I'm about 20 hours into Project Gorgon now and I pretty much love it. It was exactly what I wanted / needed in a new MMO. It's got the atmosphere of ESO, the combat of GW2 / WOW, the leveling grind of a much more old school MMO, all mushed up into a great package with a very nice community. It reminds me a bit of playing on MUDs back in the day. I wish I had played those old MMOs when I was younger...

I've been feeling the itch to play an MMO, and since I have essentially played all of them at this point, I had to go digging and stumbled on Project Gorgon. It's meant to be old school in the way Ultima Online and Asheron's Call was, which I never played way back in the day because I was a pretty lame excuse of a gamer back in the day.

I'm about 4 hours into it and it's a lot of fun. Not a lot of hand holding. You've got to rely on your experience playing RPGs all your life to know that you need to go into a town and talk to all the NPCs to figure out what the hell you're doing.

I'd say the only negative to the game so far is that the NPC, interactive objects, and player nameplates are all the same white color by default, which makes it nearly impossible to recognize in a town which characters are NPCs and which are players. But that just required a trek into the settings menu so I could configure the colors differently myself, and everything started to feel a lot less bewildering.

Apparently what I really wanted to play was Ghost of Yotei, which was originally supposed to be what I played over Christmas break, but I was distracted by ARC Raiders.

This game is unbelievably good looking and really makes the case for the PS5 Pro more so than any game previously, I think. The amount of plant matter on screen at any time is pretty staggering, definitely a 'generational improvement' over Ghost of Tsushima.

Compared to Assassin's Creed: Shadows, Ghost of Yotei has a very distinctive feel to it. Every bit of gameplay feels bespoke, from the combat down to the way the horse controls. It's somewhere approaching Red Dead Redemption 2 as far as physicality goes, though it doesn't go quite as far as that game.

Since finishing Trails in the Sky: 1st Chapter, I have been "between video games", which is this terrible state where I flail around vaguely depressively trying out a lot of video games until I finally settle on playing one in a dedicated way. It's terrible. I have played, or we should say sampled, a great variety of games. I should give you a list. You'd be shocked. But I turned off my PC already tonight and, I mean, that's a bullshit excuse–I'm just lazy, okay? I'm fuckin' lazy.

I'm too lazy to write this post, fuck it, I'll talk to you later.

I'm playing Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma and I am having a blast so far. It's a great combination of a variety of games, all wrapped up in terrible graphics, but that's okay. It's fun anyway.

I'm about to hit 70 hours in ARC Raiders and figured I would share some thoughts. I did write a Steam review of the game around the 50 hour mark:

It took me about 52 hours to finish all the quests in the game (up to cold snap's quests) and the first raider deck, so now I can probably fairly review ARC Raiders...

It's great! It's a very interesting game in all ways: the gameplay is somehow a pretty unique take on the extraction shooter despite not seeming to be one at first glance; the graphics are very good; the game is polished to hell and back with some real physicality to your character's movement that you don't see often in games (the body movement reminds me a bit of RDR2); the AUDIO, oh god, the audio, not only does it sound so good, but the design of the audio effects of the robot enemies is just so good, the positional and environment processing on VOIP in world is next level. There are SO many aspects of this game that are just insanely polished and elevate the game to AAAA status in my book.

At one point, I was so mad over getting killed by random people in solos that I thought I would never finish the quests and definitely never even try to do the Expedition stuff. But that was 20 hours ago, and once I learned to stop full on traipsing through the tulips and start being a little more distrustful of people, I started to keep a single loadout around a lot longer. Now, for want of any other goal, I am doing the expedition stuff, just farming garbage just to have an excuse to keep going topside.

I don't play trios ever because I don't really care for the PVP in this game. I don't really think the game is built for PVP unless you can no-life the game so that you have enough funds to make it feel easy to get new loadouts. If you go into PVP as a casual, even if you survive a team fight or two, your shield is going to break and then you're pretty much screwed. I guess you can bring in multiple shields if you're smart. I'm not smart. So I stick to solos where PVP is very rare and easily avoidable. In solos you are most likely to end up bonding with some other player who you will never see again, and that's another small part of the charm of this game that just feeds into the great atmosphere and environment. We're raiders, we're not really friends, but we're not enemies either; we're just a couple of strangers who met up for a few minutes topside and our interests aligned long enough for us to not shoot each other in the back (and what would be the point? we'd be fighting over scraps and garbage, who cares).

Anyway, this game is a trip. I can't believe I am sitting here itching to go back in just to sift through apartment buildings looking for candle holders and lightbulbs. At face value, that's ridiculous. But in practice, it's immensely satisfying.

Well, 20 more hours later, I got my lightbulbs and candle holders. I also ended up randomly grouping up with people to take down the Matriarch, which was quite the experience; I'm also about to finish upgrading all of my workbenches, which I definitely thought I would never do. The game has really impressed me with its ability to keep forcing me to move the goal posts on exactly when my disinterest in the game will reach its peak. I thought I was basically over the game 30 hours ago, but here I am, still wanting to go back in. I'm essentially just farming for the current event and the expedition, which I don't even care that much about, but the thinnest excuse to keep playing the game is all I really need, I think.

Just to test out image slideshow functionality, here's all of the umamusume I got during a run of like 100 pulls.

❮ ❯

It was surprising several months ago, and it's more surprising now, I am still playing Umamusume Pretty Derby. For the past few months my goal has been saving up carats for the release of Manhattan Cafe. Well, she came out on the 8th and I had something like 300+ pulls saved up, so I obviously pulled her (and like 5 three star umas along the way). Happy day! I am not going to play a game and not try to snag the gothy characters. I have yet to play her career mode, because I rarely do that these days in the game, but I am trying to do it... what was this all for if not to see her storyline?

In other news, PETA, which I donate to, really pissed off the Umamusume fandom today with this image, which is hilarious. I mean, it's true, horse racing is bad, people, no matter how you dress it up!

Two nights ago I beat Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter. It was really great. I especially appreciated that it had a "very easy" mode that was indeed very easy. Compared to some other JRPGs I've played (like Tales of Arise) there characters were very memorable and I think the ending made the game rank up there with Persona 4 and FF7 Remake as far as truly great JRPGs go. I definitely recommend it. Looked great (compared to something like the newest Rune Factory on Switch 2) on PS5 Pro and ran great as well.

It might be hard to believe but I am still playing Umamusume Pretty Derby. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a great asynchronous game to play throughout the day slowly, or to play when you’re experiencing downtime in another game (for me this has been: between races in Wreckfest, and while I am dead and waiting for a revive in the BF6 beta).

Once you’ve trained enough umas and start repeating their career mode, the roguelike gameplay really kicks in and, honestly, it’s pretty satisfying. It must suck to be a kid and have no life because the time limits on how many careers and team trial races you can do have yet to affect me… but we’re getting close! Luckily I have so many other umas to train, I shouldn’t get too impatient.