Company of Heroes 2. I am just trying to re-learn it, and finding it goddamn hard to do so.

Hell, I forced my way through Worlds of Ultima : Martian Dreams, just a few years ago. Compared to that, going back to Fallout 2 is a walk in the park. Turn based combat is just awesome.

Ugh, you people clearly have no appreciation for the desert. I absolutely loved the landscape of New Vegas … having been there before and driven for hours through the desert and developed a deep love for the desert.

And really, DA:I would have been better as a visual novel than as a 3rd person pseudo-RPG … but good luck getting that made.

I really enjoyed DA:I. I even played MOST of it through twice, before picking up my original save (with a vastly hotter Inquisitor) and doing all three DLC. Time spent with that game felt totally worth it … but I had never played an MMO before. So, there is that.

I am somewhat in-between games at the moment. After burning myself out on Hollow Knight, I read a couple novels, and then got back into Heroes of the Storm. As usually happens with MP games, though, I eventually hit the "why am I playing this?" point. I've been dabbling a bit with Renowned Explorers as well, but that…

Yes, Hollow Knight is definitely incredible. Have fun with it!

Somewhere between a deep dive and a nice relaxing beach vacation is the Idle Weekend podcast, with Danielle Riendeau and Rob Zacny. If you like strategy, than Zacny's other podcast, Three Moves Ahead, is definitely worth listening to. Soren Johnson did a really interesting podcast series of interviewers with designers…

I did enjoy the way it delved into the impossibility of progress in a bureaucracy … but it really didn't go anywhere.

Oooh, enjoy Ninefox Gambit. That was a really fun book.

I really, really liked The Long Price books. I have to agree, Southern Reach never really paid off. Finch remains peak VanderMeer, in my opinion.

Agreed, that is a really strong point in those books.

I am a big fan of him, from the few stories he had published in Fantasy and Science Fiction 10 or 12 years ago. I've even tried to teach The Imago Sequence in class a couple times, though I realize that was a bit indulgent.

Siddhartha was scar-inducingly incoherent to the 8 or 9 year old me, who was forced to read it by my academic-obsessed parents.

Max Gladstone's The Craft Sequence, which is absolutely incredible. The human drama at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis, made visible by turning it into a series of novel-length vignettes where souls and money, idols are Swiss Bank Accounts, Gods can die when their accounts go into the red, and mages are asshole…

I think so. It's not that expensive anyway, even with the DLC, and it's got a ton of replayability in it if you want to really try to score chase.

One point to you, sir. You are correct.

I took all that as trope, and just ignored it. Then again, I almost always ignore "language in and of itself," making me deaf to most poetry and actively annoyed by "writerly" writing. I got that the dwarves were Scottish, which is a (sadly) well-explored trope, and the Nilfgaard thing made sense, as they are supposed…

The less you think about Cerberus, the better. The clear and undying love that the game's makers had for Cerberus ends up being the biggest thing wrong with ME2 and ME3, and the more you can just compartmentalize it, the more you will be able to enjoy the rest of the game.

Lots and lots of Heroes of the Storm. I am back into it, in a big way, and really enjoying it again. We shall see how this goes. Usually, I pay attention enough to improve over the course of a few weeks, until I feel ready to start ranked play — and then get so brutally crushed that I just give up. Ah, the pain of…