This morning we are in the middle of a spot of winter weather and as a result all of the schools are closed down and there is madness on the roadways. As such I am going to shorten my normal morning post so that I can get out in said madness and contribute to it. Last night I wrapped up The Technomancer and across the board I considered it to be a really enjoyable game experience. My willingness and ultimate enjoyment of these games may be conditioned by having just finished Witcher 2 before starting down this descent into all things Spiders. If that is the case I am still very thankful for the shift in perspective because there is a lot of good happening in these titles.
They are all deeply flawed experiences, and I keep bringing up that point because it is important. If you can look past those flaws there is underneath it all a really enjoyable narrative with some really interesting ideas at work. The Technomancer is a sequel to Mars: War Logs in the same sort of way that Dragon Age 2 is a sequel to Dragon Age: Origins. It contains some of the same settings and central conflict but with a significantly different cast of characters and perspective on the ongoing “war” between the water merchants of Mars. Technomancer is effectively the heroes journey of one Zachariah Mancer an initiate into this order that plays a similar role in their society as the Jedi did in the Old Republic.
Your journey takes you across the face of Mars and two multiple city states in search of answers about the past and to uncover the secrets of your order. It also has a central theme about Mars being abandoned by Earth and the entire population striving to reconnect and ultimately waiting for a rescue mission that in multiple generations of estrangement never came. This central theme causes you to cross paths with so many interesting characters along the way that have moments of poor writing and moments of absolute genius dialog. The rough around the edges nature however seems to just be the hallmark of Spiders as I am now starting a third game and seeing the same sort of “almost but not quite” characteristics there as well.
Were I to give The Technomancer a numerical rating, I would give it a solid 7 out of 10. There is a good story and a lot of interesting characters if you can make it far enough into the game to feel a sense of investment in the setting and the political intrigue. The biggest negative that the game has going for it right now is the fact that you are locked into playing a Male character, and I am wondering if Greedfall was maybe the first game where Spiders experimented with having a main protagonist that did not have a fixed gender. I hope they keep that up going forward because you are playing Zachariah Mancer in Technomancer and as I am starting “Mars: War Logs” you are also playing a fixed character as well.
Speaking of which I did in fact start Mars: War Logs last night, lighting that wick off the waning light of the previous candle. Graphically the game is attractive and the motions all seem to be fine. Combat once again is vastly different from either Greedfall or Technomancer, so it is going to take some getting used to another interface. Like I have said before it seems like they are constantly searching but never quite finding the ideal interface for their games. This game came out in 2013, and as such it really belongs to the previous Xbox 360/PS3 era of games. That said I am enjoying myself so far and I think I will have no problem getting engaged with it much the same as I have the others. I’ve said it many times before… there is something about these games that makes them deeply interesting to me even though their ambition greatly outstrips their technical prowess.
It is not a great morning. I am suffering from what I sometimes refer to as “intestinal panic” and have been since last night. As a result I am little out of it and also did not get amazing sleep which has caused me to stare blankly into the void several times this morning instead of writing a post. Yesterday I found out that a round of mass banning went out in TemTem and for whatever reason I always get paranoid when something like that happens. To the best of my knowledge I have not done anything to warrant a ban, but given that there is usually no recourse it always makes me more than a little paranoid. This time around specifically because the company seems to think that maybe they accidentally banned a few people. Thankfully however I was able to log in just fine and thankfully this time around Crema is accepting appeals. However posts like this one will always serve to make me extra paranoid about random bans.
I continue to push forward in The Technomancer and while I thought I was getting close to the end… I realize that I have yet to finish chapter three of the game because I don’t have that achievement, and that there is also apparently a chapter four achievement. I may just not be able to tell at all where I am in the pacing unless the final chapter is super short. Last night I mostly spent my time working on a plan to disgrace my arch nemesis, which to be honest… I still don’t quite understand why he is chasing me in the manner that he is. That is a finer point that I have yet to figure out, and I am hoping that eventually as I wind my way further down this rabbit hole that it is explained. I am apparently the chosen one without actually having explained why anything about me makes me the chosen one.
There are two things that this game needs badly. The first is a way to skip time without having to find a bed, because unlike the Fallout/Elder Scrolls games beds are in fairly short supply in this world. The second thing is some sort of a fast travel system because I have retread the same steps to the point of madness. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but Spiders made the design decision that encounters would respawn frequently, which means each time that I trek through the slums I have to fight the same guards and the same gates over and over. The game suffers from a significant amount of backtracking because new quests will send you to the same destinations you have been to hundreds of times, and will again force you to fight the same encounters. This is definitely something they seem to have learned from this game because Greedfall had a perfectly adequate fast travel system.
In Josie news, she has entered the phase where she is into everything. She has explored her environment enough to be comfortable with going places she shouldn’t go now. I woke up this morning and she had knocked a ton of stuff off the top of one of the dressers because of course she did. We are reaching a point of equilibrium with the cats, or at least Mollie is starting to settle down. She has always been our high strung baby, and as I said yesterday over twitter she has now adopted the upstairs cat toy and Josie has adopted the downstairs one. Last night was the first time since Josie coming home with us that Mollie snuggled properly, which I am hoping is a good sign. In fact for most of the night I had Kenzie snuggling on the blanket draping my legs, Mollie laying over my mouse arm and Josie sprawled out behind my head on the top of the sectional. This absolutely seems like progress.
It has been a really weird weekend and as I sit down here to write my Monday morning post I largely just find myself staring at a blank screen. It was real hard getting up this morning because it was real hard sleeping last night. Around 9:30 Saturday morning I dropped my wife off at the airport for her very first international flight and around 7:30 Sunday morning she was landing in Lisbon Portugal. Knowing that she is that far away is doing weird things to my brain, and that first night I suffered a pretty nasty panic attack. Like it is not unusual for her to travel but for whatever reason the distance seems all the more extreme and tangible.
My parents wanted to meet for dinner Saturday night and that is probably the exact wrong thing for me to do. I love my folks dearly but they have a way of putting me into a real bad mindset after being around them. Admittedly it is a large part of why I avoid phone calls and have tried really hard to get them used to texting. I get off the phone with my mother and I am in a foul mood for the next three or four hours… and I am never exactly sure why because there really isn’t a reason to be. However that reaction combined with the fact that I was already worried about my wife’s international adventures sent me down a deep hole that I am finding it hard to dig out of today. Apologies that this is not the most cheery of topics for you to be reading on a Monday morning.
All in all however things are fine apart from the bed being too cold and there being too much room in it. Kenzie and Josie have more or less been glued to my side the entire time. I am not sure if it is that they can tell I am somewhat distraught or if they are continuing to get along better. Whatever the case I have had both of them with me in bed the last two nights, generally speaking Josie in my knee pit and Kenzie either laying on top of me or beside me. Mollie on the other hand has largely been non-interactive and I am guessing this is due to the brewing collusion between the other two. She is largely spending the majority of her time up in my wife’s office where she has reclaimed the room we formerly had Josie isolated in.
As far as media goes, I watched the first season of Atlanta because I am wildly behind watching things. That was one of my hopes for the period where I am the only person in the house was to watch a bunch of shows that I had wanted to. I knew that I really should not catch up on BoJack Horseman for reasons that it always makes me question my own existence… but Atlanta maybe wasn’t that much better of an idea. While I loved the season it also has some deeply melancholic undertones which likely did not at all help my mental state. I am engaged however and I am probably going to watch the second season tonight, or at least start it. It really has such a phenomenal cast and I am fully on board with anything that has Donald Glover or Zazie Beetz in it.
On the gaming front I made more progress into The Technomancer and I continue to love it even more. I am really interested in seeing the games that Spiders has to offer because there absolutely was a void left by Bioware that they are seemingly trying to fill. I feel like I am maybe starting to enter the phase of the game where you begin to collect allied forces and head towards a final showdown. That seems to always be a thing that exists in the type of games that Mass Effect or Dragon Age represent, and I am not exactly sure what to call that genre. It is like a sub genre within the Action RPG genre and I sorta feel dumb always referring to them as Bioware-Likes. Whatever the case I am on this course until I finish the game. It is doing a lot of interesting things, but unfortunately I can’t talk about them at length without generating significant spoilers. Part of why this game works is the way in which it unfolds the setting, and in case someone wants to follow in my shoes I don’t want to ruin it for them.
Josie is getting exceptionally good at climbing things… including me. Sunday morning I was sitting working on editing the podcast and Josie was apparently completely enthralled by whatever was happening on the screen. She figured out a way to latch onto my shoulder and then sorta drape herself down my chest as I leaned back in my chair. She is super bonded at this point and follows me around like a little lost puppy. It is almost always Kenzie and Josie that are with me all of the time, and I try and make sure they both get equal attention so that Kenz doesn’t get jealous. I write that and behind me Kenzie just bopped Josie for some reason that I fail to grasp. For those who are like me and search the background of photos, some things that you can see.
Commodore 64 Mini that I picked up on close out for $20
Sony PS1 Mini that I also picked up on close out for $15
Sealed Case of Commander 2019 that I have not had a chance to mess with
Flanaess Map from D&D 3rd Edition
Star Wars LP that I have had for ages
Guilds of Ravnica mini poster
Stuffed Topaz Carbuncle
I hope you all have a wonderful day and I hope I have a better week than I had a weekend.
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra and Tamrielo
Tonight we talk a bit about some technical difficulties that almost prevented us from recording the show. As a result if anything sounds weird we are on a different server, and will likely be on yet another different server next week. Grace was able to join us so we finally get to talk about Paper Diablo aka Book of Demons. Throughout the weekend I saw the strangest comments over our staff slack channel about a game called What the Golf and Tamrielo finally explains what the hell is up with that. Kodra and Tam talk a bit about the close of Kentucky Route Zero. Bel talks about diving further into Spiders games and playing Technomancer and how once again their ambition outstrips their technical prowess. Ash talks about CrossCode and we wrap things up with a random topic about the perils of opening a Game Store.
