I have not looked forward to the end of the week as much as this one.
It's not because there's something special planned for this weekend (that's like a maybe for next week's über-long weekend), but that I'm glad that I can drop whatever was happening over the work week to just... chill out.
Work week wasn't bad per se, but it sure had quite a few things that threw in some spanners that gummed up the [routineness] of work. I know that being a ``manager'' meant that work was expected to be anything but routine, I'm still an engineer at heart. Needless to say, I just ran out of spoons near Thursday after a whole bunch of meetings with new people, and sometimes in new locations.
But no one wants to hear about the work week---it's just what we all do to ensure that bills are paid, and hobbies can be fed.
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I completed Blasphemous last night, getting all three endings following the plan laid out in this Reddit post. There was a bug where the ``Wound of Abnegation'' was obtained from Crisanta in the Mea Culpa Chapel, but was not properly reflected in the inventory of quest items.
Actually, there were quite a few bugs in Blasphemous. They weren't really game-breaking, but it was still annoying.
All in all, I enjoyed Blasphemous. It was exactly as I had mentioned earlier---not as punishing as Hollow Knight, nor as clunky as Feudal Alloy. Blasphemous had some interesting boss fights (that second phase of the Cristanta fight was full on impossible had I not mastered the timing of the parry after the very gruelling Isidora fight that took me a few days of trying to fight it straight before cheesing it with ``Romance to the Crimson Mist'' prayer, and even that took me several tries to get right), and cool-ish traversal options that did not include an air dash nor a double jump.
The currency (Tears of Atonement) was not exactly easy to farm nearer the beginning where their impact was greatest (but I still did, 50+ at a time, near Albero, just so to get the first tier of Mea Culpa upgrades, which cost about 5k with buffer), but towards the end-game I found myself simply rolling with them, especially as I was attempting and re-attempting the Crisanta fight. Of the entire skill tree, I found myself using the Lunge attacks the most, after of course the Combo attacks. Charged strikes are too costly in time to pull off, but I suppose a more skilled player can get better mileage out of it than I.
The key thing that I learnt from completing Blasphemous was how much I preferred to do major actions with the ABXY buttons over that of the R1/RT/L1/LT set up (I'm staring at you, Elden Ring that I gave up trying to complete). The thumbs just work much faster than the index fingers, and this is true even for Blasphemous, where I face-tanked any an attack that I failed to dodge simply because the eye-brain-index-finger axis had a slow reaction.
Pressing A to jump and then X multiple times to smack some idiot with a sword? Yes please. R1, R1, L1 to do a weapon combo? Yeah, fuck off.
And so, that's that for Blasphemous for now. I didn't bother with the other [free] DLC, except for the ``Wounds of Eventide'' one that allowed me to obtain the final ``true'' ending of the game. The ``Strife & Run'' DLC with Bloodstained cross-over content was basically a series of timed challenge platform puzzles, which I didn't like because precision movement in Blasphemous is a bear. As mentioned earlier, there is no air dash, and double jump---verticality is largely obtained either through a wall jump technique that required using the attack action to ``stab'' into the wall instead of just wall-kicking a la Megaman X, or using an arcane dash-attack aerial combo (fixed from direction-attack aerial) on a strikable object to do an ``Air Impulse'' instead of an unconstrained double jump. The 8-bit area was Nintendo-hard for no good reason, and the rest of the DLC was for NG+ which I was uninterested in.
``But MT, what about the `movement progression' items like `Blood Perpetuated in Sand', `Linen of Golden Thread', `Nail Uprooted from Dirt', `Silvered Lung of Dolphos', and `Three Gnarled Tongues'?''
Those act more like keys to areas than actual movement progression, since they affect the stage itself rather than grant new abilities for the player character.
Okay, maaaaybe the ``Nail Uprooted from Dirt'' can count since it makes the marsh that was previously unjumpable suddenly operate as though it isn't there, jumping-wise.
Maybe I'll get back to Shovel Knight, trying to at least complete the base game.
Maybe.
I'm more likely to start getting into Cassette Beasts though...
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I've gotten No Man's Sky recently due to it being half-off. I started with the controller, and found that I hated it (aiming with the right stick is annoying). So it's back to the venerable keyboard+mouse combo.
First impressions so far are fine. It's a bit like Minecraft, but with less free-form building. I'm still quite early into the game (no where near the 50 h mark yet), so it's hard to say. I don't think it expands into something as crazy as Satisfactory or Factorio, but as at now, I'm not completely bored about it yet, which is a good thing.
I'm kinda procrastinating a little on fixing up my Nether rail system in Minecraft, and a recent Reine Minecraft adventure video showed an interesting in-place rail switching mechanism has given me some ideas on how I might want to set up the nether rail. But I'm lazy and don't want to think... for now.
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I spent this morning checking out a stand-up comedy special by Russell Peters. This guy was hot years ago, with this show that made its rounds on the 'net.
It's alright. He's similar to he was back then, though he does lay it on thick with the F-bombs, which is fine by me.
That's about it for this update I suppose. Till the next time.
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