Adepta Sororitas

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Yesterday was a good day, although it wasn’t a terribly productive one. Some months back one of my good friends… legitimately probably the only friend that I am still in contact with from my High School years… moved into an apartment in the same suburb of Tulsa where I live. I legitimately don’t see a lot of people right now because still fairly leery from Covid numbers in our area. However yesterday I got out of my comfort zone a bit and we got together for about an hour yesterday afternoon. I had a little something for him and he a little something for me… though his little something is pretty phenomenal. Both of our gifts were a little self serving in that I picked him up a Magic the Gathering Commander deck because I would really like to play some in person Commander soon.

He on the other hand went to way more effort and assembled and painted me this start to a Sisters of Battle Army. Again because he would really like to get some war-gaming in soon when things calm down a bit. The only problem that we foresee is that neither of us have a large table, or really the ROOM for a large table to set up and play on. I did wonder about maybe booking a backroom in the local library every so often for a games day. I miss playing games physically and would love to get engaged in more of that… now that legitimately he lives less than two miles away from my house. The photo does not at all do justice to the models as the lighting I snapped a picture under is not exactly optimal for miniatures.

In other gaming news I have passed the Wall Market section of Final Fantasy VII Remake and honestly am not super far off from the point where I left on in my PS5 run of the game. PC gaming is just more conducive to my lifestyle right now and it is super easy for me to drop into a game. I guess I could be playing remotely through my laptop via the third party app that I have been using. That is probably how I am going to play Horizon Forbidden West but there is just something preferable about controlling these games with a mouse and keyboard for me. The only section that has been particularly awful is the motorbike combat section… where I had to contort my hands in such a way as to hit the throttle button while also steering and swinging a sword. It is nothing that changing the keybinds would not fix but I didn’t take that amount of time to figure out a new scheme.

I am poking my head into New World about once a day to loot three packages and create a sword mold for a daily expertise boost. All of the other activities are sort of a bit “much” for me right now. I am very much only tangentially engaged in the game. The servers have merged and as a result I now play on Frislandia instead of Minda given that all of Arkadia Theta merged into a single server. Everything is definitely more lively and I am sure that I could probably go back to farming outdoor content for expertise levels if I wanted to. However I just have not found the drive to return to group activity. Most of the people that I had been playing with from the larger Minda community jumped ship to other servers and the thought of trying to make inroads from scratch again… does not seem terribly compelling.

I am interested to watch the map over the next few days. When the servers merged we inherited Frislandia’s map which was largely dominated by Syndicate. The only non-syndicate territory was unfortunately Brightwood… where I have my Tier 4 house. Over night it seems that a Marauder guild managed to capture Cutlass Keys, and there are a handful of other wars brewing. According to the folks on Frislandia, the server has always been dominated by Syndicate so I guess we will see how well the upcoming wars shake out in favor of that status quo. It seems like at least one of the servers that merged in was Covenant dominant because almost all of the Wars that are queued up are team Yellow trying to seize territory.

Christmas Doldrums

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Good morning friends… or at least it is still morning as I sit down to start writing this post. I have been struggling the last few days to find purpose when it comes to making a post. As of last Friday I am officially on Christmas break until the new year and finding it hard to keep any semblance of normal pattern going. We’ve been running around and scrambling to do the last things needed to do before the holiday proper and knocking off various things from our list. The biggest of these was dealing with some big expenditures yesterday. Namely my wife has needed new tires on her vehicle for awhile, and like everything else… the price of new tires has gone through the roof. Lastly we had to settle up the very large bill that comes with having a cat in the hospital under constant care for a week.

This last bit really destroyed my forward momentum for the day and I spent the rest of the day being very sad about losing Kenzie again. This ended up translating unfortunately into me being angry about everything all day long… because I sometimes have trouble translating sadness into an emotion that I can deal with on a day to day basis. It is so much easier to feel angry at the little things than accept that I am mired in being completely wrecked still from losing my baby girl. It does not help that both Mollie and Josie have been acting weird… with Mollie pretty much living exclusively upstairs, and Josie living exclusively downstairs. I had hoped that maybe Mollie would ease up and come out of her shell a bit since Kenzie was an antagonistic force. Instead it is almost as though Mollie has reverted back to the kitty who wouldn’t snuggle with us.

In our travels yesterday we went to Gardner’s books, which is a massive used bookstore here in Tulsa. If you are ever in the vicinity, you should totally check it out especially if you are a bibliophile. One of my favorite things are these two Star Wars action figure statutes, that are effectively 6 foot tall versions of the Kenner toy line from my childhood. I am pretty certain that at one point they had a Luke and an Obi Wan but I didn’t see them when roaming the store. This place is just so damned weird and eclectic with an odd blend of lots of different “geek” things all thrown into a single store. I noticed that they suddenly have some Warhammer 40k stuff when I don’t remember them ever having miniatures in the past. They have always been a great source for old RPG source books and such, but I really never know what I am going to find there on each subsequent visit.

As far as gaming goes, I am finding myself playing mostly Final Fantasy VII Remake on the PC. I seem to go through this thing at the end of the year where I mostly play a bunch of single player titles. I should be fighting my way through the queue in Final Fantasy XIV and working on getting my gear score up there… but just the act of needing to plan my play times rather than pop in at a moments notice is sorta harshing my Endwalker buzz. What makes this even more tragic is my friend Grace seems to be super into the game again… and I really need to figure out how to relight my spark in order to do some fun group time activities.

Instead I am finding it way more my speed to chill out and play some single player Final Fantasy instead. FF7R is pretty great and I greatly appreciate the action feel to it. I know that is a point of contention for some folks, but right now… at this very moment it seems to be the sort of game I need. I am hoping I can snap out of this funk that is circulating around me, because I do want to be out there and active for everyone. It isn’t like I have development my mental block around tanking, because I am perfectly find random queuing for activities. It is just that my mental patterns are flowing in a way as to greatly enjoy Destiny 2 and FF7R right now… and less so FFXIV. Here is hoping that changes throughout the break. I never did beat FF7R so I would like to do that maybe now that I have some more time on my hands.

FFVII Remake PC Thoughts

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On December 16th, Final Fantasy VII Remake came out on the PC, and once again I have been a sucker and repurchased the game. I had some credit and a coupon on the Epic Games Store which knocked down the price tag but be warned this game on this platform is fully embracing Square’s new $70 default price for games. There are lots of comments about this trend, but I don’t so much mind it. The price has been stuck at $60 for a new game for a very long time and has not taken into account a whole slew of issues that have increased the cost of game development. We have been insulated from the actual cost of development for a very long time and I fully expect the price to keep moving up there.

I think we also have this habit of misremembering the price of games from the past. This is a Toys R Us ad from Christmas 1996 and you can see there are three games that are already going for $70 in 1996 money. Adjusted for inflation that $70 item in 96 would be $124 today. I remember that when Final Fantasy 3 (known now as 6) came out it was around $80 and Phantasy Star 4 was roughly $90 making those roughly $140 and $160 in today’s money. I am just uncertain if a $70 new release is a hill worth dying on right now. However based on the various YouTube channels that I watch… it seems to be a bridge too far for some folks. For me I had coupons and some credit which took the price down to something worth it to me in order to play the game with a mouse and keyboard.

The game runs exceptionally well… but it damned well better on a RTX 3080. The only awkwardness is just how generally awful the menu system is in the game. WASD mimics a dpad, and you have to use it to navigate through the menu options… which should instead just be accessible with your mouse. It reminds me a lot of some of the early Xbox 360 ports like Force Unleashed which had a similar “keyboard as controller” sort of control scheme. I have gotten used to it pretty quickly with your mouse wheel being able to zip up and down menu structures but it might be too much for some folks to engage with. There are some really weird choices like the Spacebar for example opens up your combat menu and M brings up the menu options… whereas N is your map. I am hoping it gets either an official update or an unofficial patch that makes all of this work more smoothly. However it is no worse than other Square ports that I have played.. which often screw up the interfaces.

Combat however feels fluid and I can forgive a lot of fiddling with UI elements if the moment to moment gameplay is enjoyable. Mouse look is flawless and you can attack by left clicking in an action role-playing style. That said… for the people who did not play in Action combat mode… I can maybe see being frustrated with the game. All of the things that I generally considered “fine” would rapidly become infuriating if I were actually fiddling with the menus a lot. For me since I embrace the action mode rework of FF7, the end result feels pretty fluid. The only negative are the few segments where your camera is fixed Resident Evil style and you have to navigate with just WASD. Those felt kinda awful on the console as well, so I think that is just poor design on the part of the game and not something specific to the PC port.

Essentially if you don’t have a PlayStation 4 or 5… then this is potentially your only real option for playing through the Final Fantasy VII Remake content. If it had release on PC day one, then I absolutely would have chosen this platform from the start. If you prefer gaming with a mouse and keyboard… then again this might be the better option for you. You can always hook up a controller and everything seems to work just like it did on PlayStation. There is a lot of fiddling with the UI which is not great, but for me it is fine and I am enjoying myself playing through the early bits of VII Remake again. If the price tag is a barrier for you, then I figure in six months time that will be resolved as well.

Games of Early 2022

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Good Morning Friends! I am very much in vacation mode right now because I am off work until the New Year. As we wind down things for 2021, I usually end up starting to think about what is going to be releasing next year. More specifically since months fly by so quickly… I am focused on the games we already have release dates for during the first quarter of 2022. In an attempt to make content happen without talking about Endwalker spoilers… I thought I would spend some time this morning going over some of the upcoming releases that I specifically care about.

Weird West

Technically this is already available if you are interested in playing early access. What really interests me about this game is how much it looks like a classic Fallout game, that is set in the wild west… but with vampires and zombies and such. Essentially two folks from Arkane left to found a new studio and the game is being published by Devolver Digital… which usually means it is going to be some nonsense. I’ve been waiting for awhile for this game to officially launch and I am ready to spend a bit roaming around this setting.

  • January 11th – Windows, PlayStation, Xbox (Game Pass)

Monster Hunter Rise

I get that this has been out for half a year now on the Nintendo Switch, but truth be told… my “console” of choice is likely always going to be the PC. Since I never really got into Monster Hunter Rise before now, I am hoping to give it a spin when it releases on Steam. I’ve played the demo and it controls pretty much like Monster Hunter World did, which felt far better on PC for me personally than it did on console. Mouse and Keyboard makes everything better for me, so hoping that it gives me the desire to actually play the game and experience it all.

  • January 12th – PC Release – Already available on Switch

Dying Light 2 Stay Human

I loved Dying Light. It was such a great take on the Zombie game and was way more detailed and engaging than I expected it. Since this was first announced I have been waiting for it to release, and now it finally is coming out. This has had an extremely fraught release schedule and gone through development hell… so I have to say I am a bit concerned about how good of a game it is going to be when we finally get our hands on it. I am a sucker for this sort of game though so I figure I am going to be on board for trying it regardless of how big of a mess it might end up being. I mean I loved Cyberpunk 2077 and Mass Effect Andromeda when the rest of society seemed to be panning them as awful… so my tastes may be slightly different than the zeitgeist.

  • February 4th – Windows, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch

Horizon Forbidden West

This friends is why I own a PlayStation 5, pure and simple. Horizon Zero Dawn was my favorite game of the PlayStation 4 generation, and I am so ready to join Aloy on another adventure. I wish this was coming out on PC at the same time as the PS4/PS5 versions but I know I will probably double dip on this title and play it again when the PC version eventually releases. I enjoyed this so much more with a Keyboard and Mouse, but I was able to enjoy every last minute of it with a controller as well so regardless… I am so damned ready to be revisiting this world.

  • February 18th – PlayStation 4/5

Destiny 2: Witch Queen

I have to admit that I had all but sworn off this expansion for Destiny 2. I am still annoyed at the vaulting of content, however after coming back to the game recently I have had this whole experience of just how damned fun it can be. There is an almost truly oppressive amount of content that is relevant, so I guess I now sorta get why they are vaulting some of it because it really is almost too much stuff to juggle. I might be a sucker, but I guess I am now on board for this nonsense.

  • February 22nd – Windows, PlayStation, Xbox, Stadia, Luna

Elden Ring

I have to admit I am not fully bought into this game. I am nowhere near as hyped as everyone else seems to be. I don’t really like souls games in general but I do really like the world surrounding them. Open World games are my jam and I am curious if the souls formula will work for me… when in a big damned exploration game. I am still not certain if I am going to be playing this game, but it is definitely on my radar at least to be watching.

  • February 25th – Windows, PlayStation, Xbox

Tunic

This honestly is one of the games that I am looking forward to full stop. Tunic is essentially the original Legend of Zelda with a super cute fox character. I’ve played the demo for this game and have waited and watched as it got subtle updates each year… until now we finally have a release date. If you loved the original Legend of Zelda, maybe give this game a look.

  • March 16th – Windows, Mac, Xbox

Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands

So this is one of those games that I am interested in… but maybe not as hyped as some folks are about it. I feel like Tiny Tina is a character that is great in small doses… but can be a bit much at times. I think I am going to dig a Borderlands game but with Melee and Magic. I did not really enjoy Borderlands 3, so that also gives me pause because I am not exactly sure that Gearbox has the same magic that they once did. However I did really like the latest trailer so here is hoping it ends up being phenomenally fun.

  • March 25th – Windows, PlayStation, Xbox

Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons

Me and Guild Wars 2 have had a fraught history. The next expansion is coming soon, and I know I will probably give it a spin to see if it grabs me. There is a lot about this expansion that looks interesting, but also I know how much I have generally bounced off Guild Wars 2. So we will see if this one does it for me.

  • Early 2022 Release Date – Windows

What did I end up missing that you are anxiously looking forward to? I really only covered the first few months of 2022 since so many other games don’t have definite launch windows. I would love to hear the games you are looking forward to. Drop me a line below.