Winter Sale Acquisitions
Alright, alright this is a tad late given the sale ended some time ago. But since Krikket posted about her sale splurge I’ve been meaning to do a similar overview. Although perhaps with a little less of a focus on the costs. *cough* Although upon further reflection, I’d say once the US Dollar to NZ Dollar conversion is applied overall we probably spent similar amounts… Same ballpark…ish.
Right!
My Purchases
Outside of a few gifts here and there, the games purchased for myself were all in a single transaction. Apparently I’m still not quite there yet when it comes to only purchasing games I intend to play immediately.
Some of these I bought for a particular category of games I’m maintaining in Steam though. Namely one of, ‘<Kid> can Pick’ where ‘<Kid>’ is of course his name. This is a category of games where they meet in the centre on the venn diagram of ‘games suitable for a young child to watch’, ‘with gameplay actually of interest to said young child’ and ‘games I can actually tolerate playing’. ;)
This is now actually quite a large category!
Anyways, onwards to the things I picked up.
- Creeper World 4
- Door Kickers 2
- GemCraft – Frostborn Wrath
- Kenshi
- Neon Abyss
- Rogue Legacy 2
- Ruinarch
- Stoneshard
- Torchlight III
- Ziggurat 2
With all those purchases, it’d make a great deal of sense to be playing something on this list.
But uh… Monster Hunter: World has actually taken first place as the game of interest outside of WoW, now that I’m starting to ease up my hours there.
As I mentioned in the looking back on 2020 gaming post, the idea to go back for some more MHW had been bouncing around in my head for a little bit.
The main thing holding me back had been worry over the effort required to re-learn the game after so long away.
As it turns out? The best advice here is simple: Just do it.
A surprising amount of muscle memory returns when it comes to this game, combos and dodges just come back as second nature. Not to say there isn’t rust to shake off — there absolutely has been. But it didn’t take long, and I think in some ways I might be a better player now than I was before.
I’ve taken more of a concerted effort to learn the timing required for Foresight Slash this time around. The Long Sword attack that can’t be used directly, but must instead be chained off another attack. Executing it at the right moment allows you to dodge through an enemy attack without taking damage.
The window of opportunity is small though and as noted you can’t directly execute Fade Slash cold, it has to come off something else either worked into your attack chain or at the very least come from a quick thrust attack if you have no better options.
Typically in the past I would just roll my way out of danger which is perfectly valid, but the disadvantage being that it stops you attacking lowering your damage done.
In any case, quite the digression there! We’ll see how much I end up playing the purchased games. Some of them have been on my wishlist for years (hai2u Kenshi). Also have to see how long I stick to Monster Hunter World this time around and whether or not it can raise to the level of an all-the-time game again or not.
Then there’s Monster Hunter: Rise… Demo of which is out now, but I haven’t downloaded yet. The Switch exclusive part (despite owning a Switch) put me off somewhat… But having now seen some of the gameplay from the demo… Welp; I might be grabbing it on launch after all.
