I’m closing in on the second week without a post, and it’s a combination of issues preventing me from getting out a proper review, for games or for manga. So rather than just try to power through without an update, I’ll tell y’all some of what’s going on.
Obviously, one of the main issues is this freakin’ heat combined with random drops in temperature following rain storms. This has always been a problem for me, but lately, it’s sent me to bed for long, long naps. The last one saw me go to bed at a normal 1 AM and wake up at 5 PM the next day. It’s kinda hard to stay on schedule when my body keeps going, “Or we could nap.”
So, first of all, I’ve been playing Path of Exile. I’ve tried it before in the past, but long load times plus our crap internet connection made it nigh-impossible to review fairly. Yet, even with a much better connection, there have been many times where the game is unplayable due to lag. This problem is unique to PoE, as I was able to fire up other online games and still use them. So maybe they just have bad net code or something.
The thing is, I’ve been waiting out the lag to complete the third act, mainly because I owed some payback to a certain boss who teleported away from our first encounter when I got them down to a sliver of health. I’m glad I didn’t give up because the dungeons leading to that boss followed by their boss were just fantastic gaming all around. But there’s still four more acts to get through before I can review the game, and it remains to be seen if the review will be a rant about always online gaming being a bad idea even for brilliant games, or it that will just be a side note to an otherwise positive gush fest. If every act has to be paused for upwards of four days due to minor internet hiccups, it will be a shame, because in most ways, PoE is an amazing game that starts out looking like a Diablo clone and then goes off to do its own thing with style to spare.
Moving on, I’ve been wanting to try modding Fallout 4 using the unofficial bug-fix patch for ages, and this wasn’t possible without buying all the DLC. Well I got the DLC, and in addition to the patch, I chose a few other mods to tweak the game in little ways. What’s followed is possibly one of the most broken runs I’ve ever had in Fallout 4. One quest had to be abandoned because the NPC I needed to escort kept freezing at the door of their starting room. Another had an NPC go through the same dialogue leading to the end of the quest, pausing, and then running back to a terminal to do it again. Then one of the mods meant to reduce the thickness of fog bjorked and turned everything except the sky white, and the only way to fix that was delete two hours of save files and disable the mod. (Seriously, it somehow retroactively broke save files before the bug occurred.)
I’m debating about whether to expand on this in a post because one, a Bethesda game being a broke POS isn’t exactly a news break; and two because the folks who make these mods do so for free, and they can’t possibly account for every hardware and graphics configuration. Still, it is frustrating to finally get to try mods, only to have them blow up quite spectacularly. I dunno. Maybe one day I’ll try the Frost mod with nothing else added, just to see if I can review that.
And finally, I’ve been reading Chainsaw Man, which has had some pretty glowing reviews. That was the main reason I tried it, and I have to be honest and say it isn’t working for me. There’s a really squicky aspect to it, something I’m surprised wasn’t mention in most reviews. Yes, eventually that thing becomes explained in later issues, but even so it still left me less than enthusiastic to read anything past the first arc. Beyond that, I’m struggling on how to review it without major spoilers. It’s a difficult situation because the squick that put me off is already many chapters in, and the supposed payoff is a massive spoiler. But at the same time, I really feel like writing something on it, because so many reviews are like “Oh, this manga is action/gore perfection!” and I’m over here thinking, Seriously? No one’s going to mention the squicky elephant in the room?
I hope to break the slump next week, but with it already being Friday, I’ll make no promises. I wish I could just pick up a quick indie game to play and post a review for, but the last three I got, I bounced out hard. The most recent was Carrion, and I bounced because both the controller and mouse methods of playing were so finicky that I kept getting killed just trying to escape the first area. (Which continues my streak of Devolver Digital games that I like the idea of, but kinda hate the execution.)
Anyway, we’ll see how next week shapes up, and thanks for reading my stuff.