Serendipity Surprises

When I logged into Steam today, I wasn't expecting to see this:

Honest!

I guess that makes yesterday's Meme Monday all the more appropriate, I suppose.

It's like seeing a random comment by an NPC and saying to yourself "What the hell was THAT?" Like this one I saw last night in Stormwind on the Anniversary Server:

I can't say I've seen THAT one before, and given the lack of context (and to be fair, Blizzard's company culture's reputation these days) that just sounds so wrong.

There's one last little bit of serendipity that has nothing to do with gaming. I was working away at the end of May when I happened to look outside the nearby window and saw this:

Yes, that's a very young fawn, likely a newborn, since the fawn was still a bit wobbly when moving around. That's something you don't get to see live every day.

Elf Needs Food Badly

It's kind of weird, really, that the Steam Autumn Sale came and went and... I just kind of shrugged.

Oh, plenty of games were on sale, and quite a few in my wishlist, but I just wasn't interested in buying anything. I mean, that's good for my bottom line (particularly given just how many car repairs I've had to make this past year), but when push came to shove, I just didn't want to buy anything.

Yes, I did have Baldur's Gate 3 on my wishlist, but a) it wasn't on sale, and b) I just don't have the time to devote to playing it. Even if I gave up playing MMOs and all other video games to play BG3, I just don't have the hours in a day to play the game to the extent I want to. 

There's also the matter of me wanting to go back and finish BG1 and BG2 once more before delving into BG3, just for continuity's sake. 

Yes, I am that sort of player. I mean, you do read the blog, don't you?

***

Some months ago I stumbled on an old Blizzard gift card the kids gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago, and given that Blizz was running one of their sales at the time, I used said gift card to buy Diablo II Remastered. I figured why not? I was essentially getting the game for free, so it made sense to try the game that people still say was the best in the Diablo series out before delving into Diablo 3 and Diablo 4.

So.... Does that count as a new game purchase, despite the gift card itself being at least 2 years old?

Eh, whatever.

Now that I think about it, that's the exact same reaction I had when I played it for 4 hours some weeks ago. 

Your character is your character, just like if you were playing Gauntlet back at the video game arcade*

"Warrior needs food badly!"
From the WMS Gaming channel on YouTube.

And if you don't like your character's appearance, well... That's tough luck.

Believe it or not, there's a screenshot there.

Hmm... Now that I think about it, from what I can tell there's not much more story here than what was in that old Gauntlet game back in the day.

Or The Bard's Tale, for that matter.

Back when the name Electronic Arts
meant something good. Yes, kids, that
actually was a thing: EA being a good company.

I did discover that if you died in D2, you lost all your gear and you have to run back to get it. Which can suck. 

But in the end, there's really not a lot of "there" there. Run around, kill things, take their loot, use it. Rinse and repeat.

So.... Gauntlet, anybody?

*Boy do those two things take a body back to the 1980s!

The Steam [Don't Call it] Black Friday Sale has Arrived

You know a big sale is going on when I open up my email and find a "25 Items From Your Steam Wishlist are on Sale!" message in there.

I wish the Autumn colors looked like that around
here. It was hot until way late in Fall, and then
suddenly switched over to cold weather, with the
leaves not giving much color at all.

I'm personally debating as to what to do with Steam sale; whether to wait for the Winter Sale or pounce on this one. There are a few games I'd like to nab when they're on sale, such as Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, but there are also some others that I know I'd be tempted to purchase for the mini-Reds.*

Deadfire, because chasing after a rogue
god can be fun. From GameRevolution.

There is the Pathfinder: Kingmaker game out there that I'd really like to try, but I keep saying I'm going to wait until the release is a lot more stable. It seems to be getting there, but I'll likely wait until December before moving forward with P:K.

Well, I'll have to wait a bit longer before
having Pathfinder Barbarian Iconic character
Amiri in my party. From the Kickstarter.

Then there's also a discount on ESO: Summerset, even though I'm likely not to reach there on my ESO main for quite a while.

Because you can't have an ESO expansion
without everyone's favorite Morag Tong
agent tagging along for the ride. From
playstation.com.

Or maybe I'll go purchase a game I'd purchased ages ago for a PC back in the Vista days, such as Total War: Medieval, that no longer plays on current machines because of graphics code changes.** Before you ask why I'd want to play the first version of The Creative Assembly's Medieval games, it's because Medieval 1 is a completely different design than Medieval 2. Medieval 2 follows every design after Total War: Rome and has armies roaming through the maps in fine detail --you can go across terrain and roads, for example-- while Medieval 1 is an area control game in the same way that Risk is. Sometimes you want to play one style, and sometimes you want to play the other.

Sometimes you just wanna slam down some
armies and say "Egypt is MY territory!"
From steam.com.

But you know, I realize that whatever I choose I'll have time for playing later, as we've got the Steam Winter Sale coming in about a month. And I'm fine with that.






*Well, except for the fact that they don't need distractions heading into the final weeks of the Fall semester.

**When that first arose when I'd replaced the graphics card on my old Athlon system, both NVidia and The Creative Assembly pointed fingers at each other, but it turned out that it was NVidia at fault, as they chose not to support an older graphics ruleset. The net effect was that I was no longer able to play the first Medieval: Total War (before they changed the name around) until the Steam version appeared.