I'm playing Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma and I am having a blast so far. It's a great combination of a variety of games, all wrapped up in terrible graphics, but that's okay. It's fun anyway.

I'm about to hit 70 hours in ARC Raiders and figured I would share some thoughts. I did write a Steam review of the game around the 50 hour mark:

It took me about 52 hours to finish all the quests in the game (up to cold snap's quests) and the first raider deck, so now I can probably fairly review ARC Raiders...

It's great! It's a very interesting game in all ways: the gameplay is somehow a pretty unique take on the extraction shooter despite not seeming to be one at first glance; the graphics are very good; the game is polished to hell and back with some real physicality to your character's movement that you don't see often in games (the body movement reminds me a bit of RDR2); the AUDIO, oh god, the audio, not only does it sound so good, but the design of the audio effects of the robot enemies is just so good, the positional and environment processing on VOIP in world is next level. There are SO many aspects of this game that are just insanely polished and elevate the game to AAAA status in my book.

At one point, I was so mad over getting killed by random people in solos that I thought I would never finish the quests and definitely never even try to do the Expedition stuff. But that was 20 hours ago, and once I learned to stop full on traipsing through the tulips and start being a little more distrustful of people, I started to keep a single loadout around a lot longer. Now, for want of any other goal, I am doing the expedition stuff, just farming garbage just to have an excuse to keep going topside.

I don't play trios ever because I don't really care for the PVP in this game. I don't really think the game is built for PVP unless you can no-life the game so that you have enough funds to make it feel easy to get new loadouts. If you go into PVP as a casual, even if you survive a team fight or two, your shield is going to break and then you're pretty much screwed. I guess you can bring in multiple shields if you're smart. I'm not smart. So I stick to solos where PVP is very rare and easily avoidable. In solos you are most likely to end up bonding with some other player who you will never see again, and that's another small part of the charm of this game that just feeds into the great atmosphere and environment. We're raiders, we're not really friends, but we're not enemies either; we're just a couple of strangers who met up for a few minutes topside and our interests aligned long enough for us to not shoot each other in the back (and what would be the point? we'd be fighting over scraps and garbage, who cares).

Anyway, this game is a trip. I can't believe I am sitting here itching to go back in just to sift through apartment buildings looking for candle holders and lightbulbs. At face value, that's ridiculous. But in practice, it's immensely satisfying.

Well, 20 more hours later, I got my lightbulbs and candle holders. I also ended up randomly grouping up with people to take down the Matriarch, which was quite the experience; I'm also about to finish upgrading all of my workbenches, which I definitely thought I would never do. The game has really impressed me with its ability to keep forcing me to move the goal posts on exactly when my disinterest in the game will reach its peak. I thought I was basically over the game 30 hours ago, but here I am, still wanting to go back in. I'm essentially just farming for the current event and the expedition, which I don't even care that much about, but the thinnest excuse to keep playing the game is all I really need, I think.

Just to test out image slideshow functionality, here's all of the umamusume I got during a run of like 100 pulls.

❮ ❯

It was surprising several months ago, and it's more surprising now, I am still playing Umamusume Pretty Derby. For the past few months my goal has been saving up carats for the release of Manhattan Cafe. Well, she came out on the 8th and I had something like 300+ pulls saved up, so I obviously pulled her (and like 5 three star umas along the way). Happy day! I am not going to play a game and not try to snag the gothy characters. I have yet to play her career mode, because I rarely do that these days in the game, but I am trying to do it... what was this all for if not to see her storyline?

In other news, PETA, which I donate to, really pissed off the Umamusume fandom today with this image, which is hilarious. I mean, it's true, horse racing is bad, people, no matter how you dress it up!

Two nights ago I beat Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter. It was really great. I especially appreciated that it had a "very easy" mode that was indeed very easy. Compared to some other JRPGs I've played (like Tales of Arise) there characters were very memorable and I think the ending made the game rank up there with Persona 4 and FF7 Remake as far as truly great JRPGs go. I definitely recommend it. Looked great (compared to something like the newest Rune Factory on Switch 2) on PS5 Pro and ran great as well.

It might be hard to believe but I am still playing Umamusume Pretty Derby. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a great asynchronous game to play throughout the day slowly, or to play when you’re experiencing downtime in another game (for me this has been: between races in Wreckfest, and while I am dead and waiting for a revive in the BF6 beta).

Once you’ve trained enough umas and start repeating their career mode, the roguelike gameplay really kicks in and, honestly, it’s pretty satisfying. It must suck to be a kid and have no life because the time limits on how many careers and team trial races you can do have yet to affect me… but we’re getting close! Luckily I have so many other umas to train, I shouldn’t get too impatient.

My heart breaks for King Halo

Her mom was a famous Umamusume and her mom calls her saying shit like “Are you ready to stop being delusional and give up? Stop before you disgrace yourself.”

And with my expert training we’ve successfully proven that her mom is… right. She’s lost every race. Her career is ending in shame and embarrassment.

I had to abandon my PSI-only playthrough of System Shock 2 because I am a giant baby and the game is very hard. I was only an hour and a half into it, so it wasn’t a big deal. I respec’d as a Navy boy, like 41% of gamers on Steam, and seem to be going for a gun-focused jack of all trades with no psionic ability at all.

I’m finally past the point that I got to as a teenager, which means I got to Deck 4 and saw the (in retrospect, as an adult, obvious) big reveal. But even with some more careful choices, I am still finding myself getting utterly schooled by this game on normal difficulty. No wonder teenage Brad, who was bad at video games and impatient, bounced off it despite the wonderful everything about the game.

I’m not quite sure what I am going to do. The worms and the flies are pretty brutal and now there are zombies who can throw grenades at me. How the fuck is anyone supposed to survive this? I feel like I should go back and respec again as some sort of mutant melee tank hero, because you’re always lacking for heals and ammo.

Maybe I am just not playing smart enough. It took me a while to figure out I needed to play Prey (2016) as if I was really there, and I’m still not quite there with System Shock 2. I should be noting down which replicators have stuff I need and be doing more backtracking. The maps felt massively huge when I was a teenager, but now they seem quite small and it’s very easy to cover them quickly… so why am I so stubbornly insisting I never leave a floor except to get chemicals for research? I am being a silly goose.

Ah, well, we’ll see what happens…

Nintendo finally sent me an invite to buy a Switch 2, so against my better judgement, I bought one. (Backstory: Nintendo kind of pisses me off, from releasing underpowered hardware, to their terrible online play systems, to never discounting their games, to …)

But, you know what, Mario Kart World is pretty good. I expected to be pretty underwhelmed both by the overall gameplay itself (I wasn’t a big fan of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe) and the graphics.

In actuality, the gameplay is pretty great and appears surprisingly deep (if you want to get crazy into wall riding and rails), the tracks are a lot of fun, and the graphics are pretty good. Could they be better? Sure, but they do the job and the game runs buttery smooth and looks great on my OLED. The new Rainbow Road specifically is a joy to race on and a spectacle to behold.

Is Mario Kart World worth a full $500 asking price to get the console and game together? I mean… no… but that’s the Nintendo tax for you.

I’m 30 hours into Death Stranding 2 and I never want it to end.