Happy September! Fall's almost here and Summer wasn't too scorching in our little section of the PNW, although Conklederp and I did miss the hottest week back in July, so it's all about perception. Even Schmarschmucks has announced that it's PSL season, so it's time for everyone to dress like Han Solo I guess.
I don't know why I'm sounding like this. I love autumn and almost everything that comes along with it, with the exception that with The Squire going back to preschool means that our collective rate of illness is going to increase significantly. But on the upside, he'll be going back to school
Right, right. Video games.
Well, I've finished a handful of games recently, both on the Switch and on Steam through the Steam Deck. Last Tuesday night I finished Layers of Fear 2 which required a reading of the Plot section of the Wikipedia page. Even though that game took me fewer than 10 hours to play, I was still lost a lot regarding the overarching story and who the characters were. To say nothing of the final scene, which I might need to look up additional information on because, whooweee. You'll likely find out later this month if I get around to figuring out how to write this article.
Next, I finished She Could Fly: Documentary Escape Game which I talked about towards the end of August. I also posted individual videos from the complete (commentary-free) walkthrough I have up on the Tubes if you're at all interested. I then finished another game I received through Keymailer, Umbral, which I will have articles up all week long because there was too much-written commentary to fit into a single article. Today we're also releasing another series of walkthrough videos scheduled throughout the morning. For the Umbral videos, I mostly used the in-beta native game recording feature on the Steam Deck after having several complications with OBS. Everything from the video not showing up, to the video only showing the upper 1/3 of the screen, to the audio not being synced to the video, to just straight up not recognizing when I have a dock plugged into the capture device. I'm not sure who to blame in any of these instances, so let's just blame Issus and the rest of the Therns.
Coming up, I have a couple of articles for games that I recently started, one of which is pretty far out of my wheelhouse, but I "signed" an NDA and can't talk about it until a certain date.
But on the musings of Keymailer and its fickle metrics for deeming someone worthy, I've apparently dropped off on my average daily YouTube views, which now means I'm only green-check-verified for our Instagram account. This only means that when requesting a game to review, I am only able to select our Instagram account as a platform to showcase the game I'm requesting. So I might be slowing down in the coming weeks with how many games from outside and third-party sources we'll be featuring here, but I'll still give it a try.
Bookwise, I'm nearly finished reading The Squire The Hobbit, which he has specifically asked me to read to him whereas before I was reading him only a few pages a night. This has been a legitimate dream of mine since before Conklederp and I became parents. The Squire has even said that, and I quote, "After we read The Hobbit, then we can read Lord of the Rings," although I don't think he knows how long of a book that one is, or that Gimli and Legolas don't feature until page X. I honestly don't know how much he's able to follow anything that's going on, but I still love it. I know I'm going to have a hard time reading Thorin's talk with Bilbo at the end though. Not looking forward to that.
The book I'm currently reading, The Road to Neverwinter I talked about back on August 16th, and I've come up with another criticism related to the book not always feeling like it takes place in Faerun and that has to do with geography. I talked to The Kid about this last week and told her that I was surprised to find out that the village that Edgin/Chris Pine is based out of is Targos, one of the ten villages in Ten Towns up in Icewind Dale. I might be a bit forgiving on this point, but when you have characters traveling from Targos to a manor in the countryside outside of Neverwinter, or one mile away from the manor, in a single day. One days travel from Targos to outside of Neverwinter. That's roughly 250 miles. And they did it on foot, without any kind of magical means. Yeah, yeah, I know. Magical world, why complain about something as nearly meaningless as travel distances and time? I don't know, it just bothers me. The least the editors for Penguin and Wizards of the Coast could have done was understand a map if Jaleigh Johnson was going to be making geographical references*.
Let's cut this off now. But that's where I'm at going into September.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental*P.S. I guess it really should've taken between 15-16 days to travel from Targos in Ten Towns to just outside of Neverwinter, depending on weather conditions, wandering monster attacks, or any encounters with Tiamat or Venger along the way.
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