What did you do today.

[Jye Nicolson]

I *really* liked Veilguard. I've been with the series from the start and sunk ungodly hours into Origins and I think Veilguard is the best of them*. The main caveat is if you want more conflict in your party and to really get a good close look at the more unsavoury parts of the setting, this is not the DA for you. But I was super ready for actually liking people when this game hit.

My good run of painting elves got a bit disrupted by travel and Monster Hunter, then super disrupted by Assassin's Creed. I've been loving it for virtual tourism - haven't got much of an opinion on the story since I've barely touched it but I can tell you Himejijo and Nara are . I was super excited to see Ishiyamadera, it doesn't get as much attention as some of the others but pleased it's in a video game at all**.

Lots of meetings this week though so I expect some painting to get done.

* DA2 might have been better in a world where it got budget and time.
** Loses points for not having a Murasaki Shikibu codex entry***
*** I have a sinking feeling the only game that doesn't lose points for lack of Sei Shonagon is Fate/Grand Order

[The Other Dave]

Yeah, everyone in the party seems to really get along and be really supportive of one another, it's kind of refreshing really (if a bit saccharine). Even at the First Big Decision Point, the person I chose to not help was like "well, it sucks but I understand and forgive your decision, plus apparently I'm more of a badass in combat now".

[me_in_japan]

non hobby stuff here, but I did print off a couple of minis for my mates' D&D characters (a youthful knight with a natty nose piercing, and a sea dwarf with an anchor that he may well just stick somewhere it's not welcome), but mostly I've been away in PC land for the past couple weeks. I've ripped the guts out of my old PC and upgraded lots of it (although, sadly, not the graphics card, which is obviously the bit that would make the biggest difference.) But hey ho, I now have a nice AM5 architecture motherboard, Ryzen 9700x processor, and (most importantly*) glowy lights all over the case.

With my fancy schmancy new machine, I've been mostly playing NMS (kinda maybe getting the hang of it now?), and, like some of y'all, my son has been playing a lot of Monster Hunter. It looks pretty good, but I ain't got time in my life for that plus NMS, plus, yknow, the rest of my life. Also, I've been playing a game called Still Wakes the Deep, which is a horror game about what happens when Wierd Lovecraftian Stuff happens to an oil rig off the coast of Scotland in the mid 1970s. (mostly it involves a LOT of swearing, which pretty much tracks with how I imagine it'd go down ). It's a really fun game, if by fun you mean "tense and downright terrifying at points", as long as you don't mind mostly just walking around trying not to fall into the north atlantic/get assimilated by eldritch horrors.

*actually, the most important thing is that my PC is now running windows 11, which my previous mobo didnt support, and is also very much futureproofed, with loads of slots/space for expansion should it become necessary.

[The Other Dave]

Warning, vidyagame chat post incoming:

No Man's Sky (kind of like Minecraft I guess, although I have much less experience with the latter) has a sort of weird progression thing, where the early game (scramble to zap rocks and plants to get materials and craft stuff just to live) is basically a different game altogether from the mid- to late game (resources and money can be trivially created much faster than you can ever hope to use or spend them) so there's a point where the game goes through a state change and you're no longer playing to survive, but to see what cool aliens / spaceships / planets you can find while building unnecessarily elaborate bases just because a given planet has a particularly cute species of crab or whatever. Heck, I have a base whose sole purpose is to have a Basalt mine, a material that has no use whatsoever beyond a single stage in a single story quest and is worth only a little more money than literal dirt, but it exists and you never know, so I may as well set up a little base to extract 10,000 units of it every twelve hours.

I finished up Veilguard over the weekend, which was cool. The last like three to five minutes did feel like they were written for someone who cares about the franchise a lot more than I do, but that's entirely fair - I think on the whole it was much much more forgiving of someone new to a franchise than pretty much any other RPG sequel game I've ever played. Also after playing the weirdly-horny Baldur's Gate 3, it felt almost odd to play a game that's almost equally weirdly chaste, and most of the characters talk and interact in a way that I can only describe as "it's like they go to therapy on the regular," but those aren't even complaints, just minor observations about what was a very good game in the classic BioWare RPG mold. (The one thing that did bother me inordinately was learning that the name of the game world Thedas is literally The Dragon Age Setting, but what're you going to do.)

[me_in_japan]

No Man's Sky (kind of like Minecraft I guess) ...

This is, btw, the single best comparison I have seen regarding "what's NMS like?" Bizarrely, this is also the first time I've seen it in all my travels across the internet. NMS is absolutely just Minecraft with (much!) fancier graphics and wider construction/exploration options. But at its heart, it's Minecraft. There is no "story". There is no "why am I doing all these things?" other than "doing these things is fun."

You dig up resources. You find ways to more efficiently do so. You explore. Repeat.

I really, really feel NMS needs to work on its presentation. It's not Skyrim in space. It's not a shooting game. You don't need to find an objective. There is no mission, not really. If the game was more clearly presented as Minecraft in space, I reckon folks would be much better equipped to enjoy it. There'd be about a million less confused Reddit threads, at the very least.

[The Other Dave]

There is no "story". There is no "why am I doing all these things?" other than "doing these things is fun."

Kind of, except that I'd elaborate that there definitely is a setting and there are stories in it, which you engage with to a) learn about the setting, and - equally importantly - b) unlock cool new recipes, cosmetic skins, spaceships, and planet types, it's just that the setting and stories are explicitly just a setting and stories instead of something "real". I'd even say that one of the neat things about the universe they've set up is that it's fair to say that the two statements up there are at its core: Hello Games have created a fictional universe where "nothing has any meaning besides what we bring to it, so you may as well have fun doing things that are fun to you" is verifiably true in-setting.

(They've also created a universe where the fact that there's an easy item duplication bug that they haven't fixed in 8 years can be taken to mean that the bug is a "real thing" in the universe, and therefore it's ok to take advantage of it. At least that's what I tell myself when I get a new spaceship and the stack of storage upgrades I got from a couple months of frigate missions and starship salvage isn't quite enough to max out its storage space.)

[Jye Nicolson]

Unfortunately two weeks of getting absolutely blasted by meetings did not yield the painting progress I hoped but these guys are table ready and some birbs not far behind.

Videogame wise I finished AC: Shadows and just have some season locked tasks to get through for the platinum. I absolutely loved this game, easily the best AC IMO. That opinion is *heavily biased* by loving Japan and seeing so many places I know in a game for the first time, as well as another fun take on all the Sengoku crew. But I imagine this crowd might understand why I feel that way.

Naoe and Yasuke are great characters, I played the former more than the latter but enjoyed both.

[YellowStreak]

Haven't had much painting time, but 3d printed some vehicles recently. I tried out 'stippling' as a vehicle painting technique for the first time and am pretty happy with the results.

[Jye Nicolson]

That's a great looking Rhino!

[The Other Dave]

Looks good! Can confirm that stippling and sponging are excellent techniques for painting anything with large flat surfaces quickly and to a nice standard.