got_quiet

I've been so wrecked work wise I haven't had much time to do anything. I usually binge on games for next fest, but I was only about to try a few extremely short ones. None of them were particularly notable.

I'd caught up with the HSR story and wasn't playing much at all except to use down my energy. The last limited I pulled for was Aventurine, who I got his E1S1 for, and he has basically trivialized most basic content for me now after I had to build up and struggle on most of the plot bosses before his arrival. I'm not pulling for anything else until a new Husbando that I desire comes around, so I'll have lots of jade for Sunday (hahaha...) when he finally appears. The foxian that got teased I'll try to pick up too. I like character designs that are not so over the top. It might take me a bit to get through the new update. I'm less enthusiastic about it because all the Firefly marketing has turned me off her entirely.

I got Hades 2 a while back but have only had a couple nights to really have a go at it. The bosses feel a lot harder than the Hades 1 bosses. They've been fun, but Cronos is wrecking my shit. It took me about 30 runs to finally kill him. And a boss outright disappeared in a patch before I could kill it it seems. My only real complaint is that there feels like there are a lot more systems and mats to keep track of in Hades 2, which I don't like so much. The card table is an interesting idea but also I don't like stopping the fun part of the game to fiddle with it. The boss fights are awesome though, and I'm liking the loadout options.

I haven't been able to finish up any of the VNs or read anything. I haven't watched anything recently either. The weird work related bullshit got slightly more bullshit and parallel to that bullshit I basically picked up a second full-time job. I'm not entirely sure what I was thinking, but for the past month I have been running on fumes. This part of the year is always the most hectic for me, but this year it just feels like it's doubly so. I'm looking foward to the chance to relax for a weekend... maybe next month.

I had the misfortune of eating dinner while my house mates were watching an episode of The Boys a couple of days ago. While my sample size was small, I was still exposed to pretty much every single thing I hate about live action super shows. Reimagining heroes as cynically as possible, making everyone assholes, restricting a genre of fantasy and adventure to a bunch of sad people talking to each other in a variety of rooms... urgh. Miserable. If I wanted to be exposed to that sort of thing I'd read some trashy "literary fiction" or something.

I've been working steadily through the BLM itch.io bundle, focusing on everything tagged as VN. A lot of the games are not really VNs, or are really on the edge of the genre, but they've all been decent plays save maybe one or two. I stalled out on Inverness Nights but picked things up again after getting done with that. There's a handful of reviews playing_story for them. I'm putting that on hold though because the IF Comp voting has started, so it's time to play some real text based games. I've already finished one pretty short one. It was simple and based on being able to identify bad comma usage. My casual text posts here may not indicate it, but I actually know my grammar and am one of those nerds that like taking quizzes on punctuation and parts of speech and shit, so the puzzles were not hard at all for me. The hard part ended up being a few spots where the lack of vocab in the parser led to a simple command taking a long time to find.

But once I've played a few games I'll write things up and post the reviews where they belong.

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It's been great seeing such a huge response to Hades now that it's out of early access. I've been still playing a run every couple of days, and am working towards the epilogue and 100%ing the steam achievements, plus climbing heat. I think the ending, as in the credits ending, was a little anti-climactic, but it's hard to hit it out of the park after building up the story for almost a year. I wonder how people feel who reached the end in like 20 runs. I had played several hundred by the time the ending was unlocked, and that investment of time and effort made finally getting out feel a little different I bet.

A lot of nice art has come out for the game, especially for Than/Zag, but I feel a lot of people are sleeping on Hades. The man is broad like a house and a prickly boy who could definitely do with a good dicking down.