Endgame Viable

This afternoon I have an appointment with a new primary care doctor, one I’ve never seen before. I had no choice but to select a new one because I had to buy new insurance this year, and my old doctor wasn’t “in the network.” It took three months to get this appointment. I don’t like doctors even on a good day. Especially “primary care” doctors. As far as I can tell, the main goal of this type of doctor is to shove you out the office door as fast as possible with the most generic of healthcare solutions that they can think of: “Here, take this generic prescription and come back in a couple weeks if your problem’s not better.” That appears to be the main thing they teach you in primary care doctor school. (347 words.)

I’ve belatedly decided to officially participate in the Blaugust extravaganza. I wasn’t going to because frankly I didn’t think I’d be able to write 31 posts in August. (I still don’t think I will.) But late this past week I stumbled upon some information that I completely missed the first time: You don’t actually have to write 31 posts to participate. I figure that even in my crippled state I should be able to manage five or ten posts. (272 words.)

In The News Nobody is talking about anything except World of Warcraft’s “War of Thorns” event. It’s either the greatest thing ever, or the worst thing ever, or some variation in between, depending on where you look. However, some people are talking about the newest update to No Man’s Sky. I’ve been tempted to get this game forever, but I’m really hesitant to get a game so dependent on procedurally-generated worlds, even at a discounted Steam price of $30. I didn’t care for Trove’s procedurally-generated worlds too much. (259 words.)

MMORPG players are abuzz about World of Warcraft’s next expansion, Battle for Azeroth, which begins next month. (There are too many posts to link here; throw a dart at the blogosphere and you’ll find a post on Battle for Azeroth preparations.) The last character I played in unsubscribed WoW: A level 3 Goblin, c. 2017 Nothing makes me puzzle over my association with the MMORPG genre more than a World of Warcraft expansion. Nothing makes me feel so out of place-so much like an outsider, like I don’t fit in with the MMORPG player crowd. (1192 words.)

Weekly news and observations. In The News The biggest news this week is the World of Warcraft 8.0 pre-expansion patch dropping Tuesday. I don’t have a WoW subscription and have no plans to play this expansion (which doesn’t actually begin until next month), at least not right away. It’s tempting to jump in with all the excitement at launch time, but I haven’t played WoW since about two weeks after the last expansion, and I know I’ll only play this expansion for about two weeks before running into the “I’ve done all of this before” wall, so I’ll just save myself the $65 this time around. Not to mention I can’t play games right now anyway, see below. (455 words.)

Way back in May I was looking for an easy game to play*, and I found the Remastered editions of BioShock and BioShock 2 in my Steam library. They appeared there for free when those editions were released, because I owned the original games. My original plan was to play BioShock 2, because I have owned it since the Christmas sale of 2010 and have yet to play it, but I didn’t remember the original story very well so I started up the first game instead. (831 words.)

News and observations from the week. In The News It’s been another dead week, as far as I can tell. One of these days I’d love to do a statistical analysis to see just what percentage of news articles are about games still in development. I bet it would approach 50%. Last weekend, Tennocon, the Warframe fan conference, happened. The biggest news I remember hearing was Warframe coming to the Switch. That wacky Switch thing seems just crazy enough to work. It’s slowly but steadily gaining momentum month after month. (334 words.)

As I wait for my hands and fingers and thumbs to regenerate themselves, which is taking forever-frankly at this point I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever be able to play an action game with a controller ever again-I thought I would try to injure my hands more by typing up a bit about Demon’s Souls. If nothing else, The Nexus has a lot more artistic style than Firelink Shrine. (978 words.)

Belghast is rebooting Blaugust, so head on over there for all the details (and here for more details). All the cool kids are doing it. I probably won’t be able to participate formally, but I’m sure I’ll post something during the month and I’ll cheer everyone on from the sidelines. This is a screenshot of a cryptic book from Secret World Legends, which is supposed to sort of vaguely remind one of the topic of blogging when one doesn’t have any better images around. (243 words.)

In The News Of course the big controversy of the week was that whole thing with ArenaNet and the influencer and the two writers, which I won’t rehash here. I kind of wish I hadn’t said anything yesterday, because it was “too soon.” I only meant to say I felt kind of guilty about having just written a scathing post about the game. Maybe I’ll revisit it in a few weeks, because I do think there are a lot of different lessons to be learned from the entire catastrophe. (502 words.)