So remember when I was ultra salty about working for a stupid company that had lame media policies? Well I don't work there anymore so now a few months late, here's 2018 in Review. I've cleverly published this in the past! So, it should show up in the right place.
I didn't take notes when I was playing so I'm writing this all after the fact from my very sketch memory, I wouldn't probably vouch for the order or details of things, but the general feeling should be more or less correct. I mean, 2018 wasn't that long ago now was it? And if you missed my way-after-the-fact recap of 2017, it can be found
here.
Fallout 4 (2015): ****, ***** with mods
I started playing Fallout 4 right after finishing New Vegas. I hadn't finished it by the end of the year but I did put a
bunch of hours into it. As of the time of this writing (April 2019) I'm nearing the end of it finally so I can write more cogently about it than some of the other games listed here but I'ma save that for the next installment in this
award winning series.
Battletech (2018): *****
Battletech was a big part of my childhood, at least, the parts of my childhood I remember. This may be where I picked up some of my design leanings and my love of construction systems. And my love of tactical combat. And my love of big stompy mechs. So when I found out that they were kickstarting a modern version of the game in 2015, I gave them my goddamn money. Then I forgot about it until the game was released.
I remember this as the best game I played in 2018, granted, I didn't play many. I played through it twice, the second time hacking the game with my own mods because I could. I loved the voice acting and I loved the main plot. I'm a sucker for blowing up combat robots and then breaking them down for salvage as a scrappy mercenary which probably comes from Battletech in the 90s. I suppose that makes this a homecoming of sorts. Lots of the game just plan felt
right. I've been trying to recapture that feeling for a while and for a little while in 2018 I found it.
There are a couple things I
didn't like but I suppose that's not surprising. It was far too easy to knock mechs down. The One True Strategy(TM) was to knock the bads down with LRMs, then hammer them in the center torso until they blew up. I probably wouldn't have leaned on that if the odds weren't so often 2:1 or 3:1 which doesn't really seem all that sporting. There's also pilot skill trees that prevent the same from happening to you which, when terribly outnumbered, becomes not just really good, but required. They've fixed some of these since and have released an expansion. I'm pretty sure we'll see more of this game later in this series, 2019 if I had to guess.
Darkest Dungeon (2016): **
Darkest Dungeon has two of the things I care about, particularly strategy and style, but I didn't like it. It was depressing to play as the characters inevitably spiral into madness or are killed to death by whatever bads they might encounter. The game is too hard and doesn't go out of its way to explain itself. Despite the fact that I liked the art and ideas in the game, it didn't keep my attention and I quickly got to the point of thinking "I know what it'll take to get good at this game and I don't think the payoff is worth it." If you're a regular reader here, you know how rare this is. I guess I wanted a game where even in a dark and gritty world there could be some heroism but I don't think this is that game.
Stellaris (2016): ***
I don't remember why I bought Stellaris but it probably involves a sale of some kind. I love 4x games and I thought this would be a fun one. It is. Kind of. The first part of the game is very 4x. I liked that part a lot. The
rest of it, in fact,
the bulk of the game isn't this. It's some other kind of strategy game. One that I didn't really like.
The game is huge. I spent quite a while with it and probably only figured out half of it. I liked that you could customize your race and I really liked the modifiers that came with those modifiers and government type. I also liked the exploration and colonization part of it though I'm not really a fan of how slow and plodding it seemed. I also liked that you could build mega structures possibly from an expansion. I really
don't like the fact that you can only build one. Why? I just built a really big and expensive thing. You don't think we could build the second one much more easily? And this is just one example of the non-sequiturs I encountered.
At one point in one of my better playthroughs, one of my terrible neighbors, or rather one of my
neighbors since they were all terrible, decided to declare war. I was ready this time and had refitted my awesome killbuster fleet and sent it to where I expected the fighting to be. It wasn't a long war and I'd pushed all the way to their homeworld before realizing I couldn't bombard their planets. "So what?" I thought. "I've got most of their territory so it's all good." Except it wasn't. I didn't get any of their territory and my ships had all been moved. I learned later that there's some bullshit you have to do to have a real war and I hadn't done that. No spoils for me, just cost and war weariness. Yay. I understand that there are people out there that love these games, but I think I'll stick to my 4x, thanks.
Legend of Grimrock (2012): ***
Way back in the day I played a game called
Eye of the Beholder (and its sequel). It's a typical dungeon crawl-y game with discrete movement, all the loot you can't carry, and a lot of very deadly monsters. I recall giving up on playing it because I don't like puzzles and got super stuck in one place and went on to play something else.
Legend of Grimrock is pretty much that game updated for the 21st century. It's still a dungeon crawl-y game with mostly discrete movement, all the loot you can't carry, and a lot of very deadly monsters. I liked a lot about it including its presentation, its character building options and
especially the ability to import my own character portraits. What I didn't like was its puzzles. I got super stuck in one place and went on to do something else. I may get back to this one at a later date because like Darkest Dungeon, I liked a lot of it but didn't finish. The big learning from
thislast year is that I've got way too much stuff vying for my attention to spend a bunch of time being stuck on stuff.
Miniature Painting
This was less of a game and more of an implied obligation turning into somewhat of an obsession in 2018. I
thought that I completed my first miniatures in 2018 but I'd forgotten that I'd managed to paint a coupla Mekton figs way back in the 90s. I
did paint several dozen minis that look OK and started my sojourn into that field For Realz(TM) this time.
