I made it to the other side of the country!  Where I will be (temporarily) staying, just for a bit.  Hopefully the chickies at home don't get too stinky.

 

Impostor Factory and the Freebird Games series

I played through Impostor Factory, the third main game in the "To the Moon" series.  The Freebird Games works have a specific brand of intrigue and suspense woven into their stories that I think is really their strong suit.  Though I admit that after a while you start to get a bit accustomed to it and always start wondering how tragedy is going to strike whenever things are going too well.  I suppose that is just standard fare for stories at some point, though.

Impostor Factory itself was good, but how do I say this...it wasn't necessarily personally meaningful to me.  I think my favorite work in the series was "Finding Paradise" if only because it was the only work that I feel like had something to say to me beyond the story itself.  Perhaps this is merely because the themes explored in "To the Moon" and "Impostor Factory" were less resonant to me personally (perhaps, in a similar vein to watching Ratatouille and thinking "that's a cool story which I cannot really relate to"?)

I had a bunch of stuff typed out about To the Moon and Finding Paradise but I'm beginning to really doubt my own reflections of the works, so let's just leave it as a personal preference for now.

There's a world in which I take to replaying these games with an eye towards serious critique and analysis, but that probably isn't something I have the time for now, unfortunately.  However, I do think that the best way to get better at expressing opinions about and analyzing/critiquing works of art is to....practice...

Vacation

Or as much as you can go on vacation while self-employed, anyways.  It's been an interesting week so far and I guess a refreshing change of pace.  I've done various things here and there, nothing big though.  Just mostly taking it easy, as I should.  I've done a bit of walking around, a bit of work, a bit of just hanging out and playing, and today I went to the aquarium, which was really fun.  I even tried cooking shrimp etouffee for the first time, so there's that.

Median XL

Oh, and I've been playing Median XL a bunch, somewhat surprisingly.  There was definitely a sort of initial hump that I had to get past where I was sort of figuring everything out, but I've settled into things now.  Notably, I was speeding through the acts a little too fast and thus running into heavy exp penalties (d'oh).  I was trying to find references for the monster levels in Median XL by area so I could figure out which areas I should actually be in, until I realized that this is built into the new UI to begin with (it displays in the top right of the automap screen, if enabled).  Derp.

Anyways, I played around with a few different characters but decided to take my Neutral Paladin the distance for now -- this is a funny build that uses two buffs that shoot lightning at nearby enemies automatically, so you sort of just walk around as enemies get hurt and fall to the floor.  It's a little more complicated than that in actuality, of course, but that's still the core aspect of the build.  I seem to be doing pretty well, and am level 115, now firmly into the territory of starting to do some of the end-game quests and hidden dungeons and such.  It's been fun!

 

Pokemon Unite

Is taking a bit of a break this week, so I'll probably be back to it next week instead.