EverQuest Legends launched at the end of July. I stayed clear of the beta and the pre-order stuff. I didn’t want to help test, I just wanted to see the end result. I was, however, committed to the final product. I have been on about Daybreak serving this particular non-hardcore slice of potential fans who […]
I like to have a plan. One might suggest that I NEED to have a plan. A plan, a goal, a destination. Screw the journey, I want to know where we are going and how we’re getting there. I am like this in real life as well. It is probably why I have ended up […]
I don’t think we set a record. Just looking at Steam Charts, No Man’s Sky checked in pretty far behind even the recent peak of the Voyagers expansion. That said, I didn’t think we were going to get there. A few posts on social media and Reddit were not going to get to enough people […]
We are looking at the last big week of releases until September in week thirty-two. We had four titles slated to launch. Before we dig into that however, we need to check the scoreboard and where everybody stood last time around. The groundwork laid down, we can get on with the scoring and releases, which […]
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference –Elie Wiesel Last week the site Aftermath, had what they called Hater Week, where the staff opened up on things they did not like. There were some interesting takes. Some of them I felt in my bones, like the one about how awful Adobe is. I […]
No Man’s Sky turns ten years old tomorrow. I will not review the cycle of hype, disappointment, then eventual revival around the game. I’ve been there a few times before. It is enough for this moment to say that game is very different than it was back at launch in 2016. Still, it has been […]
It is Friday and, as foretold by prophecy, it is time for another look at how things are going over at Microsoft’s XBox Games division. After the announcement of the great layoff, have Asha and Satya solved the problems they set out to tackle? Do they even have a clue what they are on about? […]
I guess you do not technically die in Stardew Valley… but the fact that combat and loss are part of the game remains an aspect I did not expect. But more on that in a bit. Having passed through spring of year two we were on to summer and a new set of crops. That […]
The deal is done. Capital management, unfettered capitalism, and political corruption has won again. Electronic Arts has been acquired by the Saudis in a completely economically non-viable deal that saddles the company with a huge amount of debt that will be used as a boat anchor to sink the remains of the organization once the […]
I will say this; Planet Crafter moves along at a brisk pace. It is also good about laying out the next objective for you and giving you a way to see how fast you are progressing. Unlike Valheim, which I will use for comparison as it represents such a staple of the survival crafter genre, […]
In one of those Repo Man lattice of coincidence moment, I was suddenly hit with a couple of unrelated posts about Monopoly the other day, which is the sort of thing that makes you think… at least think about Monopoly. So I did. Or tried. The first was from Bhagpuss, who brought up the apparent […]
But they didn’t actually announce the expansion itself, which seems odd. They have two posts up covering features of the upcoming Wolves of Mordor expansion, as well as having given MMORPG.com an exclusive interview about the features, but didn’t actually make any sort of fuss about “Oh, by the way, we’re going back to Mordor […]
We’re now past week thirty-one, where we had just a single title ship. But it was a pick AND a counter pick, so at least it had double the impact. But before we get to how that played out, we will start off with how the scoreboard looked before the events of the week hit. […]
Here it is, Blaugust. And of course I remember how to Blaugust! I have been living the Blaugust lifestyle year round since 2020. “What does the ‘Blaugust lifestyle’ even mean?” the voices in my head ask, attempting to stand in for you, the reader, since I cannot hear you… and it is likely you’ve already […]
The Site This month I am going to bring up Warp Point, a site that is attempting to bring back web site inter-connectivity of yore. The About section sums the project up as: Warp Point is both a directory and old school webring collecting independent and personal gaming blogs and newsletters. Its goal is to […]
As we wrapped up winter of the first year in Stardew Valley, we had a plan for our approach to the new year… which is to say my daughter had a plan and I was kind of tagging along, ready to help implement but mostly leaving vision to her. The longer term goal was to […]
When did I even buy Planet Crafter? Why did I buy it? Steam says I bought it back in November of 2025, purchasing it when I grabbed Forza Horizon 5, which had been marked way down to tempt the last few of us in its target demographic before Forza Horizon 6 came out I suppose. […]
I have a little over two hours into R.E.P.O., which I am just going to call REPO from here on out, so I am clearly not qualified to give anything like a comprehensive review. But I have seen it in what feels like its essential mode, which is with five friends playing co-op on a […]
One of the hard facts that came with the big level cap increase that hit Pokemon Go back in October is that, in order to get to level 80, you will need 50 platinum medals. I don’t need all of those today. My wife and I are on our way to level 75. But every […]
Coming into week thirty we had two titles queued up for release and one title from the week before looking for enough reviews to get on the board. As usual, we will kick off with where the scoreboard stood previously. I mentioned last week how close Cyanbane, Bhagpuss, and Potshot were in score, as the […]
My daughter and I had entered into Winter in Stardew Valley at my last update, and Winter does seem to involve a lot more fishing than I expected. As I mentioned previously, for our co-op game I hold the save and play a bit ahead at times between our weekend play time. But I stop […]
Recently Daybreak dropped a bunch of information, including a few of producer’s letters and, were I looking for things to expand upon I probably could have turned all of that into at least three 1,500 word blog posts. But who has time for that when CCP/Fenris is trolling us with their Ansiblex nerf? So I […]
Having defeated the second main boss Hands down, we had opened up the next set of gated content. Windrose follows what I think of as the Valheim model in that you defeat a boss and you get a new biome type with new materials that you can use to craft new gear and upgrade old. […]
I put up a post on Monday that I had written on Friday afternoon around the Okami plan to “fix” the force projection “problem” by nerfing the Ansiblex jump bridges in null sec. In that post I used a fair share of sarcasm and exaggeration for emphasis. Little did I realize Okami would come back […]
That time is fast approaching. It will once again be Blaugust. The annual tradition for more than a decade will continue. With the tragic passing of Mark “Belghast” Temple, the event’s founder, at the start of the month it felt more important than ever to keep this event going in order to remember him. It […]
On Friday Okami, one of the troika at Fenris dictating the direction of EVE Online currently, put up a long and rambling dev blog about some proposed changes to Ansiblex jump bridges. Introduced back in 2018 with the Onslaught update as one of the three new Upwell FLEX structures, the Ansiblex jump bridge was the […]
We are past the halfway mark of July and August is looming, but we did have a couple of releases here in the summer doldrums of the league. In addition, Fantasy Critic League opened up a new feature that allows a league to have multiple drafts over the course of the year long season. I […]
We are now past the halfway point through the year. So here, a couple of weeks into the second half, and already into the summer doldrums, I thought I might trot out the usual post about how 2026 has gone for me so far on the gaming front. It has become part of my post […]
Early access as a funding scheme for video games has been on my mind a bit lately, if only because a few titles I purchases in that state will hit 1.0 and be live this year. But I’ll get to that further down the page. Early access is… well… I hate to use the word […]
We have once again arrived at that point in the year where the build up to the annual EVE Online Alliance Tournament kicks off. This will be the twenty-second running of the tournament and the regular dip into the New Eden e-sports event will commence soon. As with all thing related to the game, it […]
My daughter and I have been on a weekly play time schedule for our co-op game of Stardew Valley. While I might play a bit during the week in between our time, I try not to get too far ahead and I make sure to stop before there are any events so that we can […]
My post on Saturday morning was a quick retrospective of Pokemon Go and its success over the last decade. But Scopley/Niantic or whatever they are calling themselves this week… they do keep changing their minds on that… had plans for the anniversary weekend. Despite my playing Pokemon Go daily, I am pretty bad at keeping […]
As previous posts about the game have indicate, Potshot and I have been playing Windrose, the co-op survival Caribbean pirate title. But when I mention both of us I feel like I need to distinguish who is really playing and who is kind of along for the ride. The other day when I logged in […]
After a fairly quiet time in week twenty-seven, week twenty-eight was set to at least shake up the roster a bit. We had three titles set to launch, including one that was counter picked. With that on the line, we need to stop for a second a review where things left off last time. While […]
This past week, on July 7th, Pokemon Go hit its ten year launch anniversary, and it has been quite a ride. Launched during the year that the Pokemon franchise was celebrating its 20th year, the mobile title, a rare departure for Nintendo, which prefers to keep such titles exclusively on its own hardware, was an […]
It has been a bit since I looked in on Stars Reach. That was largely due to both the random availability of access and the fact that things were being reset often enough that starting from scratch had ceased to be interesting. But since they announced that early access was coming soon the team has […]
If you’ve been a reader for a while you knew this post was coming, the annual summing up of the Steam Summer Sale, which will be over by the time this post goes live. In the midst of industry upheaval, with XBox laying off thousands… again… while charting an almost surreal path for growth, and […]
As my post on Monday suggested, it has been something of a slog to get through Expedition 22: The Swarm. In an attempt to… I don’t know… make us spend more time playing I guess… the whole thing was gated by a community milestone, Countermeasures, that took six weeks to complete. Was that six weeks […]
All of this is going to fall on Asha Sharma’s head, whom The Aftermath described as Microsoft’s pain sponge. But I want to inject a reminder that Phil Spencer, who got to retire happily after years of huge bonus payouts, was on the XBox leadership team for a decade and personally ran the place from […]
I will be interested to see, at the end of The Swarm expedition, if Hello Games decides to use this time delay gimmick again… because The Swarm is still going and the Countermeasures milestone is still active. We’re close to being done, sitting at 96% when I checked earlier this morning. But we have also […]
The news came on Friday morning that Belghast of the Tales of the Aggronaut blog had passed away. Bel was a long time pillar of this little corner of the internet I call home, regular and reliable and somebody who worked to bring us together. On hearing this horrible news I felt the need to […]
For week twenty-seven we were expecting only one release, so it was all down to Rhythm Heaven Groove to make something happen on the scoreboard. But before we get to what came to pass we have to see where we left off last week with scores. That was where things stood and everything was quiet […]
Back in 1976 the two hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, from which we in the US mark the start of our time as nation (despite a few details, like those British troops who seemed to be against the whole proposition), was a big deal. A really big deal. Seriously, it felt like we […]
It is Friday and time to catch up on some bits of news from the co-op survival corner of the game-o-sphere. At least relative to the titles to which I pay some attention. In fact, this set of titles are all ones I have played for at least a bit as documented here on the […]
I was digging through the in-game and web stores for EVE Online the other day looking for an option to buy a neural remap. I did not expect to find such an option. I merely wanted to confirm that here in 2026, nearly 15 years after CCP introduced an in-game cash shop, neural remaps were […]
I left off last time with the end of summer with reference to the Moonlight Jellies event and my daughter and I moved on the autumn and the change of crops. Because we are playing co-op and I hold the save, we tend to play together only on Sunday (though we did sneak in a […]
The Site I have been looking through my WordPress achievements again. That I earned these two is probably no surprise. These two likely go together because while I usually press the publish/schedule button too early… everything is a first draft here on day one of it being published… so I do often go back and […]
Potshot and I were out exploring, seeking out the place where the next of our quest update points was marked on the map and… I kept dying. A lot. Like an embarrassing number of times. I was snuffing it with a regularity that was becoming a hindrance , getting knocked off in nearly every battle […]
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 […]
