Report #30: April 2023

Making decent progress on the backlog by finishing up two games this month. Fallout 4 is obviously the big one, ninety hours played since I started it in June of last year. (Ninety hours, holy cow!) While it’s impressive in scope, with hundreds each of missions, locations, and NPCs, it ends up feeling a bit like a Potemkin village. As you go deeper into the game, missions start feeling more and more alike - travel, fight, reach objective, fight some more, return - with variations in locales and enemies. Conversations and player choices have very little long-term impact on the campaign, except which faction one chooses to align with toward the end. Fallout 4 pretends to be a role-playing game but is really more a plodding looter shooter. I got to the point where I was ready to finish the game, and instead of letting it play out normally, I short-circuited the story progression by unprovoked shooting an NPC in the face, jumping to the end game. (Sorry, unarmed scientist guy!) Maybe I’ll go back and replay the ending differently one day. I said maybe, don’t hold me to it.

Pirate aficionados all love Monkey Island 2, right? Wrong. It has all the ingredients that killed point & click as a genre: inane object hunting, repetitive traveling, stupid inventory puzzles, pointless dialog choices. I’m sure devs had a great time making this game, but if I smiled a single time while playing, I don’t remember it. Watch a season of Black Sails instead.

A little disappointing, perhaps, but we’re on to Cincinnati…

Beaten

• Fallout 4
  

  91.3 hours playtime

  33 of 84 achievements

• Monkey Island 2: Special Edition
  

  10.2 hours playtime

  10 of 12 achievements

Also Played

• Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition
  

  10.0 hours playtime

  4 of 129 achievements

• GOD EATER RESURRECTION
  

  5.0 hours playtime

  1 of 33 achievements

Added (Don’t look at me like that, it was free)

• Battlestar Galactica Deadlock
  

  0 hours playtime

  0 of 26 achievements