Tag Archives: Overwatch

The Spotlight – 03

Welcome to the Spotlight! Every month I roundup every notable gaming, viewing or listening experience I’ve had in the prior 30 or so days, and assemble them into one big article.

For the month of April, 2024, here’s what I’m shining the spotlight on.

Games

Stardew Valley

An agricultural pox has taken control of my household, which has led to an inordinate amount of time being spent playing Stardew Valley between my partner and I. For two years, I have tried to get my partner to play Stardew Valley because I knew it would be extremely their shit, but they were resistant for one reason or another. It wasn’t until I saw how much time they’d been putting into the Nintendo Switch’s online service version of Harvest Moon that I knew this was the time to push the issue once more — and this time it worked.

To be completely clear, I’ve never been a fan of Stardew Valley, but I had seen rumblings from people lauding the recent 1.6 update and figured I’d give it another shot. I thought it could also be a fun cooperative game for us to play, but the split-screen experience is really rough for people who enjoy being able to see and read the many necessary tool-tips in the game.

Our split-screen experience ended quickly, but since then we’ve both poured in dozens of hours into our respective farms. With this being the first time I’d really gotten into the game, I’ve been kind of shocked to see how different the PC version (that I’m playing) is different from the Xbox version, solely because that coveted 1.6 update is only on PC for the time being. But not having all of the extra bits of content I have hasn’t stopped my partner from engrossing themselves into Stardew Valley. And while we aren’t playing cooperatively, I am able to sit on the couch beside them and boot up the PC version on the ROG Ally and still play together in a manner of speaking.

Stardew Valley is very good, and I’m really happy it’s moved into our home.

Overwatch 2

I don’t know, man. This just kinda happened. My friend was streaming Overwatch 2 in our Discord, and it looked so colorful and vibrant that I just decided to install it. Having dumped a lot of time into Overwatch and ultimately falling off of it in a major way, it’s been kind of nice to occasionally return to this familiar world I had spent so much time in at one point.

Not having played for six years I was struck with the sensation of, “everything feels different,” and, “nothing has changed.” I still remember the broad strokes of playing certain characters, while others I used to play have been completely retooled. The player select screen is comprised of about 40% unknown characters, while most of the maps I played were old standards but at a different time of day.

I don’t know if I would say that Overwatch 2 is a good game, but I will say it’s built on the bones of a good game, and that still shines through. The shooting feels good, the levels are well designed, and the characters are fun and endearing. But none of that is exclusive to Overwatch 2, and it was all true of regular ole Overwatch. I think it’s best that Overwatch 2 remains a “sometimes food” for me and not something I play regularly, because I’ve burnt myself out on Overwatch before and I’d prefer not to do it again.

Open Roads

It is really difficult to talk about Open Roads because of how weird of an experience it was. For the uninitiated, Open Roads is an adventure game that follows the journey of a mother and daughter who take a road trip to unravel the mystery of a potential secret affair the daughter’s grandmother may have had.

On paper it’s a really interesting premise, and after completing the game I can confirm that the story is well executed and compelling. The main issues I had with Open Roads however, revolved mostly around the fact that you’re not really doing anything throughout the game, and the voice acting actively got in the way of “playing” the game.

You don’t really do anything in Open Roads aside from slowly walk around an environment, picking up notes and objects that may or may not be plot relevant, and waiting for your character to comment on them. Collect all of the plot relevant objects and you can move to the next scene where you do the same thing, and that’s it.

But you can’t do that too quickly because you have to endure the characters commenting and bickering over every little item you find, even if it’s not relevant to anything. Kaitlyn Dever and Keri Russell play the daughter and mother respectively, and they do a really good job with it even if the writing isn’t always top-notch. I understand that this is an adventure game, but at some point it felt like since the studio paid these actors to record lines, they overwrote the script.

Ultimately Open Roads is fine. I still think the story itself is neat, but it could have been told in half the time it takes to actually play the game. Regardless, for fans of games like Gone Home and the like, I’m fairly certain you’ll find something worthwhile here.

Botany Manor

Botany Manor is a pretty straightforward first-person puzzle game that, at its core, is about organizing and deciphering clues in order to correctly grow fantastical flowers. You’ll spend most of your time plodding through the grounds of the titular manor, interacting with every scrap of paper, book, and painting you can find in order to obtain the clues you need and add them to your ever-expanding book of horticultural facts.

It was satisfying to pore over newspaper clippings about weird natural phenomena that took place in a specific region of a country, and then apply that to what temperature some seed would best grow at. It gets a little more confusing when the game has you juggling several plants at once, meaning you have to figure out which clue is relevant to which plant, but I think that’s a good part of the challenge and not necessarily a knock against it.

What is frustrating about Botany Manor is how much backtracking you’ll inevitably end up doing because your clue book isn’t as helpful as you need it to be. For instance, I’d find a document about how different plants require different temperatures to grow, and one of the listed flowers happens to be the one I’m working on. When it’s added to my clue book however, it just adds the name of the clue itself rather than the information I need. Having “book of temperatures,” in my clue book isn’t helpful because the information I need is actually on the document, and to see that information again, I have to hike back to the location of the document.

There are a lot of little frustrations in Botany Manor that all boil down to either tedium, or arcane nonsense, which I suppose is par-for-the-course with a lot of adventure games. Ultimately, I did enjoy a lot more of Botany Manor than I disliked, but I cannot emphasize enough how much help it will be if you just keep a notepad by your side when you play.

Fallout 4

I’ll be talking about Fallout more in a later segment of this article, but like everyone else, watching the Fallout series on Amazon Prime emboldened me to once again attempt to play Fallout 4. On this (seemingly final) attempt at playing it, I’ve realized that I prefer watching a story told in the Fallout universe way more than I enjoy playing around in it. I’ve also realized that it is still a painful process to attempt and play Fallout 4 in a modern computer setting.

I don’t like the Fallout games very much for a lot of reasons that range from genuine issue with how janky they (and most Bethesda games) feel to play, especially when they first launch, to thinking it absolutely ridiculous that bottle caps are the fucking currency in this world. As if everyone turned into children when the bombs dropped, somehow bottle caps were the thing they valued the most. And I’m sure there’s some great lore reason for it, but you can save it for someone else.

As of writing this, the modernization patch for Fallout 4 hasn’t released yet, so understand where this next criticism comes from. I tried two approaches to playing Fallout 4, the first of which involved using the PC Gamepass version, and the second of which was on Steam. Both versions could not cope with the fact that I had more than one monitor, and refused to let me play at modern resolutions until I tricked them into thinking one monitor was my primary one, while disabling another. That alone was a enough of hurdle for me to not want to play the damn game, but there was more. For some unknown reason, the Gamepass version of Fallout 4 ran at about 15 frames a second regardless of what monitor or graphics settings I had selected. Pivoting to Steam helped, but the game still didn’t run great on a modern PC.

But even if I could play Fallout 4 properly, I know the first few hours of that game pretty well, and it’s fairly dull. My understanding is that the “good stuff” doesn’t really show up until after you get your feet under you, which in my opinion, takes a longer amount of time to happen than I’m willing to spend on stuff that I’m not enjoying. I’ll probably pop back in once the patch is released, but technical issues are only half of why Fallout games and I don’t get along.

Update: The patch didn’t really do anything. It still runs like garbage.

Celeste

Celeste is a very difficult platformer with a killer aesthetic that was more than able to power me through the more frustrating bits of this phenomenal game. I feel like lauding the accomplishments of Celeste is well-worn territory at this point, so I’ll just say that I also think it’s a fantastic game that’s more than earned every piece of praise its received. If you’re a fan of screaming at your television in anger, then you’ll love Celeste.

Role for Initiative

Updates from the Campaign

I’ve been running a modified Keys from the Golden Vault themed campaign for a few months now that’s been going splendidly. My players are engaged in my story, combat is challenging but not unfairly so, and my players are slowly but surely leaning into the role-play elements of D&D, even if most of them don’t do character voices. It’s remains one of the most rewarding creative endeavors I’ve ever participated in, even when you factor in some of the speed bumps and such that we, as a group, have had to navigate.

I hesitate to say too much, but a prime example is a recent session where my players got a lot of evidence about a broader mystery that’s been unfolding throughout our many sessions, and watching them piece together the different clues into something coherent was an absolute treat for me. It was this justification moment for me, where I had successfully written a compelling story that my players weren’t just letting wash over them, but they were actively perplexed by and trying to solve.

Moments like that, where I can watch my players try and figure out things and have genuine revelatory moments where something clicks, is just pure satisfaction for me. I honestly think it’s why I enjoy being a DM so much more than just being a player. I absolutely relish the moments where I can make them so flummoxed by a mystery, or feel genuine emotion about something good or bad happening. The best explanation I can offer is that it’s the ultimate form of feedback, better than someone just telling me they enjoyed something, when I can produce something people actively want to engage with.

There’s nothing quite like playing TTRPGs, and I cannot believe it took me so long to get onboard with this genre of game.

Watch List

Fallout

I don’t want to set the world on fire with my “hot-takes,” but I thought the Fallout show was really good. That’s right, I said it. But for real, the Fallout series managed to tell several extremely compelling stories in a universe that I historically have not enjoyed.

I really have nothing but good things to say about the series. I did find myself in the weird position of having to explain Fallout lore to my partner, despite being an unreliable narrator at best. It was kind of remarkable to see how much lore I had absorbed through osmosis, and most of it I got right — probably. I just assume the nastiest version of a thing is true in this world, like, “sure, they definitely drink their own piss.”

You can find dissections of the plot and such all over the internet, but I wanted to highlight my favorite one. I’m sure other people have pointed this out, but I had a realization while watching the story line dedicated to the Brotherhood of Steel, wherein there was a Knight who wore the silly looking Power Armor, and a Squire who followed them around with a bag of supplies. The Knight was clearly supposed to represent the player character in any given game, but the story focuses on the Squire, which in-game, is an NPC that’s more than willing to haul your shit around for you. Having the default knight be this murder-hungry try-hard was just icing on the tongue-in-cheek cake.

Once again, not a unique take, but I just thought that was a fun little nod to fans of the games. But the Fallout show is filled with fun little references to the games that all manage to avoid feeling pandering somehow, although I’m sure there’s someone who would vehemently disagree with that. As I’ve stated this earlier, but I’m not a fan of the games, but I really enjoy this show and cannot wait to see a second season.

Listening Party

Good Luck, Babe! – Chappell Roan

Pulling Teeth – Slow Joy

Savior Mode – Balance and Composure

Firewalker – Black Rebel Motorcycle Club

News

Target to Stop Selling Physical DVDs

It was only a matter of time before big-box stores started shuffling physical media out the door and barring them from returning. It’s weird to see it actually coming to fruition though, and not just persistently living as this looming threat. While it’s probably a prudent business decision, it still sucks.

Little Big Planet is No More

Admittedly, I never was a big fan of the Little Big Planet games, but even I know how beloved these games and their creation tools were. While sad to see the community have the plug so unceremoniously pulled, it’s not entirely unexpected considering the last mainline Little Big Planet game came out a full decade ago. Hopefully something new is in the pipeline to fill the void, but it doesn’t change the fact that so many creations are now lost to time.

Deck Nine and its Toxic Workplace

It sure feels like a lot of these kinds of stories have been cropping up over the past few years, yeah? This stuff is so over-the-top and would seem comical were it not actually impacting actual people’s lives, but that’s kind of the reality of things these days. Still, we need to constantly call this kind of horrific bullshit out at every opportunity until there is real, systemic change.

Thanks for checking out The Spotlight. We’ll be back at the end of May with another installment. Consider subscribing to The Bonus World so you can get an email updating you whenever we publish something new.

blog: Finding the Fit – 12/12/22

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Have you ever heard the phrase, “throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks?” Aside from being an incredibly weird idiom that people use, myself included, it’s also been the technique I’ve been using to find a game I can really stick with, except the spaghetti in this metaphor is my money and so far the wall is a garbage can that’s on fire.

For those of you who aren’t aware, I have a problem with sticking to one video game for long stretches of time. Not since the days of Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds and Overwatch can I really remember spending significant time with a game that didn’t involve me playing virtual basketball. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy playing the NBA 2K games as kind of a mindless time waster, but it’s been a good long while since I’ve really dug into anything else.

That isn’t to say that I haven’t tried though. I’ve given so many different games a shot, ranging from the underwhelming but somewhat enjoyable Gotham Knights to the eternal grind-fest that is Disney Dreamlight Valley. I took advantage of Black Friday sales and picked up the bland and lifeless reboot of Saints Row, the slick and stylish OlliOlli World, and even four different Crash Bandicoot games, all of which reminded that I never enjoyed those games when I was a kid and I have less patience for their bullshit now. Those games are fine enough but none of them held my attention for any longer than a few hours which is a shame considering that while I do have disposable income, it isn’t that disposable.

I don’t have a problem with running through countless decades of NBA history in NBA 2K23‘s MyEras mode, but eventually I’d like to do something else that doesn’t reimagine what life would be like if LeBron James was drafted by the Knicks or whatever. I have some other games on the docket that I’m eager to try, but I worry that I’m just beyond the point where a single game is going to satisfy me for that long. I’ll openly admit that I’m a very picky gamer who constantly feels like they don’t have enough time to commit to something new, but I know there’s got to be something out there that’ll appeal to my weirdly specific tastes.

But therein lies the problem: I don’t know what I’m looking for. The closest thing I can think of that might even be in the neighborhood of what I’m interested in would be something like Destiny 2, but even that is a tough putt because of how much of that game there is and how much of it I’ve missed that trying to start now seems overly daunting. Maybe I’d enjoy it, but the odds are that I’ll be overwhelmed by the lore, mechanics, and my desire to play the game “correctly” by looking up optimal builds or whatever the hell you do in Destiny 2, that I won’t actually play the game how I would have if it just came out.

I think this all boils down to my anxiety about wasting time. I don’t have as much gaming time as I used to which leads to me being overly precious about how I spend said time ultimately leading me to do nothing with it because I fear that I’ll use it on something that wasn’t worth it. So I use my time doing something I know will mildly entertain me instead of taking a chance on something new that might genuinely captivate me or leave me profoundly disappointed.

I don’t have a curative salve to apply to these particular neurosis that’ll make me suddenly understand that I actually do have plenty of time to engage in my hobbies and I don’t need to be so scared about potentially wasting time, but I’ll keep looking for one. In the meantime I just need to stop wasting all this dang spaghetti.

Blog: Perpetual Motion – 03/25/20

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There’s this particular cadence and pace of game releases that’s only increased over the years that’s made covering games a more selective and less complete experience. Covering everything is a fruitless endeavor that only leads to a jaded outlook on games along with a healthy does of burnout. I bring this up only because I noticed a handful of the games I missed out on last year were on sale, but I had no desire to dip into them now.

It’s weird, right? For one reason or another (usually price), I ended up skipping out on a lot of games that I probably would’ve enjoyed from last year, but I genuinely have no desire to even try them out now. I think the reasons for this are twofold.

My first impulse is to blame my apathy for older games on the fact that I run this website. That isn’t to say that I see this site as some sort of news aggregate like a lot of the bigger gaming sites out there, but I’d like to be able to talk about more recent releases as opposed to older stuff. I gotta think about SEO just a little bit from time to time, but also I just kind of want to always try the newest thing.

This leads me to my second and probably more accurate reason for not looking back at games, and it’s because I really want to try the newest and shiniest thing out. Sure I could go back and finish The Outer Wilds, but I’d rather play the newest Animal Crossing instead.

It’s incredibly rare for me to find a game I stick with for a long time in general. These days my gaming comfort food are the NBA 2K games, and once upon a time it was Overwatch and so on and so forth. But those games only come around every so often, and I’m okay with that.

Some people become intimately familiar with a game and stick with it as it grows and develops over time. That’s great for those players and the developers as well, but it just isn’t something that I’ve ever really done. I like to sample as many games as I can, like some sort of gaming tapas, and move on to the next thing.

Blog: Uncooperation – 04/17/19

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I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s a real pain trying to find a game to play with my friends. It’s difficult for a multitude of reasons, chief among them being our tastes, but platform differences and scheduling conflicts make it even harder. I’m not surprised though, as we’ve all gotten older, gaming has kind of faded to the background for a lot of people, as it probably should.

This isn’t me renouncing my love of games or anything, but as we get older, our priorities change. We all have such limited time to actually play anything together, and that’s probably the sign of a healthier lifestyle on all our parts. For me, it’s been tough to even write the blog some weeks because I’m just not playing new games as frequently as I used to. Once again, not an indication of me cancelling the only feature on this site that regularly updates.

But more to the point, the few friends I still do have that I talk to online all have vastly different tastes in games. We tried all sorts of things on both extremes of our preferences. I tried Divinity: Original Sin II, a game in which my friends love, but one that bores me to tears. We all tried Battlefield together, but that game did nothing but frustrate everyone involved. Hell, I even bought The Division 2 thinking that it would be a good middle ground for us, but alas, it wasn’t.

But that’s alright. The more I think about it, the more insular I’ve become in my gaming habits. I can’t recall the last time I’ve hopped into a multiplayer match of any game by myself. People talk about playing a couple of rounds of Apex or Overwatch or whatever, and I just don’t know how they bring themselves to do it. It just seems exhausting to compete with others after a day of work. What my friends and I seem to crave these days is more of a cooperative experience over a competitive one.

I don’t know, the more I type this, the more I think I’ve written this same exact blog before. But it’s one of those things that remains constant in my life and stands to become a bigger part of it as time goes on. Maybe Borderlands 3 will be that game, maybe that World War Z game will do it, or maybe we’ll spend the rest of our lives trying to find the perfect game for us.

Blog: Apex Predator – 02/27/19

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Apex Legends came out a few weeks ago to immediate acclaim and success. It was more or less a surprise release that seemed to refine the battle royale genre of games, and produce something that positively builds on formula we’ve seen up till now. Despite the heaping helping of praise that’s been dumped upon Apex Legends, I don’t know that I’m entirely jazzed to play it.

For context, I’ve played an hour or two of Apex, so I’m basically the leading authority on the topic. What I played definitely led credence to a lot of the claims I had heard too. Being a Respawn game, it just feels phenomenal to play. It shakes the jankiness of PUBG and doesn’t require me to build anything à la Fortnite. Instead it most closely resembles the Blackout mode from 2018’s Call of Duty Black Ops IIII, which for context, is a very good thing, but they differ in two very key ways.

The first and most obvious difference is price point. Apex is free to play, which for reference, is cheaper than the $60 Black Ops IIII is. Free to play while not only making a game more accessible to play, also seems like the only real way a standalone battle royale game can really survive these days. It’s a smart play, and works even better when you have the potential for good cosmetics for people to buy. Which leads us into the second main difference from the genre.

Apex is charming. Both in map and character design, Apex Legends has a lot going for it. People appear to really be resonating with the characters in a way I haven’t seen since Overwatch happened. So I guess that means there’s probably a lot of porn of Apex out there, huh? But considering the characters are already pretty beloved, that opens potentially profitable avenue for skin and taunt sales. Which I’m pretty sure they’re already doing, but my point still stands. A game that combines the potential profitability of Fortnite with the characterization of Overwatch can be a dangerously profitable concoction.

I just wish that I knew what I was doing in Apex. I haven’t spent enough time with it to know the layout of the map, or what guns do what, or when to use character abilities or even just general practices I should be aware of. I want to play more of Apex, but the concept of having to adapt to a new one of these kinds of games just seems exhausting from the outside looking in. Luckily, I’ve got some friends to help motivate me and carry me through those early hurdles, but I don’t know that I’ll ever feel the battle royale fever again like I did when PUBG was released.

All things considered, I welcome our new battle royale overlord with open arms. I don’t ever see Apex Legends ever being released on phones, but who knows? I thought the same thing about PUBG, yet here we are.

Blog: Unhealthy Relationships – 07/11/18

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Every time that I end up playing Overwatch, I’m reminded how mechanically sound and charming that damn game is. On its surface, it’s a pleasant game to play and look at. It’s so weird that every time that I finish a session of playing it, I end up feeling angry or dejected. I can probably attribute it to the constant ass-beatings I end up getting from game to game.

Despite all that, I still have over a hundred hours in the damn thing. It’s this abusive relationship that keeps pulling me back in by waving a rolling gun-hamster in front of me only to kick me in the dick for being interested in it again. But it isn’t just me, I have friends who have spent way more time in Overwatch than I have, and have these violent encounters with it. The craziest part is that we all genuinely love this game despite how toxic it can be to us.

And it isn’t just Overwatch either. Dota 2, League of Legends, Fortnite, PUBG, Hearthstone, and so many more, all have their hooks so deep in people. Presumably said hooks are so deep in order to pull you closer and beat the shit out of you.

But playing a game that has the ability to illicit a huge range of emotions is a good thing, right? No matter how angry and pissed off that I get at Overwatch, it’s an experience so memorable I end up writing about it. It’s like seeing a sports team you like blow it in the playoffs. You hate them for losing, but you don’t stop watching them altogether because of it.

I love Overwatch, but I also fucking hate Overwatch. I’m sure there’s some real science that could explain this sensation, but for the time being I’ll call it “The Overwatch Effect.”