As I still have a couple of days of Premium, I decided to keep at it. A couple of hours in, you finally get some weapon variety. Not just sword and shield, but two handed swords as well.
There are no experience levels, but instead every skill has a level. Swing a claymore, and you will raise both “sword” and “claymores”. Swing it enough times, and you’ll be able to use claymore of the next tier.
Levels also affect which skills you get. Every piece of equipment has multiple skills to pick from. The choice is mostly between single-target and AoE.
Group dungeons are fun. Or at least they are fine. But unlike Diablo Immortal, there’s no built-in mechanism where you queue to a dungeon. You just need to descend into a dungeon and hope other people will come with you.
Categories
Rivington American Barleywine
Beautiful bottle, with a was seal. Tastes like triple IPA, but without the gas. Nice, as I like when a beer doesn’t taste like a beer anymore, but the aftertaste is bitter, and I probably wouldn’t buy it again.
Categories
Albion Online
I can see why many praise that game. The chunky low-poly visuals are reminiscent of Torchlight 2. Combat is quite solid, with enemies telegraphing their attacks and cycling through skills. The other aspects don’t inspire me us much, though. All equipment seems to be just generic “Novice Sword”, “Journeyman Sword”, etc. And the whole gathering/refining/crafting loop seems tiresome.
Right of the bat you get access to some pretty powerful weapons. One of the makeshift weapons is a crossbow shooting harpoons. And then there’s the in-game shop, and maybe because the game is pretty old they were giving away in-game currency at some point, but I had enough to get a bullpup sniper rifle as well.
In addition, you have a superpower in a form of a improvised backpack. The default is kind of a mortar attack, but there’s also poison and EMP AoE variants.
With all this crazy weaponry and constant references to superhero comics, it would be interesting if they try to turn this into a “Vanishing of Ethan Carter” kind of story, where everything is just imagination of the dictator’s son. Speaking of which, no matter which gender you choose at the start of the game, everyone still calls you Dani (Daniel/Daniella), which is a smart trick, instead of everyone “swallowing” the protagonist name like in some other games. And condiering how androgynous this “son” looks, it might be he’s not son at all… But we’ll see.
Categories
Kingdom Come Deliverance
Completed Kingdom Come Deliverance.
Quite unexpectedly. Which is a funny thing to say about a game you spent 80 hours on. But the thing is, one of the very first quests you get is to recover your father’s sword and avenge the dead of your parents. And turns out, you never get to complete this quest. This is quite brilliant.
So, in the end, Istvan, the evil henchman of the Hungarian king, is allowed to go free, and you end up traveling with Hans Capon, the arrogant “prince”, to convince the lords to ally with king Wenceslav.
There’s still plenty of bonus content I didn’t complete: the village that you can rebuild, and helping a band of mercenaries, and a whole lot of other stuff. But I think I had enough of that for now.
Categories
Kingdom Come Deliverance
As by the end of the game most enemies become heavily armored, in a historically-accurate manner simple blunt weapons become much more effective than fancy expensive swords. Every battle I feel like Henry IV from “The King” played by Chalamet, wielding that punny hammer with mostly anguish.
On the main quest, you need to enlist kind of a “mad scientist” to build a trebuchet for the siege. And he tells you that a trader that arrived in town recently is there to assassinate him, because he had a row with Hungarian king. You can confront the trader, and he will deny everything. At night, though, he tries to pick the lock. You can confront him again, and he’ll provide a plausible excuse. I thought that’s the end of it. Imagine my surprise when he suddenly did appear in the camp and assassinated the engineer in front of my eyes.
Johanka’s quest line makes you take a pilligrimage by walking across the map wearing a robe, and ends with a heretic trial. I didn’t get the best ending, but by that point, I was pretty tired with the whole affair, honestly.
Categories
Edradour 12 Year Old Cask Strength
This whiskey literally made me laught out loud, as it doesn’t even taste like a whiskey anymore. It’s like they got the oloroso sherry casks, and decided to squeeze every bit out of them. It’s like drinking madeira, if madeira came at almost 60%. Probably sweetest whiskey I ever had. It’s delicious. Numbs the tongue, warms the mouth. Buying a bottle before trying is always a risk, but this time, I was spot-on.
Categories
GlenAllachie 12 Years Old
Another one of 50ml tasters I bought separately, Glenallachie 12. It’s a surprising one. Very smooth for a 12 years old Speyside. Sweet, but more into apple crumble sweet. A bit of numbness on the tongue, no warmth in the throat, but nice warmth in the belly.
For 55GBP, it’s a great find.
The author is all over the place, but it is still interesting video to watch. I didn’t know that in the 80’s BBC was powerful enough to tender its own line of PCs, and then force UK government to finance half of their price.
Also it’s fascinating how they had mixed resolution: part of the screen was “high-res”, but black-and-white, whie the lower part of the screen had 8 colors, but was rendered in lower resolution.
Categories
Painting Skaven
I bought myself an Artis Opus S 00 brush. Surprisingly, it’s better than Rafael. Surprisingly, because it cost the same, more or less, and I thought that Rafael are more “professional”. But it holds the tip slightly better out of the box.
Now I’m experimenting with contrast paints. It’s like painting with acrylic versus watercolors (not that I painted with any in the past 30 years). One one hand, it’s kind of amazing how the model “paints itself”. As the contrast paint dries, it sets into recesses creating natuaral shading. But if you skrew up, it’s harder to fix. You can’t just put another color on top of it anymore.
I think I’ll end up mixing both techniques. As even now I paint metal parts still with metalic paints.
Categories
Netgear Nighthawk AC1900
Netgear Nighthawk D7000 is such a cool piece of hardware, I’m finding trouble simply throwing it away. I bought it on my first business trip to the UK, some 9 years ago.
Although I can understand why in modern times nobody would buy it: DSL is a dead technology by now, and it is not WiFi 6.
Categories
Tacticus
Unlocked Yazaghor, from grinding the campaign battle. Needed for Saim Han Mirror campaign.
Unlocked Sy-Gex, also known as “gay sex” from it’s event. The easiest event unlock yet.
Unlocked Toth, again from grinding the campaign, second character for Saim Han Mirror.
Unlocked Gulgortz on the same day from Guild Raids. This is actually big, because this finally opens the Ork Octarius campaign.
Unlocks have obviously slowing down, as the game wants you to pay 20GBP for a single character. But maybe Ork campaign will help out a little, as you should get 10 scrolls from each campaign.
Categories
Bunnahabhain 12 Years Old
I thought I had Bunnahabhain 12 Years Old, but turns out, it was their Toiteach A Dha, which is peated. While regular Bunnahabhain 12 is just down my lane. It’s very sweet, Aberlour levels if not more, and leaves a nice numbness on the tongue, although no warmth.
This is all thanks to the fact that they release it in 50ml bottles. After great success with Tamdhu tasters and now this, I wish more distilleries would do the same.
Categories
Microhistory Sharp Concepts beer
Another beer I brought from Zurich, this one brewed in Latvia, not a country you associate with beer usually, but then some of the best beers I had were from Norway.
It’s a “German dobblebock”, but at 15%, it’s more of a “qudruperbock” (term that I just invented). Deep amber and opaque, it reminds of classic Gulden Draak. But I’m not sure that extra 5% alcohol adds anything in terms of taste.
Categories
AeroPress Flow Control Filter Cap
After the trip to Texas, where AeroPress proved very useful, I decided that I want to try using a metal filter instead of disposable paper filters, despite the fact that those were widely available. Metal filter works, but the coffee drips even worse than with the paper filters. So the next step was to replace the default filter cap with a pressurized one.
Coffee machines use pressurized baskets to mitigate effect from coffee that was ground long time ago. Here, the idea is that a rubber gasket in the centre prevents coffee from dripping, until you start pressing it.
I’m yet to see the promised crema even with freshly ground coffee, byt at least I don’t end up with hands soaked in hot coffee, which is still a good thing.
Categories
Kingdom Come Deliverance
Someone really wanted an episode where you have to infiltrate a monastery, it seems. The problem is, this kills the pacing of the game. You just led an assault on Cuman camp and chased counterfeiters. Now you have to smuggle wine and wake up in time for morning prayer. Having godly lockpicking and speech skills by that point in the game definitely helps, though.
One of the chores in the monastery is copying books, and it demonstrates well how monks were able to produce those stupid mistakes. Good luck doing better:
Another extremely helpful skill in this game is the “Headcracker” perk. A change to one-hit-kill an opponent by simply aiming to the head is huge. Saved my life many times, for example, when the three bandings still turned up on me despite me spending a week in monastery doing those stupid quests.
At this point you discover that when Sir Radzig called you “my boy”, he didn’t mean it figuratively… And all the royalty knew about it.
After that point, some quests will auto-fail, but guess you can’t get the all đ¤ˇââď¸
Categories
Penguin S01
I didn’t watch The Batman with Pattinson. Not a fan of DC or the Batman universe. But after The North Water, I decided to see Colin Farrell play another villainâand I’m glad I did.
The only connection to Batman is some names: Gotham, Arkham, Oswald Cobblepot. Batman himself is literally mentioned twice: at the very start of the first episode and at the very end of the last one. Everything else is a crime drama.
I almost want to say they pulled a bait-and-switch, like Mad Max: Fury Road, which wasnât really about Mad Max but about Furiosa. But they didnât. Itâs just that Sofia Falcone is very fleshed out here. But so is Penguin. They toe a fine line, without making it a story about a “Girl-Boss” who was told all her life what to do, betrayed by those Evil White Men, and now she will crush them⌠No, itâs not that kind of story.
I also almost want to say they just repeated what Joker didâcreating an ultra-realistic villain attached to his mother. But thatâs incorrect too. Phoenixâs Joker wasnât a villain at all; he was an anti-villain, in the way there are anti-heroes. While Farrellâs Penguin is a full-fledged villain.
The main theme for me in Penguin is the theme of lies. Cobblepot is an absolute liar, as demonstrated in the very first episode when he’s tortured by Sofia, and again in the very last, where she tortures him once more. He never tells the truth, never admits itâhe always doubles down. Thereâs a lot of defiance of expectations throughout. And itâs not just Penguin; his mother plays into this as well. What actually convinced me to keep watching was Deirdre OâConnell in the first episodeâthat switch between a somewhat lost old woman with dementia and a vicious, megalomaniacal force.
And going back to liesâthe biggest lie we tell ourselves is probably that what we do is to make our parents proud.
Visually, it’s so stunning I can hardly believe itâs a TV series. They did borrow a bit from Fallout, with ultraviolence set to jazz songs, but they have their own style too. Probably the scene that impressed me the most was the âvote of confidenceâ using cheap beer cans. But really, there was so much to unpack. Like the mundainess of Penguin’s violence.
All I can say isâmy faith in TV series has returned. For now.
It feels like people understand less and less what made Far Cry tick. Far Cry 3 had immense sense of presence. How cutscenes worked from first-person, how characters followed you with their eyes. By Far Cry 6, it’s all gone. Now your missions are presented on this sterile backdrop.
I haven’t played New Dawn much, I don’t like when I shoot someone in the head and they don’t die. But the makeshift weapon aesthetic is straight from there. Weapons are the only part Ubisoft still didn’t manage to ruin.
What they got right is, for example, that you don’t put a scope on a LMG. But you can put a laser pointer. And that the weapons you get from caches are unique and useful. In really disappointed me in Far Cry 3, when you climb some lighthouse and find absolutely nothing of value.
You also have a pet crocodile now. It’s alright. Don’t remember if Far Cry 5 had pets, and don’t care much for them. Same goes for horses, which aren’t stopped by spinkes at checkpoints.
My trouble is, that the game becomes more and more Just Cause. Now you can climb everywhere with a grappling hook, fall from anywhere with a parachute, steal an ancient Soviet tank by yourself, firing and driving it at the same time.
You pick a phone, and a car is delivered to you anywhere. Everything is so effortless, it’s not fun anymore.
As I wrote at least once already, Saturn version of Virtua Figher 2 was inferior to the arcade original. And that’s the version that was ported to PS2 as part of Sega Ages Collection series.
But from this video I discovered that PS3 and Xbox360 actually had a proper arcade version. I don’t own Xbox360 anymore, but still have PS3, so I gave it a try. And they aren’t wrong. It is indeed the arcade version, with bridges in Shun’s stage and all that.
Interestingly, PC version, which was the first I played, is a mix of the stages from the Saturn version and models from the arcade version. So I was right to remember that PC version somehow looked better.
The main benefit of that version is that there’s a movelist in the pause menu.
Categories
Schorschbrau Schorschbock beer
I never thought I’d write it about a German beer, but this is a mindblowing beer. It doesn’t look like a beer, and doesn’t taste like a beer, though. Completely opaque, like a coffee with a bit of milk in it, and with a heavy sediment. I rarely “taste” anything in beere, unless it’s something like a literal chocolate stout, but here, I can taste chocolate, coffee, and raisins. It’s closer to Madeira at that point than to a beer.
Also the bottle is something else, with the swing-top cap and wax. Theoretically, it could mean you could trink this beer in two seatings, and at 16% it even makes some sense.