Time to Loot Journal: October 2019

So… *twiddles thumbs* …I’ve kinda done something just a wee bit crazy. Yesterday I wrote about selecting a mere 5 games to last an entire year. I also encourage others to think about what their list might look like, and already there are a number of great responses!

• The Gaming Diaries — Five Games for a Year
  This one not a response — it’s the original post that inspired mine. (Credit where credit is due. :))
• Nerd Girl Thoughts — One Year / Five Games
• Princess in a Castle — Just Five Games For a Year?
• Endgame Viable — Only Five Games in a Year
• Shards of Imagination — If I Could Only Play 5 Games in a Year
• Why I Game — 5 Games? Feels Like My Life Nao

Keep an eye out around the place, as I expect there might be a few more to come yet.

But! Back to that ‘crazy’ thing I mentioned…

I… might… sort… of… have… uninstalled everything except the 5 games I picked? Now I’m not talking year long crazy. I’m just going to challenge myself with it for the month of November. For now. Every journey starts with a single step. To hit a big goal, break it up into smaller ones, etc etc.

I still don’t believe for a minute I could hold to this selection for a whole year. But a month? I could probably do that. Then a month after that? Maybe! We’ll see! Right now, I’m only committing to try this for the month of November.

I don’t think I’m feeling up to a full and proper NaNoWriMo this year, so instead I’ll take on a Five Game Challenge. And like Blaugust — attempt to post about it every day. Can I do that? I don’t really know… One thing Blaugust taught me about daily writing is to write a day ahead, to keep a buffer in there.

I suspect that will be more difficult when it comes to writing about the act of gaming itself — but… well… I guess we’ll see! If this had unfolded a little less rapidly, I might even have tried to make a ‘thing’ of this and get some people onboard. Feel free to join in anyway, if so inclined! But maybe next year I’ll make this a little more of an official community event. :)

In any case! That’s all looking ahead into November. For October?

The Blog this Month

I published 15 posts this month (including this one), exactly even with September. Still no real rhyme or reason to ‘when’ I post. I’m pretty OK with that though as long as I’m hitting 2-3 posts a week still. :)

This means a total of 159 published posts. Assuming I get somewhere close to hitting my target next month, then I should cross the 200-post milestone by the end of December! :D I’ll take 200 posts in the first year as a pretty good effort even if I do say so myself.

Most Viewed Posts

1. Transport Fever: Things I Wish I Knew When I Started
2. Exploring the Intro to the Magician and Gunner Classes of Lost Ark
3. Cognitive Dissonance
4. Corporate Responsibility for Individual’s Views
5. Madness! Picking Just 5 Games for a Year

The Lost Ark post almost made it to the very top — late October the Russian Open Beta for Lost Ark kicked off and drove a lot of people to start looking up information on Lost Ark again.

Meanwhile, ye olde Heart of Rage post poofed out of the list again. It wasn’t even remotely close, despite making a return just last month. It isn’t even in the top 20, with less than half the views of the Five Games post, despite that one only publishing yesterday.

Games this Month

Figure now might be a good time to recall that ‘New’ in this context means only that I haven’t played it since starting this Journal format earlier in the year. None of the ‘new’ entries in this case were purchased this month except for The Outer Worlds.

October saw 95.1 hours of gaming, down 48.6 hours from September. Being down so much is no great surprise though — September was a crazy high outlier month.

I should also note that Manic Time didn’t capture any time for The Outer Worlds. My theory is that this is due to The Xbox Game Pass app installing its games in a highly secured folder. Even as an admin, you cannot access this folder (easily). Casting some doubt on this theory though is that Discord can detect the process as a running game.

So I’ve had to estimate the time for The Outer Worlds and so haven’t put it in the main ranking. If I’ve erred it’s on the conservative side. But I wouldn’t have played over 15 hours of it for sure.

Overall active hours came down to 236.6 total hours. A reduction of 33.6 hours from September.

Found a bit more equilibrium between general PC time and gaming time this month. Posting came a bit more easily as a result, compared to September when it took real effort to push a post between bouts of Asheron’s Call and/or Borderlands 3.

So in the end — October sat with gaming making up 40.2% of all active hours, down 13% from last month.

Asheron’s Call

Level 126. (Well, 128 now.) It still blows my mind a little when I think about finally making that magical threshold all these years later.

I noted this earlier in the games update post; a now already, mere days later, out of date post at that given my decision to try out this crazy 5 game limit thing. But that feeling hasn’t really reduced with time since.

Still — I was starting to drift a little from AC after reaching that threshold. That symbolic marker that once upon a time signaled the end of numeric leveling in the game. So at least for Asheron’s Call, I don’t think it will be too difficult to say goodbye (for now).

XCOM 2: War of the Chosen (+ Mods)

I’m so glad I kept this one on my list. I’m not ready to let go yet. My campaign seems to be going… Quite well at the moment. Let’s hope I don’t jinx it by saying so!

I am at risk a little bit of the Avatar project completing right now, with only one pip of progress remaining. And I’ll admit to flirting with danger a little by continuing to scan a supply drop in order to build the Predator Armor squad upgrade.

But I got it! And I have some Avatar Project facilities lined up in areas I control (or at least have access to) ready to knock down. :)

Batman: The Telltale Series (Season 1, and Season 2 Episode 1)

Not finishing this before commencing this challenge does irk me a little. Mostly because I could have.

As the screenshot above shows — the letterboxing effect is very real in this game on the new monitor, but it quickly fades into the background as an irrelevance. Until you want a screenshot at least. Sure, I could crop it. But eh. Effort. ;p

The Others

I talked about a large number of the others already, in the not-at-all confusingly titled ‘Long War of the Chosen‘. I diverted the first half of that post to talking about some of the titles I’d tested expressly for the purpose of seeing how they worked at the odd 32:9 aspect ratio.

Battle Brothers I last spoke about in my May Journal.

The Outer Worlds I gave my initial impressions on when adding it to the list of games.

Hero Siege is new to the blog though. I noted Season 8 had recently started, so I jumped in for a quick look. Boy has it changed. I’m not entirely convinced its all for the better either.

The ability to rush waves to increase difficulty and challenge is gone. However as a positive trade-off, it is no longer necessary to start right from the beginning of each Act and get back to where you were when you die.

It plays like more of a traditional ARPG now, rather than some sort of arena-ARPG-battler like it did before. An interesting set of changes to say the least.