Monthly Update: September 2016

Well, it's September.  It only seems like 30 days ago I was commenting on how surprised (and yet not) I was that it was August, and yet, here we are.

Looking back at August, I feel that most of my gaming time was spent playing either Fallout 3 and any one of its DLC packs (Broken Steel, The Pitt, and Point Lookout, although I still have a handful of sidequests left on the Maryland coast; actually, I probably still have some sidequests in the other DLC's as well and I haven't even started Mothership Zeta), Fallout New Vegas, which had its own ball of shit to deal with in the form of crashes (which will all be covered in a post later this month) due to common game bugs and the program apparently not happy with Windows 10.  

And speaking of Windows 10, any time I booted up Fallout 3, I was greeted with the following message to the right.  What is amusing first off, is that the Fallout 3 game is referred to as an "app," which is probably due to something in the Windows 10 language when referring to a program.  Then clicking the "Learn more" bit just downloads a Games For Windows - Live set up, which is doubly amusing since GFWL has been removed from a number of games on Steam, and the setup is basically the Windows Marketplace Client. This has also been the first instance that I personally have come across where Windows 10 has not liked something about a game that I have been able to play on previous versions of Windows.  I did have issues when I tried unsuccessfully to reinstall and run Diablo II, but colors started wigging the fuck out.  Warcraft I and II both did not like the attempt to be installed either; the last time I tried reinstalling Warcraft was on Windows XP, so I cannot comment if it would be without issues on either Windows 7 or 8.  But as I mentioned last month, Neverwinter Nights was able to be installed and ran perfectly.

Speaking of games not working (kind of), I also booted up Darkness Within: The Pursuit of Loath Nolder which I had been very excited to play, but there was one hitch.  I start the game, am greeted by a quote by H.P. Lovecraft (typically a good sign) and then notice that the mouse control was not inverted, which I was not surprised about.  Under the Options menu, I look through the Gameplay tab and do not see anything about "Invert-Y" or "Invert Mouse," so I look under "Advanced" and there is nothing.  I exited out of the game, checked the forums through Steam and apparently other people have been unable to find a way to invert the mouse/y-axis.  I then went looking for a config text file (where I know under some circumstances, altering the text can lead to inverting the mouse (which worked well for System Shock), but I could not find the correct file, only a very limited windowed application.  This has lead me to determine that the game is stuck in standard/normal/nigh-on-ass-difficult-for-me-to-play controls.  I may give it a go, but if it is anything more than Dear Esther and requires me to look around faster than my abilities on a Saturday night with a head full of NyQuil, then back into the unplayed vault it will go.  I also dipped a bit into The Hat Man: Shadow Ward  which I played for about 40 minutes and will probably garner a short Game Review article later in the month.  Or maybe next Friday.

In the world of the 3DS, I have been playing a lot of Pokémon Picross seeing as how I spent the better part of the month saving my picrites up to buy that damned "Mega Pencil," which thankfully has infinite uses and isn't a one-off item.  Now it's off to the earlier stages to do all of the puzzles that require the Pencil as well as redo the puzzles that require a mega evolved Pokémon.  And speaking of Pokémon, I was finally able to start Pokémon GO all with super much thanks to Breiber (for lack of a better name at the moment, which is his Gnome Bard character in our D&D group) who gave me an older (but new for me) phone that is capable of playing the hardware restrictive game.  I have not been walking around as much as the Internets would have had me believe, but that could also just be that I am a bit of a homebody who does not need to thrive on social and outside interactions.  So yeah, team Red (Valor apparently), which actually stems from the fact that I got Pokémon Red when The Kid and I first got the game back in 1998 or '99.

Lastly, I wanted to comment that I felt I did a pretty decent dent in the posts I listed last month that I said I wanted to talk about during August.  I had an article written about Gunman Clive 2 at about the 80% mark that should have gone up on Monday, but that will now have to wait until. . .Monday after all, just a week late.  And no list this month, because I'm currently sitting on a couch bent over so my gut's resting on my lap and I believe I've covered everything that I think I want to have covered.  

So let's plan on all of that then.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
"Well Fuck Him Then."