One random thought tonight, as it has been a tremendously sleepy Saturday and I’ve pretty much just been lazing about and reading and playing video games all day and have no thinks left: I have been tremendously enjoying Dragon Age: Veilguard, which was a great weight off of my shoulders after quitting partway through the last installment, but at 55 hours in I would very much like to put it to bed now, thanks. I just went through the trophies for the game and there appear to be five or six more story chapters, which just makes me even more tired.
It’s my own fault; if I wasn’t such a blasted completist in this type of game I could probably be done with it by now, and the worst thing is that I know I missed one– and only one– trophy, necessitating an eventual second play through. I was probably going to do that anyway to see how a bunch of different story decisions work when I make them the other way, but now I have to, at least for certain values of “have to” involving being an obsessive dork.
God, it’s good there aren’t any real problems in the world, right?
Big Bastard 2: The Rebastarding appears to be working just fine, thanks; I have come up with one thing that might possibly have affected the previous console’s ability to work beyond “this shit is broken,” but to hell with it, FedEx has it already. I need to move it to where it’s actually going to live, but the original PS5 is still there since I wasn’t about to start really rearranging things until I was certain this one worked.
Meanwhile, it’s 6:30 and pitch fucking black outside, and mentally I’m like WAIT NO HOW THE HELL IS IT BEDTIME THERE’S MORE WEEKEND LEFT, and god, do I hate Daylight Savings Time. Saving Time. Whatever the fuck it’s called. I hate it being fucking dark at 6:30 in the evening during the winter and I hate it being light at 10:30 during the summer and time is bullshit.
The cherry on top of the shitshow that was this week is that my new, ridiculously overpriced PS5 Pro that I wasn’t even completely sure I wanted came out of its box tonight, and … it’s bricked. Three different known-good HDMI cables and two known-good power cords later plus the two out of the box, it’ll turn on but absolutely will not output a signal. So I’m returning it, and I’m not particularly interested in an exchange. I’m just getting my money back.
Parent-teacher conferences at my kid’s school today, which ate up most of my evening, and then I had two tests and an assignment to write for tomorrow, and I’m contemplating how long I’m going to wait until I take this big bastard out of its box:
… so, I have spent money unwisely, but fuck it, I get to give the original PS5 to my son and get some good dad points, and fuck it, the world’s ending so I may as well buy useless shit, right?
I have two things I want to review, but I don’t have the patience to do a full-length review of either of them, so you should fully expect that the actual writing in this post will take up less space than the pictures. Short version: buy both of these things!
The Fury of the Gods, by John Gwynne, is the third and concluding volume of his Bloodsworn trilogy, and as luck would have it I finished the book I was reading the day it showed up so I was able to dive right into it. I have ten of Gwynne’s books, all read over the last couple of years, and Bloodsworn is definitely his best series, but I’d need to reread the whole trilogy to tell you for sure if Fury of the Gods is my favorite of his books or not. One way or another, this showcases everything Gwynne is best at: a deeply Norse-inflected world, with very cool magic and absolutely brutal action, that starts off with all of the gods dead and gone and ends with them very much neither of those two things. The last hundred and fifty pages of Fury is one long battle scene. It’s amazing. His character work remains exceptional and the way this series swaps POVs between both sides of the major conflict in the book is great; I think it’s fair to say that there’s a bad-guy side but everyone’s reasons for fighting the way they do make sense and damn near everyone was interesting.
Also, my God, the covers for these books are remarkable.
He’s also doing this thing in this series where men and women exist in a society of complete equality and yet he never bothers to draw attention to it. There’s a lot of stuff in The Bloodsworn that is drawn from Norse/Viking culture, including the alphabet, but he sets aside historical accuracy whenever he feels like it, and gender differences are one of those places. If you’re looking for woman warrior characters (and everyone in these books is a warrior), you need look no further.
I finished Black Myth Wukong yesterday, finally, and I’m playing at least partially through it again because this is one of those games where I feel like I need the Platinum trophy and there’s no way to do that in one play through. This game is Chinese the same way that The Bloodsworn is Norse; it’s more inspired by myth and legend than historical reality, and frankly if you’re not already a student of Chinese culture (and I’m very much not) there’s a lot in this story that’s going to leave you behind. It’s apparently a video game version of Journey to the West, one of the five Classical Chinese novels, and … uh, that’s all I know about the five Classical Chinese novels? All I know is the story in lots of places makes no sense at all to my American ass but that doesn’t matter even a tiny bit because monkey man hit monster with stick.
Seriously, outside of the Nioh series this may be my favorite non-Fromsoft Soulslike (and anyone who claims it’s not a Soulslike but an “action RPG” should be shunned; this is absolutely a Soulslike) and I think I might like it more than I liked Nioh 1 anyway. There are some technical issues; I’m still hoping for an optimization patch, and there’s a stuttering issue that gets worse the longer you go without either restarting your PS5 or actually closing the game out and reopening it, but beyond that? No gripes. You’d think that build variation would be a problem given that you’re limited to the staff as your weapon, but 1) it doesn’t matter because the staff is hugely fun and 2) there are enough different stances and other ways to set up your build that there are going to be a million ways to approach any situation anyway. I talked about the difficulty yesterday; I’d say this hits the sweet spot of being difficult but fair pretty precisely, but people who haven’t been mainlining Souls games for years like I have may want to gird their loins. I hear there’s a big DLC coming eventually and I’m going to buy it the second I hear about it.
So I just kind of randomly noticed that The 7th Guest has a 30th anniversary edition (!!) out for PS5, and then I also sort of randomly mentioned that to my wife, not expecting anything in particular to happen based on that disclosure … and I’ve been informed that as soon as she’s done eating dinner she and I are going to be spending the rest of the evening playing The 7th Guest.
My usual line on Beyoncé is that I’m a big fan of Beyoncé as an entertainer and maybe not such a big fan of her music. I buy everything pretty religiously as it comes out but what usually happens is that there are a few tracks from any given album that I like a lot and I can take or leave the rest of it. Her collaboration with her husband was an exception, and I liked her live album a lot, but Cowboy Carter is the first studio release from her where I genuinely feel like every single track is a banger. It is emphatically not a country album, despite the existence of maybe three country-ish songs (Protector, Jolene, and Texas Hold ‘Em) and Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton both doing short spoken cameos. I don’t know what the hell it is. She calls it “a Beyoncé album,” and that’s just gonna have to be good enough for us mere fucking mortals. There’s opera on this damn thing. She’s doing whatever the hell she wants, and it’s amazing, and sooner or later I’m going to have to reconsider that disclaimer because she’s starting to stack up exceptions.
Oh, and speaking of the Jolene cover: it slaps. It’s a great update to the song and I love it. I love the original too. I love other updated versions of it. Music is good.
Shōgungetting a new Hulu miniseries somehow led, not to me not actually watching the miniseries, which for the record I’ve not heard a single bad thing about, but ordering the books, which are currently only being printed in two volumes because the motherfucking thing is 1500 pages long. I’m not even sure why I did it, to be honest, because I broke my current “don’t buy new shit” reading rule to do it, and even once they got here I was convinced that I was going to read a hundred pages and quietly put them away because they were going to turn out to be super fucking racist.
So naturally I blew through the first (700-page) volume in about a day and a half. I have not picked up the second yet, but I’ll have it read by the end of Spring Break. And it’s interesting– I kind of want to compare it to Gone with the Wind, except Gone with the Wind is a really amazing story that was written by a racist who wanted to promote racist ideas and is chock-full of racist characters, but Shōgun is a really amazing story chock-full of racist characters (basically every person in the book thinks everyone of a different ethnicity or religion from them is a subhuman, and some of them don’t even extend humanity to all of “their” people depending on their economic status) but I don’t think the book itself is racist, nor does reading the book make me want to look askance at James Clavell. If anything, I think Clavell would land on the side of the Japanese if he had to, and while I’m only halfway through the book it’s not remotely as white-savior as I was expecting it to be. Like, this would be a fascinating book even if Blackthorne wasn’t in it at all; the book doesn’t really revolve around him at all.
There’s an interesting article on Vox about how historically accurate the show is; the condensed version is “good enough,” and while I’m hardly an expert I certainly haven’t hit anything that had me looking twice. One way or another, I think I can probably recommend this pretty whole-heartedly, with a caveat that, again, I’m only halfway through right now and who knows what the next 800 pages will bring.
Fuck this game.
I finally deleted it today, after giving it way too many chances over the last, what, ten days? two weeks? since it was released; I was ready to fight Sony for a refund after twenty minutes, and while with a couple more hours of gameplay I’m willing to admit that the game does get better after a completely fucking inexcusably bad first half hour, the bug I ran into today where every NPC everywhere was constantly hostile for no reason at all and nothing I could do would fix it was the last straw. The game is just deeply fucking mediocre, riddled with bugs and a ton of absolutely bewildering gameplay decisions that I refuse to defend, and it’s not getting any more of my time, I give up. I’m not going to fight with anyone who enjoys it because there’s a kernel in there that could be fun under the right circumstances, and I think I was starting to get into it before the bug, but after a couple of hours of experimenting and looking at message boards and trying workarounds, I am not about to start over and I’m done.
I really feel like I ought to throw a movie review in here too, but I haven’t seen anything new in forever. Oh well. Let’s pretend Shōgun counts for both.
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