I Finally Finished Elden Ring

 

I'm gonna take a knee, this took a while.

-109 hours total spent on my playthrough. That puts it just under Dark Souls at 115. This was a really long game, but it maintained its quality throughout, although Crumbling Farum Azula was such a hard-ass slog.

-Elden Ring has the exact same plot as Dark Souls. The old order of gods is crumbling; the magic force that held the world together is broken and in the hands of degenerate lords; only an undead warrior can fix it all. All the lore is buried in item descriptions and cryptic lines. What it has on Dark Souls is scope and accessibility. Spirit ashes help mitigate boss difficulty, along with the ridiculous amount of build combinations one can achieve. It's amazing how far a good combat system will take a game.

-Some of these bosses were definitely designed for summoned play. That second phase of the Beast Clergyman , where he reveals that he's Maliketh? His endless combos don't give you enough time to hit him. I spent more time chasing the Elden Beast than fighting him, but thankfully, I'd summoned two sorcerers who were able to complement my melee faith/dex build.

-My favorite boss fights were probably Godfrey and Maliketh. Least favorite were the Fire Giant and that goddamn Draconic Tree Sentinel before Maliketh, which wasn't even a boss. I probably died to that bastard ten times before me and a summoned managed to kill him (I even died during this).

-Did George R. R. Martin have anything to do with this, really? Considering Elden Ring has the same basic plot of every From Soft Souls game, I don't see much of his work anywhere.

-Why can't From Soft figure out that if you're fighting a giant enemy, then you're really fighting the camera? Most games would have the camera pan out, enabling you to actually see what the titan you're attempting to slay is doing, thereby enabling you to dodge. It's funny how they add modern open-world conveniences like fast travel and a steed, but can't grasp the need for an improved camera.

-I've started another playthrough with a intelligence/strength build, but I'm not sure if I'll come back to it. Elden Ring is a fantastic first experience, but one-hundred hours is a long time to spend on a video game. Deadspace Remastered awaits (I never played the first one).

Screens below:

 

Letters to a Dungeon Master

 

Greetings, Dungeon Master. Let me begin by stating that I appreciate all that you do for your party. Your campaign has, for the most part, held my interest despite being riddled with cliches and stock-characters. I personally always get a kick out of your frequent fumbling for names. "Gump Stumpin" and "Beeph" will always illicit a chuckle. You are also very punctual. Now that I am finished buttering you up, it's time for some constructive criticism.

Firstly, I believe you could lessen your judgemental attitude regarding the sexual proclivities of the party. Dungeons and Dragons is, for many of us, our main interaction with the outside world, other than perhaps a rushed trip to the local convenience store while under cover to replenish our supply of Chicken in a Biscuit baked snack crackers. Some of us might like to get our rocks off in ways that would be deemed "unconventional" by lesser minds. The fact that my half-orc barbarian can't get an erection without being primed by a busty Kuo-toa fish maiden sucking on her flippers is an essential piece of character development, and I could do without another labored sigh or lengthy stare. Also I think it would be best if you do not look any of the party in the eyes ever, lest such a look be misconstrued as an aggressive gesture and set off my social anxiety.

Secondly, I believe it is acceptable to punish the characters of party members who no-show. Dungeons and Dragons is a life-long commitment, and it is unacceptable for so-called "real life" to get in the way. What is reality but an illusion, and who is to say what is real and what is not? I don't care if Lawrence has a wife and kids, his pretentious paladin is getting half a pound of raw crayfish shoved up his rectum to fester until the next session. Surprise, bitch! Your ass reeks of sticky fish-juice. Perhaps he'll learn his lesson and treat the party with the respect it deserves.

Thirdly, if the party wishes to spend a session murdering an entire town, the wishes of the party must be respected. Our characters are veritable forces of nature, single-handedly capable of slaughtering death knights and ancient dragons, and so the lives and social mores of pathetic peon npcs should be of no consequence to gods like ourselves. Really, Dungeon Master, let's not pretend like you had much of a narrative planned anyway. So what if Olfric the goblin king beheaded the mayor and took a dump in his neck stump for all of the town to see? Who are you to stifle a player's creativity? What you're doing is ruining a good time.

Any further criticisms will be sent to you without delay. Please process this information and improve your campaign ASAP.  

Elden Ring: Thoughts After 97 Hours

 

Just a man with a big sword and some flaming red hair.

I put Elden Ring in my game of the year list, but I didn't give it game of the year. After my initial sixty or so hours with the game, I burned out on it right around when I got to Mountaintops of the Giants. My build was pretty much settled by then; Faith/Dex/Arc with the Bloodhound's Fang or Uchigatana serving as my main weapon (although Rivers of Blood replaced the dependable Uchi) with a few lightning and flame incantations to help me out. Despite breezing through most of the game to that point due to my heavy reliance on my Mimic Tear, Mountaintops the of Giants represented the first real jump in difficulty since Caelid. All of the sudden, yetis and giant crows were taking huge chucks out of my health, and the Fire Giant had a health bar the size of Texas, and there was nowhere left to go. That is, until I checked IGN's guide and found out that I'd skipped the Deeproot Depths and Subterranean Shunning Grounds, as well as a couple bosses. Playing a From Soft game is a community experience, in that I actively enjoy looking up secret areas and ideal weapons. These games are too obscure in their references; most open world games would have a quest book and a marker for, say, Ranni's quest, but not Elden Ring. You gotta be paying attention, and if you haven't been, at least somebody else was. And so my love of the game was rekindled after leveling up and finally putting down the old Fire Giant. On to Crumbling Farum Azula, Consecrated Snowfields and the rest of the end game. But goddamn, is this shit getting hard. Not hard like a challenging boss; hard like you don't have room to breath due to the constant horde of challenging enemies thrown at you. Miquella's Haligtree is full of Leonine Misbegottens and giant mages that'll summon a glowing blue hammer to smash your face in. And now, so close to the end, I'm starting to get burned out. To Elden Ring's credit, I've put nearly one-hundred hours in, and I think I'll see it to the end, which will probably take another four or six. Only a select number of titles have breached the one-hundred hour mark: Skyrim; the Witcher 2 and 3; Dark Souls; and Civilization 5. Elden Ring is a great game, a fantastic experience that's more open and accessible than any souls game before it. However, that Nintendo Hard shit wears on you after a while. In Dark Souls, the first Capra Demon boss fight was difficult because you get jumped in a tiny room by a giant monster wielding two greatswords and two dogs to stunlock you. The fight is hard because the player is unfairly disadvantaged. I don't think Elden Ring's endgame is Nintendo Hard, but it borders on the verge of being so. A thirty-seven year old gamer with limited free-time like myself is hard pressed to persevere. Let's hope there are plenty of summons to vanquish the Elden Beast, eh? 

Some random screens because this is a beautiful game:

New Music: Dark Night

 A slow blues burner that I wrote last month. I think I was going for a Tom Waits vibe, maybe mixed with a little Tin Pan Alley, although I don't think the latter came through. I got a mini-wah pedal for Christmas, so that's all over this track. I love my telecaster, but that 60 cycle hum can be hard to bear. Don't think it takes away from this track, however.

Writer's Block: The Dead God

 

The Dead God

Amidst a landscape of billowing dust and unrelenting haze, the dead god lay like a mountain, its vast bulk rising out of the dirt to precipitous heights, birds encircling the crest of its brow, which was furrowed in death, forming an expression of perpetual confusion. How could a god die? Gods were eternal; they lasted while the world wore away to slivers of bone and fossilized forests. Still, it was the age of apostasy. He walked roads that were nothing but faint outlines in the dirt, and every glimpse of a structure revealed crumbling stones that were more imagination than outline. Sometimes he would stop and bend down to investigate something in the rubble but the object would always be formless, a heap of unidentifiable material, brown or tan, baked by the merciless rays of the sun. He looked, though, as he would always look. There were small ways of keeping faith.

The god seemed to last in his perspective forever, and it wasn’t until he crossed the event horizon that the body began to grow in magnitude exponentially, as though it were moving toward him rather than he trekking toward it. As the distance closed, he kept stopping and staring, straining his eyes, looking for any tremor or tell that the mountain slumbered instead of rotted. But then the smell hit him, a profound reek, and he had to cover his face and blink his watering eyes. What life that remained in this place were dissembling the corpse, working the copious amount of flesh and sinew into their baser elements. Leathery skin hung in great straps; flies and beetles nested in the dried flesh while birds had eaten out its eyes and roosted in the hollow sockets of its orbits. Over the many weeks it had taken to cross the great desert he had seen almost nothing that walked under its own power; a tiny lizard under a stone; a fly landing on his perspiring brow. There was more life writhing through the dead god than in all of the desolate waste, and it horrified him to bear witness to it, made his empty stomach clench and heave at the grotesqueness squirming before his eyes. Are we all parasites he uttered, and his voice stirred the flesh, made it tremble until a cavity opened and two great doors peeled back to release several crested things that stood in the shadow of the god as he retreated to the brightness of the sunlight. They had long beaks and bone-like protrusions jutting from their skulls, and their bodies were long-limbed and diminutive, stunted torsos meant for climbing and scampering. Their lengthy fingers ended in talons that gleamed in the dark shadows, and though he could see no eyes in their heads, he could feel their gaze as they waited for a legible sign. From the sheathe at his hip he removed his sword, and the light glittered on the metal blade, and the creatures, eyeless or not, read his intentions and retreated back into the depths from which they came. Monsters from Rian’s fantasies. His brother had enjoyed tales from foreign lands, hearsay and merchants’ rumors. Yet he lingered still in the castle, locked away in his sequester, shunning the light and the heat and the decay festering about him. He hadn’t wanted to leave, had seen no reason for it. It is safe and cool here. There is water and servants and food of a sort. I hear the echo of conversation and that is enough. Nothing that you seek is true. Our parents have told you lies.

A shimmering caught his eye. One of the great appendages lay outstretched, palm turned upward, the soft meat of the hand gone now, leaving almost nothing but bone, but there was a shard jutting from a cuticle, blade-like, gleaming. A three-foot long splinter of fingernail so sharp that it cut the thick leather of his glove as he reached for it. Only a sudden shadow thrown across the desert before him warned of the beast leaping for his back. With a tremendous heave he pulled the shard loose and swung it in one motion, letting its momentum turn his body like a gyroscope. A head fell free of a body, its crested skull landing softly in the sand. He bent down and picked it up, examining the black blood dripping like oil from its neck. There were no eyes, only taut skin, and the beak had tiny teeth like a saw-blade. He didn’t think the others would bother him now, and why this one had decided to pursue fresh meat instead of feasting on divine flesh perplexed. The lips of the cavity trembled and glistened, quivering with subsurface activity. He would not be going through there, even if there weren’t monsters inhabiting the body.

He stepped onto the hand and began to climb the god’s forearm, using the shattered blade of his sword as a pick, the shard of fingernail carefully wrapped in cloth and tied to his back. The desert sun lowered, sending shadows across the waste, and it was dark by the time he reached the summit of the god’s shoulder. There, on its anterior deltoid, he made camp.

Pointless Venture's Best Games of the Year

 

Let's start this off with a list of titles played (an asterisk denotes a title not played to completion):

God of War

Cyberpunk 2077

Guardians of the Galaxy

Elden Ring*

Halo 5

Trek to Yomi*

Assassin's Creed Odyssey*

The Outer Wilds*

Quake 2 RTX

Quake

Portal RTX

Spider-man Remastered

Metal Hellsinger

Vermintide 2

Warhammer:Darktide

Plague Tail:Requiem

Tunic*

So this was a year of Gamepass. There were a couple more titles that I played such as Scorn and Pentiment that I haven't played enough of to really count, but such is the beauty of Gamepass--you can try before you commit. Guardians of the Galaxy, Halo 5, Metal Hellsinger, Plague Tail:Requiem, and Darktide justified the fifteen bucks a month I spent on Gamepass Ultimate. It's a great deal even at that price.

Best Singleplayer Game of the Year: God of War

God of War is a 2018 release, but it came out in January 2022 for PC. Even after four years, it's a stunning title that's probably the penultimate Dad Game. Its story is compelling, its world is beautiful, and its combat loop is great. My only complaints are a lack of enemy variety in the late game, and a slow mid-game section. Hopefully Ragnarok comes to PC in less than four years.

Best Multiplayer Game: Warhammer:Darktide

Darktide could use more maps and perhaps the promised crafting system, but it's a fun Left 4 Dead style romp through the Warhammer universe, featuring excellent graphics and meaty kinaesthetics that make heretic-slaying a good time.

Best game I didn't finish: Elden Ring

I've spent 74 hours making my way through Elden Ring's dense open world. It's a deeper, better designed take on Dark Souls, but it's just too damn big. I'm in the Mountaintop of Giants, and the difficulty curve has taken a sharp increase upward, and something else always seizes my attention. There's oodles of lore in here, but not much of a story, and I find that I typically lose interest in RPGs that aren't focused on their story as much as their mechanics. Will Elden Ring be my next Divinity Original Sin 2, a great game that I just couldn't finish? We will see.

More Plague Tail: Requiem Screenshots

 

I will say that tears streamed down my checks at the end of Plague Tail: Requiem. I had problems with the game's bleakness and the contrived nature of some of its story, but I did relate to Amicia and her struggle to let go. Requiem is one of the prettiest games I've ever played, so I'm sharing screenshots of its ending. Spoilers, of course.

Weightlifting: Running the Hill

 

I googled Running the Hill and Kate Bush came up, hah.

So I burned out on Juggernaut AI after running it nearly the entire year. Despite recommending the program several times on Pointless Venture, I'm now doing my own thing again. The mental freedom to decide what to do in the gym was the impetus that I needed to keep weightlifting. Focusing on the powerlifts gets boring; I'm overhead pressing a lot more now, along with doing power cleans.

I made this routine up yesterday to avoid doing sets of eight or ten, which I loathe. I call it Running the Hill. Simply, you start with a light weight, do a rep, add weight, do a rep, rinse and repeat until you get to a near max and twenty reps, with no rest in between singles other than the time it takes to change plates. So this was my squat workout:

135, 155, 175, 185, 195, 205, 215, 225, 235, 245, 255, 265, 275, 285, 295, 305, 315, 320, 295, 300. 

Once I got to 320, I decided to take a little weigh off, since 320 felt pretty heavy, but I added weight again for my last set. After doing the initial run, you need to get a little more volume, and start on a hill that's not as high, but just as long. So I did 225 for five, 230 for five, 235 for five, and finally 240 for five, completing the workout. I'm sore as hell today, and I managed to do forty reps of squats. I think this little routine is good for the squat and bench, but might be a little too much for the deadlift. Maybe decreasing the hills to ten reps instead of twenty would be a manageable modification.

Plague Tail: Requiem Review

 

I had to make myself finish Plague Tail: Requiem. Usually, I would say that’s a damning indictment of a game’s quality; however, in this case, it’s because Requiem is emotionally draining. Nearly unrelenting trauma is inflicted on teenage Amicia and five-year-old Hugo de Rune as they traverse medieval France, searching for a cure to Hugo's supernatural affliction. Hugo suffers from the Prima Macula, a symbiotic illness that spawns and attracts hordes of plague rats, which often burst through the ground or walls in writhing heaps to consume any nearby humans alive. In addition to the rats, the de Rune family must contend with non-stop violence. From angry beekeepers to soldiers just following orders, nearly every adult male in 14th century France is willing to skewer a teenage girl and her little brother. Requiem's heavy bleakness reminds me of the work of Cormac McCarthy, who often fixates on the senseless violence of existence. Hugo and Amicia are convincing characters, who grow increasingly damaged from their exploits, from Amicia having panic attacks to Hugo eventually succumbing to his illness, which is sentient and hungry. Moments to breathe come fleetingly and perhaps not often enough. I felt bad for powering Amicia through all of her torture, to the point where I wondered whether or not I was complicit in it. Ultimately, I was unsatisfied with how Requiem concludes its story. Don't Hugo and Amicia deserve better than this? I asked. To quote Clint Eastwood, "Deservin' ain't got nothing to do with it." Sometimes, you have to let go and surrender to circumstances. Amicia refuses to do so and admirably fights to the bitter end, but by refusing to accept reality, she continues to put her brother and herself through more suffering than any people deserve. So while I didn't necessarily like Requiem's story, I appreciate its thematic elements while wishing it had just a little more compassion at its core.

Gameplay mostly consists of stealth-action, with neither the stealth nor the action being particularly smooth. There were a few sections that I had to replay several times, either due to the game swarming you with too many enemies or requiring more sneaking than I was able to manage. Amicia has a slingshot that she'll upgrade, but most enemies are armored, which necessitates sneaking, distraction, or the crossbow, which only has a few bolts and therefore must be sparingly used. Often, you'll have to manage huge hordes of rats as an environmental puzzle, utilizing torches, flame pots, tar, or some other feature to clear a path. The gameplay, therefore, is similar to a big-budget cinematic game, a la The Last of Us, with a bit more jank and probably a fraction of the budget. Still, Asobo studios does well, especially in crafting their authentic-appearing version of medieval France. This is a stunning title, one that will have you reaching for the screenshot key. Performance was decent on my high-end system, with a few frame drops experienced during wide vistas or rat swarms. Admire the screenshots below.

I recommend Plague Tail: Requiem with hesitation. It will get you invested in its characters, but you'll feel their pain, and whether the experience is worth it depends on your interpretation of their suffering. I can't help but feel as though it would've been a better game had the trauma been reined in substantially.