The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
WordPress appears to be having technical issues tonight, so I’m gonna just toss this up– gotta keep that streak going– and call it a night. The boy downloaded Nightreign tonight and watching him play has proven quite amusing so I’m going to go do that. Hopefully this will actually post.
(Randomly: listening to a Pearl Jam concert from May 8th of this year. I swear, Eddie Vedder has not correctly remembered the lyrics to Wishlist even a single time in his entire career.)
I was all ready to write a big long post about the best video games of 2024. Then I thought about it for a while.
Turns out … there weren’t that many, really? At least by my standards? And that’s really surprising, to be honest. I spend a fair amount of time playing video games, as all of you know, although my rabid devotion to reading certainly stole a lot of time this year that might have been spent on playing games in previous years. This year has been a lot of either mediocrity or “Oh, that was fun, I guess” types of games without much staying power.
One way or another Shadow of the Erdtree is Game of the Year.
But … man.
I basically went through all of 2024 and didn’t touch my Xbox. Check this out:
Unpacking is a cute little thing but is entertaining for a couple of hours. Palworld is a Pokemon ripoff that I played with my son for a little while, and that’s already a year ago. Of the four games left, the only one I liked (and, frankly, the only one I played for more than a couple of hours was Lies of P, and I’m pretty sure that was in 2023.
I played zero Switch games in 2024.
My PS5 game list is a little more robust, but still, it’s really nothing to write home about. I’m having fun with Cult of the Lamb right now, and I downloaded Carrion earlier today because I was curious and it was five bucks. Neither are 2024 games. Baldur’s Gate III left me cold and I never finished it, quitting after Act II. It’s highly unlikely that I’ll ever go back. Lords of the Fallen was fun and kept stepping on its dick. There have been tons of updates since I beat it, so I might go back at some point, but I spent at least 20% of the time I was playing it absolutely hating it. I played through The Surge; the sequel was a vast improvement. I still haven’t finished Rise of the Ronin because Shadow of the Erdtree got in the way. Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Black Myth: Wukong were the only challengers to Shadow for my personal GOTY, and really, neither of them were very close. BM:W is definitely the best full game of the year, but Erdtree is a better game.
I know there was a recent expansion for BM:W, and there’s supposedly big DLC coming, so I’ll probably go back to it at some point. I need to play through at least part of Veilguard again if I want the platinum. I’ll probably do it eventually.
As far as the rest of the actual GOTY candidates … well, I’ve played the ones I’m going to play. Deckbuilders hold no attraction for me, so Balatro is out. I want nothing to do with the Final Fantasy series, much less the remakes. Metaphor: ReFantazio has too stupid of a name for me to even look into it, and I refuse to admit that Astro Bot is even a real game. The whole series is a marketing gimmick. It might be a good game; I just don’t care. And it takes a lot to get me into a platformer anyway. I definitely enjoy one once in a while but they’re rare.
I wasn’t expecting this post to end with “Blech,” but … blech.
God pissed in my face last night, by allowing me to briefly believe that there was either a second DLC or an actual by-God sequel to Elden Ring coming in 2025. The phrase co-op multiplayer roguelite does not make me happy, God damn it, and while it might still be something I play it is absolutely not something I want, and when you start off by getting me all sloppy about the idea of a surprise reveal of a sequel to one of my favorite games of all time, anything other than “this is a sequel or another big DLC” is going to be a letdown.
Par for the Goddamned course for 2024, of course, which just in the last 24 hours has also featured a so-far underwhelming Snoop Dogg/Dr. Dre collaboration and The Cure deciding to release a second version of their latest album with an entire live album attached to it, when the original album has only been out for a few weeks. The whole world is making me stabbity, is what I’m saying here.
(The Cure’s album-plus-concert is only $9.99, so I bought it anyway, but … if you’re gonna sell it for just ten fucking bucks, why not release the concert separately? I don’t need another version of the original album even if they’re both digital and technically not taking up any space anywhere!)
Also while I’m bitching I refuse to accept Astro Bot as Game of The Year. Yes, I know I haven’t played it. I don’t care if that’s unreasonable. I say no and that’s the end of it.
I feel like I should end that with some good news, and the truth is I’m not even in that bad of a mood; other than Tuesday, which was genuinely awful, this wasn’t that bad of a week. I really need to finish up my Christmas shopping this weekend, because … I’m not going to go into a rant about shopping, but I don’t know how retail stores expect me to avoid Amazon if they don’t ever have anything I’m looking for. I went to Target earlier and couldn’t find tape. Or, at least, I could only find the kind that’s already on the little plastic shell and not refills for my tape dispenser on my desk at work, which is what I wanted.
Damn it that’s bitching again. Finishing Christmas shopping! That’s something I need to do. I need more/better stuff for my wife and my son and maybe something for my sister-in-law. Everybody else is done.
Yeah. Christmas shopping and books and then five days until Winter Break. I can do this. Who else do you need to shop for?
All right, FromSoft. I just strapped on my heavy shield and my bleedin’ stick and absolutely melted Promised Consort Radahn. What else you got?
Yeah, so I’ve bought Shadow of the Erdtree twice today. Shut up. My son asked for it, and there’s a whole rant on how fucking stupid buying digital items from Microsoft is, and I’m downloading the Goddamned thing right now for my PS5.
So … see you in a week, I guess. Who knows; I’m still stressing about the build I’m going to use. Christ, I pick the stupidest things to blow up my anxiety with.
I haven’t ordered the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC yet.
I … what?
I put something like 130 hours into Elden Ring. My Let’s Play series is a hundred and ten episodes long. I completed every mission I could find, got the Platinum trophy, all of the endings, everything. Played the absolute ever-loving shit out of that game and enjoyed Goddamn near every second of it.
And they’re releasing a lengthy DLC on the 21st, which by all indications is amazing. And I haven’t bought it, I don’t think I’m going to buy it, and I’m not excited about it. Right now I should be planning on staying up late on Thursday night so that I can get started immediately, just like I did with the actual game. I stayed up late to record the demo, for God’s sake.
What the hell is wrong with me?
There’s been a consistent theme in my life over the last several years of this creeping anhedonia, where I just … stop doing things I used to really love doing, or stop enjoying things I used to enjoy. I effectively don’t watch anything any longer. No movies, no TV, nothing streaming. There’s a new season of The Boys, which I’ve enjoyed. Not gonna watch it. The Acolyte? Not gonna watch it. I’m done with Star Wars. I’m done with Marvel. I’m only still buying comic books because my weekly trip to the comic shop is my only reliable in-person interaction with human beings I’m not related to or work with; I can’t stop shopping there unless I move or die. I could literally just come home and put them in a box and never read them and I wouldn’t miss a thing.
You’re never going to catch me complaining about reading, but it’s literally the only thing I do for fun. That’s weird, right? I read books and I write here. Dassit. Those are my hobbies. The honest truth is I think I could sell my PS5 and my Xbox and I wouldn’t miss them. And I’ve been a gamer my entire life.
I don’t fucking get it, and I don’t like it.
(And, to forestall this: Yes, I recognize that I’m basically describing a textbook case of clinical depression here. And while I’m on Effexor, that’s an anti-anxiety med, not an antidepressant, and I don’t think the two overlap much. But I have no other symptoms of depression, including the not exactly minor detail that I’m rarely actually feeling depressed. This is a mental health issue, don’t misunderstand me, but I feel like the most obvious answer is not the right one.)
I still haven’t really decided if I’m going to return to an hour of new videos a day once the Elden Ring series ends tomorrow over on YouTube; you would think that my use of the word tomorrow in that sentence would imply some urgency, and you might also think that the existence of a Let’s Play thumbnail right there on the screen might imply that I had, in fact, already started another series! I have. Sorta. I’m two episodes in, and then I got distracted by Infernax, which is more fun than it has any right to be, only that game is only like six hours long and I’m already most of the way through it and I haven’t been recording any of my playthrough because I’m currently kind of tired of that. So I need to finish up this game before I pick up that game and I already don’t remember where the hell I was or what the hell I was doing and did you know that the way the Xbox handles family accounts is bullshit? Because it kind of is.
There will probably be a whole post on that, once I figure out how they think this bullshit works.
Oh, and also Cuphead, which I’ve settled into a nice little boss-a-day schedule on, although I think my video game skills are going to top out before the game does. I don’t remember the last time I played a game and thought “I can’t beat this,” but this might be the one.
This is all to say that I have been playing Infernax pretty much nonstop since dinnertime and I have to write an assignment for my shitheads students tomorrow (I used the phrase “rude-ass child” to refer to one of my kids today, and when she threatened to tell her mom I told her to go for it and that the conversation wasn’t going to go the way she thought, and I don’t feel the slightest bit of remorse over it) and I probably ought to do that at some point. Then again, I get to work 40 minutes early most days. That’s plenty of time, right?
… right?
Sure.
Do you know what I did when I got home from work today?
Well, okay, I ate a pile of Arby’s. But after that?
Yeah, I fired up fucking Elden Ring again. I only played for a few minutes, but there was this one minibus I hadn’t killed yet, and … well, I wanted to, so I did. I am currently trying to decide whether I want to go ahead and dive into New Game + or hold off in hopes of being properly leveled for the inevitable DLC, which hasn’t been announced and probably won’t be released for months yet. I think the answer is probably “dive into New Game+,” except for … everything I said yesterday, which is all still true even if I’m apparently too dumb to act like it.
Today went well, I suppose; there are 31 days of school left as of right now, and I’m being observed tomorrow. I should probably figure out what I’m having the kids actually do during said observed lesson. I’ve never actually done an observed lesson by the seat of my pants, though, and if there was ever a time to do that just for the hell of it, the last month of my boss’ time in the building is probably it. He’s not going to give me a bad observation. He’s just not. I know this, which allows me a certain amount of freedom. That, and the fact that even if he did give me a poor evaluation I don’t think it would actually matter to anyone.
(I’m not going to do that. I’ll come up with something. We’ll see what it is, though.)
Let’s see, anything else? I wrote a post about the Expanse series a month or so ago, and while looking for books to compare the Expanse to, I commented that I’d never read any of Iain M. Banks’ Culture books. That wasn’t 100% true, as it turns out; I have owned the first book, Consider Phlebas, for long enough that my single, aborted attempt to read it doesn’t show up on Goodreads anywhere. I decided to take another shot at it and finished it the other day. The good news: I can’t figure out why I put it down all those years ago; the bad news: that doesn’t mean I thought it was especially good. I’ve heard that Phlebas is among the weaker Culture novels if not the weakest, so I might go ahead and try the second book anyway. Anybody out there have any observations to make? If I didn’t like the first Culture book, should I continue on anyway?
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