initiate of the Brotherhood of Steel, rescued a scribe from The Hub, and got a suit of power armor as a reward.

(The scribe was being held by only 4 dudes, but one of them had a combat shotgun, so kind of a tough fight at level 9. Needed to take Psycho to survive it.)

Dang, it's striking how this game just rips through quests at warp speed, compared to the CRPGs that came after it. In Fallout 4, or even something like D:OS, this questline would've entailed 10-20 hours of faffing around.

Stayed up way too late exploring The Glow. This is my favorite part of this game, I think. Stresses your resources mechanically, just as it also starts to reveal big chunks of the story's central mystery.

I'm on a summer vacation, and it's got me reminiscing about my high school summer break in 1999, when I first picked up Fallout and Fallout 2 from the markdown rack at an Office Depot and played them both back to back on endless August days.

So, this Sunday I booted up the GoG version of Fallout Classic, picked one of the 3 default characters (Albert, the vault's charismatic rabblerouser) and headed out into the wasteland.

I often forget that this game is so concise. Completed the entire first half of the game in one long sitting. The mainline quest to find a water chip involves visiting 3 main locations: Shady Sands/Vault 15, The Hub, and Necropolis, with an optional sidetrip to Junktown)

The Switch version was on sale and has crossplay now, so played that for about a dozen hours during the Summer Games this year.

Game's still fun on the small screen, gang.

Completed Mass Effect 1 on Legendary difficulty

(...in a series of sessions leading up to this day, obviously, not all in one 30-hour marathon. This was a couple months before I started using this site.)