alias_sqbr

I've been pondering this post for a while but it's taken me a while to be able to articulate my thoughts.

So: The world felt out of character, and that threw me out of the story aggressively. I could plausibly have enjoyed a very similar game if it was an original setting.

Also I hear it has platforming, which I am very bad at, but I'd have been willing to get Cam to help with those parts if I'd been enjoying the game otherwise.

It does a good enough job at other things that I can intellectually see how someone could enjoy it, and I'm legit happy for those people. But this post is about how it did not work for me.
( Read more... )

Masterpost

I only just started but thus far I am having a great time, the non binary inclusion is reasonably good for this sort of AAA roleplaying game and I'm enjoying the weird, darkly humourous dark-fantasy-horror and old school D&D inspired RPG vibe, it reminds me of playing Dragon: Age Origins, Planescape: Torment, and Neverwinter Nights mods back in the day, but as a modern game (albeit with all the graphics settings at lowest quality so my computer doesn't fall over). I continue to not be very good at this sort of combat, but that's what story mode is for! (It's presumably even more like other Larian games like Baldur's Gate 2 or Divinity Original Sin but I never really played those EDIT: ha, Baldur's Gate 2 was made by Bioware, guess that explains the Bioware Vibe!)

( No spoilers. Brief genital mention )

I recently subscribed to College Humour's streaming website, Dropout TV, and have been enjoying it enough to keep subscribed for something like two months over the 3 day free trial period so far.

It's about $9AU/$6US a month for access to a large backlog of generally humourous shows. The two I have been watching the most are the nerdy game show Um Actually, and the scifi roleplaying show Dimension 20: A Starstruck Odyssey, both of which I've really enjoyed, but there's also a bunch of other silly game shows, comedy skits, and roleplaying.

The College Humour Youtube channel has a bunch of trailers, which imo generally aren't very good, and little clips of funny moments, which are what actually got me to try out the free trial. There's also full episodes and in some cases entire runs of a few shows. Dropout.tv has pretty good closed captions, from a brief check the Youtube ones aren't as consistent. It looks like you can subscribe on youtube instead and see all current subscriber-only releases but I'm not sure it has the full backlog.
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So Final Fantasy 14 has these things called "minions", which are entirely cosmetic but fun little pets that follow you around doing absolutely nothing but look cool/cute. Thus far I've just picked up a couple from quests: a little wildcat kitten you rescue, a wind-up airship souvenir from flying in an airship, etc. They're fun, but can clutter up the screen, and sometimes it stretched my suspension of disbelief that like...a little puppy was following me into battle with giant monsters and not being hurt. It all felt a bit silly.

But that was before I got the minion reward for the quest The Rising Chorus.
( Major spoilers up to near the start of Heavensward! )

There was another of those massive itchio bundles recently, this time for Palestinian Aid. Having bought a copy, I went through all FORTY THREE pages of games to compile some recs with half-assed notes. If you didn't buy the bundle the games might be worth checking out anyway.

If you have opinions on any of these please let me know!
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This month, One Shot Club, the roleplaying discord I'm on, is doing non-realtime "play by post" games. Normally time zones make it hard for me to match with the other (largely american) players, and I always find realtime voice a bit stressful. The games emphasise collaborative story-telling and involve a variety of interesting sounding scenarios. So this looks like fun, and I thought it might be relevant to some of you too.

The discord link.

The games for this month.

There isn't long to sign up so if you're interested don't wait too long.

For years, I pretended to myself that I would never take this final step. I mocked others while knowing in my heart of hearts I would one day join them. But today, at last...

I played a tabletop roleplaying game.

And it was fun.
( Cut for roleplaying anecdotes )