Each of these probably should get their own posts, but I am exceedingly lazy.
Starting off with Ogre Battle — about halfway through at about 25 hours in. The plot has a lot of twists and turns. Modern RPGs could learn a lot by looking at these old classics, and I really regret not playing this game back in the day.
The game is somewhat slower and smaller than the previous SNES game, Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen. But, though the maximum group size is smaller (5 vs 6) in the Nintendo 64 game, there are more tactical options, with every spot in the 3×3 grid used for positioning units being tactically significant. If you’ve been watching my Twitch streams, you’ve seen the difference between how a well-formed group is structured.
Although the screenshot above is obscured by the text box, you can see that Commander Rhade wasn’t protected by the paladins in front of him or the knights behind him (granted, I did sneak up on him from behind; normally the knights would be in front). This means that all I had to do was waltz past the first row and keep hitting him. Paladins in the last row will heal, but paladins in the first row will try to block. The healing made this fight take a long time, before I eventually figured out I needed to ping pong Rhade’s unit to force an eventual hit from behind so that the paladins would calm down a little. The two witches in my unit were supposed to poison and sleep the paladins so they would just let me kill their boss. But anyway.
Loving the game. I don’t think I’m going to get the worst ending of the, I think, four, but I’m pretty sure I’m not getting the best ending, either, due to a poor decision I made in the first few minutes of the game.
Every year, Belghast decides, at the cost of his own sanity and peace of mind, to invite everyone who thinks they would like to share their thoughts with the world to participate in “Blaugust”, a celebration of game blogging. And he’s decided to do it once more. I’d taken a long break from blogging, like five years or so. It was awhile. I’d gone to Google+, and most of my blogging was over there. When G+ died, I floated around for awhile and then left the gaming community until I finally returned to Twitter, saw the posts about Blaugust, joined the Discord and started tentatively talking about gaming once more.
I’ve taken short breaks since then, but I always show up again for Blaugust. I urge anyone who used to blog, or anyone who thinks that they might like to try, to click that link above, sign up, and just… do it. It costs nothing. You don’t need to have a schedule or a theme or anything, really. Just start a blog, talk about anything — 5 words or 500. Hit publish, share on the Discord, and *bamf* you just blogged.
I bought the Steam Deck last July, but only now received it. I anticipated I’d be playing classic RPGs on it, and I have a BUNCH of them saved up, including FFVI. But, like I mentioned on Twitter today, it’s become my No Man’s Sky machine. It’s fun to just pick the thing up and almost immediately be zooming through space with it. I look after my settlement, run some quests, do maintenance on my fleet, and put it down again. Super fun. I’ve also been playing some rhythm games on it.
I do intend to play those RPGs, though. Worth the purchase? I think so.
Team Spode is pretty much done with V Rising. The game was a lot of fun, but without the PvP element, there’s only so far you can go. We had a pretty successful night last night, killing a bunch of bosses for those that needed them.
V Rising is often compared to Valheim. In my mind, Valheim is a better game that has more to do, from a PvE standpoint, once all the bosses are dead than V Rising. There is an after game with V Rising consisting of grinding chests and fishing spots to get some rare cloaks and hoods, but for now, for most of us, there is little to do except wait for the DLC.
I think Team Spode will be back in Valheim when the Mistlands are released, but for now, it looks like our next game will be one we’ve played before, Guild Wars 2.
I have not played this game in YEARS, and I have little recollection of how to play. We’ve decided we’re going to spend this week re-familiarizing ourselves with the game. I was hoping we would start from scratch, but that doesn’t look like what we’re going to do.
Is Engineer even a good class anymore? I guess I’ll find out.
The GW2 client wants me to stream the gameplay, so you’ll probably be able to find out more about our adventures over on my Twitch channel.
Oh, I look forward to reading about Team Spode in GW2. It’s a very different game from what it was and yet somehow always the same. I’m on a break from it right now, instigated by the arrival of a dog in the house but continued because I’ve been playing continuously for just shy of a decade and I *needed* a break even if I didn’t realize it, but no doubt I’ll be back soon enough.
Engineers, like most classes, have had their moments in the sun. They were flavor of the month at least twice that I can recall and I think the addition of the Jade Mech they get in the last expansion has propelled them back to the foore once again. Despite having every class leveled up and multiples of several, I don’t really play anything other then Eles and occasionally Rangers, though, so what do I know?
Elementalist was my class in GW1, so I wanted to try something different here. I checked my blog; 2015 was when we played last. Seven years!
Should I buy the expansions right off? I don’t think I have any of them. I probably should buy them 🙂