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Red Dead Redemption 2 (PS5) by dkirschner (Mar 9th, 2026 at 09:45:05) |
Yeah, this was incredible, as expected. The story, the character development, the historical setting, all incredible. My brother and another friend (especially the friend) were highly invested in me playing the game, so I was keeping them updated while playing. Another friend was supposed to be playing it at the same time as me, but I paused a couple months ago and he defected to Mass Effect for a break and never returned. I need to be like, "Dude, I beat it. Hurry up so we can talk about it!"
There are so many memorable missions, from the night out with Lenny (the game explores race and racism during this time and place, which was neat) to going to get the kid from the Italian guy to an epic train robbery to the final showdown, and even to the side missions, like collecting debts for Strauss (which seems so mundane), but realizing the damage that Strauss's money lending causes to individuals and families and then eventually kicking him out of camp. The characters are all flawed, and the main character arc of Arthur about made me cry throughout the last chapter (though I had a MAJOR plot point spoiled for me by a John Green book!). Truly, it is a story about redemption, with some characters growing and others succumbing to their flaws. Very human, very emotional.
Two main activities in the game are riding your horse and shooting people. Riding your horse could have gotten boring fast, but you have good control over movement and how fast you go, and have to manage horse stamina. You also encounter things along the road, from Strangers (capital "S") to meet (aka side characters with their own story arcs), to strangers (small "s") whom I usually ignored (aka random events to random NPCs like passing someone calling for help because he's getting chased by bandits, passing a person begging for money, passing a hunter stuck in a bear trap [I felt bad that I never helped the hunter]), to ambushes, etc.
There is a handy auto-ride system, where you can set a cinematic camera to take over as you go from one place to another. Arthur will actually ride the horse the whole way, but you can put the controller down and watch the beautiful landscape and bathe in the ambient music. You can also fast-travel using wagons or trains between towns, but I hardly ever did that.
Shooting people is pretty basic. You have a weapon wheel and an inventory wheel, and during combat you basically duck behind cover (R1), pop out and target someone (L2), which uses handy aim assist, flick the left control stick up to the target's head (because aim assist always centers on their chest), and pull the trigger (R2) for a headshot. Duck again, line up your next headshot, kill. Move forward to the next cover. Repeat until mission cleared. This did get repetitive by the end. I hardly ever used "dead eye," a slow time ability that allows you to shoot multiple enemies at once, and I hardly ever used items, including healing items, because you just don't need them. Weapons are just regular pistols and rifles and knives, whatever they had in the late 1800s. Combat was spiced up by the various contexts in which you fight (e.g., raiding a mansion, robbing a train, shooting on horseback, etc.), and it was engaging, but like I said, it did get repetitive.
Another thing that got repetitive, and that I quit doing after too long, was looting corpses and searching places for loot. Each "search" animation is way too long, and like I said, you don't end up needing health items, or any other items. You can always pick up new guns from the ground and ammo is plentiful. You can also buy guns and ammo too if you want. There is a "camp upgrade" element to the game in the earlier chapters, and I collected money and items to sell until I had upgraded everything, but that was a small portion of the game. Once I'd upgraded everything, first of all, the camp moves and you don't even have access to all the upgraded stuff for a chunk of the game (I don't think), and second of all, you don't need all the stuff anyway. So once camp was upgraded (by like chapter 2? of 6 + epilogues!), I basically had no use for money for the rest of the game. Sure, you can buy outfits and new guns and whatever, but none of that is necessary.
This made me feel like I went pretty straight through the main game, plus most of the Stranger missions, but didn't touch much else. I didn't mess with mini games, I didn't spend time in towns going to the theaters and whatever, I didn't mess with cosmetic things like giving myself haircuts or trying on outfits, I didn't do optional legendary hunts (those wild animals will kill you so fast!) or search for special gear or do the treasure maps, etc. That all sounds nice if you want to spend more time in the game and do everything that the Wild West has to offer, but I didn't. The main story was fantastic, so that was my focus, and I've played so many open world games and MMOs that I felt no need to hunt extra legendary creatures or collect special item sets.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was an epic tale. I can see why my brother and my friend were so excited for me to play it. Now I will be the one harassing other people: "Did you play RDR 2 yet?! Let me know when you start it! Keep me updated!" Next up from Rockstar later this year: GTA 6!
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My Hero: Doctor (DS) by jp (Mar 6th, 2026 at 18:01:32) |
From the back of the box this game looks like a "western realistic" Trauma Team game - use the touchscreen to do medical stuff like bandage a patient's arm or give them an injection. And it is...sort of? Weirdly every single "case" (mission) I played began with (and sometimes also ended with) a driving section - an ambulance of course. Here you have to dodge other vehicles and obstacles to avoid damage as you travel to a location where something happened or back to the hospital. Roads are full of other vehicles that have no qualms with suddenly changing lanes in front of you and such. You can collect "energy" (not what it's called in the game, but I don't remember the name in the game), and when you have enough you can turn on the siren - and this causes other vehicles to get out of the way (sometimes not fast enough). It's kind of a bizarre gameplay addition - and it doesn't help that the controls are kind of wonky and, from my experience, it really out stayed it's welcome even as the background locations you're driving through change.
I even unlocked a better ambulance (better driving stats)...and there's more to (eventually) choose from. I mean, the game's basic structure is pretty standard, there's cut-scenes with stories (everything so far seems to involve college kids of some sort). It makes me really wonder who the intended audience/age group for this game was. The name of the game would imply children (it's aspirational!) but the story seemed a bit more "grown up" - i.e. adolescent, but the gameplay was also quite simple..skewing younger again in my mind.
The more games of this kind I play (not top-tier first-party DS games), the more I wonder about the conditions in which they were made. Was this a game that was knocked out by a small studio in 6 months?
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Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom (PS4) by jp (Mar 2nd, 2026 at 19:08:07) |
Decided to quit suddenly because I realized I was just starting to grind for achievements and not actually having fun or enjoying the game. Which, in the grand scheme of things sounds like a bad thing other than I think that I quit in time BEFORE I got super tired and bored. So, leaving on a (little past) the high of the fun experience.
I was grinding the Dream Doors - and apparently there's a nice monster at the end that can be a real challenge - but, I didn't have a sense of WHY I'd want to do that. Here I mean motivation within the game's story. I was hoping for a nice story payoff if anything? It seems like there isn't, it's just a grind for resources and stuff and so...time to bail!
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Vampire Survivors (PC) by dkirschner (Mar 2nd, 2026 at 15:38:02) |
I first played this a few years ago on Game Pass and loved it. I rebought it on Steam because there was so much extra content. (I have since learned to avoid long games, roguelikes, and stuff with tons of replayability on subscription services; buy those instead!). Last summer, I replayed the game and started to dig into the DLC. There is practically an infinite amount of stuff to do in Vampire Survivors. I still feel this after sinking another 30 hours into it. The achievements and unlocks are extremely compelling and I could chase them all day. But it has finally started to feel repetitive. Longer 30-minute runs that result in like one unlock or just some progress through a map feel more and more like a time sink, especially as I have other games to get to, including newer games in this genre.
The DLCs (so many!!) have been interesting in that they alter the base game in interesting ways. The maps have rooms, islands, and more geographical features; they are not just massive plains with the occasional obstacle. Contra has a different kind of boss fight. They have new characters, weapons, evolutions, and secrets. The Ode to Castlevania DLC is massive, about the same size as the entire base game! It also has unique boss fights, and an even bigger map to explore, including different spawn points so you don't start over every time. I mean, really, I could just keep playing this forever...but I can't keep playing this forever! I must delete it. Maybe one day there will be another DLC that really piques my interest and the game will rise like a vampire from the coffin of my Steam library! I did see that they are releasing a first-person card battler roguelike, so I am sure I will get sucked into that too!
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Fabledom (PC) by jp (Feb 28th, 2026 at 18:37:25) |
This one is in the "sim" sub-group "city building" bucket for this semester's critical game design class. I'm generally not a fan of city building games since I find that the simulation part often runs away from me. I think I'm doing well, but then everything falls apart.
This game was surprisingly chill - it almost feels like the game you'd just keep on playing? As in, you start - and then just continue. I'm 6 hours in and I've just hit the point where I should be building palaces and having nobles prancing around. The game is basically a "Sim-City FairyTale Edition", but I've really liked the pace of it. At times things were going wonky, but I just kept going and slowly things have recovered (I took too long to build the hospital, so people died - once it was finally built it was funny to see a huge swarm of sick people mob it).
The economy is rather complicated with lots of different resources and I find it really hard to know if things are going well/poorly - there's time delays on everything of course, I just don't notice when "production" happens and whether or not it is sufficient for the demans of my populace. Basically though, it's always "make numbers go up" and then you run out of people to work - so make houses for them, and so on.
Here's the things I've particularly appreciated in this game's design (or that I thought were neat).
a. People live in houses (and bigger residential buildings), but there's always ONE person who is the head of household. That's their job.
b. When you pay for a new building you basically pay money, and decide where it's going. But you then have to wait for the resources for the building to be delivered/transported there. I often ran into an issue where I paid for a bunch of stuff, but no construction was happening because I didn't have enough planks or something.
c. My village has a cyclops that wanders around making people happy. So much better than terrorizing.
d. In winter, lots of things shut-down, this felt like a "vacation" for the farmers, which I let them have/enjoy.
e. I thought it was funny that Commoner's really don't like living next to peasant homes. So, a peasant home could be super desirable - but only for other peasants. It's the complete opposite for commoner's (highly undesirable). Basically, there's a class system and they don't like each other when it comes to living close by. (I'm assuming the same will apply for nobles, but I don't have any of those yet).
f. A common driver of unhappiness in the people is how far they have to walk to work (you can manually assign different people to different buildings). It makes sense - but this is all walking anyways...but still - distance from home-to-work matters! Apparently this is because workers go home to eat!
g. I liked how you could chop down trees but also have a little add-on forester hut so they grow back.
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Star Wars: The Old Republic (PC) by dkirschner |
| Very similar to other MMOs so far, nothing really different. AAA production though. --------- Yep, basically the same synopsis at the end. |
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most recent entry: Friday 31 May, 2013
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As promised, the second half of my Star Wars thoughts as I leveled up to 17, started a Sith Inquisitor, and saw more of the galaxy…
A few big things happen at level 10. You can queue for the game’s PvP “warzones,” PvE “flashpoints,” and you leave the newbie planet and go to a hub world (Coruscant for my Jedi). I’ve learned that each planet in the galaxy is a “zone.” The story mission leads you from planet to planet, and there appears to be one planet for each level bracket. So planet A is levels 1-10, B is 10-15, C is 15-20, and so on. I wasn’t too excited about having only one option of where to go at any given moment, but more on that later. Let’s talk about the hub world Coruscant for now. I had thought that Coruscant would be like the hub cities I was familiar with in RPG games. They’re mostly just the city, with a lot of vendors and trainers and some quests. Hub worlds here are more than cities. They are full zones. I always like hubs in games because it’s a break from the monotony of questing to explore and just see what all you can do. But this one, all the vendors and things to do were crammed into one little corridor of the zone, the majority of which were skill trainers for your ‘crew skills’ (archaeology, treasure hunting, armorsmithing and so on). The scale of the city itself was awesome, as are the rest of the zones I visited. But there is NOTHING THERE. NPCs stand around together not doing anything and…that’s mostly it. It’s that issue where it appears populated and lived in, but after being there a while you realize you’re the only thing acting. So anyway, I found an auction house and listed some items (even sold a few!), tons of vendors selling stuff that no one except high level players would care about, and the like 20 crew skill trainers. Otherwise all the big open spaces and pretty architecture is just to run through, point A to B, point B to C, point C to A, back and forth back and forth, playing the typical MMOG quest courier.
Not knowing what else to do, I did most of the quests in Coruscant, and near the end decided I was going to focus on my Jedi story missions only. Turns out that if you focus only on story missions and neglect other quests (I did do the ones that were directly on my way to story missions), you start lagging a bit in level. So by the time I quit at 17, on the next planet, I was fighting level 18-19 enemies, which was starting to be a little tougher. It turns out that the life of a Jedi is completing trivial tasks for an endless number of people who need your help. Through at least level 10, this was all fine, new and exciting being in the Star Wars universe, and the full voice acting was mesmerizing. It is still cool for sure, but there are serious drawbacks to the full voice acting. The game moves slowly. If you listen to the quests, then it’s taking you like 5 times longer than other MMOGs to receive and turn them in than if you just read/skimmed them. Since that is the quest difference between SW and other MMOGs, I want to experience it. But it does drag the game’s pace. Then especially when you realize that so many of the quests are dull errands to keep doing the same tasks for NPCs, it loses its luster.
I switched to a Sith character at one point to see if maybe the Jedi was just getting a bit dull. With the Sith, I decided to be only a jerk, thinking that the Sith would react. Turns out it’s the same as the Jedi there, and it was not how I imagined it should be. In the conversation wheel, I’d select only the smart-ass things, talking back to Sith masters and all that, and they just get pissed for one line of dialogue, and then continue on asking your help for something. No, I am a Sith and you are a Sith NPC. We should all be power-mad and vicious to one another. You should not let a mere slave talk trash to you, master Sith NPC, sir. So being a Sith was amusing for a few levels, then it just was silly that I could be an ass to such people without consequence.
Anyway, so at level 10 I immediately queued for a PvE flashpoint. This has the same issue, at first glance, as the planet level ranges. There was only one flashpoint I was eligible for at any given time, meaning if I wanted to do flashpoints, I would be doing the same one over and over until I leveled out of it. I ended up playing two, and they were very different. The first one, I would not have a problem playing over and over, and in fact I tried but the queue times for the random groups were up to 90 minutes. The second one was a completely straightforward MMOG dungeon. Back to the first one, the conversation wheel works in groups and it is brilliant. There are 4 people in a full group, and when you get in a conversation with an NPC, each player chooses a response from the conversation wheel and gets a die roll to determine whose choice is the one that impacts the progression of the flashpoint. In this first flashpoint, there were like 30 conversation decisions. Everyone gets their lines heard at some point, and it is really really cool to be like, oh hey, this happened because I chose it!
Example: This first flashpoint takes place aboard a ship. As I recall, it was being invaded by some Imperial forces that we have to run around stopping. There was some espionage and some backstabbing within the Republic crew, and it was very twisty-turny regarding the story. The whole thing really was a new experience for me and I thought it was fantastic. So anyway, at one point we run out into the engineering room of the ship and there is part of our engineering crew who has gotten locked in an airlock when something or other went down. If I recall correctly, we could either keep them in there and try to rescue them later, or vent them into space. I remember laughing at the vent into space option and I selected it. Then I watched as my die roll won, and my character said, “We’re going to vent you into space,” and then the cut scene played of me hitting the airlock button and all the crew ejected to their deaths. I was like “Whoa.” Then I felt bad and got 100 dark side points. Point being, we could have saved them and something different would have happened later I think. At another point, some other NPC called us out for venting the engineering crew into space. You can also choose to rescue some story NPC or ditch her and leave her behind. We rescued her, but I wonder what happens if you ditch her since she is a main story NPC in the flashpoint. I read that some of these decisions change boss battles, where you go, who you fight, rewards you get and so on. Worth playing again if it’s interesting, right? Unfortunately though, and mind-bogglingly for me, that second flashpoint I played had like 2 conversations and was just so cookie cutter. I don’t know why it didn’t pull all the cool tricks that the first one did.
At level 10, you can also begin doing PvP warzones. I queued for one of these instantly and thought I was going to be squashed because I was in a group with level 20-somethings. I was getting squashed a little bit just for being new, but I realized at some point later that the warzones normalize player level. Everyone’s health and stats become normal for a level 55 character! Equal playing field, yay. Although I think that equipment is not equal, that if you have better equipment on, you are stronger. Not sure on that, but seems like if it did normalize equipment too then there would be no point for PvP equipment, which does exist. There are 5 or so PvP maps, which are neat, standard PvP modes. I couldn’t select a specific map, so it randomly tossed me in a few over the course of my time. One was a ‘capture and hold the locations’ kind of thing, where the locations were turrets that shot down an enemy ship. If your team held more bigger turrets longer, you’d shoot the enemy ship down first and win. Another mode was the typical attacker/defender thing. Team 1 attacks and gets as far as they can, then when time runs out the teams switch and Team 2 attacks and tries to get farther than Team 1 did. Then there was one more I played but I honestly can’t remember what it was. PvP was fast and fun, especially when I was doing it at the end around level 17 and had learned more (PvP) skills and how to fight better. The last one I did I was actually barely second on the damage charts, which made me feel good.
After level 10, the next big thing is just following your story mission around until you get your own spaceship. I was really anticipating this because I thought it might mean I could explore the galaxy on my own and go wherever I wanted. I didn’t know what all I’d be able to do, what story lines I could discover. It happened after completing the Jedi story on Coruscant, when I was level 15. My own ship with my own crew being the three companions I now had acquired. I stepped inside and…my expectations were immediately dashed a bit. You see, I was imagining Commander Shepherd’s Normandy in Mass Effect. This is not the Normandy. It’s a tiny ship with three crew members, none of whom talk to you unless it’s story-based, one storage locker, a holodeck that is also only for missions, another space battle mission-dispensing machine, and a map. Ok, I thought, still plenty of new things to do, right?!
Let’s try space battles. Ok, I can accept space battle missions from the computer and then click on the galaxy map, find the space battle icons, and travel there. Ok, first space battle. O…Ok, I can’t control the ship. All I can do is shoot lasers or shoot from my stock of 20 missiles. Ok, so I’m on a rail and I just need to shoot anything that moves for 5 minutes. O…ok, this doesn’t seem exciting at all. Yeah, yep, ok I’m just playing a shooting gallery for 5 minutes. Ok, first mission success. Maybe the others will be different. [Tried two more missions.] WELL, all the space battles are apparently 5-minute long shooting galleries, the exact same thing. How freaking lame! And you get yet another type of currency as rewards, presumably to get better parts for your ship(s) to do more difficult shooting galleries. Let’s try something else…
Oh, I know, I’ll explore the galaxy now that I have a ship! I’ll just look at the map here. Neat, there are a lot of planets, but most of them are too high a level. Hey let’s see if I can travel to Illum, a level 50 planet, or if the game stops me. Oh awesome, I can go! I can go anywhere!
I explored Ilum for a few minutes, wandered outside through the safe Republic base camp, wondered at the snowy and jagged planet, was attacked by level 50 creatures who amazingly did not kill me before I ran back to safety, and left. I really liked being able to go to Ilum, and figured if I could go there I could go anywhere. I knew I was approaching the end of my play because the whole boring questing thing had gotten to me already, and I wanted to see what all the different planets looked like, because as I have said, the game is beautiful and the scale of some of these environments is massive. So I went to leave Ilum and fly somewhere else only to see “Not enough credits” on my screen. What? Then I saw how much I had paid to fly to Ilum. ALL MY MONEY save about 20 credits. DOH! I couldn’t believe that I’d had exactly enough money to get there and accidentally stranded myself! The only planet I could afford to fly to was back to my Jedi starting world. I could have gone back and sold some things out of my storage to make enough money to fly somewhere else, but then I would have had to just stay there and do the quests and missions because I had no money to leave. So the real lesson here is that you can technically go wherever you want, but at level 17 it costs you a lot of money to get to places that are for higher levels. So though you can go…you can’t go. Or you can go, but you can’t return…easily.
And that is Star Wars: The Old Republic as far as I will go with it. Broke and nearly stranded in a level 50 zone. Sad Jedi.
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