Fantasy Critic League – Like Fantasy Football, but for Video Games

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.

Week 30 Scores

Things were already in motion as the one release for the week had already landed some reviews during week thirty.  Pulling the entry last week, Halo: Campaign Evolved, was ready to go.

• Halo: Campaign Evolved
  • Picked by TAGN HQ (Wilhelm)
  • Counter Picked by Pretty Blue Fox Games (Bhagpuss)
  • Now has a score of 83.3

I was a little worried about this one.  Early in the year its release date got pushed out to Q4 and it felt like it might not ship.  Then it got pulled back in for a July release just as Microsoft was preparing to slash and burn on the staffing front at XBox Games, which is likely why reviews seem to be noting some issues with the game.

So it went from maybe not shipping in 2026 to feeling like it might have been shoved out the door prematurely, which is something that tends to lead to low scoring reviews.

Halo: Campaign Evolved

But Halo: Campaign Evolved… has done okay.  How much of that is because, behind the glitches, there is a good game, and how much of it is not kicking a dev team when they’re being decimated to satisfy the AI gods… well, I cannot be sure.  I’ve never played a Halo title and I am not going to start now, so I’ll just take the reviewer’s word for it.

When Halo launched on Tuesday it had not impact on my position, except to push me a bit further into first place I suppose, but did knock Bhagpuss down a notch.

• Publisher Score Updates
  • S Class Warfare Studios (p0tsh0t)
    • Moved from 9th place to 8th place
  • Pretty Blue Fox Games (Bhagpuss)
    • Score has gone DOWN from 43.0 to 30.2
    • Moved from 8th place to 9th place

And that was all the planned excitement for the week.  Halo launched and held firm at 83 even as it approached 90 reviews.

We did get a few score updates.  On the upside, week twenty-nine’s The Incident at Gallery House saw a boost in its score.

• The Incident at Galley House
  • [Picked by Rodent Entertainment (Arhanta)]
  • Score has gone UP from 82.5 to 83.8

Then there were the week thirty titles, both of which took a score hit on further reviews.

• Splatoon Raiders
  • [Picked by Hidalgo Trading Company (Pallais)]
  • Score has gone DOWN from 83.7 to 80.2
• Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game
  • [Picked by Crash and Burn Games (Shawn)]
  • Score has gone DOWN from 79.0 to 77.5

That saw some shifting on the scoreboard, as Shawn’s descent lifted up Shilgrod and Archey.

• Publisher Score Updates
  • Rusty Shackleford (Shilgrod)
    • Moved from 12th place to 11th place
  • Frabjous Day Enterprises (Archey)
    • Moved from 13th place to 12th place
  • Crash and Burn Games (Shawn)
    • Score has gone DOWN from 17.0 to 15.5
    • Moved from 11th place to 13th place

That change didn’t hold.  Something likely rebounded, as everybody got moved around a day later.

• Publisher Score Updates
  • Crash and Burn Games (Shawn)
    • Moved from 13th place to 11th place
  • Rusty Shackleford (Shilgrod)
    • Moved from 11th place to 12th place
  • Frabjous Day Enterprises (Archey)
    • Moved from 12th place to 13th place

Then Splatoon Raiders rallied a bit and came back up.

• Splatoon Raiders
  • [Picked by Hidalgo Trading Company (Pallais)]
  • Score has gone UP from 80.5 to 81.7

That is still less than where it started the week, but still up from its low point.

All of which left the scoreboard looking like this.

Week 31 scores

Arhanta’s projection went up a bit, no doubt due to this week’s bids.

• Bids in TAGN League
  • Kena: Scars of Kosmora
    • Won by Rodent Entertainment (Arhanta) with a bid of $2
    • Dropped game ‘Total War: WARHAMMER 40,000’ conditionally

Just one bid this week, but it saw Arhanta dump Total War: Warhammer 40,000 for Kena: Scars of Kosmora.

In addition to that, we had a single date change.

• Pokemon Pokopia: Bubbly Basin
  • [Picked by Play Forever Mwahahaha (Shintar)]
    • Release date changed from ‘August 2026’
    • to ‘Wednesday, August 05, 2026’

That puts another title into the mix for next week, with the upcoming titles looking like this.

Week 32 Coming Up

That gives us four titles in play next week, for four different people.  That could shake the board up a bit more.  And then it looks like we’ll be taking the following two weeks off while we wait for one more title to show up at the end of the month.

Related:

• TAGN Fantasy Critic League
• TAGN Discord Server
• Fantasy Critic Site
• Fantasy Critic How to Play
• Fantasy Critic FAQ
• Fantasy Critic Most Desired Reviews
• Open Critic Review Site

Blaugust 2026

“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 skipped down the page because there is another image to look at.  Kids these day.

I am not sure it actually qualifies as a ‘lifestyle,’ but Blaugust has had a fairly solid influence on my trajectory as a blogger.  It, and the Newbie Blogger Initiative before it, has had at least some minor influence on what it means to be a blogger in my view, if only because blogging about blogging does encourage one to examine, if only lightly, what blogging is about.

For example, back during the original Blaugust of 2014, when it was a bit more of an ironman competition than the causal social affair it is today, there was a hard rule that if you couldn’t string together a post of at least 500 words it did not count.

I internalized that metric and you can see it in my average words per post, a score that was hanging around 500 word for the first six years or so, which quickly move to around 1,000 words in 2014 and has remained there… well, has grown actually, passing 1,200 words in recent years… ever since.

That isn’t 100% on Blaugust.  I also adapted my style as time move forward and the plague of link rot started to show its effects.

A classic example is this post in which I point to a review of the EverQuest expansion The Serpent’s Spine over at the Mob Hunter blog pretty much without comment.  I no longer do that.  These days I would at least sum up the review a bit and include some comments on what I thought of the review.  Or, lacking the energy to do that, I would have included the related link at the bottom of the previous post, which I reference in the Mob Hunter link post, as something for interested readers

If you go back and view that post you will see that I have updated it, including an annoyed side note about what a poor excuse for a post it was, at least in the eyes of 2026 me.

And that too is a thing I do.

I have been told in the past that writing… real writing… is mostly re-writing.  You get something down and then work to perfect it.

This blog, by comparison, is a huge collection of first drafts, of posts that were the first thing to come to mind that I pounded out, often due to being annoyed about something.  Rare is the post I spend a much time… if any… editing, much less re-writing.  It happens now and then, usually with posts that don’t have a real window of need, posts where I am not grabbing onto a current event or announcement or other bit of news of the moment.  You do press the publish button on at least 500 words every single day… for that is another aspect of early Blaugust that I have internalized, to post every day, with my current streak now past the 2,300 day mark… by lingering over prose or making sure your subject and verb use match or that you didn’t just trail off into nothing when you were interrupted then picked up with another thought and left yourself…

Where was I?

Oh yeah, you don’t get that AND have a full time job and a family life and time left over to actually play the video games you write about if you spend time honing a post to perfection.

And, when it comes to reader response, there is an inverse relationship between how much time I spend on a post and how many views it gets.  Quick rage posts where I rant about something seems to beat out introspection.  Welcome to the internet.

So yes, absolutely yes, I know how to Blaugust like it was 2014 or 2026 or 2026, because it means just doing what I am already doing… with a hashtag.  #Blaugust

But what about you?  Are you ready to Blaugust?

Well, first of all, it is NOT TOO LATE to join in.  It is never too late.

Here are they key links to get started.

• Blaugust initial Announcement – All this info in a longer format
• Blaugust Sign-Up Page – Get yourself officially on the Blaugust list
• Blaugust Discord Server – Come hang out with fellow Blaugust participants
• The Blaugust Prompt List – The 2024 version, but they’re still fresh
• Past Blaugust Media Kit page – Where to find past Blaugust logos
• 2026 Blaugust Media Kit – Plus all of these links and a few more

So you can get yourself signed up… or not.  It isn’t mandatory to fill out the form.  There have been people over the years who have been content to play the home version of the game, joining in by using the hash tag or just tracking their own progress and meeting their own goals.

It is a very easy and loose sort of event.  They don’t even make you write 500 words in order for a post to count.  It is more a matter being something of a community.

Of course, there is the whole AI thing.  I keep asking myself “what would Belghast do?” when it comes to that.  He had a knack for finding the right path.

My reflection, in hindsight, is that perhaps the event should have had no opinion at all on the topic.  I certainly have no ambition to become the AI police, spending my time driving from site to site in the LLM Detector Van in order to sniff out transgressions or monitoring the AI violations tip line so we can get some vigilante justice against those not adhering to some level of purity.

Maybe, at most, a “we would prefer you not” statement would have been right, but that it is up to you to police yourself.  I don’t know.  It has been said and done at this point and there are hurt feelings all around now.  I should probably stop bringing it up because I absolutely do not want to make it my problem to deal with.  I dislike LLM output, the correctly named “AI Slop” of it all, but not nearly as much as I dislike petty authority wielded poorly and arbitrary purity tests.

Sorry, I keep going on about that because I keep thinking there is a solution.  I’ve said too much already.

Anyway, there you are, ready to Blaugust, but you aren’t a crazy person like me and have a life and maybe want a little structure, a little guidance, a little nudge in the right direction to get you going.  Well, we have that, in the form of theme weeks.

Blaugust 2026 Schedule

This is my Welcome to Blaugust entry.  I am never quite sure what really lands for these themes, but they are vague enough that you can make most anything fit.  A simple declaration that you’re joining in will do here for sure.

Introducing Yourself is the second week, and I think you can handle that.

Creator Appreciation, which used to be developer appreciation when we were all video game blogs, is just a place t shout out something or someone you follow and appreciate.

By week four Staying Motivated will seem like a real issue for some.  This is a chance to explore how you’ve made it this far or what is becoming a real obstacle.

And, finally, there is Lessons Learned, which assumes we have learned anything at all.

So there we go, Blaugust is off and running.  I will wrap up this post with the HTML formatted list of sites that have registered for the event.

If you don’t have it in you to participate in the writing portion of the event, you can always just visit those who are putting in the effort and perhaps leave a comment.  Getting a thoughtful comment can be a high point in a blogger’s day.

Here is the list, which currently stands at 108 116 133 sites joining in, presented in alphabetical order:

1. 26g
2. 392ms
3. 82MHz
4. A parenthetical departure
5. Academic Aesthetic
6. Agnes the Alien’s blog
7. Alessandro Cuzzocrea
8. Alex’s Review Corner
9. An Archaeopteryx
10. aneeshsathe.com
11. Aster’s Asterisms
12. Axxuy’s Internet Notebook
13. Aywren’s Nook
14. bearblog
15. Ben Ramsey
16. Beyond the Horizon
17. Biggus Bloggus
18. blog.x2600.cc
19. BongoTwisty
20. Brennan.day
21. BurgeonLab
22. Byte Vortex
23. Casual Aggro
24. Chasing Dings!
25. ChristiRichards.com
26. Christopherhimes.com
27. clandestini
28. coffee spills
29. ComradeNerdy Blog
30. Contains Moderate Peril
31. Cubic Creativity
32. Dave Henry Blog
33. diary.lollyrots.com
34. Divergent Rays
35. Dozenial Dragons
36. Emma Juettner’s Blog
37. Endgame Viable
38. fluidline.neocities.org
39. Fragmentary
40. fyr.io
41. GamerLady P Blog
42. Gamers Esoteric
43. Games and Geekery
44. Gaudete Theology
45. Geek on a Harley
46. gRegorLove.com
47. Gridranger’s blog
48. hamatti.org
49. Heart Soul Machine
50. I Can’t Think of a Name for this Website
51. In An Age
52. inconsistent.software
53. Indiecator
54. Inventory Full
55. Jak2k’s Website
56. Joelchrono’s Blog
57. K-Squared Ramblings
58. Kai Gulliksen
59. Kay Talks Games
60. Kayriene
61. Kedara
62. keeroks space
63. Kevin Cunningham
64. Knifesedge Blogs
65. KVibber.com
66. Lameazoid.com
67. Lucky Instar
68. Lyons in Beta
69. Mailvaltar
70. Many Welps
71. Mar Qaroll’s The Marrowing!
72. Matt’s Blog
73. Medium
74. michcia’s notes
75. MMO Casual
76. MMO One Night
77. MogBlog
78. muttthecowcat
79. Nerd Girl Thoughts
80. Nerdy Bookahs
81. Noisy Deadlines
82. NomadWarMachine
83. not all those who wander are lost
84. note (large blog platform)
85. Notes by JCProbably
86. Off the Top,
87. OrbitalMartian
88. owlblog
89. Personal InfoCloud
90. Pinkway
91. Point, Click, Repeat
92. Portrait of a….
93. prin.lu
94. Quail Creations
95. Quinn Daedal – Blog
96. rachonaut
97. re: nyman
98. Riel’s Nest
99. Ryan Patrick Randall
100. Select * From Life
101. Shadowz Abstract Gaming Blog
102. Sheri42.net
103. SweaterPockets
104. Syl’s Blog
105. Tabitha
106. TAGN
107. Tantek Çelik
108. Taxodium
109. Taylor film crit
110. The Friendly Necromancer
111. The Ghastly Mirror
112. The Maker Dad
113. theTangentSpace
114. thethinkingboard
115. ThinkRoot
116. Through Wolfy’s Eyes
117. Troy Press
118. Ubergeek Kelly’s World
119. Varun Barad
120. WCRobinson
121. What the Fran
122. Why I Game
123. with words, wonder
124. Words of the AgingGamer
125. Words Under My Name
126. Wry Writer
127. Zelibeli
128. コーポ雪原
129. もうすぐ33歳
130. わくパンの思考のかけら
131. 世界のねじを巻くブログ
132. 伏枥之间
133. 素生

Take some time to visit a few if you can.

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 rebuild the homegrown personal networks that fansites fostered in the early days of the internet through affiliates and webrings.

That’s cool.  I’m in favor of that.  I signed up and they let me in.  There is an entry for TAGN.

My entry on Warp Point

Cool beans.  It hasn’t generated much traffic as yet… I suspect that at least one of the two referrals over the last month was me checking the entry on my phone and clicking on it…  and the other was probably the site owner validating my entry…  but the project is young and it is still developing. (Also, I will confess I haven’t clicked on any of the sites in the listings either.  Maybe I should do that.)

There are the usual discoverability issues that have plagued the web since its inception.  There are about 200 sites listed as I write this and you can sort the list alphabetically, reverse alphabetically, or by oldest or newest, but users lack the patience to parse anything that requires you to scroll down the page in my experience, so my blog, which is not on the first page of results no matter how you sort… or even when you click on the tags… and don’t ask my why I picked those four… so the likelihood of a random stranger stumbling over my site is pretty close to zero.

They do also have a web ring widget, which is very cool.  However, it uses elements not allowed by WordPress.com hosted blogs, so I couldn’t get it to work here.  I’ve sung that same song more than a few times over the last two decades.

There are also some barriers to entry.  No Substack sites are allowed due to it lacking a strict “No Nazis” policy. (I hesitate to check how WordPress.com fares on that front, but I’m good for now I guess.)

And then there is a “No AI, No LLMs” barrier to entry as well, stated as such:

Finally, please don’t make us be the AI police. If you create text, imagery, or vibe code using generative AI, we ask you not to submit to the directory. Warp Point is meant to uplift human writers and artists, not the regurgitatations of LLMs.

This was what kept Tipa off the site.  The struggle is real.

LLMs remain a divisive issue, and that has also spilled over into Blaugust, where the desire not to have to become the AI Police led to a middle of the road policy statement in the event announcement allowing that AI might assist one’s creative work but not substitute for one’s actual efforts manged to get some grumbling defensiveness from some sites who have gone in on LLM enhanced content as well as angry reactions from zero tolerance purists for whom any use is spitting in the face of human artists.

It turns out there is no answer that pleases everybody, and even the ambiguity of the middle is annoying.  I tend towards the purist side of things, though more from larger scale problems than everyday plagiarism problem of LLMs.  I fear much more so the influence it has on things like search.  Google’s injection of an AI result at the top of their search returns page means most people won’t go further than that.  And Google (or Microsoft) can 100% shift and weight what those results say.

Of course my example of personal butt hurt on this is the acronym “TAGN” for which this blog has been the top result for maybe fifteen years.  Not bad for a scrub like me, somehow beating out Triaminoguanidine nitrate for so long.  But last week it looked like somebody moved a level and when I put in TAGN on my work laptop and found the TAGN Group at the top, my explosive rival of all these years as a secondary mention, and zero mention of my blog at all in the AI response.

The result changes when I try it elsewhere or at different times.  A lack of consistency is one of the many LLM flaws.  Anybody defending LLMs when they get a different result from yours should be reminded that is a huge problem as well.

Overall the AI response from Google (or CoPilot if you’ve somehow stumbled onto Bing) is as often as not bad or wrong or otherwise incomplete and only getting worse as Google itself, and other companies spending money on search, figure out how to manipulate it for their own personal ends.

Which brings me back to Warp Point, because while it is in its infancy as a registry… some day I’d like it to allow me to search on the content of sites listed, so I can see which other sites might be writing about XBox layoffs or the Steam Machine… it also hearkens back to a time of curated lists and the way Yahoo was in its early forms.  Granted, exploits and bots broke Yahoo while Google initially had a much better plan.  But in a world where Google is abandoning the idea of search in favor of manipulated results, what else have we got?

This probably should have been a blog post on its own.

Anyway, welcome to July 2026 in review!

One Year Ago

There was a bit of a reminder of where we started out here on Independence Day.

The Steam Summer Sale for 2025 wrapped up.  I did not buy anything, but I did sum up my gaming so far for the year.

Looking forward, we were warming up for another Blaugust.  We had a pretty big lineup of blogs as the start grew near.

In WoW Classic we finally got the pre-patch for Mists of Pandaria Classic.  I started some warm ups, including doing some pet battles.  The we got the launch and were let loose on Pandaria.  I was wandering about in the Jade Forest soon enough.

I was away when it happened, but I summed up the Viking funeral for the Innominate Palace Keepstar in 1DQ1-A, the long time home of the Imperium.

Elsewhere I had bought a jump freighter as the Imperium moved from Tenerifis to Insmother.  I tried to sum up the new destinations for the alliances of the Imperium after we left Delve and Querious behind.

Asher was once again pushing us to get into capitals, supers, and titans, at which point I asked myself how badly I wanted a titan.  Not really that badly as it turns out.

CCP introduced the Global PLEX Market to try and control/normalize the price of PLEX in EVE Online.  They also started adding PLEX to some subscription packages.  The company also laid out the road to Alliance Tournament XXI.  I was keeping track of destruction by digging through the MER.

My journey to Mordor to witness the fall of Sauron in LOTRO had reached its goal and I was knocking about post-fall.  I then summed up the whole journey in a post with links to the whole series.  I also took a side trip to review the state of legendary items, which were less annoying than they once were… but they were still annoying.

Meanwhile, SSG was updating their LOTRO roadmap for the year and we reached the 30 day notice mark for the life of the soon to be closed 32-bit servers.

We were messing about in Enshrouded, exploring the Thralls of Twilight update.  That included exploring a couple of the new night sanctums.

In the face of the popularity of The Heroes Journey I wondered why EverQuest needed to be the way it was.

RimWorld released its Odyssey expansion, which I jumped into.

Finally, Tom Lehrer passed away, a huge influence on my humor and outlook on life.

Five Years Ago

There was the usual Steam Summer Sale.  When it ended it turned out that I actually bought a few titles.  That led me to sum up what I had played so far in 2021.

At home we were still binge watching TV despite there being a lull in the pandemic.  We watched Community, Hacks, Manifest, and The Kominsky Method.

My wife and I completed Pokemon Go Fest 2021, in part because the cut the price to $4.99.

Lord of the Rings Online launched the Shadowfax and Treebeard special servers for a fast or a slow run through the game’s content.  I was also on about how much stuff ends up in my bags when I start a new character in LOTRO due to my having been around the game since launch and owning all the expansions.

The instance group was into Burning Crusade Classic and finally creating a guild tabard.  We finally had some gold, in part because I was scarfing up thorium in Frostwhisper Gorge.  Meanwhile, I was MIA from Outland leveling up alts back in the vanilla content due to the eased level curve and better traits.

Somebody once again claiming they could dictate what immersion meant to other people got me on a kick to explore what immersion meant to me.  It is a complex and somewhat less than tangible topic, but I wanted to go down that rabbit hole.  Middle-earth was one of my first stops on that exploration.

World War Bee was hitting its nadir, with a declaration that PAPI was going to take the summer off.  But lots of people were taking the summer off it seemed as the PCU, which had kept around 30K most weeks, dropped down to 25K.  Fraternity, however, was getting tired of the war and demanded and end to it, so PAPI came up with a plan to win in four weeks.  CCP also said that scarcity would be over in Q4, which turned out to be a flagrant lie.

Anyway, this is what I wrote about EVE Online in July of 2021:

• 52 Weeks of World War Bee
• How Does World War Bee End?
• 53 Weeks of World War Bee
• The Hunter’s Boon Update Lands for EVE Online
• CCP Announces the Return of the Alliance Tournament to EVE Online
• Saturday Night Action in Delve
• 54 Weeks of World War Bee
• The Fraternity Alliance Update and the Direction of the War
• The End of Scarcity Foreseen in EVE Online in Q4 2021
• The June MER Shows Industry Still in a Slide in EVE Online
• PAPI All In to Win the War in Four Weeks
• 55 Weeks of World War Bee
• CCP Releases the ESS Reserve Bank Keys and Hands Out ISK in EVE Online
• Which Games Hand Out Cash in the MMORPG Space?

Then, past me, whom I really hate, wrote four freaking Friday Bullet Point blog posts that were each all over the map.

The first was about Crowfall shipping, RimWorld Ideology, some stats from the Burning Crusade Classic beta, and Minmatar Liberation Day.

The second mentioned the Steam Deck announcement, Pokemon Go anniversary items, the Diablo II Resurrected alpha, and the reserve bank keys coming to EVE Online.

The third was on about the New World beta, the Path of Exile expansion, EverQuest offering old items, and Blizzard’s big harassment scandal starting to come to light.

And the fourth carried on with MORE about Blizzard’s scandal, the Guild Wars 2 expansion, bards coming to Neverwinter, Crimson Desert failing to ship, and a panic about California having some power consumption recommendations for gaming PCs.

It was quite a July.

Finally, there was the traditional announcement that Blaugust was coming.

Ten Years Ago

Pokemon Go was everywhere after it launched.  Everywhere.

I listed out the NBI Class of 2016.  I haven’t gone to check how many survived the year.

Daybreak turned off the last PlanetSide server and the game was gone… though it lingered on the server status page for a while.

Daybreak did launch a pair of special event servers for EverQuest and EverQuest II.  I was keen enough to go earn the special mount on the EQII server.

There was strange news for Turbine as their parent company, Warner Brothers, announced that they were transitioning into a mobile app development studio.  We wondered what that meant for Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online.

In Minecraft I was tinkering with maps and night renders while Aaron created a huge map room in game.

In World of Warcraft I managed to unlock flying in Draenor.  Just in time too, as the 7.0 patch was already pre-loading.  Soon the garrison gold mine would be turned off.  And then it hit, bringing new features.

In EVE Online the Casino War was winding down.  There was a Keepstar to chase, the alleged hellcamp, and some sovereignty exchanges in Pure Blind.  That wasn’t really going anywhere though.  We killed four titans in Okagaiken and blew up a CSAA just to show we were still fighting.  But in the end we admitted defeat and began packing for our trek to greener pastures.

Our destination was Delve, ever the region that calls to Goons.  But first we had to get through Rakapas.  I was there for a bit before I ended up soloing my carrier down to our staging in Sakht, accruing the maximum about of jump fatigue possible.

I also hit 160 million skill points while the Blog Banter spoke of malaise.

Fifteen Years Ago

Google+ was already starting to become annoying. (At the end of that post I also link out to an article that predicts that social media in general, and Facebook specifically, will start to fade by 2014.  If only.  It just kept getting worse.)

I tried Civ World, the Facebook interpretation of the classic Civilization series of games.  I didn’t like it.

In EVE Online, the results of the emergency CSM Incarna summit were released with CCP barely deigning to acknowledge any error in their ways.  Hilmar will be Hilmar.

I hit level 50 in LOTRO, got into Eregion, and actually saw the door into Moria.   Only a couple of years had passed since I bought the expansion. Gaff was ahead of me, as usual.   Meanwhile, Isengard was in beta, but nobody was supposed to talk about it.

Getting lost… rules.

EA, BioWare, and their new Origin service got together and combined my accounts without bothering to mention they were doing it in advance.  Just another day at EA as I understand it.  Customers come behind their own convenience.  Still, I was interested in their authenticator and how it stacked up against others.

Speaking of authenticators, SOE made one available as well that looked just like the Blizzard model.  But they could not be swapped, one for the other.  I got the official line from VASCO on that.

And on the EverQuest II front, they announced that they were going to revamp Freeport, which I took as a waste of time.  (Plus, of course, Qeynos, ever the step-child in Norrath, got shoved off until later.)  I am still not convinced that either revamp was worth the effort or the time spent downloading the assets.  But I am not sure Beastlords were either.  They seemed pretty broken when they launched.

The instance group wrapped up our last adventure in EverQuest II Extended.  There were a number of ways the game wasn’t right for us.  It wasn’t just the ugly mounts.

The pending closure of Star Wars Galaxies led to interest (and concerns) about SWG emulation.

But PlanetSide 2 news was coming.

I started playing Need for Speed: World, a driving MMORPG.  It wasn’t a bad game with the right music playing.

Zynga helped reveal the two faces of Tobold.

And World of Warplanes was announced, which got me wondering if this might not be a spiritual successor to Air Warrior of old. [The answer to that was “no.”]

Twenty Years Ago

Twitter launched.  This blog lasted longer than Twitter, because whatever that site is now, it sure as hell ain’t the Twitter we once knew.

Microsoft was talking about a device to challenge the iPod and denying they would ship an XBox 360 with an HD DVD drive.  Being on the mark half the time is pretty good for them.

EA was trying to retain people by giving out more stock options and revising under water options while Take-Two Interactive was being investigated over stock grant shenanigans.  Remember back when employee retention was a strategy in the video games industry?

The ESA announced they were downsizing their yearly E3 conference.

The Civ IV – Warlords, the first expansion for the title, came out on Windows,

Thirty Years Ago

The perhaps unfortunately named (and all the more so given the later harassment scandals) CUC International purchased Blizzard Entertainment parent Davidson & Associates and Sierra Online, which became the heart of the new CUC Software.  The company later became Cedant Software, Havas Interactive, and eventually Vivendi Games.

Most Viewed Posts in July

1. Windrose: Welcome to the Swamp
2. No Man’s Sky and The Swarm Expedition: Countdown to the end of the Countermeasures Milestone
3. Planning My Path to 50 Platinum Medals for Level 80 in Pokemon Go
4. Planning my Platinum Medal Strategy for Pokemon Go Level 49
5. Stardew Valley and Creating a New Save
6. Stardew Valley and Through the Winter and Into Year Two
7. This One Simple Trick will Up Your Pokemon Go Steps Dramatically!
8. Windrose and Sailing Forth to Booty Bay with Potshot the Builder
9. Friday Bullet Points About Co-Op Survival Game News and Updates
10. No Man’s Sky and Getting Started with Expedition 22: The Swarm
11. Stardew Valley – The Luau, The Train, and the Green Rain
12. Cat Catching in Enshrouded

This list of the most popular posts for the month is a reminder that I don’t write ranty posts about EVE Online for views.  I would have to extend this list to fifty to include my two ansiblex nerf posts.  Also, Windrose, Pokemon Go, No Man’s Sky, and Stardew Valley… that is where you go for popularity I guess.

Game Time by ManicTime and Nintendo

Something of a spread of games for me this month.  As noted along the way, I started the month with some games and ended with other.

1. Stardew Valley – 57.92%
   • Switch 2 – 40.5%
   • PC – 17.42%
2. Windrose – 10.14%
3. Planet Crafter – 10.27%
4. No Man’s Sky – 6.41%
5. EVE Online – 5.80%
6. Civilization II – 4.30%
7. R.E.P.O. – 2.23%
8. Stars Reach – 1.61%
9. Forza Horizon 6 – 1.21%
10. LOTRO – 0.07%
11. World of Warcraft – 0.04%

Stardew Valley tops the list and this may be the first month since I started tracking that a console title came out on top.  I guess I am getting some use out of that Switch 2.

EVE Online

Not much going on for me.  I even let my PI lapse.  Just not feeling it at the moment and CCP being all about their shooter and plans to nerf null sec once again hasn’t helped.

I did start off exploring the new player experience, but that got dull very fast.  The company has gone back to the “we’re going to present the game as having story and narrative for an hour” sort of thing, which has failed in the past… but why not waste some more time proving it again?

No Man’s Sky

I finished the swarm event.  That was a thing.  And then I finished it again on a second save and found that doing so really doesn’t get you anything when rewards for expeditions are shared across saves.

Planet Crafter

A new thing this month.  Late this month even, so not much to say about it.  We will have to see how far that goes, but it has been fun so far.  As I mentioned in the post about it, we’re also testing out Save Sync in the process.

Pokemon Go

We had the 10 year anniversary event which worked out pretty well.  But I am still mostly focused on earning the required 50 platinum medals needed to see me through to level 80.  There are a lot of other tasks along the way, but that one is a blocker to leveling up at all at this point.

• Level: 75
• XP Progress: 89.8% of the 203,353,000 xp needed for level 80
• Tasks for Level 76
  • XP: Done
  • Platinum Medals: 36 of 38
  • Defeat 100 Team GO Rocket Grunts – DONE
  • Explore 300 km – 252 of 300km
  • Catch 200 Pokemon in a single day – DONE
• Pokedex status: 936 (+1) caught
• Pokemon I want: Basculegion
• Current buddy: multiple as I work on parallel buddies

Stardew Valley

I have three saves of this running.  There is the one with my daughter and I that has made it into spring of year 2, there is my other Switch 2 save that is in winter of year 1, and then I have been playing a bit off and on with my Steam PC save, which is in fall of year 1.  And combined this is where I spent most of my gaming time in July.

Windrose

We made it to the swamp.  The swamp, however, is the end of the road for Windrose currently.  They have a new biome in the works, but once we defeat the swamp boss we’re done.  However, we got distracted before we made it to the boss.  He’ll wait, I’m sure.

Coming Up

No Man’s Sky will be hitting the ten year mark, so I expect some celebrations and events.

EverQuest Legends launched earlier this week.  I am tempted by that, but perhaps not as a mid-week purchase.  Let the real enthusiasts find the day one bugs.  There has already been a stability patch I hear.  We shall see what the weekend brings.

Stars Reach will hit early access mid-month.   I am interested to see how that pans out given how little game there really is there.

It seems that Potshot and I are suddenly into Planet Crafter.  Expect more on that front.

My daughter and I will no doubt carry on with Stardew Valley.

I’ll hit a major milestone in EVE Online at the end of August.

And, of course, it is Blaugust tomorrow.

Stardew Valley Splash Screen

The longer term goal was to unlock the greenhouse, which makes farming easier.  Or so I am told.  I have not seen it in action yet.

To achieve that we need to finish up the pantry bundles at the community center.  While we pretty easily finished up the spring, summer, and fall crop bundles in our first year, we still need to get the quality crop bundle, which requires six gold star quality specimens, and the animal bundle, which requires the production of farm animals.

So back to the farm.

First up was a change in layout to our field.  We had just been tilling an open area south of the house, as one does, watering it with the watering can every day it wasn’t raining.  That was becoming a real chore.

So the first thing was to crank out some quality sprinklers, which take care of the daily watering for you.  Then we walled off the crop area.

Crops walled off and preserves brewing

Walling off the crops was part of the bundle plan.  To fulfill the animal bundle you need to have happy animals that produce the right output.  Animals are happiest when they can roam around in the grass on sunny days to eat and frolic and get up to whatever it is they do outside.

However, the animals will totally eat your crops if allowed free access.  So we started out with a chicken coop with a wall around it and a bit of space for the chickens to roam.  However, not only had the chickens quickly chomped most of the grass in their enclosure by the time winter arrived and they stayed indoors for a season, but we also had to get a barn to house further animals.

So the fields got a wall, the chicken coop was moved, and a barn was added.  Fortunately, Robin will move farm buildings for free once they are built.

The farm buildings on the edge of the grassy field

They now have a lot of open space… and an upgraded barn.  It needs an upgrade to accommodate goats I guess.

We bought two cows and a goat.  I was a bit surprised at the price of the goat, being 5x the price of a cow.  The strange economics of Pelican Town I suppose.  But the farm animal thing has expanded.

In the barn with the new animals

For the quality crop bundle we will need to wait until fall before that is done.  We managed to get the fist batch, which was gold star parsnips, done in year one along with gold star ears of corn.  We still need enough gold star melons, which are a summer crop, and gold star pumpkins in the fall.

So we have a bit of a wait on that front.

Meanwhile, my other two saves in progress as following along.  My second save on the Switch 2 is in the back half of winter with the Night Market having just arrived.  Then my PC save just made it through the Stardew Valley Fair where, on my third try I made it to first place.

A score of 95

I thought it might be due to my finding the right diversity of items, but I suspect that the fact that I managed a couple of iridium quality items helped as well.

My third fair display

Anyway, that was my display.  I beat out Willy and Pierre’s this time at least… and whoever it is who has that giant cheese wheel.

And is it Planet Crafter or THE Planet Crafter?  It seems to be called both at various locations.

Certainly A Planet Crafter

Anyway, I got online on Sunday afternoon after helping move a couple couches and a host of other furniture pieces, to find Potshot online and playing Planet Crafter.

It was on sale and I think he saw that I already owned it.

Anyway, rather than getting back to Windrose, where we were rapidly reaching the end of the current content, we opted to give Planet Crafter a shot.

It offers online co-op play in the traditional “one person creates the game and holds the save and you can join them when they’re online” approach.  That is fine and Steam provides the infrastructure to handle that, so I can see why a lot of titles go that route.

Our group tends to prefer titles where you can rent a server, first made really popular by Minecraft, but embraced by other titles like Valheim, where you can have the persistent shared world of an MMORPG where the group can log in when they have a mind to, without having all of those annoying strangers messing things up.

The problem with the shared save file is that you hold the save file you don’t want to run ahead of the rest of your group… see my posts about playing Stardew Valley co-op with my daughter… so you might not play as much, while if you don’t hold the save file then getting to play means waiting for the person who holds it.

But a lot of the time when we play things together it is somewhat opportunistic.  One of us gets online, sees somebody else is in the game we share, and jumps in to play as well.  If you don’t start playing then others won’t be enticed.  This is kind of how some of our co-op adventures, like Raft or Baldur’s Gate 3 ended, with the save sitting stagnant because one of us didn’t want to play ahead so we never played at all.

Anyway, for the moment we were on together.  Potshot, who had done the tutorial, started a game and sent me an invite code and I… who installed the game just then and had never played… joined on it.  We were soon on an orange tinted alien world.

Potshot out in the world

We had one little lander pod to work from, which had a small storage crate and a simple crafting station.  Outside was the alien planet, littered with resources as these things tend to be in such games, and we had to go outside and start collecting things to first enhance our gear and then to terraform the world.

You have to manage three resources to stay alive food, water, and air.

For food you have a few packages meals and can find more, though eventually you’ll need to grow food.  And your need for food is on a pretty slow cycle.  You can go a long stretch between meals.

Water you can make at the crafting station from the ice you can find on the planet.  Your hydration level goes down faster than your need for food, but it still isn’t a constant nag or anything.

Air, however, that is always a ticking clock for you.  Standing in the lander pod your fine, but as soon as you exit your air supply starts ticking down.  You start with a suit capacity of 100 units of air, and that goes by pretty quickly.  So there is a lot of running out of the pod, collecting some stuff, then running back.

You can create air bottles from the resources outside which will refresh your air supply on the go, but those take up an inventory slot and, as with so many such titles, inventory management is on the list of your initial challenges.  You have just a few inventory slots and you need to collect resources when you go out, but resources don’t stack.  If you need two iron for something, that is two inventory slots.

The game knows what it is about and sets you some initial goals to begin the long process of mitigating storage as a critical limitation.

Your initial task list

You spend a time initially on just survival.  Par for the course for survival crafting titles.  Then it is time to start on a bit of infrastructure.  Potshot put up the first habitation pod for us.

Our starter home

The habs are nice because they are automatically another air zone you can duck into if you’re running low.  They are also hilarious because both of us have ended up far afield and our of air, at which point building one is the logical step.  But they don’t come with a door.  You have to build the hab and then build the door to get in.  I have had a couple of panic moments with air dwindling while I find that last item to craft the damn door.

Eventually we started hitting things to build that required resources that were not just laying about on the plains around us, either loose or in the occasional storage container.

These are a thing

Those often have some other goodies, like additional food packets or seeds or such, but we were missing raw materials for some of the other things we could otherwise craft.  So our eyes fell upon the wrecked spaceship thing on a hill overlooking our little base.

The wreck on the hill from our first base

The wreck, as we had hoped, has stuff for us.  But it was also dark in the wreck and we hadn’t built the flashlight module and I damn near got lost in the wreck because I couldn’t see where I was going.

Having a light improved that experience and we found new materials and even an email terminal.

They had a dedicated terminal for email?

Once we had explored that we started to figure out that we would only get new tech to build if we started terraforming the planet.  That meant building things and managing power and finding more resources, and more resources meant going further afield to find additional wrecks and occasional harvestable goodies.

Finding where aluminum spawned was a big deal

We carried on for over three hours and managed to get ourselves to the point where we had turned the sky blue.

Welcome mister blue sky

That is basically the first stage of terraforming achievement, turning the sky blue.  There is still lots to do and we’ll likely carry on.  But it was a fun afternoon of us bumbling around and figuring things out.  Not too difficult of a puzzle, but enough to keep us entertained and feeling like we had accomplished something.

As for carrying on, I wrote at a bit of excess above about the save file problem for this sort of co-op title.  As part of this we are also experimenting with a utility on Steam called Save Sync.

What this does is let you share the local save file with one of your Steam friends so that at the end of session you will both get a local save for the current game.  If somebody then plays a bit on their own, the updates get saved to both of you.  If you’re playing on the save and the other person shows up, you send them an invite code like you were the one holding the save and then you play co-op.

Anyway, this is in testing for us and so far it seems to work.  Like so many other things, Save Sync is in early access.  I found it pretty aggressive initially in setting Steam to launch on system start and auto launching itself.  It is all a bit fussy about you quitting.

I get that it wants to be there to make sure your saves are all in sync, but I also find apps that assert the whole “I must always be running for the good of the universe” attitude a bit irksome.  I know, you want to protect me from myself… but have you met me?  There is no hope on that front.

So that was our new venture for the week.  We’ll see how it holds up.

Related:

• Steam – The Planet Crafter store page
• Steam – Save Sync store page