We are at the half way point for the 2026 season. It is all down hill from here… though some say it has been down hill since the 90s. But what can you do about it? Having reached the turn-over point, we were looking to have two titles show up this week. But first, where […]
It is Saturday, but I wanted to get the Steam Summer Sale post out yesterday and didn’t really have another post queued up for today… well, I did actually, but I’ll save it for another time. Besides, I’ve done Friday bullet points on Saturday before. Some stories from the wild that caught my eye. Grand […]
The Steam Summer Sale started yesterday and will run through until the morning of July 9th. This post is a bit late compared to previous years. There was a time when I was in a rush to post about it soon after it started. There was a time when knowing about the sale right away […]
One aspect of playing Stardew Valley with our daughter is that it is not just me seeing things for the first time in the game. We were trying to figure out when I bought her a copy of the game, because much of her experience appears to pre-date the current 1.6.x release which added some […]
Back to Forza Horizon 6, which I will admit I have not played much of recently due to the fact, as noted back on previously, that I seem to be playing a lot more games than usual. There is only so much time in the day to play and/or write. There is also the issue […]
The ValveBox or the GabeCube or whatever people have been calling it up to this point… though I think we’ve known the real name for a while now… has arrived. And by “arrived” I mean you can now queue up to be on the randomized-order list of people who will get to buy one whenever […]
A week or so back I put up a Friday Bullet Points post where I mentioned that it sure looked like layoffs were coming over at the XBox Games division. I mean, when Asha Sharma, the new head of XBox Games, wouldn’t commit to the $69 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition being a good thing… that […]
Welcome to the week twenty-five round up, here on the summer solstice and what is “Father’s Day” in the US, which has only really been an “official” thing here since 1972, so I am old enough to remember the before times when pops didn’t get a freaking day. But, also, did he really need a […]
I tend to believe that, among other things, Steam and its regular pattern of seasonal sales has driven others to follow their lead. Some, like Paradox, have direct sales that coincide with the Steam sales, where you get the same price at from them or Steam, but if you buy direct they don’t have to […]
When I bought the Switch 2 just about two weeks back my immediate goals were pretty clear; I wanted to be able to read text in Stardew Valley which, for a few reasons, was not working out for me on the Switch Lite. (small screen, low contrast, poor font choice) And, mission accomplished! That was […]
I will admit here, up front, that when my daughter suggested playing Stardew Valley together my inner monologue was less enthusiastic than I was in my outward expression. I have owned the game since I bought it during the Steam Winter Sale of 2016, but haven’t played it all that much. This is largely because […]
As previously noted, I have given up covering the the monthly economic report, mostly because it is a job to do it and it seems to garner very little interest. Even I don’t find it all that interesting when I go back and look at them for month in review posts. But every once in […]
I mentioned last time around that I dove into The Swarm expedition after letting things cool down for a week. First I used my main save, then when that was… complicated… I turned off multiplayer and started a new save for just the expedition. That ended up not being the huge difference I thought it […]
I have been playing Windrose with Potshot this month, but I haven’t been blogging about it that much for a few reasons. First, while it is my top title for time played so far this June, I am kind of playing at least five titles in rotation and my bandwidth for playing and blogging is […]
We rolled into week twenty-four once again expecting only a single title to release, but also waiting on the back half of the news from Summer Game Fest and the ship dates that were announced with it. But first a review of where we left off last time around. With that set… not much happened. […]
Our daughter was home for the month of May, a stop over in her transition from Portland, where she got her undergraduate degree, and San Diego, where she was headed for her masters. So we had a month with her around the house with her, during which she wanted to setup a game we could […]
We have arrived at Friday once again and, as often happens, we’re here at the end of the week and I have a few items that I don’t feel warrant a full blog post… but that I still want to mention. So we have another Friday bullet points post. EverQuest Legends Pre-Orders Arrive Next Week […]
Hello Games gave us The Swarm update at the end of last month, which was largely centered around Expedition 22: The Swarm. I was a bit dubious of this two month long expedition as it intended to require players to work together in “huge battles” as the motherships of the Hive of Glass will be vigorously […]
Back at the start of the month we got the news that LOTRO was going to have something of a price increase when it came to some of their subscription plans. SSG was really easing their way into the whole thing, but it still caused a few people to lose their minds. I covered this with […]
The Cradle of War expansion, the first of a three part cycle of expansions focused on faction warfare, arrived in EVE Online earlier today. The name of the expansion gives you CCP’s plan, They want to create a direct path to guide new players from character creation directly into low sec PvP and the war […]
The time has come at last. Valheim, which has been hanging around in early access for the last five years… my first post about playing the game was in February 2021… as the small dev team built out their vision for the game… will finally hit 1.0 this coming September. The announcement out this past […]
I expected week twenty-three to be fairly quiet. After a couple weeks with multiple titles launching, there was only one game queued up to launch. And then I found out it was Summer Games Fest this past week as well, and with that came a bunch of launch dates. So the end of the post […]
The hype and speculation was real. Guild Wars 3, teased back in early 2024 at an NCsoft shareholders meeting, was announced yesterday at the Summer Game Fest. Now people will just have to wait for it to show up. With a beta target in late 2027 it feels like we are probably a good two […]
Starting off in Forza can run you through a bit of a change up. When you first start the game everything is pretty much on rails. You have to follow a set path, run through a bit of intro, do a couple of specific event. For about 20-30 minutes there is one path forward. It […]
SOON! -Stars Reach Early Access Announcement Yesterday I got notified over a variety of channels that Stars Reach was going to land in early access on Steam “SOON!” My gut reaction… and the general vibe from responses I have seen… has been some concern as to whether or not it is ready for this level […]
Capsuleer Day XXIII: Warpath has concluded. Quartermaster Traders will remain in space for an additional week, until June 9. -June 2 patch notes update The event is over. Another Capsuleer Day has passed. We have a few more days to turn in our Warpath Operational Intel tokens for the rewards available. I picked up one […]
Windrose has been on our list of potential future destinations since it landed in early access back in April. I’ve also watched Tipa and Team Spode work their way through it. They’re already done. I was expecting we would get to it at some point after our return to retail WoW started to get stale… […]
We got a bit of a surprise announcement from SSG last week about LOTRO getting an increase in some of the available subscription options. The base monthly price will still be $15 a month, but there will be less of a discount for multi month plans. Here is the price increase in US dollars. Old […]
The Site We’ve reached the time of year when I turn off ads on the site because the revenue potential falls off a cliff sometime in March or April usually. So no ads on the site until we approach the holiday season. That said, I do recommend any active viewer of the site to use […]
We arrived at week twenty-two expecting two possibly big titles to launch, in addition to watching for one of last week’s titles to finally get enough reviews for a score. Also, this post is going out on Saturday night rather than Sunday morning because Sunday is the last day of the month, so there is […]
The first of the TWO special servers slated for EverQuest this year launched this week. Named Frostreaver after… something I am sure… there is too much Norrath lore for me to keep track of… it is the server idea that they pulled together after polling the user base earlier this year. (Many related links at […]
We continue our roll on towards to the No Man’s Sky 10th anniversary this coming August with a new update; The Swarm. The Swarm introduces a new set of foes for players to grapple with. Confront a new threat to the universe in update 6.4, The Swarm. The Traveller soul is fragmented, and something terrible […]
In the final week, starting 26 May, the reward track will extend, with some unmissable surprises. -CCP/Fenris, Capsuleer Day XXIII: Warpath is Here post The last week of the Capsuleer Day XXIII event has arrived and, as you can see from the quote above, CCP promised us some “unmissable surprises” for this, the final stretch […]
I got in some more time with Forza Horizon 6 over the weekend, some of it involving me seeking out the best car for me For a car racing game that is a key. I need something that matches my skills… or, more accurately, my lack of skills. In FH6 there are a lot of […]
Calmly sleeps the youthful soldier, Life's rough march with him is o-er. He has crossed the deep, dark river, Crossed it to return no more. He has fought the last great battle, With that unrelenting foe, From whose grasp there's no receding, To whose bidding all must go. That though in that fierce encounter, No […]
A big week again for the TAGN FCL league as we had two highly anticipated titles launch. But first we need to see where we left off in order to evaluate where we ended up, so the scores from last time. Those scores were cut off a bit early last week, before I had to […]
Forza Horizon 6 landed this week, though if you purchased the super deluxe premium version you could have spent last weekend playing as you got a couple days of head start. But since I was gone last weekend there was no need for me to start early, so I bought in with the base edition […]
Welcome to Friday, where I will once again be indulging the bullet point format, this time with a focus on Middle-earth. Amazon’s LOTR MMO is STILL DEAD WCCF Tech – Amazon has a Lord of the Rings Game, It’s Just Not an MMO Games Industry.biz – Amazon reportedly cancels Lord of the Rings MMO Eurogamer […]
EVE Fanfest was held this past weekend on a chilly and wet volcanic island in the middle of the North Atlantic. Meanwhile, I was on a tropical volcanic island in the middle of the Pacific attending a college graduation, so I had to catch up after the fact once I got home. (That also means […]
I predicted back in January that EverQuest II would give the whole special server thing a miss this year, in part because there just isn’t that big of an audience for the game. It never got close to the level of saturation in the market that EverQuest achieved at its peak… or even the level […]
As has become the pattern of this series of Valheim posts, we’re going straight to a boss fight. I had setup for the fight in the previous post, so now it was time to go fight Yagluth. First things first though. I had to make sure everything was ready. I got Frostner off of the […]
Time flies when you’re having fun… or when CCP keeps stuffing you full of skill points. Omegas get 15K from the New Eden Store every week, there are the AIR daily goals that will get you 300K every month easily enough, the login rewards, the event rewards… I swear, if you told 2007 me that […]
This will be an abbreviated weekly update as we’re away for the weekend, so I will have to cut things off early, before the bids are resolved and probably before some final score updates for the week. But I will try to keep to the usual format, so we’ll kick off with the scores from […]
NetHack, which will hit the 40 year mark next year if you adhere strictly to its origin, or past 40 years if you mark from the start Hack, from which it was forked, which in turn was a rework of Rogue, the origin of the term “Rogue-like”) and started off in the tradition of the […]
One of the updates that came with the Capsuleer Day XXIII: Warpath event has been an empire conflict around Jita, with there being trouble at the jump gates leading into New Eden’s trading hub. There was a lore post about this earlier this week, which led with this: CONCORD’s new oversight of Jita is the […]
During the final timer they were much more prepared to shoot bombers and during the timer Shines DMed me and said that the BR showed they had already killed 800 of our bombers and I responded “Shines, I have 8000 bombers” and I believe his reply was the Ace Ventura allllrightythen.gif. -Asher Elias, Victory in […]
Today is the last day you can start doing the Capsuleer Day XXIII login rewards portion of the event if you want to collect the big 325K skill point award at day 22. The direct quote from their post: 11 May is the last day to begin logging in and still claim the big Skill […]
My goal here is to put Bhagpuss in as many FCL headlines as possible as I have noticed Google favors my site when I do, and when you search on him now these posts come up on the first page of results. But messing with Google might just be my kink. Anyway, we had a […]
I may have made my final road trip to Portland. At the end of last month it slipped into the distance in my rear view mirror, likely to never be viewed again. Not because there is anything wrong with Portland. It is an interesting city that reminds me a bit of pre-gentrification San Francisco back […]
It is Friday and time to roll out some tidbits that have collected in my ever increasing supply of Notepad++ tabs. Conan Exiles… Now Enhanced! Funcom – Conan Exiles Enters a New Era as Massive FREE Unreal Engine 5 Upgrade Goes Live! Massively OP – Conan Exiles Enhanced is officially live for Steam gamers today Massively OP […]
The company remains profitable, with strong reserves and the ability to keep investing in the long-term health of New Eden. -Hilmar Veigar Petursson, CEO of Fenris Creations, A New Era post Last week we heard from Pearl Abyss that they were selling CCP, the makers of EVE Online, back to its management team and that […]
After something like a month of mostly avoiding the Midnight content… I spent time leveling an alt via Outland… I decided that maybe I should focus on that and my main for a bit. Part of this stemmed from my failed attempt to stop over in The War Within with my alt, who shot right […]
I was tempted to go with the German title for that allusion, Im Geminate nichts Neues, which I think better reflects the situation in what is now being called the Vexor War. It was just a week ago that the WinterCo Keepstar in 4-HWWF was destroyed, a task that saw the Imperium burn through more than […]
Having setup a base in the plains and found a few of the key resources I needed it was time… to go back to the swamp and mine more scrap iron because the padded armor upgrades require it. Still, that gave my flax time to grow, get harvested, and get processed. I also had to […]
Week eighteen rolled on through, ushering out April and welcoming in the merry month of May. May is merry, isn’t it? Maybe I am thinking of the Merry Wives of Windsor? I don’t know. But whatever May means, this is where we left off last week. Week eighteen promised some changes as we had unfinished […]
I have long maintained my lack of PvP prowess in EVE Online. In the now nearly 15 years I have been in null sec there has been an almost 100% correlation between me engaging another pilot on my own and my ship blowing up. Me activating a weapon against another player while not in a […]
Q: How do you tell the difference between a CCP ownership transaction and a Jita scam? A: I don’t know either. For those trying to catch up on the history of ownership of CCP… good luck. I am pretty sure they were partially owned by the Icelandic phone company at one point and there was […]
The Site Comments. You would think comments would be easy… but you would be wrong. I was wondering earlier this month why every comment was either anonymous or from somebody with a WP.com account. I mean, it didn’t used to be that way. So I went and checked the settings, and pretty much the only […]
It is time for the annual Capsuleer Day event to being, this year marking the 23rd anniversary of the launch of EVE Online. Yes, there is other news about the game and the company about, but that is for tomorrow. Today is about the event… because it has a time limit as it only runs […]
Strictly speaking the Imperium’s campaign against WinterCo has achieved success. Beyond success, really. Asher declared our objective back at the start of the month as follows: Our objective is straightforward: we will attempt to destroy their staging Keepstar in Geminate. That we destroyed WinterCo’s main staging Keepstar in Vale of the Silent, the region beyond […]
Andrew Groen, author of the two volume set Empires of EVE is back again with another book. It is not another volume about EVE Online, though a third and final Empires of EVE book is said to be in the works. But before that comes to pass, he has another project set to go, The […]
Do we have access to housing again? It seems like it is mostly back… except for flooring. I guess flooring is still broken, falling back to the default setting the moment you look away. It was kind of a tough week for Blizz with the big 12.0.5 update undoing some of their game to the […]
Week seventeen opened up on Monday, April 20th, which made for the usual round of 420 jokes and a 420 related release. But before we start on the journey of week seventeen, here is where the scores left off last time. The week opened up right away with its first release, Jay and Silent Bob: […]
For every show we watch there is some other show or three that we start, sit through it somewhere between five minutes and two episodes, only to stop and never return. These shows are immortalized in the lingering “continue watching” sections of various streaming services. They sit there, with the digital version of puppy dog […]
Enshrouded dropped the Forging the Path update this week, which the teams says is the last major update before the game hits its 1.0 release version later this year. The release notes warn you up front that they are “pretty hefty,” ringing in at something like 13,000 words. And there is, in fact, a lot […]
I seem to have set up a new pattern for posts in this fourth, solo, and very casual, run through Valheim. Rather than a post that builds up to a boss fight result, I start off with the boss fight then move to the next biome. So, enter Moder! After having found Moder, which is […]
As I mentioned on Friday, CCP put out a dev blog around the Keepstar battle at Atioth that took place a little over two weeks back. And, I will say up front, that I appreciate them putting in the effort. I love me an info graphic and CCP has provided that up front. (Also, I’ll […]
I had a simple plan. Barely a plan even. I was just going to take my level 10 Dark Iron dwarf to Outland because it is the oldest or old school content remaining in retail WoW. There I was just going to level up in one of the more quiet corners of the game running […]
In addition I’ve been seeing more and more people talk about winter co as though we’ve been abandoned by winter co. We haven’t been abandoned at all by our allies. Sapporo Jones, Leader of TEST, March 5, 2026 This past weekend saw multiple armor timers for TEST structures in Geminate. It was a big red […]
Week sixteen promised to be another big week, with five titles set to launch. The question was, as always, how much would that shake up the rankings. But first we have to start where the scores stood last week. Last week saw Pokemon Champions land hard on Potshot, with our first negative score of the […]
120 years ago, at approximately the time this post goes live (adjusting for DST, which wasn’t a thing back then), the city of San Francisco and surrounding cities in the San Francisco Bay Area were hit by a 7.9 magnitude earthquake, commonly referred to as the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. Or, commonly when I was […]
Well, it has been wet here in California, or wetter than usual. And that is a good thing, since dry years tend to end up with a good portion of the state on fire come the summer. Wet weather also means an extended allergy season, but I guess having a runny nose and sneezing when […]
The problem is me, of course. But I can’t stop being me, now can I? Not for very long, anyway. Digging a little deeper on this, one of the aspects of PG that sets it apart from things like WoW is that progression is not through levels but through skills. And, as I mentioned in […]
It has now been over a week since the Imperium’s shaky start in the Geminate campaign, where we lost 33 titans and assorted other capital ships and subcaps totaling up to around 8 trillion ISK in value in our first attempt to deploy a Keepstar in Geminate. The more superstitious in the Imperium claim this […]
As I mentioned in my last update on our venture into retail WoW, I chose to take my Dargan, level 10 dark iron dwarf, to Outland, that being the most old school, least cut-scene laden option in Chromie’s list of destinations. My theory was that, give its design, it would be a place that I […]
Having found some silver to ramp up my weapons last time around, I was now set to go take on Bonemass. I had already found his spot, dropped a portal nearby, and had the necessary withered bones to summon him and the meads to survive his onslaught. Nothing left to do but get on with […]
Week fifteen and we had just one title set to ship… and the headline should be a hint as to how that went. The question is how badly it went, but we’ll get to that after we review the scores as we left off last week. Ula, Shintar, and myself were in the top three […]
As expected… and even announced if you CCP Okami’s videos… the Gallente Presidential Election event had its reward track extended. You no doubt saw that in the launcher or pop up in game. My first question is, of course, why is Naglfar, a Minmatar dreadnought, on the announcement? I mean, sure, Gallente has some vertical […]
Did you expect anything less? But there were things to do first. The battle over the first Keepstar in Atioth ended at downtime, when CCP restarts all the servers and everybody gets logged off. Most of the Imperium pilots got the message and did not log back in when the servers came back up. The […]
Do you long to capture exotic xenomorphs and train them up to engage in intergalactic blood sports? Have you always wanted to be Ash Ketchum, but in space? Did you once discover a planet populated by Snorlax-like beings and are aching to do something with them? Are you hungering for an overly complex new play […]
We continue on as a group, moving into retail WoW and trying to figure out what characters we are going to play. We took a couple more runs at follower dungeons with mixed results as we tinkered with our group composition. We seemed to have the best luck in Neltharus, where NPC tank Captain Garrick […]
TL;DR – 10K capsuleers in local turn Asher’s cunning plan into a disaster. The Imperium’s attempt to deploy a Keepstar in Atioth was set to be the first real struggle in the conflict between them an WinterCo. The gauntlet had been thrown down. Asher asked if WinterCo was a sleeping dragon or a paper tiger […]
Having upgraded my food and started mead production, I was left pondering the coming fight with Bonemass. Checking the wiki, Bonemass is weak to blunt and frost damage. Our traditional method for taking him on has been to build a tree house to stay up and out of range of his poison and just pepper […]
We are now into the second quarter of the 2026 league. For week fourteen we were expecting two titles to launch while waiting on scores for at least one title from week thirteen. But first, where we left off last time. That was where things stood, but not for long. Less than an house after […]
For years, the people of EVE have said that your only true advantage was your time zone. They said you could top the MER, but not win a real war. Now we are giving you your chance. We are coming into your space, on your terms, in your strongest hours. Are you a sleeping dragon, […]
TL;DR – There is a new utility looking to fill EVEMon’s sizable shoes called EVELens. Links for it are at the bottom of the post, past my bloviation… I mean history lesson! EVEMon. There is probably a whole epic to be written about EVEMon, the long time character utility app for EVE Online. I first […]
WoW Midnight remains on the menu for the instance group, though there have been some initial issues and decisions to make. The first of those decisions has been who is playing which character/class/race. I have enough characters for now, as noted in my play time round up, but some people want to start fresh. Also, […]
It is April Fools Day and at one time I used to do a post about what Blizzard was up to for the day. However, Blizzard kind of gave up on that for a stretch and I think I called it quits a while after that. But I cannot really recall off hand and I […]
The Site In a bit of a surprise turn of events, WordPress.com actually added some features to the premium level hosting package, which is the one I use. At that level we are now allowed to use plugins… or addons… or whatever they are called. Plugins. But I had to go check. This is exciting […]
My next goal was stone. I prefer building with stone rather than wood. But to get to stone you need a stone cutter, which requires iron, which comes from iron scaps in the sunken crypts in the swamp biomes, all of which are locked. The Elder, the next boss on the list, has the key. […]
Week thirteen had just one game set to launch, which seemed like a recipe for a quiet week in our league. Would one title upset the standings? As it turned out, not so much. But that didn’t stop the standings for getting updated. First, however, where we left off at the end of week twelve. […]
Monsters & Memories is having an open play test weekend this weekend… and I decided to take a peek. Not that I need another game to play. I am juggling too many already. But I have been keeping M&M in one corner of my eye, not really paying close attention, but watching as it moves […]
The Gallente Presidential Election event carries on in New Eden, and will through to down time on April 16th. But every election season seems to last forever at my age. As I posted at the start of the week, I jumped on into the event to see how it would go. CCP has a post […]
Having previously posted about how our group dove into housing, I have since wandered off to do other things because the housing system is more a toy than a game. My desire to improve my neighborliness score just isn’t sufficient to sustain me. It has actually been more than a week at this point, but […]
So EverQuest Legends is a thing. Or will be a thing at some point this year. Or so I have read. Though, I will admit I have not seen all that much in the way of details. And the intro was fumbled a bit. I woke up yesterday to a ping on Discord in the […]
As noted last time, I was set to take on Eikthyr, which wasn’t all that tough as there was an alter withing bow shot of my hovel. I just needed to craft a spear, upgrade it as much as possible, practice a bit with spear and shield, then summon the mighty beast to slay it. […]
I will say up front that we should be happy that CCP has found some time to get something besides Crimson Harvest and the Winter Nexus events into a calendar year. I mean, what with all the other non-EVE Online projects they are focused on, like getting Flappy Bird running in their blockchain game, that […]
We have now arrived at week twelve, we’re into spring, and it is finally not going to be 90 degrees outside today here in coastal California. I mean, we have solar on the house now, so more electricity generation, but still. Week twelve had two titles set to launch, plus we still had some unfinished […]
I am not going to lie. The whole Account Played addon thing that went by a while back did make me want to resubscribe to WoW… a bit… if only to see how much time I have spent in Azeroth over the last 22 years. The addon is pretty simple. It just does a /played […]
The first day of spring in the northern hemisphere… for locations that consider the vernal equinox the first day of spring. Also, it has been above 90 degrees Fahrenheit all week, so we seem to have proceeded straight to summer despite what the calendar says. But enough banter. On to bullet points. Enad Global 7 […]
