where are your gloves and your helmet?

I've been playing Spider-Man 2 for the PS5 the past week or so. Quite enjoying it- much more so since the ( Villain! ) plot finished up. God, I hate that guy.

But it is unutterably weird to catch myself thinking ( Villain 2 spoiler! ) I can totally sympathize with that.

Earlier this year I finally got around to building the gaming computer I'd wanted for some time. It isn't for high end power gaming. It's for playing older games with whatever the hell mods I want.

I am learning that installing whatever the hell mods I want can be tricky and weird. Last night was Dragon Age Inquisition, and the majority of mods at Nexusmods appear to have been created for a mod manager that's no longer being updated or supported by its creator, so I'm doing what I can with a different manager called Frosty. Which... would not be a problem except that when I start Frosty, both the EA app and Steam start up and both of THOSE think they, in particular, are supposed to be what starts the game running. Also EA insists on me logging in every. single. time. even though I have the box checked saying 'keep me logged in'.

At the moment it appears that I have to start the game from Frosty, and when Frosty starts saying 'waiting for dragonageinquisition' I then hit Launch or Start or whatever in EA to start the game. It's loaded at least one mod, because I installed one that changes the game's typeface from that copperplate gothic whatever to the same type used in Dragon Age: Origins- and gives it the ability to use both capital AND lowercase letters. Next time I load it I have to see if the other mods are working too.

I've been playing Batman: Arkham Knight on the PS4 lately. Kinda disturbed at the level of brutality involved in this, mostly because it's a Kevin Conroy-voiced Batman and I'm used to his Batman being compassionate and more human (this one seems to have pretty bad flat affect when he's not threatening to bite someone's head off). The Joker work Mark Hamill put in is amazing, though.

The Batmobile has incredibly sensitive controls and moves at insanely high speeds when it's not in tank mode. In tank mode it maneuvers in all ground-bound directions like a helicopter but moves comparatively slowly. I tend to like tank mode better. I'll say this for car mode, though: once I discovered that the Batmobile doesn't actually take any damage from impact with scenery, only from actual attacks from other vehicles or from flying arsonist villains, I wound up with the best possible defense against bad guys with rockets, and that's my own driving. Kinda hard to get an actual lock on a vehicle that's doing close to a hundred miles an hour through the equivalent of the streets of Boston, with the maneuverability of a greased weasel, while a hyperactive chimp is pulling on all the driving controls at once.

(I mean it about not taking damage from scenery impact. Streetlamps, parked cars, actual concrete pillars that're supposed to be holding up part of an elevated highway, fire hydrants, metal pillars marking the center divider of two-way bridges, you name it- as far as I can tell, if it's not something you're chasing, and it's not hefty enough to stop you from moving, you can ram the Batmobile through it and it won't damage the car. Batman's only marginally less destructive to property around him than the Tasmanian Devil.)

Started playing Civ 6 on the iPad a while ago, mostly because I wanted something to do during prep time (I'd seen several suggestions that I just hole up in the bathroom until things finished). Sean Bean does the game's opening narration.

Poor bastard, his character doesn't even survive the introductory cinematic.

WHY THE !*(@)!@ IS THE !$*!)@%^!@% KALYDONIAN BOAR ROAMING AROUND !@*)(!^% IRON AGE GREECE

THAT WAS A @#*()^)(#^)@(#&$ BRONZE AGE MONSTER

FREAKING !#^!&%)!(@^#()*!%_#@)!&@)&!#@* PIG



.... guess why I didn't get to bed last night until close to 3 AM. Go on. Guess.

.... apparently Ubisoft's ancient Greece has cuccos; I got attacked by no less than five level 5 chickens when I was investigating a farm on Kefallonia last night.....

not that being level 5 helped, I mean, they all died of being hit with a sword exactly once, but they DID have '5' markers over their heads.

but still.

Well, this should be interesting. I was poking through the games on the Playstation Store the other day to see what they had in the way of science fiction based games other than bullet hells- Skyrim's nice enough but I've been doing fantasy gaming a while now, and after watching several episodes of Girls und Panzer I wanted to do something in a non-magic setting. They had X-Com 2 on sale for $18 (base game plus three DLCs), so I got that- I loved X-Com: Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within, as well as the original X-Com: UFO Defense and X-Com 2: Terror From The Deep. Tried loading that up. Print is ridiculously TINY on my tv. Apparently 2k/Firaxis/whoever is victim to the delusion so many software companies have, namely that only two uses of a display are possible: one is attached directly to your desktop computer, no more than thirty inches from your face, and the other is that you own and use a seventy-two inch or larger television which you may very well be using from about thirty inches away anyway.

I'm gonna set the PS4's accessibility options to allow Zoom viewing, which is done by the PS button plus (I think) X button. We'll see if that helps.

The interesting part isn't that, though. It's the 'people who liked this game also bought' selection. One of the games mentioned in that section was called The Outer Worlds, and I did not recognize the font or imagery at all, so I clicked on it.

It's a semi open world space-based RPG. From Obsidian. Specifically, from the people at Obsidian who were responsible for Fallout New Vegas and at least two of the writers from the original Fallout game. When I checked the reviews for it, the reviewers said 'it's not the Fallout universe but it's the same kind of humor and it's really well written and unlike the aggravating aspects of many RPGs you can kill any npc you want except for one and the script will adapt, and also the first patch allows you to set a slightly larger font size, and it has a semifrontier style like Firefly but without Joss Whedon's fingerprints being all over the place, and and and'...

So, yeah, last night I fired it up and started on my new character there. I am avoiding any further information about the game until Meredith is further into the plot.

Notes From New Vegas 61: 'Lucky' 38, My Ass

When last we saw our heroine, Janice had just entered the Strip, met Victor the Creepy Robot Cowboy, and been told to report to the top floor of the Lucky 38 Casino to meet with Mr. House. As it 's been a long time since I started writing these things, I don't remember how much I may have said about the Strip or the setting in that regard; my apologies if I repeat anything you already know.

( Cut for spoilers, because even years after the game is out, I still care. )

Had another Civ: Beyond Earth play-through. Transcendence victory this time. Only marginally more interesting than the last one. It would help if they didn't first put the text for your victory on screen as just plain letters on a black background, then play them over their painting while an actor or actress reads them off; seeing the "You Won!" message like that before they give you a picture leaves you with the "A Winner Is You!" taste in your mouth and when they bring up the artwork and the voice acting it's too late to be properly impressed. That being said, the voice acting does not impress me at all. I mean, the actors are okay, but none of them are voices I know, and if they are not going to be voices I know then they should at least be voices that are impressive. They are not. The developmental paths for tech and society in the game are kind of interesting, but the whole "You have to choose one of exactly three possible directions to take your society in unless you want to use one of the really boring anybody victories" thing makes it feel like stuff's being rammed down your throat- especially since you only get three possible Affinities, which more or less amount to "AAAAAAH SPACE IS SCARY! WE'RE HUMANS! XENOS SCUM WILL CONTAMINATE US ALL!", "We're going to live in harmony with this planet. SERIOUS harmony. Raise your hands if you've seen James Cameron's Avatar", and "The flesh is weak! HAIL THE MACHINE!".

Which isn't to say that the game isn't kind of fun in its own way, but it's really hard to get emotionally attached to or even seriously interested in bodged-together scifi space cultures the same way as you can get wrapped up in a given culture of Earth, back in Civ V. Each of the culture leaders has a name, but I've had a hard time being impressed enough with any of them to actually learn them. I've wound up calling them Brazil Guy, France Lady, Maori Tony Stark (he's in charge of 'Polystralia' and he seriously resembles Robert Downey Jr.), CEO Susan (that's the American colony, they're corporate sponsored), That Asian Lady In The Green Outfit (she runs the Pan-Asian Collective and she sounds like she's speaking Chinese, but 'Sochua' isn't a Chinese name- I think it's Cambodian), Indian-Looking Prophet Lady, and African Guy. Oh, and Slav Guy, I forgot about him. I think Brazil Guy's first name is Rejinaldo. France Lady's name is Elorie or Elodie or something like that, but as far as I'm concerned she's France Lady. I think Maori Tony Stark's name is Hutama. Slav Guy usually winds up being called 'General' within about two or three diplomatic visits so I suppose he's General Slav Guy. African Guy kinda drives me up the wall because he mostly turns up during the game to offer trades of resources or energy, which is fine, but his introductory spoken line is 'No village was ever destroyed by trade'. Um... wow. Just... I'm pretty sure anybody who had to live under the colonial rule of Leopold of Belgium would disagree with you there, sir. Wow. And Prophet Lady is the faction I first played when I started the game; I picked her faction because I liked their ability to gain more ground very quickly, and only learned later that the leader was supposed to be the daughter of a charismatic speaker and leader and prophet who had united the whole Indian subcontinent under his leadership. Her name's Kavitha Thakur, but since some of the guys I saw in the startup animation for the game were wearing what looked like Sikh turbans, my brain keeps insisting that her last name is supposed to be Kaur.

Anyway. The game's all right. The graphics are neat and the music is pretty awesome. The gameplay isn't really all that innovative, though, and the tech web- technologies are arranged in a web rather than a linear tree, so you don't have to progress through a specific linear path of development- can be a little annoying if you don't remember where to look for the next tech you want (Swarm Intelligence and Swarm Robotics, for example, aren't anywhere near each other). It's an okay game, but the scifi elements aren't enough to really get me going. If you like world colonization and development games, go buy Civ V and make sure it's got the Brave New World and Gods and Kings expansions. I can't recommend Beyond Earth, at least not yet.

Started playing Civilization Beyond Earth last night. I keep trying to call it Civilization V: Beyond Earth, which is not entirely fair. Does rather resemble Civ V, though. I do like the way very nearly everything you build and create gets slightly tweaked along the way according to your decisions; that makes sense in an environment where you're starting from scratch. I'm a bit annoyed about the difficulty of keeping the colony's health up, though. And I am going to put the Brazilian guy and the French lady through the WALL. We came umptybajillion miles through space in coldsleep to find somewhere better to establish ourselves and you two can't figure out a way to handle your differences other than warfare? We are ON A COMPLETELY NEW PLANET. You have been here LESS THAN TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS. How do you not have enough room to refrain from trying to kill each other? HOW?