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Breath of the Wild update:

While there were several struggles at first with this game, with Stelly having trouble with the camera controls and it being overwhelming to her, she has come along nicely with it, and although I do tend to be at the controls most of the time, she does so some exploring and a bit of fighting and has gotten the camera controls down enough that she can get around, find a place she wants to go and sort of navigate towards it pretty well.

For a while, I thought we had become bogged down and perhaps would just sort of put it down, as we weren't making any progress. At this point, we have freed three of the four divine beats, and have done several dozen of the shrines and a decent amount of side content. We may actually end up finishing the game!

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So uh...
We're nearly to end of our Baldur's Gate 3 adventure. Our last session put us against the coworker's character, Astarion's master, Cazador. Yeah, we killed him pretty quickly and, in that this was something Michael had never accomplished, let him take Cazador's place in the ascension ritual. That was trippy. We didn't realize the first time that we needed to first collect the spell scroll from a side room before engaging with Cazador.. Apparently, you shouldn't kill any of the floating guys as part of that ritual if you want to claim it. You need them all, I assume? My point from all that is that we had to reload a save state.

Still a nice, complex game but the stories are friggin convoluted. I am the emperor. No, I'm a mindless mind flayer! No wait. I regained control of myself! I just disguise myself so as not to scare you to gain what I need from you. But FIRST, I was a human! man.... I'm sure I'm exaggerating that progression, but honestly I can't remember from all the plot turns!

Our next session sends us to the Counting House for some other quest that Michael's not accomplished. He's committed to finishing now that he's doing things he's not experienced I guess. Otherwise, he would have bailed by the 4th. So far so good. He's also agreed to a Diablo II run through! He's never played it btw.

Sorry, McClain, that we never got any farther than we did on our attempts last year. =*(


EDIT: yeeeesh. I've already corrected a handful of errors here. I give up! sorry that you had to read that, but thanks if you got this far for sticking it out!!

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"My Dionne Warwick understanding of your dream indicates that you are ambivalent on how you want life to eventually screw you." - Joel

"Ever try to forcibly pin down a house cat? It's not easy." - Captain Steel

"I just can't get pass sticking a finger up a dog's butt." - John Dumbear

Newer cool Switch game recommendations.....and go!

I'm into 7 Days to Die right now. Especially because there's an update coming that people have been waiting for 10 years! So, hell yeah, I'm excited to see what changes they have in store for us.

I hope there are others here who play it. If you want, you can join me and my friends. We have a private server, and there's room left anyway. Our server is from https://7d2d.net/, so it's reliable. And it costs $10, so it's cheap, and you won't need to pay us anything.

Any good Steam summer sale purchases?

I only got an older game, The Flame in the Flood, because it's mentioned in a really interesting book I'm reading right now, Press Reset. It's about failures in the video game industry (Irrational Games, most of Warren Spector's ventures, etc.). That and it was only two bucks.

I picked up Paradise Killer and Riven. I see way too many others on sale that are on my wishlist, though, so I have a feeling I'm not done.

Curse you, Steam Summer Sale!

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The sale ended yesterday. Hope you didn't want those other games that badly.

Whew! I'm SAVED! (Well, my checking account is saved, at least.)

Baldur's Gate III
We're almost done!!! Last night we entered the Counting House/Bank place and bribed our way downstairs. We were in unexplored territory as our game guide had never entered this quest line. Exciting! I happened upon a hidden hole that I could fit through after shifting into cat form. Good thing, as this led to the Head Banker's Office containing the main vault code.

We encountered a problem though, when a companion bear summon got too close to the locked vault gate and triggered an alarm. We killed 14+ guard as a result. We did discover a russian Kratos, who had a companion space hamster but, due to making a few errant choices earlier in the game things did not go well for him.

We're more or less done with the bank story line and are moving forward to take on Hellraiser Meatsuit Hottie, Orin, Sunday at 5:30. Then it's on to the Big Brain on Brad!

I've been playing Tunic, which is a Souls-like, classic Zelda-like action adventure where you control an adorable fox in an isometric world. I could see myself losing hours to it if I had them to spare. Luckily, the game makes you feel very rewarded when you reach milestones, which make them seem like good stopping points. The ambient soundtrack is also soothing and relaxing as heck.

Anyone have interesting stories of long gaps between starting and finishing games?

Maybe it's not that interesting, but I started Max Payne on the PC slightly before the pandemic and less than a year before becoming a dad, played it on and off in between and finally finished it last week. The sensation of doing so was a real rush mentally for how much it made me realize how much the entire world and my own world have changed since I started playing it.

As for the game, it's really good, but man, due to the gameplay and bugs that Rockstar admitted they wouldn't patch, those dream levels are among the most frustrating levels I've experienced in any game. They're probably supposed to be frustrating given their purpose, but they overdo it.

Badlur's Gate III
WE FINISHED!!!!
Unfortunately, we had to reload an auto-saved state about 30 minutes into the final fight as our strongest character happened to be on a platform the brain destroyed. That left only me with hardly any health left and one action. The brain dodged my attack and I died too.

Half an hour or so later, we beat it.

Not a bad game. There are still several bugs throughout, like our characters randomly not rendering and being invisible until a game reload, or action wheels changing order with each level up, awkward random movement restrictions, and such, but it really is an incredibly dense story. Relatively speaking, those bugs are minimal. I am glad we're done, as is our tour guide Mike. I may revisit this in a few weeks or months , as I had already started a solo campaign with a much better understanding of what was going on that my first time through, but I am glad to be done as it was become a chore to keep up. This probably should be a classic, if it's not already; however, it cannot compete with Chrono Trigger

Yeah, I posted in 2022 about bouncing off of Breath of the Wild and returning five years later and loving it.

And a few posts follow that one as I keep playing and become more and more enamored with it.

My then-little kids (including a preteen Yoda) and I played the original Myst game together in the mid-1990s when it first came out (pre-walkthroughs, etc.). Great fun, so when the sequel, Riven, came out, I thought I'd give it a go. We didn't play as a group then, so I was on my own. One son, Yoda's brother, finished the game. I never did. It was another point-and-click slideshow-type game of that time period, and I had a terrible time staying oriented to where I was and whether that click meant I had moved exactly 90 degrees one way or another. I got lost in the various locations and gave up many times. I set aside Riven more times than I can count.

It came out in various formats (CD, then DVD as part of a group of Cyan Worlds games, then through GOG and also Steam) and I kept repurchasing it and trying again. I'd end up stuck and give up in almost the same spots every time. I was at a point where I was ready to just use a walkthrough and get through the game any way I could.

But last month Cyan Worlds released a complete retooling of Riven into a free-motion game, with not only updated graphics but updated puzzles--so that the diehard fans who had properly finished the point-and-click version, like Yoda's brother, would still find it interesting. Meanwhile, I had very little foreknowledge of most of the puzzles since I'd barely gotten far enough into the game to even SEE them. (I'd traveled to most of the areas in the game but got very little done once I arrived.)

I bought it on Steam and have been LOVING it, finally. Being able to travel freely and SEE where I'm headed has made all the difference in my ability to make progress in this game. I haven't used a walkthrough at all yet, and even though it's been slow plodding along like I'm doing, it's still progress. I don't have a ton of time to spend on it, and one section that puts you in what's been called the "starry expanse" is a bit of a motion-sickness issue for me, but otherwise it's living up to its original reputation as one of the best games of its time.

So we're talking a gap from about 1997 to 2024: 27 years. Do I win?

I got ya beat. Played Super Mario Bros. a bunch as a kid but never got past the second world. I beat it last summer.

So like 1995ish - 2024

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"This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." -Baruch Spinoza

Then again, I haven't finished the updated Riven YET, so if it takes me a while, I could still surpass you later (in 2026?).

Whoa. Nobody is beating that!

I can relate, I started playing Metroid for NES in the early '90s and didn't complete it until the late 2000s. That Mother Brain level is fun and intense, but man, you cannot stop paying attention for a second or you're screwed. No room for error. Since the PlayStation/N64 generation, I have expected to complete every game I play. As for the NES generation, it was a rare occurence.

Granted, I played them on and off, but since they are so dense, it took me 7 years to complete Morrowind and 6 for Oblivion. It only took me 1.5 years to complete Skyrim, which is surprising since so many people still play it.

Zork

Started in 1979 on an Apple 2
Finished in 2018 on a Samsung Galaxy S6.

Did you ever geat eaten by a grue?

Back then, for sure. One of the first things that happened to me. That stuck in my head, though, so when I went back to play it again all those years later, I still remembered not to wander around in the dark.

In full disclosure, I did fairly well with the later play through, but did have to resort to a walkthrough at one point because I just couldn't figure out how to progress. This was pretty far into the game and the solution was pretty obtuse.