PS4

I’m not really sure how interested people will be, but I took some pictures and want to write about them and I have a blog and… well… here we go. My sister sent me an empty envelope to show her support for the US Post Service, which our government is trying to kill, for some reason, ahead of the elections in November. The envelope wasn’t actually as empty as I’d thought… it was full of glitter… that got all over my kalimba. I had to dump it all into the sink, and now it’s all over the sink and I can’t get it all in the trash. It just… sticks there… ...

I at first didn’t want to write anything about fear, the topic of the first Blaugust Promptapalooza prompt. I’d much rather talk about the second one, which was easy, and all prepared. But, I came into this Blaugust thing determined to write a post for each writing prompt. Just because something is hard doesn’t mean I get to skip each. The things that are hard, are the things on which I should focus. ...

There’s a lot of issues I have with gaming. Lack of time, for one. I’d really like to have a lot more time for gaming, and blogging about games. But then I think – hold on, wait a second, I work. And if I wasn’t working, then I’d be broke, and unable to play games (or at least, unable to enjoy playing games), and then I’d lose the house and be on the streets and be miserable and clutching the Othello set my mom bought me when I was a kid, my last remaining game. ...

It is known that the best bad guys are mirror reflections of the good guys. Batman and the Joker. Superman and Darkseid. Wonder Woman and Cheetah. Captain Marvel* and Black Adam. I imagine the same holds true with the Marvel heroes, but I’m not very familiar with them. They should make some movies, get some publicity. * This is the real and only Captain Marvel. Fight me. The very best villains go beyond the mirror, with goals and dreams all their own, and perhaps knowing them so well, they wouldn’t seem like villains at all. Misguided, but perhaps not beyond redemption. ...

Since at least the thumbnail to this post will be shared where people who have not completed Ghost of Tsushima will see it, I headed this with a picture of Jin and Yuna limping together off the battlefield after the final battle with the Khan. But, it was clear from almost the beginning of Act II that this game would not have a happy ending. In history, the Mongols invaded Tsushima twice. The first time, they swept through the island (which is really quite small), moved on to Iki Island and on to the Japan mainland, where they were beaten back by hundreds of samurai. The second time, they were repelled in Tsushima, and Iki, and an unusual typhoon – the kaze-no-kami, would help the mainlanders drive the Mongols back to Korea. Since this was set during the first Mongol invasion, I fully accepted and expected that Sakai would fall to the Khan. ...

Having now completed (I estimate) the first third of the game, I think I can talk a little more about how I feel about it. Ghost of Tsushima promotes itself as a Kurosawa samurai movie come to life, and it’s pretty explicit in its classic movie references. This, however, is just a skin over what turns out to be a fairly standard open world action adventure game. But, a really fun, standard, open world action adventure game. ...

Since finishing Chocobo Mystery Dungeon, I’ve been sorta casually playing some Tomb Raider; Rise of the Tomb Raider, one of this month’s free Playstation Plus offerings. And it’s been no small amount of fun to be the badass Lara Croft, able to take on – and crush – entire Siberian prison camps with a couple sticks and a bit of string. But the buzz surrounding today’s release of Ghost of Tsushima (a name I am training myself to pronounce correctly) was too much to ignore. Last night I left Lara at one of her innumerable base camps beneath the very noses of the enemy, and took up the *katana and bushido of Jin Satai, last of the Tsushima samurai, off to avenge his honor against Hans Gruber and the rest of the Mongol horde. ...

I’ve been buying a lot of casual games to pass the time when I don’t have a lot of time to play. Bunches of puzzle games. Some programming games. Some action games (and more on those later). But the one casual game that had that perfect blend of drop-in playability and finely tuned difficulty was one I didn’t even see coming: Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon: Every Buddy. CMDEB for the PS4 is a remake of an old Wii game called Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo’s Dungeon, itself an entry in a long line of entry level dungeon crawlers featuring Final Fantasy and Pokemon characters. ...

June hasn’t been the best month for gaming. Tom and I are ramping up our 3D printing, and working on that sort of stuff is taking more and more of our time. I hope it’s worth it. I have a severe backlog of minis to paint – I have to finish the Gloomhaven PC minis, I have an army of vermlings and cultists to paint for the first few Jaws of the Lions scenarios, some snakes… Plus printing the terrain tiles. ...

I mostly wanted to see if I could pull an animated GIF off the PS4… I posted last week or so ago that I liked Chocobo Mystery Dungeon: Every Buddy! as a sort of light RPG that I could enjoy while waiting for something better to come along. That something better came in the form of Witcher 3, which is downloaded – all 40+ gigabytes of it – and waiting for me to play. ...