fucccccck i cannot focus on ff9 now that I’m on disc 3

this is where I’ve lost steam on this game every time, for decades.

damnit i need to finish it!

Fired up Desynched again for some reason. It’s a factory game, but instead of conveyor belts you have little robots that you can program to do stuff, from something as simple as pickup->dropoff to entire decisions trees and logic that fights enemies and builds stuff.

F1 Manager 2024

I discovered that there is a 2026 season mod so gave it a go this week. It a great mod (updated teams, drivers, personnel & assets to add Cadillac) but the gameplay in general is just so broken I gave up. I remember now why I stopped playing last time as the fun quickly disappears as you literally have to work around the flaws but by doing that it ruins the experience.

Still Overwatch. I’m really happy they brought 6v6 open queue back.

I have been slowly playing Darkwood, still. We’ll see if I finish it or not, but if I do this will be the world’s slowest playthrough probably. I think the game is very good, but it does stress me out quite a lot. I have a hard time playing it for extended periods of time between the tension, the occasional confusion of what to do and the general difficulty. A lot of the time I will play through a single day/night cycle, save during the time freeze the next morning after having survived the night and exit and do something else.

Regardless of whether I finish it myself or watch a playthrough of someone else though I am glad to have played it. I really love the atmosphere, the writing and characters. I love the gameplay design that manages to make a top-down survival game without jumpscares both generally unsettling and even genuinely fucking scary at times. And as I’ve said last week, the sound design is just some of the best I’ve heard, and such a huge part of what makes everything land.

Still playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly. Before anything else, I’d like to get one thing out of the way: I’m an idiot. Descriptions for (most?) Anomaly mods aren’t as bad as I thought they were, it’s just that ModDB has no indicators there’s anything beyond the initial sentence or two if you browse the site with JavaScript disabled. So yeah, that was a fumble on my part but also why the heck does ModDB show all of the text on normal mod pages but doesn’t for Anomaly addons?!

I was expecting to write something like “I didn’t do too many changes since last week, mostly just started using modded exes and made some further gameplay options tweaking” today but… yeah, no. While my mod list is far from the behemoths I tend to play with in something like Bethesda titles, my Anomaly collection grew way faster than anticipated. Here’s my current mods list if anyone’s interested:

I’m sure this list will grow as I spend more time with the game but even these additions make for a fun return to the zone. I’d like to once again thank @Coelacanth@feddit.nu for their help with figuring out a good starting point with modding Anomaly. I still need to check your base list and your alternative LASS population addon but I’ll get there.

As for the game itself, once I got my bearings it turned out to be somewhat easier than I initially thought it would be. I’m currently playing on medium difficulty and progression settings (with previously mentioned custom tweaks) so I might have to play around with those a bit more. I don’t mind though, it’s suppose to be fun not feel like a punishment.

Besides that, I decided to give The Elder Scrolls Online another go. Its latest update included difficulty setting, a feature intended to tackle one of my main issues with the game (everything being a cakewalk).
I quickly started to regret my decision thanks to a launcher issue which prevented me from downloading files with speeds above 5MB/s. Anything higher would leave it in a perpetual cycle of downloading at max speed for a few seconds followed by freezing for a couple minutes. Thanks to that I got the “pleasure” of experiencing internet speeds I didn’t have to deal with in years. Can’t say I missed that.

Thankfully, things were better once I finally got into the game proper though I can’t say much yet as I only played for 2 or so hours last night. There are 3 new difficulties available and bumping it even by 1 makes a noticeable difference in combat. I’m not sure yet if I’ll stick with that (I didn’t want to go too crazy before checking out the new balancing and remembering how to play) but it’s a good sign.

One thing I’m not fond of is the fact that one of the skills I use with my Nightblade adds permanent passive movement speed increase as long as it’s equipped. I’m sure it’s cool for people who like to sprint everywhere but for me, someone who likes to act like part of the world, seeing my character move like I’m watching a video at 1.5x speed is a little jarring. Looks like I’ll have to keep (un)equipping it if I want my experience to feel right. Oh well…

I completed Under The Waves. I’ll play the Gothic remake next. I recently played the original Gothic and Gothic 2 - The Night Of The Raven with mods.