I have rebuilt Endgame Viable as a static site, which means massive changes for me, the developer, and some changes for you, the reader. First, it probably looks completely different. Second, there are some things that you won’t be able to do on the new site, at least not initially: Search for posts. Update: The workaround is to type “your search term site:endgameviable.com” into Google. Comment on posts. For comments, I wired up a somewhat janky private Remark42 server. (289 words.)

Just a quick note for the archives, to report that I did finish Pathologic 2, by which I mean I reached the end credits. I wouldn’t say that I “won” or “beat” the game by any means, since everyone died, and I myself died about a million times by the time I got to the end. A YouTube commenter quite explicitly informed me that I was playing my first blind playthrough using trial and error with no foreknowledge or wiki guidance very wrong, perhaps because I simply lacked the brain capacity to understand the game. (525 words.)

I mentioned before that I hadn’t run into any “difficulty walls” in Pathologic 2 yet. Well, now I have! In my first playthrough, I got about 12 hours into the game, which put me at the start of Day 4-the beginning of Act III, where the story really starts going pear-shaped-before I reached a dead-end, no-win scenario. My hunger level was so extreme and my health was so low that I simply couldn’t walk far enough from my last save point to find any more food, and I died over and over and over again. (316 words.)

While everyone else is playing Shadowlands for some reason, I just got a game called Pathologic 2. It’s been on my wish list for over a year and I just saw it was on sale for $20 last week. I first heard about this game when I saw a YouTuber mention it while playing Death Stranding. They suggested it was, like Death Stranding itself, one of those atypical experimental sorts of games that more people should play, so I put it on my wish list. (841 words.)

This is a post that I’ve meant to write, started to write, given up writing, re-started writing, given up again, and now re-started for the hundredth time over the course of the last three or four years. In the post-2020 election world, it seems like a good time to try again to publicly codify these things. (I’m reminded why I’ve never finished these posts before. The more I dig into my thought processes, the more I find a complicated and nearly-limitless set of rules. (1356 words.)

It’s quite a thrill to find out some random word or phrase or sound you recorded months ago just happens to fit perfectly into a piece of music. Also, it’s a great distraction from the election, which is tomorrow. It feels like all of society here in the U.S. is on hold until we see how it turns out. So it’s a lot of waiting and hand-wringing for us here. Personally I’m tired of the speculating, and I’m ready to rip the band-aid off, to find out which version of Awful we actually end up with. (459 words.)

Sometimes I cope with daily stress by staring at hundreds of YouTube video clips of The Chase, stuffing food into my mouth, feeling smugly content that I can answer every question about American Football. Sometimes I cope with daily stress by making a thing. This is the latter. It was an idea that just popped into my head one day, fully formed. What if I export the isolated microphone track from one of my game videos, go through it and clip out any noteworthy words or phrases out of context, and set them to a beat? (134 words.)

People on Twitter seem to be freaking out about paying $20 for some new thing in Lord of the Rings Online. I am baffled. I don’t currently play LotRO, but I’ve always wanted to finish the Epic Story before they shut down the game. It’s just that it’s an Epic Chore to do so. But I’ve made peace with the fact that I’ll probably never finish the whole thing before the game ends. (700 words.)

I tried out the Resident Evil 3 remake demo on the PS4 the other day. It looks nice, but the gameplay is brutal. It takes three headshots to kill a zombie, and about a dozen non-headshots if your aim is as bad as mine, so you run out of bullets in about 10 seconds flat, and then have to either run away or use the knife. The knife is not a very effective weapon. (530 words.)

Ha! Here’s one more post about Genshin Impact. I copied the (100% unedited) transcript from my video down below. I had hoped I could do that in the last post, but it apparently takes a day for YouTube to think about the video and make the automatic transcript. The transcript also includes the NPC dialog, which is kind of a bummer. I still wish I had a tool that I could run my microphone track through to automatically create a transcript like this. (5588 words.)

This will probably be my only post on Genshin Impact, the hot new MMO everyone is talking about. It was kind of fun. But not because of the game. I derived the most enjoyment from making up my own dialog to go against the NPC dialog. Since, for some incomprehensible reason-I guess JRPG tradition-you have to press X after every NPC line, there is plenty of opportunity to inject yourself into every scene. (288 words.)

I would have sworn that I’d written a post about Horizon Zero Dawn at some point in the past two years, but apparently I haven’t. So here it is. In 2017, everyone lost their minds over Horizon Zero Dawn, a game which was a PS4 exclusive at the time. I thought it looked cool, but I couldn’t play it. In 2018, I bought a PS4 Pro on sale, and Horizon Zero Dawn was one of the exclusive titles that I intended to play on it (along with Bloodborne and a slew of Naughty Dog games). (1253 words.)

I started to write this post after seeing Roger’s post on the complications of ethical gaming, which followed Wolfy’s post on the same subject, although it turns out I don’t have anything to add to what they said. Just go read their posts and imagine me nodding along in agreement. It’s complicated, and it’s personal. But beyond simply agreeing with them, I suppose I felt compelled to continue with this post to acknowledge that yes, I know, I’ve played a lot of Ubisoft games this year, and I’ve enjoyed the heck out of them*, even while Ubisoft Corporate has been under fire for gross social and ethical malfeasance. (548 words.)

This has been a weird day since I woke up. First, I slept all the way through the night without any interruptions from my cat, dog, bladder, or back pain, which is quite rare these days. The encroaching darkness and change of the seasons is at peak strangeness right now where I live, so all day the lighting and temperature has felt off. Then Twitter apparently decided to screw me over for no apparent reason. (935 words.)

So I’m playing an MMO again, kind of. I just happened to notice the other day that the base version of The Division 2 was on sale in the Ubisoft store for $10. Adding in a handful of “Uplay Points”-or whatever they’re called-that I’d gathered from years of playing Assassin’s Creed games, I knocked it down to $8. The Division 2 is my favorite of the “looter shooters” I’ve seen, mainly because the cover shooting mechanics looks and feels more natural than any of the others. (740 words.)