This Old Neon Forum

While I've been continuing UFO 50, on vacation last week I grabbed my Switch for the road instead. Sailing Era remained in the back of my mind and the $6 DLC had been calling to me for most of a year.

While it's mostly "more of the same", the DLC story gets going faster and doesn't tutorialize as much. Most features are available almost immediately and you're thrown into some tough encounters (although the permanent NG+ upgrades make up for it). The game flow is still great, very relaxing but still leaves you wanting to do just one more thing (land exploration, discovery, character recruitment, trade, boat-building, whatever). And actually knowing where to go and how to recruit characters doesn't change that. Somehow the minor random elements make the first 10-ish hours - where you're working to get established and build up a crew - less boring, even the 5th time I'm doing it! It's a bit reminiscent of Europa Universalis, where you're functionally doing the same things just in a different context, so it exercises your brain but is mindless, if that makes sense. It tickles the spreadsheet-loving part of my brain.

The additional DLC content is interesting conceptually - although the first couple of chapters are kind of boring, it integrates one of the weirder quest chains (Tulip mania) into the story and the focus on the Hanseatic League is interesting both as a backdrop and in terms of what happened to it in this era (though that is certainly not an upstart trader bootstrapping Iceland into a manufacturing and trading powerhouse). Mechanically building up a port is a bit boring - it's mostly fetch quests and many are totally unmarked, the game doesn't do much to help you keep track of it. But it works well with the existing game flow and thematically it's pretty fun.

I'm actually a bit surprised at what things haven't been fixed in the game. There are large blocks of text that are unreadably small during events/dialogue (dialogue box will change font size based on content, and some things didn't get broken up - this is unreadably small on any screen). But it runs reasonably well on the Switch, so I'm glad I'm not tempted to double-dip on the steam deck.

I haven't been playing very much at all lately. Distractions... Anyway, I did start Grandia recently and it's lovely even if it is a bit clunky. The tone reminds of me of Skies of Arcadia, which is a good thing. I haven't gotten motion sickness yet, but I've just now started it!

Visage ended up being too haunting but will get back to it. It's not the first horror game that's lingered through an October for me. Alien Isolation ended up doing it several times and it became one of my favorite horror games later.

This has been one of the best years of my life. Third best, probably. Anyway, it's been really great. I've got some really exciting things coming up in the short-term and next year is looking to be fantastic. I'm so excited and there's so much to do. I'm blessed and happy.

Been playing a bit more UFO 50. As I've dug deeper into Grimstone, I can appreciate what it does but it is still a bit too tedious for me.
My fighter/tank, Bull, is just not very effective anymore. Shotguns are not great as they can't crit, haven't seen a good pistol in awhile, and rifles are trickier to get the timing right and limited to one target. While Maria is better, she's starting to struggle a bit too! Umbra has become my best group attacker AND my healer, which makes her turns (and MP!) most constrained. Rufus is... still Rufus. Periodically useful, mostly mediocre. I was hoping for more from the dog.

While I've found a set of weapon upgrades, they're in a town that's not on the train network (and I think doesn't have horses either). Since I can't access the bank easily, it's a bit trickier and more annoying to grind. Not to mention dangerous! The enemies around here are tough - skunk apes are probably the easiest and they hit like a truck.

I dipped my toes into Lords of Diskonia. It's an interesting idea, but so far it seems a little basic.

But more recently, I picked up RTK8 Remake and it's been a lot of fun. The way historical events have sets of prerequisites and can only be triggered by the player, no matter where the player is, makes it feel even more sandboxy. It's not particularly challenging, and I feel like I've seen much of what it has to offer in only 7 hours, but... it's a sandbox game, so you kind of make your own challenges.



In my most recent struggle for Ru Nan, my spouse Zhou Yu was slain by a stray arrow (I remarried ~3 months later...). Although I failed in my initial assault, a revenge campaign was more successful and now I'm in a province adjacent to 3 enemies with little allied support. But at least I have several good supporting officers (Jiang Qin, Cheng Pu, Huang Gai, Zhou Tai, and Lu Xun).

Yuan Shu's single province, which he hasn't expanded from, has 23 officers and is a great target for expansion as it'll make for another adjacent entry point to Dong Zhuo's territory. That'll probably be my next target once I'm done consolidating.