I finished the story of Death Stranding over the weekend. It took almost 80 hours over the course of two months. I left a large number of optional tasks unfinished, but I’m hoping to get back and do them at some point. It’s definitely the game of the year for me. These 80 hours have been quite an experience. I’m very thankful that I’ve been able to play a AAA game with so much originality, because frankly I didn’t think I would ever see one again in my lifetime.

Here’s a quick rundown of memorable games that I played throughout the decade. These are games that I played more-or-less continuously for a month or more (that I remember, at least). In between these games were plenty of others, but these are the ones that made the biggest impact on me. Age of Conan. 2010. I can’t find many records of what I played in 2010. Age of Conan, WoW. (ref)

I briefly mentioned the category “Ongoing Games” in my last post (or “post”) as a potential replacement for the terms “MMORPG” and/or “MMO.” Even before I saw Jeromai’s post, which I agree with, I started to doubt my own judgment about it. The more I thought about it, the more “Ongoing Game” meant nothing whatsoever. It might as well be “Game.” Almost any game could fit into this category in 2019.

I try to avoid “tweet storms” that go beyond two or three threaded tweets but I couldn’t resist the temptation to live tweet the Game Awards last night, as I was just sitting in front of the television and a laptop. My assumption is that people can mute tweet threads if they find them annoying (and let’s be honest, every tweet thread is always annoying to someone). It’s the first time I’ve watched them, and probably the last time as well.

I picked up a game called Outward on sale for $20 a while back. It looked like a fun single-player third-person RPG, and the emphasis on starting weak and earning your rewards appealed to me. My jaunty adventurer with a big permanent smile on his face. I almost immediately regretted my purchase. The voice acting isn’t very good, and they do that thing I really hate where they only speak the first line, leaving you to read the rest of it.

I don’t exactly write “reviews” here on the ol’ blog, but these are my thoughts about the XIM APEX Adapter. It’s a USB gadget that plugs into a Playstation 4 (or an Xbox One, allegedly) and allows you to use a mouse and keyboard to play games that otherwise could only be played with a controller. You may or may not have noticed a recurring theme here in the past year, which is that I constantly mention how much the PS4 controller hurts my hands.

I’ve heard about Death Stranding for years, but I’ve never had any idea what kind of game it is. Shortly after the game begins. I tried to read some reviews, but I simply couldn’t stand to visit any of the major games journalism web sites to read them. Every game web site is completely obscured by ads that cover almost 75% of the screen, blinking at you, playing videos at you, whatever.

Over the weekend, I noticed Steam was giving away a free trial of this game called Generation Zero, which I’d never heard of before. So I thought I’d try it. I kind of miss those Halcyon days of the Steam Backlog Bonanza, when I got to play a brand new game every day. I didn’t even know what this game was, to be honest. It sounded like a shooter. But it said it was “set in Sweden,” which is something I’ve certainly never seen before in a game.

Naithin poked some of us on the Blaugust Discord to chime in on this: If you could only play five games in a year, what would they be? It turns out this would not be a terribly big sacrifice for me. I don’t play a lot of games in a year to start with. I’ve already done some research for my 2019 year-end post, and the number of new games that I’ve purchased and started in 2019 is extremely small.

I don’t get into Halloween much at all, but this year I thought I would break with tradition and try to find a scary game to play. You know, one of those kinds of games that makes the streamers whimper and cry and scream and jump, for the lulz and the clicks. I’m not especially prone to being scared by a game, and I’ve played a number of horror games before that I didn’t find particularly scary, but I wondered if I could find one out there.

The last time I wrote about The Last Of Us, I said, “I think I’m about 3/4 finished. I’ll probably get through the rest of it this weekend.” That was over a year ago. Red Dead Infected I wasn’t planning to play it again. I mentioned that I just bought The Division 2 on the PS4 because it runs better on console than it does on my PC. I’ve been playing that now and then, trying to catch back up to where I left off in the PC free weekend.

Over the weekend I learned about the The Division 2 free weekend. I remembered generally liking the The Division 2 open beta, so I decided to download it and take advantage of the gift. (I wish I’d known that the free “weekend” had actually begun last Thursday.) I proceeded to play for about seven hours on Saturday and Sunday, making my way to level 8. I enjoyed it so much I considered buying it, since it also happens to be on sale right now.

MassivelyOP did a Daily Grind post that led me to an unexpected insight into my current view of MMOs. I think I’m vaguely on the record as saying MMORPGs aren’t in a very good place right now. I have a bunch of reasons for that which I won’t get into here. The relevant information for this post is that most of the reaction I see to my offhand remarks is, “What are you talking about?

Back during my Steam Backlog Bonanza, which now seems so long ago that I can barely even remember it, I identified only a few games that I definitely wanted to return to later. For the record, those games were, in the order I encountered them: Life is Feudal, Kholat, Age of Decadence, and Max Payne 3. Max Payne 3 wins the award for most character costume changes in one game.

Last time I mentioned Elder Scrolls Online, I was working my way through Rivenspire, which is the third zone of the Daggerfall Covenent. During the mad scramble of Blaugust and the Steam Backlog Bonanza, I wandered away from that. But I finally got back in there and finished up the Rivenspire zone story. It was less enjoyable toward the end, but I didn’t hate it. I recorded the whole experience and I was thinking of uploading it, much like my playthrough of the Morrowind zone story.

For SEO purposes, I should probably break these into separate posts, but I just don’t feel like it. But I’ve identified four big gaming news stories of late that I figured I should at least make a note of for posterity. Raph Koster’s New Company. Don’t really care. It’s vaporware until proven otherwise. Mainly it makes me wonder about the future of Crowfall. Perhaps he’s only left because Crowfall is fully set on its course and there’s no more creative work to do.

Sorry folks, this page will probably take a year to load. Up front I should say that I’m well aware that I could have turned to Google to clear up any confusion described below. I’m simply relaying how I interpreted the game screens presented to me in the absence of any other context, from the perspective of a person who has never seen or played Destiny 1 or Destiny 2 or even any Halo games before.

I can tell from the whopping two comments on my Astellia Online impressions post that interest in this new MMORPG is simply through the roof. (Actually most people probably still haven’t even heard of it, and I wouldn’t have either if it weren’t for a random MassivelyOP article here or there.) The theme of those two comments was something like, “They’ve got to be crazy if they think anyone is going to pay $30 for an unknown Eastern game.

Yesterday I decided to roll the dice and bought the $30 standard buy-to-play edition of Astellia Online. I’ve heard that it’s “okay.” But I like the idea of paying a modest fee and having essentially lifetime access to the game. (Its lifetime, not mine, probably.) It's a nice-looking game if nothing else. I paid $30 for Black Desert Online back when it came out, and I haven’t regretted that choice. I only played for a month or so, and haven’t really touched it since, but I appreciate that I can still log in whenever I want to look at it.

I learned something yesterday that isn’t getting the attention that it deserves, so I thought I’d write a blog post about it. Are you sitting down? This is really amazing, so make sure you’re sitting down. You can now change the quest text font size in Lord of the Rings Online. I searched my MMO News feeds to find the all-caps headlines shouting this from the rooftops, but I didn’t find any.

I don’t know what we’re calling this Icebrood Saga thing. Is it Living World Season 5? Or is it something else entirely? I don’t know. I’ve seen people calling it Season 5 so that’s probably the label that will stick in the community. It’s a lot easier than “Icebrood Saga.” (I’m certainly not going to be abbreviating it “IS” because I don’t particularly want a bunch of Middle Eastern terrorists showing up on my web site.

Even though ArenaNet is dead to me and I almost never actually enjoy playing Guild Wars 2, I decided to log in again. I’ve been hearing some good things about the new Icebrood Saga thingy, so I wanted to try it out. It’s free, after all. That’s the best thing about new content in Guild Wars 2 by far. Also it’s kind of a tradition at this point that I record my gameplay of these Living World episodes.

I’m back in a “I don’t really have anything to say” blogging mood. I’ve played maybe, possibly, two hours of games in the last week. I played a little bit more of Max Payne 3, and I logged into World of Warcraft for about 20 minutes to check something. I logged in to check that a wonderful discovery someone made in Classic is, in fact, right there in Retail as well.

The inevitable side effect of rediscovering an easy way to listen to new music is the rediscovery of my love to create new music. I’ve been largely stagnant as a musician since around 2000, for various reasons. It’s an extremely time-consuming hobby, at least the way I approach it. Which reminds me, Bhagpuss made me chuckle recently when he wrote: I agree with that completely with the exception of the word “hobby.

This one’s about Hugo, the static site generator. I’ve seen references to it all over the place during this ongoing research project. (Also Jekyll.) It seems to be popular among programmers, for reasons that should become obvious as I describe it below. A static site generator is a tool that takes a series of input files, usually plain text files, and turns them into a big directory of HTML, CSS, and Javascript files.