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.

Previously on The Death Stranding Experience: The Prologue. As we roll into the second hour of the game, you may have noticed I haven’t talked about Death Stranding gameplay very much yet. That’s because, in the first couple of hours of Death Stranding, there isn’t very much gameplay. It’s extremely cut scene-heavy. (It becomes cut scene-heavy at the end as well.) It’s one of the game’s criticisms, though I personally found the cut scenes riveting so I didn’t mind at all.

I had designs on writing at least something about all fifteen episodes of Death Stranding, but I’m getting tired of this already. The problem is that there is so much to go over, especially at the beginning and at the end. After the last post, I learned what “BT” stands for: Beached Things. That explains everything, right? Some of the terminology in this game feels like translation mistakes that they just stuck with and doubled down on.

It’s time once against for the prestigious Endgame Viable Awards for 2019. 2018 Awards 2017 Awards 2016 Awards 2015 Awards 2014 Review 2013 Review This year, I’m going to shrink the size of this post considerably. I didn’t buy or play very many games this year, so there’s not much point in making a huge affair out of it. I’m going to list all the games I bought this year, then I’m going to pick the ones I liked best, and that’s it.

Here’s my annual summary of PC MMORPGs that are on my radar for the new year 2020. (Here is 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014). I’ll warn you up front it’s bleak, just like last year. I am only considering “traditional” style MMORPGs in this list, not things like MOBAs or brawlers or Diablo-clones or whatever else people call MMOs these days. Actually, since I find out about these from MMO sites, and most MMO sites now cover things that aren’t traditional MMORPGs, some of these might in fact not be traditional MMORPGs.

Previously: Episode 2. As I’ve moved on to playing the next game in my list, which happens to be Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, a game whose story also requires a lot of processing, I’ve sort of lost interest in processing Death Stranding in writing. But I shall valiantly try to press on and remember some key points. This post covers Episodes 3 through 8, which represents the vast majority of the player’s time spent in the game.

I don’t really plan my gaming very much, I tend to just play whatever I feel like playing on any given day. But I decided to make a list of the games that are currently on my highest priority “to play” list at the start of 2020, along with a rough estimate of how long they’ll take to play, according to HowLongToBeat. The obligatory blog post picture requirement that vaguely relates to the text.

It seems like every time I mention EverQuest I or II, I inadvertently start a firestorm of blogging controversy. :) Even before I read Bhagpuss’s post, I was thinking I should probably expand my thoughts on EverQuest II*. It’s one of the games I periodically try to get back into, and one that I wish I was caught up with. I can’t precisely explain why I wish that anymore, though; I suppose it always felt like one of the most “complete” fantasy MMORPG experiences, representative perhaps of the pinnacle of what the genre is capable of.

So I had planned to just upload some videos as I stumbled and bumbled around in EverQuest II and forget about it, because it’s super easy, barely an inconvenience for me to do so, but it turns out that EverQuest II is, well, not a very good video subject. So since all the update comments I left on my last post are just a jumble, I thought I’d try to write down a more coherent narrative of my attempts to find some meaningful gameplay with my lost Level 100 Ogre Coercer.

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice has been on my radar for quite some time now, as I’ve heard nothing but good things about it, but I only just picked it up in a sale at the end of last year. After finishing up with Death Stranding, I had narrowed down my choice for the first game of the new year to trying out Hellblade or going back to Horizon Zero Dawn. I picked Hellblade, and I’m glad I did.

I haven’t played much of any games in the last month, because I’ve been busy dealing with a lot of overdue tasks that I’ve been putting off for so long that they’ve gone from Merely Unpleasant to A Huge Overwhelming Insurmountable Problem. It’s mostly “administrative” tasks-household and personal and money and insurance stuff. All the things I hate dealing with and put off as long as possible, in other words.

Unrolling a Twitter thread because it’s sort of like a blog post, kind of. Today I’m getting scar tissue blasted out of my eye with a laser beam. Maybe by tonight I’ll be able to read and write again. Or be permanently blind in one eye. The possibilities are endless! I’m using humor as a defense mechanism! Procedure is complete and I can already see much much better. Had no idea how bad it had gotten.

You’ll have to follow me on Twitter if you want all the minute-by-minute details, because I still don’t have new glasses yet and long-form writing is a pain, but I’m pretty sure I got “it.” Either that or I got “something” at a ridiculously coincidental time, when I haven’t had “something” in a good ten years. Fever spiked up pretty high yesterday (Saturday), and I spent most of the afternoon and night alternately shivering uncontrollably or drenched in sweat.

First, just a quick note to say I feel like I’m “recovered” from whatever it was I had. I still have a minor cough now and then, but that’s something I’ve had for years anyway. Secondly, I’ve been so distracted lately that I’m only just now realizing that Blapril is not just coming soon, but already here and started. So go do that if you haven’t signed up yet. It’s a great event.

I’ve been wrestling with whether I should get No Man’s Sky for almost four years now. To their credit, Hello Games has put a lot of work into upgrading it over the years, but I worried it was one of those games that looked great visually and conceptually, but didn’t have much substance or gameplay underneath it. Recently I heard they did another big update, and I was looking for a mouse-and-keyboard game to play on my PC on my “controller-rest days” in between playing Horizon Zero Dawn on the PS4 (which I restarted a little while ago).

I saw Roger posted his Gamer Motivation Profile, which “motivated” me to take the test myself. Many others have also done it, including Rakuno at Shards of Imagination, who links to surely at least a dozen others. Anything I can do to help dislodge that Bartle thing-the test that our gaming neanderthal ancestors* created from stone knives and bear skins and VT100 terminals and MUDs-from the public discourse is a win.

I’ll start with non-spoilery stuff. I saw some folks talking about Doki Doki Literature Club on the Blaugust Discord (raving about it, one might say), and I noticed it was free on Steam, so I downloaded it to try it out. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard people talking favorably about it in the past as well, though I never understood why. It’s a really, really slow burn, but I think it’s probably worth it in the end.

I’m going to attempt to write a blog post now. I don’t really want to, but I feel like I should at least try to get one post out about something every month. But honestly, who gives a crap about blogging right now? Not me, that’s who. Anyway, after I reached a stopping point with No Man’s Sky, I turned to the Assassin’s Creed franchise. I didn’t really plan to, but after I saw the reveal trailer for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, I thought, “Hey I want to replay that first Assassin’s Creed game and get a good recording of it.

Continuing my epic playthrough of the Assassin’s Creed franchise in my Steam backlog, so that I can be ready to … not buy Valhalla at launch and wait for a Steam sale some time in the future, like I do with every iteration of Assassin’s Creed. These blog posts are largely here to archive and expand on all the tweets I wrote. (To be perfectly honest, this specific blog post is mainly here to test whether or not Tweetdeck is going to show an image on the automated tweet that Jetpack is going to create for this post.

Continuing my epic playthrough of all of the Assassin’s Creed games in my Steam backlog in order, and archiving the tweets I wrote about them. Last time it was Liberation HD. This time it’s the pirate game that I knew I wasn’t going to like, and the main reason I stopped playing Assassin’s Creed games in the first place. Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (2013), May 28 Get used to this sight.

Continuing my epic playthrough of all of the Assassin’s Creed games in my Steam backlog in order, and archiving the tweets I wrote about them. Last time it was Black Flag, next is the one that made everyone step back and say, “You know, maybe we don’t actually need a new Assassin’s Creed game every year.” Assassin’s Creed Rogue, June 2 Shay Cormac, our completely level-headed character for this game, who will not at any point make any rash decisions whatsoever.

Two things happened to derail my Assassin’s Creed franchise backlog playthrough: First, controversy surrounding the Ubisoft company (what else is new) which I assume is common knowledge by now. Though I personally do not have any difficulty distinguishing art from artists (or executives), I figured I should shut the hell up about Assassin’s Creed games for a while. Second, The Last Of Us Part II launched on the Playstation 4.

There are massive spoilers for the game below. Don’t read this unless you’ve finished the game through to the credits. Having finished the game, I’m only just now starting to see all the articles and videos containing let’s charitably call them “criticisms” about The Last Of Us Part II. There are plenty of things about the game to legitimately criticize and discuss (sadly I have no knowledge of where honest discussions of video games can occur with relative safety on the Internet anymore, or in real life for that matter), but I’m seeing a preponderance of what I’ll charitably call “shallow interpretations” of the game.

The Blaugust Promptapalooza is starting, and I’m in it! I’ll be perfectly honest: I’ve been so completely out of it lately that I’m still not completely sure I understand the exact details of what I’m supposed to do. I think I’m going to be writing a post about a super secret topic on August 28th. As of this writing, I have no idea what to say about the super secret topic, so that should be fun.

Yesterday’s Promptapalooza topic, spearheaded by Dragonray, asked which popular media we didn’t like. The first thing that sprang to my mind was a very touchy subject. I know it’s hard to imagine now, but in the not-too-distant past, there was a time when Harry Potter was universally loved. I, however, never particularly liked it. The movies were okay, but I didn’t even make it more than a chapter or two into the first book.