Good Morning Folks! Hopefully yall are surviving Snowmageddon 2026. For the most part I have stayed in out of the mess. I had plenty of food, and so long as power stayed on I was going to be good. We got somewhere in the neighborhood of eight to ten inches. The snow was so dry that drifts were pretty rampant so it was really hard to tell an actual estimate, but I know when I was clearing my jeep yesterday and making a path so I could get out today for an appointment, it was coming up to mid calf high at times. I cleared the front porch enough that I could start putting food out for the outdoor kitties as well. I’ve not seen Tripod, but in the past when we have had cold snaps like this she has an underground borough system that she crawls down into. For years we had bunnies in our backyard prior to Tripod taking up residence there, and I think she has been using their underground warrens.
Things have mostly been okay… save for the fact that it has been raining in my livingroom. This is a problem that I had hoped we solved about three months ago when the roofers came out to work on the flashing at the top of the roof. My guess is that the snow sitting up there has basically been on top of wherever the leak starts, and then heat rising up through the roof is melting it. Essentially as far as we have been able to guess it runs down under the shingles and then finds a way into the house in the middle of the livingroom, dripping out onto this cross beam, and then down onto the ceiling fan before ultimately hitting the floor. Sadly the leak does not come down in a single spot, so essentially I just have to put towels out. It had stopped mid day yesterday, but then started up again late last night as things started to re-freeze and was still going whenever I went to bed. It stopped at some point over night because it is not going this morning. I’ve called the roofers to be on the list for after this is all over, but for now there is not a whole hell of a lot I can do. I have some IKEA bathmats and some towels down to soak up the water…. which I will run a load in the washer once things have chilled a bit.
My folks I think got it worse north of me. This is their front yard and you can barely make out the wheelchair access ramp. My dad of course had already trudged a path out to his shop, because he spends most of his time there. I think more than anything he was checking on the cats, who stay overnight in there with a heater on. I never knew my Dad was as big of a softie for strays as he is, until later in life. Maybe I get my own attachment to street cats by genes. I got out yesterday and cleared the cars and a path out, and then was wondering why the hell everything hurt today. These are all activities that I do not normally have to do, so I guess it makes sense that everything feels like it aches in my chest and arms. I don’t even have a proper snow shovel, because this happens so infrequently. My old shovel was rusted through so I tossed it, and had not gotten around to getting a new one. I guess I will make that a bigger priority. Essentially I cleared what I cleared with one of those giant plastic yard rakes and a nylon bristled broom.
This weekend I spent a lot of time snuggled with cats and watching movies downstairs on the television. I will probably make a post tomorrow about some of the things that I watched. “The Librarian” reminded me that I have a Letterboxd account so if you do that thing feel free to follow and I will likely give you a follow back. I like keeping track of media consumption and previously my plex server log was the most reliable method up until this point. However that was flawed because when I was pulling together my movies of the year post… I completely somehow missed the existence of Sinners. I figure I will try and keep up with this similar to how I do Storygraph and Bookwyrm. Speaking of those two I really need to get back in the swing of reading, or at least listening to an audiobook while I do other things. I figure on the 29th with the launch of the Phrecia league it might be a good time to get back engaged.
Speaking of gaming… I played a heck of a lot of Destiny Rising this weekend. I was trying to keep all three accounts active, because we were having some bad luck finding strongholds. Yesterday morning we cleared the three that we had access to, but did not find the third until we were already logged in trying to clear the other two. Thanks to Jade Rabbit I have been playing Umeko a lot more on my alt accounts, and apparently doing well enough to regularly get MVP when I run some strikes. Essentially I am trying to get account two high enough so that I can get 3 charges of Iron Commander and can get my 60 Pinnacle done without running any strikes. Account three… at some point I just need to put my head down and push through the campaign because I have not even unlocked the second planet.
Last night I played a bit of Path of Exile II, especially since Kodra has been talking about it quite a bit. I know come the 29th I will be over in Path of Exile and playing the new Legacy of Phrecia event, but in the meantime I am hopping around and making things explode in POE2. For Phrecia I am all over the place on what to play. Right now I am looking at either doing something akin to my Ice Trap of Hollowness build, a Blind Prophet bow traps, or Poison Minions. Pohx is going for a life stacking Righteous Fire build, but it is going to require a lot of gear to make it work. I had fun with RF Scavenger last time but I also needed a mageblood to make it work, and I am not sure if I want to push that hard. It sort of annoys me that there has not been a lot of fresh theorycrafting for builds within the POE community. Everyone seems to be focused on currency strats… which will fucking sort themselves out pending you have a good build.
Anyways! I hope you have fared well during the winter onslaught. I hope my livingroom rain comes to a close finally, and I hope todays tests go well and they don’t find anything else wrong with me. I am deeply scared about everything that is going on right now with cancer diagnosis and still not having much information. I will hopefully make it through this however.
The post Snowmageddon and Livingroom Rain appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are back in full force and continuing our adventure through the second part of the Games of the Year 2025 podcast. We cut the list in half, giving us fifteen games that we were talking about in each episode. This is not necessarily a numerical list, but the titles that appear later in the shows did get more votes. It was a great year for gaming, but also a year where we were constantly getting distracted by the next big thing coming down the pipe. While we played a lot of games… we did not necessarily FINISH a lot of games.
Good Morning Folks. Today we mostly return to our regularly scheduled gaming content. I’ve been playing an awful lot of Path of Exile, mostly because I feel like I am maybe done with Path of Exile II for the moment. My jumpy Fire Bear build works amazingly well, and has completed most of the content in the game except for the most tryhard hardcore content. I have no real interest in doing any of that, just like I have never had much interest in doing it in Path of Exile. So instead I have shifted gears to working specifically on trying to get 34 of 40 Challenges in the Keepers of the Flame league. Since my Righteous Fire Chieftain is pretty much as blinged out as I can get him…. I have opted to start working a bit on my Ice Trap of Hollowness Elementalist, which was not a thing… prior to me doing it I think. It has been freaking potent as far as characters go and I would honestly do this over and over if I had the option. Unfortunately a lot of the power of the build is coming from Foulborn Uniques, specifically the double explode Berek’s Respite. I hope this shit goes core.
I had been trying to finish the challenge that requires you to run 50000 quant worth of maps. However on a whim I decided to see just how well my Ice Trapper could do at the Bolstered Breachlords challenge. I had knocked out one of the three conditions, and I figured since I do so well at Hive Fortresses I might as well give it a shot. The thing about the Ice Trap build is that it essentially freezes the entire damned screen. You know what is really good defensively? Freezing the entire screen when you are facing a boss. Sure enough I was able to effectively keep the “It that was” bosses locked down for the entire fight and kept them from firing off any of the specific abilities that I was not supposed to get hit by. After my second hive brain, I managed to complete Bolstered Breachlords and with it my 34th challenge of the league. I am not sure if I am going to try and knock out any more challenges at this point.
The real thing that I am chasing is getting the same sized totem pole for my hideout. I have been collecting totem poles since the Sanctum league, and when Necropolis league happened I was able to get 34 of 40 challenges. After that it has sort of set a benchmark for me in my league journey, and now that is my ultimate goal is to be able to get the same size as I have previously gotten. I doubt I will ever be a 40 of 40 andy, at least not without paying for some of the ubers… which is not a thing that I want to do. Please note when I talk about paying for carries in Path of Exile, we are not talking about real world money. There is a thriving business of people who make bossing specific characters and then spend the entire league doing nothing but carries for Chaos or Divine Orbs. There are a lot of places where you can get access to this but the most common is The Forbiddden Trove discord. I specifically hate doing The Maven fight. I CAN do it… have done it more than once… but I hate the fucking “simon says” round and as a result I almost always pay for that carry to get my last voidstone.
In my travels of completing my last challenge of the league I happened to get a Hinekora’s Lock to drop, and these were at that time going for 147 Divine Orbs. I don’t really NEED the Divines right now since I am winding down the league, but I figured I would rather than the Divines in standard than the Lock. For reference at this point in the league a Lock effectively sells for Mageblood money. It is not like I need a Mageblood for anything however, because I do not want to shuffle the gear on either of my characters to try and make room for it. I still stand by my statement that a Mageblood is the least interest of the high priced items, because it mostly just allows you to cheat things on your build, and doesn’t really add anything interesting to the mix. Given the choice I will always build around a Headhunter instead, because it actually does something interesting mechanically. Though in truth I rarely play the type of builds that can benefit from either of those.
In other Path of News… we are getting a redo of The Legacy of Phrecia event and I am pretty pumped about it. Instead of using Standard as the baseline we are getting all of the bells and whistles that come with the 3.27 Keepers of the Flame league. Phrecia was one of my favorite events last year, and honestly it was hype enough that I put it on my games of the year list. Essentially every normal ascendancy is replaced by 19 new alternative ascendancies, and what is wild about this version is that we will also have the new bloodline ascendancies… which will create some truly wild combinations. I have no clue what I am going to be playing, because I am waiting on the patch notes to drop that explain some of the updates that rebalance the state of things in the last running of this event. Everyone is assuming this will mean some nerfs for Scavenger and Ancestral Commander because they dominated the last round. Scavenger for example made it trivial to get 90% of physical damage converted to elemental damage, because you could stack that cloak of flame node with an actual cloak of flame. Anyways this one starts on the 29th and I am fully expecting to be mainlining this event for awhile.
Last night I spent a bit of time in Destiny Rising, because due to all of the shit going on in my life we did not get to do our normal “Sibling Time” night on Tuesday. We knocked out a couple of rounds of Grandmasters, and unfortunately learned the lesson that you can in fact run with characters that have run out of stamina… but you do not get the Grandmaster rewards. We got enough to Calamity Ops to not be relegated, which we are calling good and then finished up with some Morgran’s Hunt. I will still need to do another 5 key run, but that should be easy enough before the reset. We have found two Strongholds for the week, but I know I have expended resources on three accounts… so that is probably all we are going to find. I know I need to spend some time running The Expanse this weekend so I can get some fruit and progress for the upcoming reset next week.
As far as the other news in my life… I greatly appreciate the outpouring of support that I have received. It is honestly overwhelming. I had a bit of a nervous breakdown yesterday at one point when out of the blue and without warning I was scheduled for two diagnostic tests that I do not remember the doctor mentioning. I of course immediately expected the worst… but then later called their office only to find out that no they did not have the biopsy results back and that these were just part of the standard procedures to look for anything else that might be going on. I still know next to nothing other than I have cancer, and at some point it has to be removed. I am just hoping that the snowmageddon we have barrelling down on us, is such that I can get out Monday for those diagnostic tests. I am trying desperately to hold my shit together in the meantime while my nerves eat away at me. I go between being largely fine and resigned to whatever is going to happen, to being a basket case.
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Good Morning Folks! After giving you updates on my life… it is time to roll on into the rest of my year in review topics. I legitimately do not know how many of these I have, but I have stalled long enough. This morning I am going to talk about the games that were important to me during the last year in either a good way or a bad way. This list is not going to look anything like most 2025 in review lists, because I do not play a ton of new games. I play an awful lot of ARPGs and treat each season as though it were a game launch. This wildly skews the sort of results that I have in this scenario. I am also this time sort of loosely grouping the list into less important to more important, but not necessarily a strict order.
Path of Exile II: The Last of the Druids
This is probably the most recent of the games I am going to talk about it, and I am still more or less playing it. On December 12th, Path of Exile II released a big update that launched the Last of the Druids and Fate of the Vaal league. In it they gave us access to the first of the Int/Str hybrid classes the Druid which has ascendancies for Shaman and Oracle. More important than that, they gave us access to the primal ability tree and the talisman weapon that allow us to turn into a Bear, Wolf, or Wyvern. I’ve been deeply critical of Path of Exile II up until this point, seeing it as a bit of a mechanically worse version of Path of Exile that just happens to have better graphics and a better user interface. Playing Bear Druid, and specifically Demon Bear Shaman is what really pushed me over the edge to truly enjoying this game. It is fun as heck to hop around the map causing big explosions with my fat bear ass. The game still has problems… and will continue to have problems for a very long time… but this gameplay got me hooked.
Slormancer
Slormancer is a little 2D sorta isometric view roguelike arpglike game that is a heck of a lot of fun. I did not play this game anywhere near as much as I should have, but I hope to remedy that in 2026. I did play it enough however to want to talk about it. The mechanics of this game are just really fun, and it reminds me of what if you took Rogue Legacy and turned it into an ARPG. I mostly played the knight character, but the archer was pretty fun as well. This really wants to be played with a controller though, and is ideal for television gaming. Once I get off my ass and figure out what I want to use as a proper Steam in the Livingroom setup, I will probably be playing more of this. If you have not checked it out and like any of the types of games that I eluded to in this post… check it out. It’s a heck of a lot of fun for $20.
Dune Awakening
I have such wildly mixed feelings about Dune Awakening. This is going to be a game that goes in my disappointments of the year pile. The AggroChat folks and friends decided to play together on a private server that Tam rented for us as we all got started, and I feel like that is the correct way to play this game. It is unfortunate that it requires someone shelling out for a server, and it is even more unfortunate that it does not grant you private access to the shared open world pvp deep desert. What killed this game for me though… was upkeep. You are required to play a certain amount of this per week in order to generate enough fuel to keep the shield on your base active, or your base slowly disintegrates over time. This feels really fucking bad. Namely because I got busy with various events while playing this game… and then had the death of a spouse which knocked me even further out of whack with ever getting back in. Once I lost everything, there was no point in me going back. I would love to see a pure PVE sandbox version of this game that allows you to set custom rules on a server by server basis for things like upkeep. The game itself has gone from a peak concurrency of not quite 200k players to an average of 8k…. so I think maybe it did not work quite right for a lot of players.
Hellclock
So what if I told you there was a game… loosely based on the real world events surrounding Brazil’s War of Canudos… that took place in the aftermath of the abolishment of slavery, but also somehow involves exploring dungeons and killing zombies and shit? Hellclock is a deeply odd and stylistic roguelike ARPG where you have a fixed amount of time to explore on each run, and once you run out of time everything winds back and you get to keep any powerups that you purchased during the previous run. The cyclical nature of the game is deeply satisfying and you get various tools to extend your runs as you get better. I did not play anywhere near enough of this game but again I think it is prime fodder for once I sort out my Steam in the Livingroom setup. I have to solve my wireless network woes before I really do that unfortunately because I have my old gaming rig hooked up in the livingroom, the connectivity speeds are complete ass. I’ve also not really figured out a good keyboard and mouse option, and there will be games that I don’t necessarily want to play with a controller. Anyways NONE of that is about Hellclock, which is just a universally interesting game.
Titan’s Quest II
Titan’s Quest II had quite a number of updates throughout the year and I spent several days really getting into the game and checking out what it had to offer. I landed on the decision that I do not really enjoy playing a melee class in the game, but dig the heck out of playing ranged. I played a sort of icicle archer thing that worked really well, and honestly the game itself is just gorgeous. The fights are pretty interesting, and this is very much a worthy successor to the first game, which in itself was a worthy successor to Diablo II. If you like ARPGs in general or you were ever a fan of TItan’s Quest, then I suggest checking it out. They are continuing to release updates for the game as it is still in development so if you would rather play it once it is finished, then this might be a game to put a pin in and check back when the 1.0 release finally happens.
Abyssus
This game is a heck of a lot of fun to play with a friend, and Ace and I spent a bit of time playing this game and should probably at some point return to it. I think Destiny Rising more or less stole the place in our gaming lives that this took up for a bit. Essentially Abyssus is a wave based arena shooter rogue-like… about exploring the depths of an underwater dungeon. You and your friends take on waves of monsters, get loot, and work your way down to fixed boss fights at specific floors. The deeper you go the harder it gets and the more varied the environments become. Big Nautical-punk vibes with this game because you are both wearing these diving suits while you wield your big damned guns and kill things. The further you go the more points you get to configure your build and control your weapon load-outs, but a lot of options unlock symmetrically as you reach certain floors giving you a mix of guaranteed upgrades and choice based upgrades. I am not sure this game would be fun solo, but it was a blast with someone hanging out on voice chat.
Path of Exile – Mercenaries of Trarthus
Mercenaries of Trarthus was a challenge league that ran in Path of Exile from June 13th to October 27th and represented the first new content we had gotten in almost a year since the launch of Settlers of Kalguur the previous year. First it was just amazing to get some new content in the game, but more than that it introduced Mercenaries and I have always loved those sorts of mechanics in ARPGs. One of my favorite aspects of Diablo III was building out my companion to buff the things that were weak in my build, and that is largely what players did in order to make some truly busted builds. The real meta of the league was doing some sort of build that could apply large amounts of Lightning damage, and then using Doryani’s Prototype on your mercenary, to debuff all of the mobs in your presence to have large amounts of negative lighting resistance. I think the build that I ran as my second in the league managed to get close to -300% Lightning Resistance while dealing a ton of damage with Storm Brand of Indecision. It was thoroughly busted but lord did I have a lot of fun playing this league.
Monster Hunter Wilds
There will be some of you who do not remember just how much I got into Monster Hunter World when it released in 2018 both on the original PS4 release, and later when it came out on PC in August of that same year. I had never really mainlined a Monster Hunter game despite trying to dabble in them on the mobile platforms, but this game sucked me in and stole so much of my time. Monster Hunter Wilds was a return to the same style of game as Worlds and when it launched I had a heck of a lot of fun playing it. Sadly I did not really stick around as much as I thought I might, but that does not discount the fact that I had an awful lot of fun playing it. I probably would have played it more but every time Ammo, Sita and I tried to group up I started having network problems. Capcom… has some of the shittiest grouping systems ever, and if they got someone from a western live service game to come unfuck their game interface… I think folks would be around far longer. I only put in around 60 hours, but it was 60 hours well spent.
Last Epoch – Beneath Ancient Skies
On August 21st Last Epoch dropped a pretty signfiicant update with Beneath Ancient Skies which added a whole new chapter to the game and a new league mechanic hunting down primal monsters and chosing to evolve them making them more difficult and rewarding. I had a really fun league with this game, but ultimately I burned through it pretty quickly. I played a Fire Minions Necromancer build and then ultimately hopped on the Thorns damage train for quite possibly the stupidest build I have ever played in any game where I am just nuking the entire screen with thorns damage. The new act was a lot of fun and it is probably the best content they have added into the game to date. The primal league mechanic was also a lot of fun, and each time this game expands it keeps getting better. I think the challenge for me is that I “finish” with the game way faster than I do with Path of Exile. I reach a point with my builds where I have seen everything that I really want to see and really pushing to the true pinnacle content of the game requires more hours than I really want to dump into it. That is not a failing of the game and more a case that it still needs more years to cook before it will be as rich of an experience as Path of Exile has.
Path of Exile – Legacy of Phrecia Event
Earlier when I talked about Mercenaries of Trarthus, part of the reason why that league was so damned much fun is that it had been a literal year since we last got a new league in the game. So much of GGG’s time was being devoted to the care and feeding of the fledgling Path of Exile II, that the POE core felt ignored. That is not to say things were not happening, we had a few fun private leagues like the Pohx League event, but there was one thing that probably took the cake. Almost as a shadow drop, Grinding Gear Games gave us the Legacy of Phrecia alternative ruleset event where every single one of the 19 Ascendancy classe were replaced. It was wild to play through this and I played a Righteous Fire Scavenger… which is the alternative version of the Scion. It was so much fun, and now this game mode exists as an alternate ruleset that you can use to create custom leagues. There is part of me though that wishes at some point all of the Phrecia ascendancies go core and become just alternate options allowing us 38 different ascendancy choices in the game.
Destiny Rising
Destiny Rising is essentially my game of the year…. but it does not get the top slot for reasons I will talk about later. This is a gacha game from Net Ease that remixes the tried and true Destiny format, but also makes it a heck of a lot more enjoyable in the process. There is no reason why I should be loving a Gacha game as much as I am, because I thought Genshin Impact broke me of that. However… Destiny Rising is shockingly fair when it comes to its Gacha mechanics. I have 3 accounts, 2 of which I have spent zero money on… and they both feel like I have plenty of things to do without having spent a dime. The whole three acccouints thing is largely because I am trying to maintain a guild when there are really only two or three of us that are actively playing. That is a whole other discussion. If you ever loved Destiny at any point in the past, you owe it to yourself to check out Destiny Rising. It is so damned much fun and really streamlines what made that game great. If you DO end up playing… hit me up because we certainly can use some more active players in our guild to do dailies.
Guild Wars 2 Fractal Incursion Event
My “Game of the Year” really goes to more specifically an event of the year. In September, Guild Wars 2 shadow dropped an event called the Fractal Incursion. This added a new feature to the game which allowed you to randomly queue for Fractals, giving the game what it needed so badly… a more modern group finder. Not only did they do this… they bribed the fuck out of us to run tons of them by providing a path to a piece of legendary armor, and also giving you a pathway to get said armor for every single weight class in the game. The end result was that Lion’s Arch specifically around the Mists portal was busier than at any point I have ever seen in this game’s history. The above screenshot was taken one morning when I was working on my blog post… so completely off peak hours for either EU or NA and it was STILL packed. Better yet we are going to be getting a version of this same group finder for a combined version of Raids and Strikes later this year. This has breathed so much new life into Guild Wars 2, and prompted us to have some really fun Thursday night fractal groups as we all chain ran them trying to get through the achievements. Absolutely the highlight of my gaming year, and on the 13th I believe we are getting a return of the Fractal Rush event so looking forward to that as well.
Those were my games and gaming events of the year. I am sure it looks pretty different than the lists for most people. I did not really play much in the way of single player experiences this year. I hope to remedy that in 2026, but who knows where that will go. My happy place tends to be listening to an audiobook while plugging away at a mechanically interesting but narratively devoid experience. Even for this coming year my games list will be the games that I played, not necessarily the games that came out so at some point when I finally do get around to beating Clair Obscur it will probably make a list. Anyways. Were there any unusual games that made your personal Games of the Year list? Drop me a line below.
The post 2025 in Review: The Games appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
