Saturday, 24 September 2022

Gilded tombs do worms enfold

With Mass Effect 3 wrapped up, I’m casting around for something to get my teeth into on the gaming front. Maybe not another RPG, ME3 felt a bit of a chore towards the finish. Playing all three games of the Legendary Edition in quick succession might have contributed to the fatigue and the ending is still pretty anticlimactic, a slow trudge before that fateful choice. I fired up Destiny 2 for the first time in a while, I hadn’t played since the Witch Queen expansion and it was quite comforting to slip back into, but didn’t really sink the hooks in. Melmoth pointed out that Titanfall 2 was on sale, and rather good; it’s proving most enjoyable, quite a throwback to be playing a single player FPS campaign for the sake of it rather than to slowly upgrade loot and abilities. I’ve dipped the briefest of toes into PvP, which involved an entirely expected number of deaths and few kills, I’m not sure it’s for me but seems very well done.

Elsewhere SongPop has slipped out of my regular free-to-play rotation after it dropped its cheap monthly subscription option. It has a daily login reward, and a long enough streak of those gives a pretty decent bonus to progression; miss a day, though, and the reward gets reset. As there are, shockingly enough, odd days when I might not have a burning desire to recognise short snippets of music, that sort of thing has booted it from a “maybe now and again” to a firm skip. Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms, on the other hand, has seen me splurge an unprecedented sum of cash (£7.99) after it introduced a season pass. Very similar to seasons/battle passes in other games it comes with a bunch of themed quests/goals that give out a currency to buy rewards with, some available to everyone but the best locked behind a paywall. I’d spent very little previously – most of the cash offerings are for stacks of chests of random loot – but for a ten week season with defined rewards it looked like a decent deal. There was a bit of vocal protest on its introduction (“gamers in vocal protest shocker”), including some classic If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next-ing (“this particular pass might look reasonable enough but give them an inch and you’ll have to pay ONE MILLION POUNDS just to LOG IN to the game soon enough”), but things seem to have calmed down a bit now as everyone gets down to grinding through 1.14 x 10^58 enemies.

Maybe I’ll get a bit more reading in; the third book of the Locked Tomb not-a-trilogy-any-more has just come out, so I’m re-reading the first two of the series, and if ever a series warranted re-reading it’s that one. I’d forgotten a fair bit over the past two years (like the whole climax of the first book), but enough has stuck around to make it a little less disorienting and I’m thoroughly looking forward to getting my teeth into the third.