You’ll have to follow me on Twitter if you want all the minute-by-minute details, because I still don’t have new glasses yet and long-form writing is a pain, but I’m pretty sure I got “it.” Either that or I got “something” at a ridiculously coincidental time, when I haven’t had “something” in a good ten years. Fever spiked up pretty high yesterday (Saturday), and I spent most of the afternoon and night alternately shivering uncontrollably or drenched in sweat. (351 words.)

Unrolling a Twitter thread because it’s sort of like a blog post, kind of. Today I’m getting scar tissue blasted out of my eye with a laser beam. Maybe by tonight I’ll be able to read and write again. Or be permanently blind in one eye. The possibilities are endless! I’m using humor as a defense mechanism! Procedure is complete and I can already see much much better. Had no idea how bad it had gotten. (290 words.)

I haven’t played much of any games in the last month, because I’ve been busy dealing with a lot of overdue tasks that I’ve been putting off for so long that they’ve gone from Merely Unpleasant to A Huge Overwhelming Insurmountable Problem. It’s mostly “administrative” tasks-household and personal and money and insurance stuff. All the things I hate dealing with and put off as long as possible, in other words. (416 words.)

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice has been on my radar for quite some time now, as I’ve heard nothing but good things about it, but I only just picked it up in a sale at the end of last year. After finishing up with Death Stranding, I had narrowed down my choice for the first game of the new year to trying out Hellblade or going back to Horizon Zero Dawn. I picked Hellblade, and I’m glad I did. (601 words.)

So I had planned to just upload some videos as I stumbled and bumbled around in EverQuest II and forget about it, because it’s super easy, barely an inconvenience for me to do so, but it turns out that EverQuest II is, well, not a very good video subject. So since all the update comments I left on my last post are just a jumble, I thought I’d try to write down a more coherent narrative of my attempts to find some meaningful gameplay with my lost Level 100 Ogre Coercer. (2378 words.)

It seems like every time I mention EverQuest I or II, I inadvertently start a firestorm of blogging controversy. :) Even before I read Bhagpuss’s post, I was thinking I should probably expand my thoughts on EverQuest II*. It’s one of the games I periodically try to get back into, and one that I wish I was caught up with. I can’t precisely explain why I wish that anymore, though; I suppose it always felt like one of the most “complete” fantasy MMORPG experiences, representative perhaps of the pinnacle of what the genre is capable of. (798 words.)

I don’t really plan my gaming very much, I tend to just play whatever I feel like playing on any given day. But I decided to make a list of the games that are currently on my highest priority “to play” list at the start of 2020, along with a rough estimate of how long they’ll take to play, according to HowLongToBeat. The obligatory blog post picture requirement that vaguely relates to the text. (980 words.)

Previously: Episode 2. As I’ve moved on to playing the next game in my list, which happens to be Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, a game whose story also requires a lot of processing, I’ve sort of lost interest in processing Death Stranding in writing. But I shall valiantly try to press on and remember some key points. This post covers Episodes 3 through 8, which represents the vast majority of the player’s time spent in the game. (2027 words.)

Here’s my annual summary of PC MMORPGs that are on my radar for the new year 2020. (Here is 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014). I’ll warn you up front it’s bleak, just like last year. I am only considering “traditional” style MMORPGs in this list, not things like MOBAs or brawlers or Diablo-clones or whatever else people call MMOs these days. Actually, since I find out about these from MMO sites, and most MMO sites now cover things that aren’t traditional MMORPGs, some of these might in fact not be traditional MMORPGs. (1176 words.)

It’s time once against for the prestigious Endgame Viable Awards for 2019. 2018 Awards 2017 Awards 2016 Awards 2015 Awards 2014 Review 2013 Review This year, I’m going to shrink the size of this post considerably. I didn’t buy or play very many games this year, so there’s not much point in making a huge affair out of it. I’m going to list all the games I bought this year, then I’m going to pick the ones I liked best, and that’s it. (541 words.)

I had designs on writing at least something about all fifteen episodes of Death Stranding, but I’m getting tired of this already. The problem is that there is so much to go over, especially at the beginning and at the end. After the last post, I learned what “BT” stands for: Beached Things. That explains everything, right? Some of the terminology in this game feels like translation mistakes that they just stuck with and doubled down on. (1975 words.)

Previously on The Death Stranding Experience: The Prologue. As we roll into the second hour of the game, you may have noticed I haven’t talked about Death Stranding gameplay very much yet. That’s because, in the first couple of hours of Death Stranding, there isn’t very much gameplay. It’s extremely cut scene-heavy. (It becomes cut scene-heavy at the end as well.) It’s one of the game’s criticisms, though I personally found the cut scenes riveting so I didn’t mind at all. (2747 words.)

I finished the story of Death Stranding over the weekend. It took almost 80 hours over the course of two months. I left a large number of optional tasks unfinished, but I’m hoping to get back and do them at some point. It’s definitely the game of the year for me. These 80 hours have been quite an experience. I’m very thankful that I’ve been able to play a AAA game with so much originality, because frankly I didn’t think I would ever see one again in my lifetime. (2943 words.)

Here’s a quick rundown of memorable games that I played throughout the decade. These are games that I played more-or-less continuously for a month or more (that I remember, at least). In between these games were plenty of others, but these are the ones that made the biggest impact on me. Age of Conan. 2010. I can’t find many records of what I played in 2010. Age of Conan, WoW. (ref) (413 words.)