Apologies for the sudden disappearance—work got busy, and then I found myself distracted by video games for a while, and then work got busy again, and then, you know, video games. I’m attempting to spin things back up here as far as regular content goes, but we’ll have to see.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, a lot of my time has been dumped into various fighting games (also Trackmania). I’ve brought this up before (if not here, certainly on the podcast), but part of what makes fighting games so appealing to me these days is the brevity of an actual match—you’re looking at around five minutes per match, tops—but at the same time I’ve found myself spending entire afternoons just kind of sitting in online play (or, as has been more frequent these days, sitting in training mode). The point being that unlike so many other genres it lends itself to both short and long sessions, and the more time I spend with them, the more I like ‘em. In the last week, I’ve been spending a lot of time with one flavor of fighting game in particular—the anime fighter.

More accurately, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Melty Blood Actress Again.

What the fuck is that?

Okay so, story time.

I spent a year abroad in Oxford my third year at college, and while I did not spend as much time playing video games (there were an awful lot of pubs nearby which I was busy devoting my attention to), I did wind up killing a not-insignificant amount of time dicking around on the internet when I should have been writing papers. This was also coming off a summer of working third shift construction, where I wound up casting about on the internet for shit to do on my nights off and, inevitably, spent a lot of time on 4chan, because of course I fucking did. This meant I wound up watching a lot of anime that I wouldn’t have ordinarily watched, because this was also when torrenting became super-prevalent.

The thing about being in another country for school was that the only thing I had to play games on was my laptop: a cheap Gateway (formerly eMachines) which could just barely run World of Warcraft. I’d installed Fallout 2 on it before leaving for school and it was those two games I found myself saddled with for the entire year—that and some games on my trusty DS which I don’t actually recall all that well.

Lord knows why, but when I saw some chatter online about some game called Melty Blood, I became interested enough to check it out—which involved torrenting, finding an English translation patch, and buying a shitty Logitech gamepad which was basically a Dualshock 2 but without the responsiveness of a Dualshock 2 (this was at the prompting of my brother, who assured me it was a quality controller even though it really, really wasn’t).

As it turns out, Melty Blood was a fan game of sorts which spun out of some visual novel or other about vampires, the people who hunt vampires, and the people who fuck vampires, their sister (but don’t worry, she’s not a blood relative!), the maids, and the possessed nun or whatever pretending to be a student. Yes, I know. For whatever reason, the creator of the VN is massively popular, and this particular thing was popular enough that some people made a fighting game and got it inducted into the actual “canon” universe (I think).

What Melty Blood really is, of course, is a Guilty Gear clone. Or at least that’s the game it reminds me of the most—right down to an enemy who just sort of hits you with shit that comes out of his vaguely amorphous body—including sharks and a deer that just sort of wanders around hitting you until it goes away (you know, like summoning Eddie in GGXrd). I played either the first or second version (I believe it was ReAct that I grabbed in college) and enjoyed it for what it was—although I couldn’t play other people because I only had the one controller and online support didn’t exist. I went through the story mode, which I actually enjoyed quite a bit—I liked that it branched if you lost, so that instead of having to restart you just got a different story in particular—and got… I won’t say “good,” but at least competent. Then my laptop got stolen that summer and what with one thing and another, I never gave the game much thought again.

Until this year’s EVO, that is.

AnimEVO

It was bouncing around this very website’s EVO post that I saw a familiar name included in the AnimEVO side-tournaments. I was already kind of interested in seeing the latest BlazBlue and vaguely interested in Under Night In-Birth (developed by the Melty Blood people), so I was surprised to see Melty Blood on the list of planned events. I certainly hadn’t thought too hard about the game in the nine years or so it had been since I last played any Melty Blood myself, so I decided I would make some time to check out the tournament and bask in the warm glow of my own nostalgia.

As it turns out, the game’s pretty fun to watch in the same way that most anime fighters are really fun to watch—the combos people pull off look really ridiculous and cool, and as memories of the game came flooding back I made an inquiry in the twitch chat about just how the hell people were still playing this game and, of course, how one could go about getting a copy for themselves, you know, if one were interested.

Google proved to be the answer to the latter question, and a quick browse of a comprehensive pastebin document later I had an installer, a crack, and a translation—just like old times!

I vaguely remembered dicking around as Sion (the girl with the gun) last time, so I hopped into the story mode and discovered it still hasn’t been translated. Undeterred, I settled for dicking around in the training mode and fighting the AI, which did a handy job of handing my ass to me for a good portion of my time until I remembered most of the mechanics (I have yet to fully wrap my head around the moon system they implemented in this version—they work like grooves in SFIII, but some differences are universal and some are character specific). Eventually I got to the point where I figured some online play couldn’t hurt, so I hopped into a steam group chat set up for this very purpose and found myself a sparring partner.

Said sparring partner proceeded to utterly annihilate me, although he was very nice about it and knew I was completely in the woods re: competent play. It was a lot of fun, at any rate, to see how the various characters played, and the community (such as it is) was all quite helpful and seemed to be Solid Dudes who all pointed me toward some guides and such to pick up some basic combos and whatever.

So that’s what I’ve been doing recently—sitting with training mode open, usually with some other thing going on because the game can be run in a small window, practicing the sort of simple combos that one generally does when one is completely out of practice with the game they played That One Time Nine Years Ago. There’s something about the sprites that I like which I can’t pin down—the somewhat low-resolution look leans a little more on the viewer to fill in the blanks and that works in a way that other older games don’t (not to be too reductive, but the jump from Street Fighter to Street Fighter II is enormous, and even then the jump to Street Fighter III is such that II looks bad by comparison). That and the fact the soundtrack is surprisingly good secures a place in my heart for this game, weird-ass pedigree and all.

SUPER OBVIOUS NOTE ABOUT PIRACY: As a general rule, I try to avoid pirating whenever possible. I like paying people money for the work they do! It’s kind of my thing these days, because I have a job and can afford to do so. If there were literally any legitimate way to get my grubby hands on this game, I would’ve done so. As it is, this particular version (the one with online support and shit) was only ever available in like a boxed anime set that goes for something like $300 goddamn dollars these days, and is super-rare to boot. So I broke my “pay people” rule, although in a gesture of like… soothing my own feelings of guilt I did pick up Under Night In-Birth on Steam afterwards so at least some money went to the devs (I have yet to play any of it, because I’m busy in MB, but still). That doesn’t make it right, of course, and I fully acknowledge I’m a complete fucking hypocrite in this instance.

OTHER EDIT: So here's the thing: I 100% was going to pick up UNIB on Steam after I wrote this, which is why I said I picked it up--only it turns out there's not actually a PC version out? So nevermind. I'll have to pick it up on PS3 or (as is more likely) wait for the PC version to arrive--which I could've sworn was set to happen soon, but a quick google search turned up JACK SHIT, so maybe the PS3 version's in my future after all.

OTHER OTHER EDIT: Yeah, I have UNIEL on PS3 now. Doubtless I will check it out soon enough.

My goodness, but it’s been a while. All these video games out there, you know, and so few of them are fighting games (and anyway, I’m not sure how many more fighting games I can realistically take up before I go mad). I had a lot of other things demanding my attention, so I spent just under a week doing very little in the way of fighting at all. In spite of that, it’s been an eventful time since the last installment.

Street Fightin’

Most importantly (or at least, most importantly to me), I’m no longer winless in USFIV—I may have racked up a ridiculous amount of losses in the process, but I made the decision to switch back to Sakura and stuck with her. This paid off in a downright heart-pounding victory over a Chun-Li player, which basically left me feeling so goddamn elated that I nearly called my parents to brag before I realized they’d have no fucking clue what I was talking about (I settled for sending a series of excited texts to my brother, who was polite enough to pretend to care). The funniest part about the win was that I was close to giving up on the game altogether. A series of (frankly humiliating) defeats had left me thinking that maybe the Street Fighter series just wasn’t for me (a note I wrote down at the time posits that maybe “I’ve got some strange enjoyment out of being terrible” and laments a predilection for poor timing and panic). Shortly after that note is one written in an unsteady hand still shaking from adrenaline “Have I found my feet?”

Well, as it turns out I haven’t really found my feet that much. I did manage to string together a series of wins after the first one. This also basically ensured that I will never stop playing as Sakura, as she pulled off my first win and has continued to perform well for me, at least in terms of winning me a couple matches here and there (I think my record is something like 19-81 overall). Yesterday I discovered the match replay functionality and, figuring there wasn’t much reason not to, decided I would upload one of my matches to YouTube so you can all watch it and laugh at how cheap my wins are (I tried to find my original win but with no success—the game only keeps a set amount of matches in its memory before it deletes them, so it’s likely I’ve lost it forever).

No, I don't know why the whole thing recorded in slow motion. Yes, my wins really are that cheap.

One thing which I’ve learned, at least, is that it pays to sit back and watch your opponent—as much as I’m a fan of just charging in swinging, my better fights have come when I spend the first round playing slightly more passively, waiting to see what they favor.

I also impulsively decided to try playing Cammy, which went about as well as you’d expect (i.e. I got my ass handed to me).

Teaching my Shadow Poor Fighting Habits

Like the rest of the world, I was super-excited by the announcement of the Shadow Lab. As soon as I heard about it, I knew I’d want to make one of my own, particularly since any advances in AI (even simple-ass videogame AI) fascinate me to no end. So shortly after watching Jeff play around in it on UPF, I fired up Killer Instinct and made myself an AI me.

I got absolutely murdered by the Jago you fight initially to program your AI, incidentally. It’s appropriate, because that’s what usually happens when I fight Jago as Sabrewulf (or anyone). I’ve since spent a lot of time challenging the shadows of others and it’s been a hell of a lot of fun. There’s a lot about the shadow system I like—it gives me the ability to fight my brother, for example, even though our schedules don’t always line up—plus it really is shockingly close to fighting a real person (right down to getting teabagged after a loss). Also, as someone who occasionally has connectivity issues (in a perfect world, I would not be forced to use god-awful Comcast internet—but they are the only game in town and their service is fucking dog shit) it is nice to get the “fighting a real person” experience without the “whoops say hi to lag/dropped connections” part.

Oddly enough, I don’t seem to be able to get any statistics about my Shadow’s performance online (I figure he must have been in some fights by now, but I don’t get any statistics beyond the ones I create by fighting shadows myself). There’s no replacement for good old fashioned fighting actual humans, but the shadow system comes incredibly close to it. At this point I’m sure I’ve spent more time fighting shadows than fighting real people, and it’s been a blast. Plus I’m sure it’s all made my shadow even more like my own, awful fighting performance.

Other Stuff

I wound up taking a massive break from MKX—the fighting in KI and USFIV flows so smoothly for me that MKX feels clunky by comparison. I just didn’t want to spend time figuring it out anymore, so I gave it up for a while. My brother has been a little more stubborn about it, and convinced me to give it another try recently, so I went back into it. I read a couple guides on MKX (Sub Zero, specifically) and tried out some of the combos, but the timing on them is unlike anything else I’ve played, and I’m not sure I have the patience to keep banging my head against the wall. It’s hard to muster the urge to get back to the game when I’ve been having so much fun with other (better, if you ask me) games.

Speaking of other games—how about that Street Fighter V news, huh? I can’t help but wonder if they’ve gotten rid of the Z motion in it entirely after hearing Jason talk about how it’s not required for Ryu’s uppercut anymore. I would be more into the idea if I hadn’t gotten to the point where I can actually pull the damn move off consistently, but I think I’m into the idea of a more accessible Street Fighter. It sounds weird to say it, but SFV might be the thing that makes me pick up a PS4? I like the look of it, and while some of the animations still seem a little off (there’s something about Ryu’s fireball that has a little judder to it I can’t quite place), I’m pretty sure they’ll sort that out by the time it launches. I’ll be interested to see what comes out of E3 for it (more character announcements would be nice—I need to be able to play Sakura or I’m screwed).

PS. Please announce Season 3 of KI at E3 and put the KI season 1 and 2 bundle on sale. Thanks.

PPS. If you want to fight my awful Sabrewulf shadow, I'm forddent on XBL.

I am born, or more accurately created, on the first day of my reign—and there is a giant chalice talking to me. I am an immortal god-king, the product of the blood of the nation’s heroes, and it is my duty to keep the kingdom going long enough for the aforementioned chalice to do its work and save us all. We’re fighting a holding action—the best we can hope for is to slow our defeat in the face of an inevitable foe which brings the ravages of time and decay prematurely into the world. There is, indeed, none of the world outside our borders left—as far as we know, anyway. A vanguard of heroes stands ready to fight at my command, and through these mighty bloodlines the future of our nation—my nation, now—rests assured. Provided, of course, I can manage to keep the kingdom going. Also, I can’t leave the throne, which is kind of a bummer—but I can astral project, which I suppose is almost as good—and I can withdraw inward to allow the years to fly by, should I wish (the chalice promises to wake me for important events).

I am twenty years into my reign before my kingdom suffers its first loss. Perhaps that is what caused me to become so hideously overconfident, trusting that I would always come out ahead. My warriors were strong, and they were smart, and I should’ve paid more attention when the game told me this would not last, because it did not last.

Thirty years into my reign and the first fatalities in battle have occurred. My houses have failed to produce strong heirs (or any heirs, in a few cases, because I grew too attached to some fighters and could not bear to part with them—how could I, after all we’d won together, send them off to marriage and old age? Far better for them to die in battle, I thought—or to only retire after old age prevented adventuring—and then to aid in research, or training of the new generation of fighters). By the time I realize my error, forty years have passed and my ranks are perilously thin. A few early deaths due to the caprices of chance and health, and it seems I’ve got to all but start over.

I have failed to produce a diverse set of houses, it would seem. We are a nation of alchemists and hunters, with no front line troops. I should have focused on a more balanced military when determining who should run things. That would have been the act of a wise ruler, but I clearly have no wisdom. We are too low on heroes to even risk marrying them off to produce more heroes, for what if they fail to produce heirs? I spend too much time—far too much time—having the chalice search for new heroes rather than producing them. Yet these heroes seem more fragile than the champions of old, or perhaps the enemy has grown more powerful.

My fiftieth year is a good one. The heroic houses have produced offspring, and adoption has ensured bloodlines where babies could not. My people are stronger, now, and the next encounter with the Cadence is a resounding victory—as is the one after that. Time, however, refuses to slow down. This generation grows older, and once again I find myself in danger of losing whole bloodlines due to my own mismanagement (or rotten luck when it comes to baby production, even from unions which promise fertility). Still, I grow attached to a few young heroes—attached enough that it absolutely destroys me when a poorly-thrown flask cuts one down in what should have been his prime. The thrower was a member of one of the original houses and should have been great, but instead proved to be an incompetent wretch, incapable of hitting targets. I can’t marry him off, so I send him out to die and feel a vicious sort of satisfaction when he does.

My sagewright’s guild is destroyed and its personnel lost in an explosion in my 80^th year, because I trusted them to create useful things and hoped for the best when they approached me about a new project. Soon thereafter, the keep of my oldest bloodline falls to an attack that I did not have the strength to repel. I despair, spending the next few years reeling from the loss and trying to figure out a way to recover. I try to start new bloodlines, maintain the faltering ones, keep moving—but another keep falls in my 90^th year, and the heroes I recruit as replacements are almost uniformly sickly. At this point I can expect no more than a few survivors out of every engagement with the Cadence.

I suspected somewhere back in my 70^th year that my kingdom was doomed, and that it was my fault for being so foolish in the early years of my reign. The Cadence takes more territory, and my heroes keep dying, and after a hundred years of strife, I feel compelled to call it quits and accept oblivion. I am worn down by frustration at these young heroes and by grief at the loss of some of my best houses. The Chalice continues to tell me that we can continue, that we should not give up until the bitter end, and perhaps that is true. Perhaps I will gain some form of dignity in fighting until all is well and truly lost. I do not know, honestly, which would be worse—to lay down and die now, or to keep fighting in the face of an inevitable defeat, drawing out the end and making that much more painful when the end does come.

I’ve made the decision to fight to the end. One day the remnants of my kingdom may stand testament to those who fought, or maybe all will be devoured by the rushing tide of decay and ruin that even now sits at my capital’s doorstep. I have served 127 years as ruler of this kingdom. I do not believe I will serve much longer.

Perhaps there is another like me, somewhere. Perhaps they too have a chalice, and immortality, and a chance to stop the Cadence from devouring the entire world. I will never know, because my story ends here, facing down the monsters at the door, unable to even leave the throne.

Damn me for my foolishness. I’ve killed us all.

Before we go any further, I’ve got an important confession to make: I’d intended to keep to my semi-regular schedule of getting these up on Sundays, but I spent the lion’s share of Sunday the same way I spent the lion’s share of Saturday, and indeed the lion’s share of my Friday evening—watching the Combo Breaker tournament on this very website (thanks for allowing me to not have to sit in Twitch chat, Giant Bomb, I appreciate it more than you know). It was a massive bummer to have the streams go down as often as they did (some serious ISP shenanigans apparently went down, and that’s a shame), but whenever the feeds were up it was great to watch a bunch of intensely good players do battle in games which I either own or happen to have an interest in. I particularly enjoyed watching the Killer Instinct and Guilty Gear Xrd finals (I wanted to watch the P4AU finals too, but stream problems prevented it). I will never be on the level that basically any of the participants operated on, but there’s always some knowledge to be gleaned from watching folks play at a high level (like “block sometimes” and “maybe don’t just charge at people all the time”). Also it’s fun to watch and chat with people who know more about fighting games than I do. Some pretty damn good matches happened over the weekend, and the MKX final in particular was intensely exciting.

So obviously I finished watching Combo Breaker footage and got intensely excited about playing some more fighting games—specifically, I got intensely excited about playing more Killer Instinct.

I Gave Iron Galaxy Five Dollars

Shortly after my last post, some discussion in the comments ensued, and it was recommended to me (thanks, @l1ghtn1n) that I should consider buying either Jago or Sabrewulf, as my previous posts indicated a preference for rushdown characters (which is pretty accurate, since my go-to strategy involves just lumbering forward like a big dumb animal and swinging wildly—there’s a tip for any of you who happen to encounter me in any fighting game). A vague memory of playing a lot of Sabrewulf on the original KI as well as a passing interest in werewolves (I would kill for a Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines type of game, except you get to be a werewolf instead, because vampires are fuckin’ boring) got me to shell out the $5.00 it took to unlock Sabrewulf.

Here’s something I really like about Killer Instinct: It has a nice training mode (not the best training mode, but a nice one) that lays out the basic mechanics and has you essentially do a bunch of crap as Jago. Once the combo system was explained, I had a better idea of what I was doing—and it turns out Sabrewulf’s linkers are insanely easy to pull off. I pulled up the arcade mode and jumped in, setting the AI to I think “medium,” which in my parlance usually means “this will beat the piss out of you,” because as I may have mentioned in the past I’m not very good at fighting games.

I charged in, started a combo, hit a linker, and then… everything slid into place. 16, 24, 32 hit combos, all of them suddenly pounding the absolute shit out of enemies I’d never managed to come close to beating in previous, aborted attempts with Glacius to do anything of note. The system clicked for me, and I fell instantly and irrevocably in love with this fucking game. I haven’t taken the game online yet—I was going to do it over the weekend, but Combo Breaker happened—but it is something I am pretty excited to do. If you happen to see me online and in Killer Instinct (my XBL handle is forddent), feel free to challenge me and, I’m sure, beat my ass like a fucking drum because I’m still pretty shit.

The Quanba and CronusMAX combination, incidentally, continues to work well as a way to have a fightstick on the Xbox One—I leave the stick set to 360 when I use it, and since the adapter isn’t doing any weird-ass macro inputs or anything (because who has time to fuck with all that nonsense, also why would you want to? That whole concept is dumb as hell to me) and just serves as a bridge I haven’t noticed any input lag of any sort—although I struggled a little more to pull of some quarter-circle motions with Jago to start out with, so maybe there was some lag in there after all? I kind of doubt it (it is more likely that I just wasn’t making a smooth enough motion), but more testing will doubtless suss out the truth of the matter.

The Perfect Training Mode

I think I mentioned this last week, but I was alerted to a sale on the Humble Bundle store which had Skullgirls on sale for like… three dollars or something like that. I if course grabbed a copy because I’d been considering doing so for a while and three dollars falls well below my threshold for impulse purchasing. I mean shit, you can barely get a drink for three dollars these days.

Anyway I grabbed Skullgirls and jumped right in, although I should be up front and admit that I think I’ve played the least amount of this one—only an hour and a half or so (Steam claims I’ve played like 38 minutes but I think that’s probably not accurate). I’m most impressed with how comprehensive the tutorials in Skullgirls are: they explain a lot of basic fighting game concepts which a beginner might not understand, for example, and have you pulling off combos before you even quite realize you’ve gotten that far.

The MvC team play that Skullgirls seems to rely on is not exactly my cup of tea—I prefer to have my fights as one on one affairs, for the most part—but I went through most of the story mode with Miss Fortune and had a lot of fun with it so far. The story mode’s a little weak—you have some random fights and the occasional story beat, and that’s about it—but it is a decent way to experiment against different matchups with a character, which is all I ever use story mode for anyway (unless we’re talking the story mode for the last two Mortal Kombat games, which are more of a sampler that allows you to figure out which characters you are good with). I’ll probably head back to Skullgirls sooner rather than later, because there were some entertaining SG matchups at Combo Breaker that got me itching to play again.

The Rest of the Stuff

I did some more SFIVU experimentation, and wound up changing characters again—I’ve become attached to Elena, who more than any other character got me close to actually winning a goddamn online match. I’ve had some pretty rotten lag on a couple matches, which is probably because I’ve been trying to find games late on weeknights—certainly when I bother to look for matches on the weekends I’ve had a little more luck. I am still terrible, and I do mean terrible at SFIVU, but I’ve found my footing a little more to the point where I can actually get through most of the arcade mode (when I’m not being interrupted with online match requests, which are pretty frequent if you turn them on) without getting super-stuck, so there’s been a little improvement there.

Persona 4 Arena is probably still the game I’m playing the most of, if only because I really want to get through the story mode—I’ve unlocked all the characters, and just need to knock those out before I get to the bottom of things. It’s a hell of a lot of fun and, like I mentioned last time, almost stupidly easy to pick up and play. I’ve been focusing only on Chie when it comes to online play, and she’s won me more than she’s lost, which is unusual. There’s still a pretty good online community for P4AU, which is a relief, since it’s the game I’m actually decent at.

I have played very little MKX recently, partially because I’ve been focusing on other games, and partially because I am just tired of the terrible online performance (and sure, partially because if I’m gonna play a fighting game on the Xbone, I’m going to hook up my stick and play KI). There was some really exciting action at Combo Breaker that got me thinking about jumping back into it though, so I’ll probably wind up heading back to that soon. Supposedly they’ve tweaked Sub Zero a little so he’s slightly less terrible? That’s an exciting thought. Killer Instinct, though…

Basically, watching the Combo Breaker tournament got me excited to play more fighting games. Next year I might even head down and check the thing out. I considered heading down this year, but for a variety of reasons (mostly involving my inability to plan ahead, so I would’ve been paying to get in like, at the door) I gave it a miss. Chicago’s only an hour-hour and a half drive for me, so it should certainly be worth checking out. Maybe I’ll even register for a tournament and get my ass kicked (probably not though).

It has been a general rule for me for a long time that I don’t typically buy games the week they release. I made exceptions for more tent pole releases that I was particularly fond of (your Halos and Mass Effects), but generally I pick games up weeks (or months) after they’ve released when they go on sale, or when I know for sure they’re games worth getting. Since I started frequenting this site, I’ve found it easier to pick things up closer to their release dates, as Quick Looks tend to make it much easier for me to immediately get a sense of how the game is.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that both Axiom Verge and NOT A HERO released this week on the PC and I picked them up immediately. Here’s what I thought about them, complete with terrible headlines:

Axiom Verge puts the Metroid in Metroidvania

This doesn’t actually count as a “new release” I guess, because it’s been out on the PS4 for like a month or so at this point, but apart from dicking around in the demo in a Best Buy I’d had no real exposure to it. I do not own a PS4 (in spite of the constant pleas of my friends to buy one), so the release of Axiom Verge on the PC made this an easy buy for me.

I never actually played Super Metroid on the SNES, although I did play an emulated copy in high school and really enjoy it (I also owned Metroid Fusion and was a pretty big fan of that too), which is about as close as I can come to describing the sort of game Axiom Verge is. The whole exploration/find weapons to unlock other areas/fight weirdly organic-looking creatures is all there, and the game controls super-well. I’ve spent maybe an hour with it so far (I just got the disrupter), and it plays really well. The soundtrack is also delightful, with a thumping bass line that gets in your head and, at least in my case, had me actually moving and shooting to the beat on several occasions (possibly I’ve been playing too much Crypt of the Necrodancer).

There are a generous amount of save rooms, which is another one of those things which, as a shitty game-player, I appreciate. The boss fights have been somewhat underwhelming thus far, but I’m having enough fun exploring the world and seeing what can and can not be hacked or whatever that I really enjoy it. The story so far is… interesting, at least, although a bit thin (even from an environmental storytelling standpoint). We’ll see how much more I put into this—I’ll probably beat it? I don’t know. I like it.

NOT A HERO is Not a Bad Game

More accurately, NOT A HERO is a fucking joy, and not just because you can run around murdering people as an angry Welsh woman (although that helps considerably). I’ve been of the opinion in the last few years that Devolver Digital can damn near do no wrong when it comes to picking games to publish, and the Roll 7 guys already won my heart forever with OlliOlli, so on the strength of that alone I was willing to drop a tenner on the thing. That the game’s sense of humor manages to walk the increasingly fine line of LOLSORANDUM and just straight-up black humor helps considerably. Bunnylord might be my favorite character in years, if only because his increasingly bizarre ways of expressing his excitement are stupendous (also his thoughts on children are a delight).

The fact that it plays remarkably like OlliOlli helps a shocking amount (not in a control scheme way, but in an...overall feeling sort of way, if that makes sense). The quick restarts and challenges keep me going back, and the minimal pixel look they’ve gone with works really well (I guess I’m not completely fucking sick of that look yet). I hear it’s coming out on the Vita and damn if I probably won’t pick it up there too when it releases. I had some time to kill last night while waiting to leave and see Mad Max (you should all go see Mad Max, it’s fucking stupendous), and I quickly lost an hour to playing through the first block of missions and unlocking the irate Welsh lady. Fuck this game is good.

Oh and the soundtrack is also really quite stupendous.

Also this trailer is a work of fucking art.

I picked up a few other games which happened to be on sale (Skullgirls (shouts out to @grandcurator, who messaged me about that deal) and Double Dragon Neon), but I haven’t had time to sit down and play through those. I’ll have some thoughts on Skullgirls by next week, I think, when I’ll put up the next installment in Let’s You and Me Fight, unless something else catches my eye.

This is part two of what will be a continuous series on my foolhardy attempts to actually become semi-decent at fighting games. You can read last week’s entry here, where I lay out the whole plan. This edition: The stick arrives, and Chie continues to be Best.

So Wednesday evening, I’d planned to see Age of Ultron, but my buddy had to cancel on me. I was disappointed, but not that disappointed, because my Quanba Q4 was supposed to arrive Wednesday, so I’d be able to take a look at it as soon as I got home from the office. Given the fact that I’d been impatiently waiting for the chance to get my hands on the thing since I ordered it the week before, I was almost relieved to have my friend cancel on me. Work was slow, so I bounced out of the office a little early. I might have been a little excited.

I got home and sure enough, UPS had not let me down and had, in fact, left the box on the porch like I’d requested. I opened the box up and lifted the (12 lb!) stick out. I like everything about this stick—it makes satisfying clicks, the buttons feel good and are super-responsive, and you can, indeed, switch between PS3 and 360 modes as required. I was most curious about the effect it would have on my (previously terrible) attempts to do anything in Street Fighter IV, so I immediately plugged the controller into my PC and launched the game (as was pointed out to me last week, the game may claim to be Ultra SF IV, but it’s actually still Super SFIV).

SSFIV

Here’s the thing—I bought SSFIV on sale during some Amazon sale and never managed to get into it. Using the D-pad (my usual strategy for fighting games) didn’t work at all, and switching to the analog stick just didn’t seem precise enough for me to pull off anything more complicated than a quarter-circle (and even those tended to be a bit dodgy). This all lead to me being a little dubious about the game, figuring the controls were just going to remain impenetrable for me forever and I more or less had given up on ever learning it in any capacity.

Playing with the Quanba, I think the phrase “night and day” is somewhat appropriate. Suddenly moves I’d struggled with were actually coming out, which blew my mind. I picked a couple characters and set about learning their moves (I particularly grew fond of Sakura and Makoto, although I spend a little time with Ibuki and E. Honda (for old time’s sake)). I am still, as it turns out, fucking awful with charge characters—I must have spent a solid fifteen minutes fucking around with Chun-Li’s moves before giving up. I was surprised to see that on two separate occasions there were still some online fights to be had—I acquitted myself pretty poorly a few times, but had a particularly close match against someone playing Ryu (I almost had the bastard but he caught me with an ultra combo that hit just before mine did).

More importantly, the game transformed for me from something I’d bought and somewhat regretted into something that I’m now mildly obsessed with. The stick might have not made me good at the game (I need to spend a lot more time before that happens), but the game opened up for me in a way that I was not able to experience before. I really like this game now, and will probably wind up upgrading to Ultra SFIV to find a slightly more vibrant online community.

Dan can go fuck himself though. Even the CPU plays the motherfucker spammy. I spent an embarrassing amount of time stuck in Arcade mode against Dan. It was brutal. My dignity did not survive.

Mortal Kombat X

I was super-curious to see how the CronusMax did as a converter for my stick on the Xbox One—I’m very used to using a controller for MKX, but part of the whole point was to see how a fight stick potentially changed the game, so I fired it up.

It helps that I’m already… I wouldn’t say “good,” but at least “passable” at MKX. I’ve won some online matches (when the netcode has been good enough), and playing the CPU is usually pretty easy for me. Using the stick made some Fatalities a little easier to pull off for me, but that’s about it. I also learned that if you sit and play SFIV for a while and then switch to MKX, you spend a lot of time hitting back to block and wondering why it isn’t working.

The default layout of the controller has the block button on the bottom row, which I’m not wild about, but I haven’t bothered to change it to the top row yet. Sub Zero plays real nice with the stick, but the last time I fired up the game I didn’t bother hooking up the stick and just played with the fight pad. I think it is partially because having block on the trigger feels more natural to me at this point. I’ll spend a little more time learning the game on the fight stick, maybe, but it wasn’t the revelation that SFIV with the stick was for me. I enjoy the game enough with the regular-ass pad that I don’t think I’ll bother hooking the stick up for it all the time.

For real though Netherrealm, get better netcode. I had two matches which were more or less unplayable because the lag was so bad.

Killer Instinct

I figured I might as well fire up KI while I was at it, but I did not spend a ton of time with it. The combo system in KI seems to require quite a bit of effort, and I haven’t spent the time with it to get in its head. Also unlike SF and MK, my memories of the original KI are hazy, at best (we played a lot of it on the SNES at a friend’s house for a good 2-3 month stretch when I was in like…fifth grade?), so while I remember how the SF and MK systems work and can easily pick them up, KI is very much starting from scratch.

Also I kind of hate Glacius and he’s the current free character, so I wasn’t really that excited to spend time with it (I will probably wind up giving Lang my money so I can experiment with different characters). The stick made life easier in terms of getting moves to come out but again, it didn’t click the way SF did. I need to spend more time with this one before I feel in any way prepared to check out the online scene.

Persona 4 Arena

This game is fucking unreal. I’ve played a lot of ArcSys games in the past, but this one is super-fast and allows you to get away with button-mashing up to a point (like all ArcSys games, really). A ton of depth here if you’re crazy enough to go looking for it, I’m told, but I’ve had way too much fun making my own combos and pulling off the odd insta-kill to get too into things. I burned through the story mode with Chie (twice, as I got the bad ending for her the first go-round as I made the command decision to hunt beef bows rather than the perpetrator).

Unfortunately, the online scene is dead as hell. This is a real bummer, but the appearance of P4AU last year (was it last year? I don’t remember) basically ensured that was going to happen. Still, this game was fun enough that I’ve literally left the house in the middle of writing this post to go pick up a copy of P4AU in the hopes that I will find some online action (which will mostly involve me getting absolutely destroyed by everyone). Still, I kind of want to see the rest of the story mode because I’m a huge loser so I’ll probably run through it at some point. I don’t think there were any big mechanical changes between the two, so switching back and forth shouldn’t be a problem.

Chie is still the best, even in fighting games.

Initial Thoughts

So, with several days of stick-ownership under my belt, I’m finding it a much more comfortable way to play for the most part. Everything’s been easier to control, especially SFIV. At this point I’m most enjoying Persona 4 Arena, but by far the best discovery has been SFIV. It went from being a game I almost regretted ever spending money on to being a game that I’ve spent significant time with nearly every night. I can see myself picking up the upgrade to Ultra sooner or later, if only to expand my horizons as far as characters are concerned (and to find online matches more reliably, of course).

I need to spend more time with Killer Instinct—maybe drop some money to unlock a character or two—and see how that all shakes out. I’m really interested in the combo system there, but I don’t know that I’ve got the patience to learn it all. There’s a shitload of tutorial material to go through in KI, so I might see how I feel about everything after I go through that.

Overall, I’m glad I picked up the stick—it’s an absolute blast to play with, and it’s opened up games which had previously been damn near impenetrable for me. Next time, I’ll do a little more work with KI and see what the online scene in P4AU is like. I’ll try to have some thoughts written down in the next couple of weeks—next week will be about something else (I’m not sure what, but there are a few games which have been calling to me lately which I need to get back to and put some serious time in on). See you next week!

I spent a lot of time in elementary school being tormented by my peers, as I basically assume anyone you ask about their time in elementary school will tell you (this is part of my working theory that children are assholes and everyone has a miserable first six or seven years of schooling), but in spite of the constant bullying and social ostracism, I still found myself attending school events of my own free will.

These school events were held at a local skating rink, which is something that I don’t think even fucking exists anymore and there’s something that makes me feel slightly old. This was somewhere in the middle of the period of time that rollerblading was super-popular, but my family couldn’t afford rollerblades so I always wound up with rental skates (I would eventually get rollerblades of my own and promptly break my arm the first time out, which ended my rollerblading career before I could learn any sick stunts or tricks a la Jet Grind Radio). I tended to spend some time skating, but I would eventually convince my mother or a friend to spot me a few quarters (I also discovered an unattended $.75 at one point and took it and spent the next like six months wracked with guilt—I was raised Catholic, after all) so I could check the arcade cabinets, or more accurately, so I could play Mortal Kombat.

Obviously, since I think I only at most got a dollar’s worth of quarters (although thankfully this was still back when you could actually fucking get a game of MK for a quarter), it behooved me to play well to get the most out of my money. My brother and I spent a lot of time watching others play, picking up moves by osmosis and once, in our greatest triumph, pulling off Scorpion’s fatality against some kid who was probably an asshole which felt like the ultimate revenge (actually getting into a fistfight, which I managed to avoid doing for another few years, proved to be even more satisfying, but only because the same teachers who turned a blind eye to the bullying I underwent also turned a blind eye to my occasional outbursts of violence. The 90s, everyone!).

Later, a friend of mine would reveal his copy of Mortal Kombat for the Game Gear, and we spent a good deal more hours than you’d think possible huddled around the screen trying to beat the game, passing the console around as we died over and over again to fucking Goro, or got wrecked in a mirror match because we’d picked Sub Zero. We also spent time looking on the nascent internet for fatalities and the blood code (we got the blood code, but never did manage any fatalities on the Game Gear version—possibly because the d pad on the Game Gear was trash). Eventually this same friend would get a copy of Mortal Kombat Trilogy for the N64, and that’s when we really started to spend serious time fighting.

I could tell a similar story, of course, replacing Mortal Kombat with Street Fighter II Turbo, although SFII was strictly an arcade-only treat for us, generally played once a year when we’d go on vacation to Garden City, SC, which had not one but two arcades (one on the main drag and one out on the pier). I would inevitably spend some money in each playing various games including, obviously, Street Fighter II (There might have been an MKII cabinet in there too at one point but I don’t have a clear memory of it. What I have a clear memory of is getting my ass run by some dude who played Ryu really well, in spite of my horrible attempts to cheese him with Blanka). I downloaded a poorly-emulated copy of SFII for the SNES at one point, but never got super into it because it was poorly-emulated (I also hunted down a NES version (or I think it was an NES version. NESticle played it, at any rate) of the original Street Fighter, which for reference is god awful and you should not play it). My second year of college, the school finished building a massive “Student Recreation Center” which had a SFII Turbo cabinet that, as it happened, was free to play. I spent a lot of time there that year, and was disappointed to discover that the cabinet was broken when I got back from a year abroad. College kids: Also shitty human beings who will break things like goodass arcade cabinets because they are shitty).

Similarly, I got really into the Guilty Gear franchise at one point, and have copies of X, X2, and AC floating around somewhere. This is all without mentioning Soul Caliber 2, which was also a major time-waster, or buying whichever DoA it was that came out on the original Xbox. Also, the year I was abroad was the same year I discovered Melty Blood and played the everloving shit out of it using a Logitech gamepad which shared more than a few design similarities with the PS2 controller, except it was…chunkier and worse in every way.

This is all to explain that I have played a few fighting games in my day—as have a lot of people who owned games consoles, I’ll wager—but I need to stress a point here which is that I am generally fucking terrible at fighting games. I own them, and enjoy them, but with the exceptions of, I want to say, Mortal Kombat V and Guilty Gear X2, I never got any good at them. Maybe I was once decent at SFII, but I’m not sure if that’s one of those things you look back and adjust in retrospect or not.

With the recent release of Mortal Kombat X, and my first stumbling steps into playing Mortal Kombat X online and getting completely fucking bodied at every turn, I started to think to myself (as I historically have done any time a particularly interesting fighting game comes out) about getting Seriously Into this whole fighting games thing. Not in the sense of “I’m going to run out and join fighting game tournaments,” because I don’t have time for that and neither does anyone else—but in the sense of “hey let’s do some research on hitboxes and frames and shit and get a proper fightstick and see if we can’t at least have some dignity when we go online in these things.”

And obviously, because I’ve put it upon myself to produce content on this here website every week (when possible), and because I need more shit to talk about on the podcast I do with my brother, and mostly because it seems like it will be a good time, I’m going to take all this information and shit and turn it into a regular (or semi-regular, because I’ve got other projects to work on too—like the Pathologic playthrough, and cleaning up/expanding that Twine experiment I did, and a bunch of other stuff) feature here. So let’s quickly go over the games and the equipment and you can all tell me what a terrible mistake I’ve made already:

The Games

These are all games I already own, and mostly picked up on sale (with the exception of MKX). I tried to pull something from everything, although in terms of “indie fighter” I still don’t have anything (Skullgirls, maybe? Or I could try hunting down a copy of Melty Blood but honestly it’s not like that had online matches).

• Mortal Kombat X (Xbox One)—The latest and greatest.
• Killer Instinct (Xbox One)—Support your local Lang! I haven’t bought any of the content packs yet but I’ll get around to it.
• Mortal Kombat 9 (PC)—So I have Mortal Kombat I can play when my roommates are using the TV, mostly
• Ultra Street Fighter IV (PC)—Steam took the amazon code for my broken GFWL version of SFIV and changed it alchemy-like into USFIV. I’m not gonna complain. This also runs at an average 112 frames per second, which is insane
• Divekick (PC)—I mean of course this is on the list. OF COURSE IT IS. I certainly didn't forget to put it on the list and have to come back and edit it in like two hours later, no sir! Incidentally, I went 4-0 in the ranked matches and have decided to retire on top.
• Persona 4 Arena (PS3)—Because Chie is the best, and it was on sale last week for like $7.

I also have a copy of Blaz Blue: Continuum Shift for the 360 somewhere, but I haven’t found it and am unsure whether or not it’s still at my parents’ house. So we’ll have to wait and see about that one.

The Controller

Based mostly on Jason’s excited reaction on the recent Mailbag, I went with a Quanba Q4. “But that doesn’t work on the Xbox One,” you helpfully point out. True! Which is why I picked up a CronusMAX usb converter which, from the research I did, seems to solve the problem with little to no input lag to speak of. Is this a complete horseshit claim? I guess we’ll find out together, won’t we?

The Plan

The controller shows up Wednesday, assuming UPS does their fucking job right for once in their miserable goddam lives. The converter is actually slated to show up tomorrow (Monday, for those of you playing at home), because that shipped through Amazon and that shit is timely. That gives me three or four days to sit down and put the Quanba through its paces, get a feel for how it works, and pick one of the games listed above to start delving into (I will probably wind up dicking around with every game I’ve listed, of course, but I’ll try to pick one to focus on). Come Sunday, I’ll report back to y’all on how the great, stupid experiment is going. After that I think I’ll probably try to stick to bi-weekly updates, if only to give myself the opportunity to write about other shit that isn’t fighting games now and again (I picked up Dragon Age Inquisition again after a three-month hiatus, so I’ll probably have some thoughts on that soon, and obviously there’s Pathologic calling my name in the night when I think I’m alone).

I’ve been putting this off, because I knew deep in my heart what was going to happen the moment I booted up Pathologic again. In my last update, I’d been infected, failed to save a house full of people (and gotten one poor bastard assassinated), I was low on food, low on health, and exhausted. The only thing I’d managed to successfully take care of as the morning dawned was convince the leaders of the town that I was competent and there was in fact a plague happening and not something brought on by the fucking Baba Yaga or something.

In short, I’d accomplished precisely dick, and to make matters worse I realized with a sinking feeling that I was out of bullets for my revolver, not that I’d had very many to begin with. To make matters worse, I had no clear idea of what I was supposed to do now—my quest log was clear, so I had no real idea of how to proceed. I knew stuff should have been happening, and there had to be more quests for me to take, but I didn’t know where they were.

Confused, and already hallucinating from the force of the infection I’d picked up (the screen goes all swimmy and it is legitimately disorienting as all hell), I decided I would trek across the village and look in on the leader of the town. I figured that if anyone was going to give me something to do, it would be the guy in charge.

I dutifully filled up my water bottles (this is a Pathologic pro-tip. You can carry a shitload of water bottles, and some townsfolk will give you shit for them so you don’t have to spend money) and struck out on my journey, stopping to sift through any dumpsters or garbage cans as I went (a good way to find discarded razor blades and the like, which are super valuable to the children of the town; the only things more valuable are nuts, because there’s a fairly complex nut-based economy the children have going on. It’s almost as many currencies as Destiny).

As I walked, I talked to a few townspeople, accidentally giving 500…rubles(?)—I don’t know what the currency actually is in Pathologic, so let’s go with rubles, because this is Russian, after all—to an infected townsperson begging for his family; I consoled myself by thinking that my generosity would if nothing else help my reputation and make people more likely to lend me aid. I found a child and gave him some peanuts in return for a few pills which would boos my immune system at the expense of my health—meaning the infection would slow down, but I’d be weaker than I already was.

Then I got near the house of the military leader, and was confronted by a weird-ass checkpoint. As I stood there pondering my situation (and taking a screenshot), a rat darted out and bit me to death.

I reloaded and pulled my pistol on the rat. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten that I was out of bullets (but I bet you didn’t) and was chewed to death again. The third time, I actually managed to avoid the rat entirely and talk to the soldier at the checkpoint, who informed me the area into which I was planning to enter was, in fact, plague-ridden. I went through, and the rate of infection sped up, quickly incapacitating me.

The fourth time, I said fuck it and skirted the infected area and managed to find the back entrance to the house. I begged for access to the body of a victim of the plague so I could perform a proper investigation of the infection and, you know, work on a cure. The leader said that I could, but also said he didn’t really have authority to authorize that and I should head to the person in charge of the graveyard, whose name I neglected to write down (the journal also didn’t see fit to take note).

I left with a vague idea of who I was heading to see, and keeled over almost immediately. I decided to stumble into a store selling medicine, pawned my pistol, and bought something that might have been morphine. I took it all the medicine I could, which sent my exhaustion to dangerous levels.

I decided I would go see Julie, who seemed to have a good head on her shoulders, and see what she thought I should do next. Unfortunately, she’d taken up with the Devotress and offered me no advice beyond “hey I really think the Devotress knows what’s going on.”

So the Devotress and I spoke, and as I’d been playing as a man of Science the whole time I came away thinking she was either a fucking loon at best or a charlatan at worst—she kept talking about the plague as judge, which would eradicate the guilty and leave behind a new civilization or something like that. I did not trust her at all, but it seems that I’ve lost control of my allies to her—the mayor’s wife similarly had pledged her support to the Devotress, so I was short on allies.

It was at that point I discovered the separate notebook, which contained an urgent message from one of the town elders begging me to come see him first thing that morning. It was the middle of the afternoon, but figuring better late than never I headed over.

My hunger had by this point gotten dangerously high as well, so I went to the woman I’d bought supplies for the day before and got some food. Eating raises exhaustion, however, so I needed to sleep and get some of that stat down.

Problem was, every time I tried to sleep I died, so I decided I would head out into the world and find some coffee or something. I took two steps outside the door and collapsed from exhaustion.

I loaded a slightly earlier save, got some more powerful medicine, and took it, figuring that would raise my health and allow me to sleep. I fell over dead immediately, because it raised my exhaustion too high. I’d fucked up too spectacularly to continue.

This is something I was afraid of having happen to me, of course—Pathologic famously will allow you to put yourself in a completely unwinnable scenario and force you to start over. Such was my situation. I’d foolishly wasted my food and supplies, wandered unprotected into plague houses, and become too weak and infected to get out alive. I don't know how I feel about a game that allows me to render the rest of it unplayable--certainly there's a great freedom to be had, but at the same time you almost wish there was something you could do to recover from the hand you've dealt yourself. Then again, the game is very much about helplessness in the face of an overwhelming calamity, so the prospect of a no-win scenario coming about is not entirely surprising. There are very few games these days that would allow such a scenario to take place (the most recent I can think of off the top of my head would be The Void, another Ice Pick Lodge joint from 2008), but then again I would suspect there are very few players who would put up with it. Which reminds me, of course, that I should really dive back into The Void and see what can be seen in there. Much like Pathologic, I will probably have to start a new game.

I’d always intended to try to make this an ongoing series that would end with me actually defeating the game, which is still the goal—but next time, we’ll be starting all over again from square one. Hopefully, with what I know now, I’ll be able to stay alive a little longer—at least past the third day.

Rocks fall, everyone dies.

A few notes from the author: First, hi! It's good to be getting back into the swing of things; hopefully this will become a weekly thing again. I've made some actual plans for the next few weeks' worth of articles, so that should keep things humming along nicely. Pathologic is a game that wears me the fuck out when I play it, so the next part of this will probably take some time. Maybe I'll put off writing about it until I've cleared day 3 in my new playthrough, but things will probably be so different that some discussion of the first two days will be warranted.

If you're interested in playing Pathologic, I'll remind you it can be found on GoG.com for like $10. You could also just wait for the remake, which is still accepting donations/preorders/whatever you want to call them. I just upped my donation so I can get my hands on the board game version they're working on because I am Ice Pick Lodge's bitch. From the looks of it, the remake is shaping up nicely, and I think they are shooting for a release sometime next year? I know donations are shutting down soon so they can lock in all the content they are going to make, at any rate. I just hope the systems are as unforgiving (but if they want to make the interface a little less confusing, they can feel free).

See you next week, probably!

When deciding the best way to return to the site after nearly a month away (I was in England for a week and a half, and there was some other travel in there too. England was lovely as ever, in case you were curious, and Wales remains near and dear to me in a way that few other places could ever hope to be. I even had nice weather!), I figured something new should mark my glorious return, so here we are.

I woke up in my Aberystwyth hotel room one morning with the idea for a game, or at least the beginnings of one, and having no programming knowledge beyond the year of Java and year of C++ I took in high school that were both mostly just excuses to play Quake deathmatches with friends, I figured I needed something easy to start with to get the skeleton of the idea down.

Twine's been getting a lot of attention these days, in that it has allowed tons of people to make super-interesting pieces of interactive fiction, and some have been games, and all of them have got plenty of people whining about how they don't think they're really games but fuck those people.

Twine 2 released...not too terribly long ago (maybe earlier in the year?), and I'd bookmarked the site with the intention of checking everything out at some point when I found the time. Which I found, as it happens, on a Monday in Aberystwyth. Once I had the initial idea down, I spent the remainder of the week picking at it, and today I put the finishing touches on what is, basically, the beginning of a possible game thing. I like the idea of a game like this, so I made one (or the beginnings of one, anyway), and it took about a week to do so. That alone makes Twine a neat thing, if you ask me.

The programming part of Twine is basically knowing how to create links to other sections, which you can get the hang of pretty quickly. You can also create text and sections that only show up once particular variables have been tripped, but that was slightly more involved than I was willing to get for a brief experiment (also I didn't think to make anything dependent on variables until much later, and by then I didn't feel like going back to re-work everything to implement it, although I might later?).

Oh, yeah. You can play my game here. It's not long and ends... abruptly, with me telling you it's over because it was only meant to be an experiment. I am tempted to put more planning into it and continue things, but for now it's a good little experiment.

One last word of warning: Under no circumstances attempt to use Twine's web interface in Internet Explorer. I was on my work laptop when I started, which only has IE, and it was a fucking nightmare to work in. Changes were not always saved, the cursor wasn't in the right position, and anyway IE is a piece of garbage anyway--but you knew that already.

EDIT: I should probably link to Twine 2.0 too, huh? You can find it here.

Not much to say this week--I was away on business last week, which meant I didn't have much time for gaming although I can say Pillars of Eternity is a masterpiece and Forza Horizons 2 Presents Fast and Furious is pretty fucking fun, but that's really it--and I'll be away on business next week, and then I'm going to be drunk on the shores of the Irish Sea after that...which is to say the next few weeks are going to be quiet over here. I'll try to have some actual thoughts on PoE put together before I head off to the UK next week, but I don't promise anything; there's a shocking amount of prep work I need to do and also some freelance stuff I really should try to get started on before the trip too, so.

It's been a busy goddamn month and it looks to continue to be that way for a while, so I apologize in advance about the lack of stuff to read.