Time to Loot Journal: September 2022

The back half of September saw very little gaming going on. For me at least; I can’t speak for you. But I’ve gone from Blurgelflurgal a few days ago back into a pretty heavy gaming swing now. It’s only been a few days of October as I write this, but I’m not too far off the total hours played for all of September already.
Not that that was a particularly high bar… nor is this post about October!
I will add though, that the games played a different enough to warrant a refresh of the sidebar. Clearance sale! All must go! Well, not XCOM 2. That can stay.
Looking Back
One Year Ago
- Tales of Arise came out, and I finished it — started and finished all within the month. Fair to say, I was rather well taken with it! In a comment reply to Tipa I noted by the time I finished, 15% of purchasers had also already finished it. I was curious where that might end up landing. Answer: 34.9% — not too bad! And it has managed to maintain it’s overall 90% positive rating on Steam, too.
- I decided to refresh my coding skills — I picked up several courses during one of the many (many, many) Udemy sales and started with Java, a bit of a throwback to my Uni days.
Two Years Ago
- I built a new PC! It all seemed to be going fairly swimmingly out of the gate, but I did later encounter some issues with the RTX 3080 which took the better part of October to finally resolve. Turned out, the crashing had nothing to do with capacitor-gate or even the shonky day 1 drivers. Nope; was stranger than that. It just didn’t like the full speed memory timings of my RAM — even though the RAM was perfectly comfortable running at those timings when tested independently. In any case — the system has been amazing since then.
The coming 40-series cards are a temptation, but there is nothing to truly warrant upgrading just yet. Or… At the very least, I will hold off consideration for such until the inevitable 40-series ti cards come along and see what the jump looks like then.
Gaming Goals
September (and October’s) Goals
- XCOM 2: Start a new campaign!
All the way through the succession game, I’ve had a bit of an itch to play more than the game has allowed. But I’ve been reluctant to do so, from a desire not to play without mods or, worse, to risk corrupting our current game with mod data inadvertently. But! I think vanilla XCOM 2 is actually pretty OK after now having played it a while. So, I’ll just do that. :) - Cities Skylines: Start a new blogger city!
Scratching another itch and following on the theme of new beginnings. It seems oddly appropriate as a theme, as I do feel quite refreshed and ready to start again in a more normal fashion upon completion of Blaugust.
Welp… I didn’t do *waves hands* any of all this. As we’ll get to again shortly, I didn’t get to gaming very much over September.
But I still want to!
So these goals live on to fight another day! I’ll have to reassess if still not done by end of October though. Which… is possible, because a lot of my recent gaming time with the turn of the month has headed in the direction of Ghost Recon.
Games Played September 2022
Rank | Game | Hours | % Gaming Time |
1 | Aliens Fireteam Elite | 2.9 | 19.1% |
2 | Prodeus | 2.4 | 16.3% |
3 | Across the Obelisk | 2.0 | 13.2% |
4 | Warhammer 40,000: Chaosgate – Daemonhunters | 1.9 | 12.3% |
5 | Spiritfarer | 1.8 | 12.2% |
6 | RimWorld | 1.6 | 10.3% |
7 | Descenders | 1.5 | 10.3% |
8 | Ghost Recon: Wildlands | 0.9 | 6.2% |

I don’t recall any month since I’ve started tracking where the delta in time between most played and least played were so close together.
Aliens Fireteam Elite could’ve seen more play; my friends and I bought the expansion for it. But… that’s all there was. We finished it in that time. Granted, we could’ve bumped up difficulty to the max or ground out weapon mastery for everything. But… If you’re not keen to do that, then yup… A few hours of content is all you’re going to get out of the expansion.

Books Read September 2022

Welp… I waylaid my Kindle for a good few weeks this month. So I’m still in the first (of three) books contained within The Great Leveller, but I’ve found it again now!
And I’m almost done, I think. It’s hard to be certain as the Kindle marks % completion of the three books together, but the story beats and cadence seem to all be indicating a final climax to the book so far is about to happen.
You know, that, and… I’m over 33% of the way through now.
I’ve been enjoying it so far, though. I have an inkling of where the end is going, but who knows, perhaps I’ll be way off!
The Blog
After the high of Blaugust, it was a return to a more modest post count, with just 5 new posts published over September. I started out on a good rhythm, then, boom! Two+ week break.