Vandal Hearts
I’m going in order from oldest to new just to make sense of things.
Vandal Hearts is a tactical RPG in the same vein as Tactics Ogre, out for the PS1. A better comparison might be to Final Fantasy Tactics, which came out a year later. Both have 2D sprites on 3D environments. You can rotate the arenas around. Both have jobs that open up as you play through.
Vandal Hearts might have been better remembered today if Final Fantasy Tactics had never existed. Unfortunately for its legacy, FFT does exist and improves upon both Vandal Hearts and Tactics Ogre in every way, setting the standard for the entire genre going forth.
I got about halfway through this game when I decided to start using my new computer as my main computer. Since I also changed my PSX emulator from the out of date PSXFin to the new hotness Beetle PSX HW under Retroarch, I lost the save file. I will probably go back to it at some point. Having a really huge party size allows for some more interesting mechanics than the limitations Final Fantasy Tactics imposes.
Hons VR Lenses
I have the PlayStation VR2, but I have a huge problem when wearing glasses with the thing. They… they scrape. As such, I couldn’t really play any games with it. When I had my glasses pressed up against my face enough, it sorta worked, but the eye tracking didn’t work, the interaction between my glasses and the lenses in the VR2 was questionable, and I just set it aside. Nimgimli at Dragonchasers, a blogger who seems to discover things I need to know all the time, got some lenses for his Oculus setup. With one thing and another, it took this long for me to decide I needed to take the leap as well.
Hons VR came recommended for the PSVR2 by Reddit. I just recently had gotten a new glasses prescription, so I typed the prescription into their order form, paid the sixty or seventy bucks, and in a couple of days, they were on the plane from China to me.
They went in easily, and the experience was transformative. So this is what VR is supposed to look like? I downloaded a few VR demos, played Beat Saber some, and even jammed out to Drums Rock, another game Nimgimli suggested. (And I haven’t even talked about another of his discoveries, Snowrunner! Just… just go read his blog.)
Anyway, expect to hear more about VR here, soon.
Palworld
I wasn’t super interested in another survival game. For my money, Valheim is tough to beat. But, last game night, my son-in-law mentioned that he was spinning up a Palworld server for he and his three kids… and of course, I could come along, as well as anyone that was interested in joining.
Okay. If you want me to play a game, tell me I’ll have people to play with, and I am there. And so I joined up. And Palworld is actually fantastic. Sure, “Pokemon with Guns” is the tease. I haven’t even bothered with the guns (because this is a PvE-rules server).
The closest Pokemon comparison would be to Pokemon Legends: Arceus, which shares the open world, random enemies jumping in, bosses, dungeons, and having your best buddy Pokemon with you. But add base building to that. Automating resource gathering and refinement. Really cool boss fights. Dungeons. A fully explorable world.
And to that, add in the fact that there are other people running around to chat with.
Here’s the first boss battle. I apologize for the lack of game sounds; swapped computers, new one not 100% set up yet.
You have the rabbit ears, I see. I have the schematic for them but I haven’t made them yet. I think I’m missing some mats.
In fact, looking at your gear and Pals, you seem to be waaaaay ahead of where I was when I got to Zoe and Grizz. That Tombat is still too tough for me to catch several levels later and the long, ferretty-looking Pal I have never even seen.
I think I ought to concentrate more on catching Pals and leveling up and less on flying around taking screenshots…
I did try Zoe and Grizz earlier, but never got further than halfway. The ferret one is low level open world boss in the area of the small settlement. Tombat was and remains way above my level — I was just lucky in catching it. I was level 16 when I did the tower, and I think I am level 17 now. Mostly focused on dungeons at the moment.
Adding detail — my weapons were weak, so I went through all my Pals before I could do enough damage. If I’d had the fire crossbow earlier, I could have done it earlier. The ammo is hard to come by, though, so it’s only for special occasions like this. Also, I had a lucky Direhowl that I really wanted to use, but Grizzbolt deletes him in seconds. I needed to get Pals that could apply status conditions (frozen, on fire, poisoning) to Grizz.