During February I felt like I was being stretched out as there was a mix of real life stuff I had to help with and stuff I wanted/had to do. Before I knew it the month was over and I barely did any of the gazillion things I wanted to do.
Another side effect of it is because of all the stress I kinda ended up looking for refuge in video-games which turned out to be another reason for me not doing any of those other things I wanted to do.
Oh, well. Such is life I guess. I’d like to hope for this month to be better but I doubt the storm is over. In fact I think it barely started and this year will be one of personal challenges. Hopefully I am wrong about it.
Anyway, here is what I’ve been playing lately.
Hitman 2
When life gets like that for me I often find it hard even getting into the mood to play. So on a bit of a whim I decided to play a bit of Hitman 2, just to kill a bit of time, maybe even have some fun.
Well, I found out that, unlikely I previously thought, there were still two story missions I hadn’t completed yet. I decided then to tackle those and before I knew it I was hooked on Hitman 2 again!
I only did one of those though. Then I realized there were a bunch of useful stuff from the Hitman 1 campaigns I never unlocked in this game. Supposedly I could have imported my progress from the first game into Hitman 2 but I was never able to do that. Since I wanted all that stuff I decided to go do those earlier campaigns, clear them and unlock as much as I could.
Just to blaze through them I am using some guides from YouTube. This does bring the extra benefit of unlocking a bunch of challenges I could have never figured out on my own during my run with the first game. It even have me trying to unlock the Master difficult challenges, something I never bothered with before!
I also realized I never used distractions as much as I should even though it is the most useful strategy in the whole game!
At the moment of this writing I already finished all the Hitman 1 campaigns up to Marrakesh and I am currently working my way through Bangkok. For now I am ignoring the Escalation Contracts except for one I had to do to unlock a sniper rifle. Eventually I will get back to those as well as the Hitman 2 content. But for now I am just happy to wander through the Hitman’s levels, murdering people in crazy ways and watching how Agent 47 will disguise himself.
Perfect Gold
This is the game I was supposed to be playing during February instead of Hitman 2. But due to my mood I’ve barely played it.
Anyway, after playing a couple of visual novels that were full of horror, tragedy and death I decided it was time for something completely different. Plus since February was the month for Valentine’s Day in a lot of regions of the world it also felt fitting to play one that was about romance. And that is why I decided to bring this one out from the backlog.
Since I barely played it I don’t have much to say about this game yet. Only that it surprised me for having English voice acting. I thought it was from a western indie studio and like usual they wouldn’t have any voiced characters at all.
To be honest I didn’t like the voice acting much at first. Not because it is bad, quite the contrary, it is very professional. It is just that for some reason my brain associates visual novel = Japanese voice acting. If there was no voice acting that was fine too. Having something different than those options was something my brain just wasn’t accepting. But I think I am getting used to it now.
I will probably say something more about it next time I do one of those posts, if not earlier.
Blue Archive
It took far too long, mostly due to a mental barrier, but I finally managed to get past the fight in the main story that was I stuck on. I’ve been trying to do a couple chapters every day since then and I should soon be caught up.
I think of all the main stories so far, Volume 3, is the one that I am enjoying the most. I just like the theme of friendship found and fighting for what you believe to be right even when it all seems to be in vain. Yeah, it is pretty much anime tropes 101 but they do a good job of writing it. Plus I am a sucker for that kind of story.
It is even making me think twice about eventually stopping playing it but mobile games just take too much time, specially since all of them have some kind of daily thing going on. And between the events and story parts that are actually good, mobile games just feel like doing a laundry list. I’d honestly prefer to spend that time with other types of games.
Anyway, I am rambling, another event started yesterday but I haven’t done much on it yet. It does seem like it will be a fun introduction to a couple new characters though.
Fate Grand Order
The first event in February for FGO was the Roman Front. It was just like the previous Grail Front event except this time they didn’t even bother putting some cutscenes to justify it plus it was a lot easier too.
After that it was the usual FGO Valentine’s event. Of all the storylines of this event I’ve seen so far this is certainly my new favorite. It introduced the new servant, Amor, aka Caren. She is one of those characters that appear in a few different Fate works. Well, Caren that is, not Amor. But that is about what I know of her outside FGO.
In this game she is one of the most absurd and funny servants I’ve met. Just remembering the event makes me laugh. It was that good.
Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Soulbound – Shadows in the Mist
Our group is almost done with Book 2 of the Shadows in the Mist campaign. There are just some personal goals stuff we want to do then we’ll move on to Book 3.
Overall this book was so much better than the first book. But the players still went through it in completely unexpected ways because that is just what players do. Not that I am complaining, we all had fun with their shenanigans.
We did discover though that just doubling the Toughness of every enemy might not have been the best way to balance the game. Neither is making a bunch of Warrior type enemies attack the same player character and using just one roll for all of them to save time.
Ironically I thought they would have that kind of trouble with one of the big monster fights in the adventure but they were able to overcome those without as much difficulty.
On the other hand it might just have been a problem of the circumstances or those particular enemies. Further testing will be needed.
For now I should worry about doing more battlemaps as I think the next book will be another annoying one for those. This time though I think I will test out Dungeon Alchemist to see if it helps me save some time and see how the players like it.