When in doubt folks, lead with the coolest screenshot that you have. This is one of those weekends when I spent a truly phenomenal amount of time playing a specific game… that I absolutely cannot talk about because reasons. I believe I clocked in around twenty hours playing the thing that I can’t talk about over the course of primarily Friday and Saturday. I look forward to seeing more of the thing that I can’t talk about seeing. Instead this morning you are going to get one of those general rundown type posts talking about where I am in various games.
I got into Shadowlands Beta out of the magnanimous nature of a friend of mine, so huge props to them for helping me out there. I’ve been piddling around over the last week and I am having a lot of fun. The most important thing to talk about however is the changes to the character creator. I can have a beard as a Blood Elf, which is phenomenal since that was not a thing you could really do well. The best you could do previously was a weak assed chinstrip. The undead models look amazing as well and are pretty much everything I have ever wanted in a rotting corpse. The big thing is it seems like they have expanded the options and decoupled them so whereas things used to be locked to specific sets of choices, but for example Tauren horn and hair and face are no longer combined in weird forced sets.
As far as the Story itself… I am getting DEEP Wrath of the Lich King vibes here and it is more than just the fact that the Ebon Blade are factoring significantly in everything we are doing right now. I am also greatly enjoying that there has been no faction based bullshit yet, and it is all a big team pulling together to save Azeroth sort of feel. The intro quest reminds me of the storming of the Dark Portal in Warlords, if that even were less on-rails. It has a “we did a thing and we were absolutely not prepared for the ramifications” type feeling to it. As far as the zone content, it reminds me of the best parts of Legion and Burning Crusade in that we are exploring a world that works NOTHING like the one we came from and it is a “stranger in a strange land” sort of feel.
In more of my usual nonsense, I for some reason decided to reinstall Return of Reckoning which is a thing. I’ve not really done much but I did create a Dwarven Iron Breaker which was my class of choice back when this thing was a live game. I have to say that the quest advisement is not super amazing. Sure this was the first game to do the whole highlight an area of the map, which was cool… but I still cannot for the life of me find a damned book that is supposed to be on a nearby bench. I got in for a bit, played through a few quests and then got frustrated. Hopefully when I am in a different mindset I can pop back in and play some more.
In other random news I have settled on what I feel is the perfect controller for my Retro Freak. I greatly prefer the layout of the 6 button genesis and saturn controllers, especially when it comes to fighting games. I never got used to hitting the shoulder buttons in place of attack keys and spent a lot of my time on SNES playing with the Capcom Soldier Pad. Ultimately I was looking for something that would facilitate my preferred layout but also offer a bunch of buttons for mapping things to. Enter the line of officially licensed Sega Saturn controllers from Retro-Bit. The only negative is the home button appears to be unique to the Switch and is not mappable, but it gives me A, B, C, X, Y, Z, Start, Select, Left bumper and Right bumper to map inputs to which neatly fits all of the systems that are playable on the Retro Freak. I have to use it wired, but I went ahead and got the Bluetooth model for future options.
Lastly I have been trying to wrap up Death Stranding, and spent most of the day yesterday working my towards the eventual conclusion of the game. My grand plan had been to be finished with it by the time Horizon Zero Dawn lands next week, and I think that is well within reach… at the very least finishing the story. There are a bunch of miscellaneous side quests that I could be doing, but I have to say the mountain region really killed my joy for running random fetch quests. Hideo Kojima really loves sending you completely out of your way… because there have been three times so far when I have been asked to more or less traverse the entirety of what was then my game map. Yesterday I was asked yet again to traverse from the furthest possible point on the west coast of the map, all the way to the east coast of the map while dealing with extremely ramped up versions of everything I had encountered before.
At this point… I am ready to be done. I have greatly enjoyed this game and the storyline has wound its way through some deeply interesting lore and world building bits, but I am ready to say goodbye to Sam Porter Bridges. It is a phenomenal game, and pending you have the time to really spend exploring it then I would highly suggest giving it a go. There is a lot that you have to get used to early in the game, but it really is a masterpiece as far as games go. What has been surprising is how much of the stuff I considered to be complete nonsense on day one, has been fully explained and has paid off in a significant way. Extremely impressive.