Quick Game Hits & An Apology

Good evening, mortals.  First things first…sigh…I’ve given my word to Editor that I shall begin tonight with a sincere apology for missing another entry of #FrozenFoodFridays.  I believe that I have informed you of the past couple of weeks being difficult for me – and they have been particularly bad these last couple of days.  But that is no excuse, considering this blog has always been my outlet for when things are difficult for me, and #FrozenFoodFridays has been a mainstay segment of it.  (Editor’s Note: We haven’t been hurt this badly since our fiance walked away.)  Silence, fool!  I will NOT allow this to devolve into some kind of therapy session.  (Editor’s Note: Oh, if anyone needed therapy…)  Ha.  Ha.  Ha.

Now then…with that out of the way, let’s see what EWE has been up to in his gaming time, shall we?  And with a backlog to rival that of the lovely and talented LightningEllen there is plenty for me to bounce around between.

Let’s start with one of my most anticipated, and least (currently) played, games, the recently released Tales of Berseria.  Now, I’m going to be honest here – and I feel like I may have said this before, so bear with me if I have – but I am a relative newcomer to the Tales series, with Tales of Vesperia being my first experience with it.  Vesperia went on to become one of my absolute favorite RPGs of the Xbox 360 generation.  Since then I have played Tales of Xillia and Tales of Xillia 2, as well as Tales of Zestiria, and while I thoroughly enjoyed each of those games, Vesperia remained my favorite, primarily due to it’s incredibly well-written and diverse cast of characters.  So how has Berseria stacked up?

Unfortunately, much like the last time that I mentioned this RPG, I am not far enough into the game to be able to really say, due to the ongoing PC audio bug that creates a horrific screeching/droning noise during almost every single battle in the game.  There have been a couple of patches released, and I have not tried the game since the most recent patch dropped, so hopefully this issue has now been resolved.  But until it is, I just cannot bring myself to play much of this game.  Based on my limited experience so far, I can say that Berseria’s protagonist, Velvet, reminds me a bit of Yuri from Vesperia, in all the right ways.  The tone of this game is much darker than the Tales games after Vesperia, which I enjoy thus far – Velvet’s quest for revenge has just begun for me, but holy FUCK does she have a solid motivation for wanting it.  I mean, not that you really NEED a motivation for wanting revenge…(Editor’s Note: Don’t start.  You’re just hurting.)  Oh, shut up and let me be bitter, would you?

As a Tales game, one would expect combat to be the highlight of the experience, and sans the audio bug, one would be correct in that assessment.  The action-packed, combo-driven Tales combat is honestly at it’s peak among the games in the series that I have played, being fluid and forgiving enough to allow button-mashing to be effective, but with nuance and depth that mastering its intricacies is highly addicting.  I don’t want to get into much more detail on the rest of the game due to my limited time with it thus far, but if you are a fan of the combat in the later Tales games listed above, and if Vesperia was a great game to you, then you’ll want to try this out.

Next up, I decided to spend some time with a game I picked up during a recent Steam sale for almost nothing.  Can’t beat an old Diablo-style lootfest, right?

So, everyone loves Diablo clones, right?  I mean, sometimes you just want to kill everything in sight and collect oodles of treasure that explode from their corpses.  But most of those games share a similar, fantasy setting – so one of the most refreshing things about Titan Quest, both the original game and the recently updated Anniversary Edition, is it’s setting of Egyptian-dominated myths and legends.  The Anniversary Edition upgrades the graphics of this classic to make the game more palatable to modern gamers.  But even without the graphical upgrade, this game is just fun.

You really don’t need me to analyze much in the way of the gameplay systems in this loot fest – click on shit until it explodes into loot, do this until you level up, assign points to skills, traits, and abilities that help you kill shit more quickly and efficiently.  Rinse and repeat until you are a physical god laying waste to everything in your path.  The audio is well done, but nothing particularly memorable has jumped out at me in my play sessions thus far.  This may be in part because when I’m playing a game like this, I tend to put on other music or something so I don’t really notice the in-game audio.  I haven’t experienced any technical issues during my gameplay thus far, but I will note that the NPC text is somewhat small and difficult to follow in the tiny chat bubbles that appear over their heads.  But this is a small complaint, outweighed by many more fantastic Diablo-esque tones that scratch every itch that a compulsive loot-gathering dungeon crawl should.  Even at full price, it’s a great cost-benefit ratio, and if you find it on sale, snap it up.

And finally, I’ve been feeling the urge to jump back into an MMO again lately.  Not because I have the time or money or patience to do so, but because I have no life whatsoever and probably stand no chance at love or friendship outside of either the Internet or the MMO gaming community.  So, I dusted off and updated my Elder Scrolls Online account – since there is no monthly fee, I could remind myself of why I don’t play many MMOs without killing my budget deader than it already is.

Now, in order to make things a bit more interesting (Editor’s Note: or just because he’s not all that bright), I have taken a sleep aid just before I fire up the ESO client each time.  This resulted an an…odd looking Dunmer Nightblade named Evil Wizard Esq (at least I retained consciousness long enough to name him) who has engaged in a few beginner’s adventures that I have little to no memory of at all.  At one point, I woke in the middle of the night to find I had apparently murdered a villager while trying to talk to her and now the guards were…upset.  I frankly didn’t see the problem, but sadly they did not agree with my point of view.  In the days and weeks to come, I will try to keep you updated on Dunmer EWE’s adventures throughout Tamriel.

And that’s that for tonight, kiddos.  Thanks for sticking around, and again, I am sorry for the missing #FrozenFoodFridays entries.  Since I have not contributed to your culinary requests recently, I will instead leave you with some advice from Editor.

Do not take for granted the people in your life that love you.  Maybe you think they aren’t good enough for you, or aren’t what you pictured in your imagination, or that you can “do better.”  But in reality all you’re doing is demonstrating a complete lack of caring for someone that likely cares about you quite a lot.  And while I doubt that you are out there reading this (you know who you are), on the chance that you are, you may tell yourself whatever you like to help you sleep at night for treating someone who loves you like a piece of refuse.  You may say that I am not good enough to be worth keeping around, even when you just recently expressed how glad you were to have me in your life.  But no matter how hard you try, where you look, or what you tell yourself, you will never find anyone who as honestly and truly loves you as I.  For now, you will be glad to be rid of me, to be able to see me around but never have to speak with me outside of the briefest of moments.  But someday, sooner or later, you will miss being able to pick up the phone and know I’ll be there for you; you’ll miss the warmth of being next to me and communicating so many thoughts and feelings without exchanging any more than a glance or two; you’ll miss me doing silly little things for no reason other than to show you that I wake up every day and choose you as the person I want to be with.  I don’t know when that will be – but I’m not going to just let myself be continually hurt until it comes.

Until next time, minions…be kind to one another.  Life is too short to do otherwise. – EWE