It’s that time of year again, where we tell ourselves we’re going to do things differently. We’re going to hit the reset button, or change directions, or some shit that we all know probably won’t happen. I for one, have not made a New Year’s resolution in ages. I always felt they were futile attempts at doing something we obviously hadn’t managed to do in the past 365 days. The first day of January is a chance for a fresh start, to walk out the front door with a new outlook on life.
Well I have no intention of walking out my front door today. New Year’s Day is the buffer between your celebration of what was, and your begrudging acceptance of what’s to come. We’ll save that for tomorrow.
For now, let’s look back a bit, at the year that was 2017.
Actually… let’s not. Fuck 2017.
Instead let’s play some video games while we can. I’ve been chugging along on The Evil Within 2, and I can honestly say that I’m not making any significant progress at all. It seems the only thing Sebastian is good at is dying. He does that with relative ease, and it’s slowing my progress to an agonizing pace. Either I’m carefully sneaking my way through an area, which takes forever, or I’m carelessly trotting through and alerting every monster in the area. Which ends with Basti in a pool of his own fluids. I call Sebastian “Basti” for short, because while ‘Sebastian’ and ‘Castellanos’ aren’t silly names in their own right, saying them together just sounds ridiculous. So Basti it is.
Basti finds out at the beginning of the game that his daughter didn’t really die in a fire. So he’s been pissing his life away for nothing, and he has to go back into The Matri– I mean, the Upside Dow– I mean, the Framewor— I mean, the STEM. (It’s not the most original idea, is what I’m saying.)
If his daughter is Eleven, I’m going home.
But it’s cool, it gives Shinji Mikami an excuse to not make a lick of fucking sense, which works because anything he made probably wasn’t going to make any sense anyway. So he hops into a neighborhood that exists completely in the STEM, which apparently is a shared consciousness by all the citizens that lived there. Or something. Like, I said, it’s Mikami.
Apparently people from MOBIUS, the organization that created The STEM, have people that hop in and out of it all the time, and actually plan things within the STEM itself. Only something has gone wrong and everybody either turned into a monster or got killed by someone that turned into a monster. Basti often comments about how this situation is strikingly similar to the situation in the previous game.
But here’s what I don’t get. The STEM is a simulation that can obviously be manipulated. It can be directly manipulated by MOBIUS (as illustrated in The Assignment and The Consequence DLC for the first game), it’s manipulated by monsters, and it’s manipulated by the “Bad Guy.” Why can’t Sebastian manipulate anything? If Kidman sent him into The STEM, why not give him some super powers or something? Why can he still only sprint for five seconds? Physical limitations in a game where laws of physics can be manipulated by seemingly anything that wanders by is a bit perplexing. At least in the first game, the dude doing the manipulating was literally the brain that was “hosting” the simulation. Who’s hosting it this time? I have a feeling it’s his daughter, but I haven’t played far enough in to see if that’s true. If that is the case, why can’t she just teleport him to her? Wouldn’t she know his every move, since it’s her brain he’s running around in? The bad guy in the first game not only knew Basti’s every move, but literally manipulated the world and events so that Basti would do things that served his agenda.
See? This is what happens when it’s cold as shit outside and I don’t wanna go anywhere.
I’ve also been playing The Witcher 3 in spurts. When you’ve already played through most of the game and have to start over, that beginning area is such a slog. Not that it’s bad, it’s just so slow story-wise; there’s just not a whole lot going on. Now that I’m finally getting into the story, things are picking up again. I can once again play for longer than an hour without dozing off. I’m getting into the meat of the game now, having just completed Keira Metz’s side quests and met her for a picnic in the woods. Geralt got to do the nasty with her and I got to watch. Wow, that sounds creepy.
But not as creepy as getting a screenshot of Keira’s oh-face.
Anyways, with Keira now being another notch on Geralt’s belt, I’m now at the point where I’m trying to decide if I should head to Crookback Bog or go see the Bloody Baron. I’m thinking probably the witches in the bog, since I remember the Baron’s questline being pretty long.
Fable Anniversary is still in the rotation as well. I’m trying as all hell to stay interested, too. I don’t remember this game being quite so fucking boring. I want to like it. I remember it being fun. Of course, that was back in 2004 when the original came out. I haven’t played it since, but I picked up Fable Anniversary during one of MS’s sales and it’s been a chore trying to make headway. There’s so much backtracking. On top of that, my character looks like a doofus. I know that was intentional, and at this point in the game he’s barely an adult (i think), but holy shit, this kid. My ultimate goal is to try to own every house in Albion and have a wife in each town, but that’s gonna be a challenge when my character looks like a melted bobblehead. I need to get him buff quick. Until I get crackin’ on the housing market though, I’ll be struggling to just make enough money to buy better shit.
The last game in the rotation, that I’ve put any amount of time into, is Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse. This one comes courtesy of the Xbox Game Pass, which is perfect for games like this, since I want to play them, but not bad enough to actually purchase. It’s actually a pretty fun game, and not nearly as “girly” as I was expecting. On the contrary, this seems like it was designed for guys. Every female character in this game is wearing something skimpy for no apparent reason. It’s also got a quirky and weird sense of humor.
Spit. They’re literally swimming in spit.
It’s fun enough though. It has a bit of a Metroid-vania feel to it. We’ll see if it’s enough to hold my interest to play it all the way through.
Last but not least, I’m still playing Forza Motorsport 7, which I’ve wanted to complete for a while now, but when you have special events like an Endurance Race that, by my calculation, will last almost three fucking hours, it’s something I just have to chip away at. Or maybe dedicate an entire afternoon to. Because nothing says “I have no fucking life” than spending several hours on a single race. Call me crazy, but wasn’t one of the original bullet points for drivatars was that you could actually have them drive races for you? And that was the reason you wanted to drive well and race clean, was so that your drivatar could be as good as possible, and you could set them up to do endurance races on your behalf and make money? I could swear I read that somewhere. I might be thinking of a different racing game.
Anyways, such is the state of things in my world at the beginning of 2018. Here’s to hoping it won’t be another 2017. Because despite getting some great games, and a new house, 2017 fucking sucked.
Cheers!
