Stage Select Start: Monthly Update: November, 2022

Well, first off I would like to apologize to every"one" of you who was looking forward to my Inktober 2022 entries. I fell hard off of the wagon on Day 13: Kind. I genuinely blanked on how to best represent and concept or a feeling with my artistic abilities on a 3" x 3" neon yellow piece of paper. I did draw Days 13 - 20 though but then fell off again upon getting to Day 21: Bad Dog, although I knew what I could have done for that day. I also had an ambitious idea for Day 23: Booger, but again, that did not happen. The other side of me not being able to finish was that I mostly did my artwork while at work, on my breaks, but as we are in the midst of our annual audit, and catching up with financial reporting, I found that I had less and less time to draw. I also wanted to read The Temptation of Elminster, which has taken me past the original 21-day eBook loan period, but I have discussed that on our Twitter account. If you make it to the end of the article (or just want to skip down to the bottom), I will post the rest of the Inktober entries I drew.

October saw the beginning of an unintentionally long-running series on our site where I played and reviewed all 51 games in the Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1 collection. I have already talked a bit about this series, but just a quick sum-up here. I will be releasing an article every Friday from October 7th, through the end of March where I review several games in this collection, grouped by their original presentation and similarities between the games. There will be certain Fridays when we skip a week, like today, for Monthly Updates or if something at the moment unexpected comes up, like if EA Motive sends me a Steam Deck Verified review copy of the Dead Space Remake that needs to be published the day the game releases on January 27th, 2023.

Speaking of Steam Deck, that has taken up about 60% of my gaming time this last month, and I wouldn't be surprised if it eats up about the same amount in this here November. Most of that time was spent playing Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin, which Dr. Potts is also playing following his playthrough of the first Dark Souls game. I am also following along when applicable with Dan Floyd's playthrough back when he was still with Extra Credits, although all of those videos are now on their new YouTube channel, PlayFrame. The thing with DSII is that there are so many branching paths following the Forest of Fallen Giants, that you could spend hours upon hours in the Shaded Grove and not even touch the Lost Bastille, or spend a lot of time grinding in Not-Anor Londo-Heide's Tower of Flame and No-Man's Wharf while not touching The Doors of Pharros. Or only barely scraping through Huntsman Copse before reaching level 110 *cough-cough.*

The other game I've been playing on the Steam Deck has been American Truck Simulator, partly because The Squire loves trucks and I wanted to unlock stuff (more trucks?) but also because of Griffen & Justin McElroy's Overview video from 2016 is still one of the funniest things on the Internet. The game was on sale (because it was on Steam and of course it was) and I saw that there was an Oregon DLC (also on sale), so I thought it would be a good counterpoint to the stressfulness that can be "Dark Souls." I will likely write a First Impressions article because I do not know if I will be putting as much time into the game to finish what constitutes as the main campaign, i.e. owning my own west coast trucking company.

On the 3DS, I am still playing Dragon Quest IX, but after acquiring the ship, I became a little lost on where I could go and where the developers had intended me to go next. So after a brief consultation on the Internet, I ended up in Gleebo and now I am exploring around Batsureg, although I am going back to Gleebo so that I can unlock the Paladin job. On the Switch I am still playing Kingdoms of Amalur: ReReckoning and I have found myself doing more of the main quests than focusing on side quests. I realized I was losing a bit of the plot in lieu of leveling up my character, while fun, it started to feel like it did not matter what I was playing as long as I could gain experience and increase my stats. And that made me a little sad, so I changed my tactics a bit and now I am doing the main quest. Most of the time because it is kinda hard not to pick up side quests here and there, especially if they do not require me to traverse the whole of this new continent.

Oh yeah, there was the massive Silent Hill announcement toward the end of last month where three games and a new movie were announced. Four games? There was the Silent Hill 2 remake by Bloober Team. Silent Hill: Ascension, an interactive live-streaming series from Bad Robot., which I am very excited about, is likely to be revealed that neither my laptop or the Steam Deck will be able to play. Silent Hill: Townfall from Annapurna Interactive. And Silent Hill: F. And then Return to Silent Hill, from the same director as the first Silent Hill film from 2006.

On the TV Show front, there has been a lot. We finished House of the Dragon, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, in what felt like a single week (meaning the season finales were all clumped together. At least Andor will take us through the end of the month. Conklederp and I also started and finished The Midnight Club, a show by Mike Flannagan (Midnight Mass, The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor), which should not be overlooked because of the younger teenage cast if you are a fan of any of his previous and upcoming series; I'm debating if I want to write an article on this. Conklederp made the comparison that it feels similar to Are You Afraid of the Dark in that each episode has its own separate isolated B-Story in the form of a ghost story while the A-Story is happening. The only disappointing thing I found out was that the series is only 10 episodes, not an around-the-clock 12. But at least there is a season 2? That could be a good thing. We also just started Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities on Netflix and love that it feels like a modern day Alfred Hitchcock Presents as each story is introduced, or at least the first one was.

I am guessing that we will also be starting Tales of the Jedi over on Disney+ because Star Wars.

That leaves the shows that are not out yet this year. Looking to the rest of this month, I am beyond excited for the start of Willow, a sequel to the 1991 film of the same name and from what I could tell will not take into account events from the book trilogy published between 1995 and 2000 seeing as how Sorsha and Madmartigan are not killed in the first couple of chapters in a cataclysmic explosion having something to do with a dragon. I think. And then The Bad Batch Season 2 starts up in January.

I would like to talk about movies, but Conklederp and I have not seen any movies since. . . Well, it has been a while since we watched either anything recent or otherwise. By now you know from my ramblings over the last couple of years that it is easier for us to find time to watch shorter hour-long shows and not 90-120 minute movies. I guess we could break up a film into multiple nights, but that is something that we have not gone into a movie planning to do, but something that happens as one of us dozes off. We will likely get back to watching movies again. Maybe. Soon. Ish.

But until then, these trucks aren't gonna drive themselves. See y'all out there on the road.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
But I'm Sorry I Don't Pray That Way

P.S. And here they are:

Day 14: Empty