I also have everything forwarding to another account, with a rule to tag the ones sent to my gmail so that they’re highlighted. It’s a big task at first but just do a couple every now and then and eventually it’ll be done.

I’ve restarted Pokémon Legends Z-A, which I haven’t played since completing my shiny dex 6 months ago. I spent the first 8 hours looking for a shiny Pancham to be my starter (luckily it appears in an area that’s really easy to cheese) and now I have a full Dark type team.

While I liked the character customisation the first time as a girl, it’s a lot harder to scrape a good looking outfit together as a boy. Here I am with Gristle

I never use the same species more than once, at least not as part of a new team (I’ll recreate old “characters” in each game to add to a roster to mix up the endgame), so since that takes about 200 species off the table that makes building them a fun challenge, especially for single-type or gimmick teams. This one’s Pangoro, Krookodile, Sableye, Sharpedo, Malamar & eventually Yveltal.

I’m also replaying Batman Arkham Asylum, possibly for the first time since Knight came out. I was devastated to learn even that one’s already over a decade old. These games are masterpieces. The plan is to get 100% in all 4 of them over the next year or so, and I might go for all achievements while I’m at it because I’m missing a bunch of the challenge room stuff.

Then I’ve recently gotten into games like Quarantine Zone (decent) and That’s Not My Neighbor (fantastic), that are all about attention to detail and thoroughness. QZ you’re checking for symptoms of infection to let people into an evacuation camp during a zombie apocalypse and TNMN you’re making sure doppelgangers don’t get into an apartment building.

After beating both of those 100% I was waiting for Security 51 which came out a couple of days ago but I’ve been working too much to play it. It’s like Papers Please but you’re guarding an alien lab. My girlfriend can’t believe I come home from my job as a security guard just to play security guard games. Contraband Police is on sale so I picked that up today too, it’s more of the same but it scratches an itch.

Thanks for the reminder. I’ve seen the show somewhere around 9999 times but never got around to the books.

Hey, I’m not saying they’re bad, I’m glad you enjoy them. It just doesn’t sound like it’s for me and that’s fine too.

I hadn’t really thought about it, I just got negative vibes I guess. Since you asked I went back to reread it and examine what I was feeling.

It’s the most-watched game show in the galaxy!

Straight away, the framing of it is that it’s all a big game, which combined with the general opinions being about how it’s so funny and that it’s “popcorn” and whatever puts me off because I read this as it being unlikely to take anything seriously.

In a flash, every human-erected construction on Earth–from Buckingham Palace to the tiniest of sheds to all the trucks and cars–collapses in a heap, sinking into the ground.

The buildings and all the people inside, they’ve all been atomized and transformed into the dungeon: an 18-level labyrinth filled with traps, monsters, and loot. A dungeon so enormous, it circles the entire globe.

Great. If this were it I’d be in.

Only a few dare venture inside. But once you’re in, you can’t get out. And what’s worse, each level has a time limit. You have but days to find a staircase to the next level down, or it’s game over. In this game, it’s not about your strength or your dexterity. It’s about your views and your followers. It’s about building an audience and killing those goblins with style.

You can’t just survive here. You gotta survive big.

You gotta fight with vigor, with excitement. You gotta make them stand up and cheer. And if you do have that “it” factor, you may just find yourself with a following.

Now it’s a battle royale game, which I’m not into, and it’s all about this streamer/reality tv culture that I’m really not into. Like the very first line this screams to me that there won’t be much weight to anything. The comedy and fighting will all be over the top just for the shock factor which means it’ll probably have to escalate more and more each time.

That’s the only way to truly survive in this game, with the help of the loot boxes dropped upon you by the generous benefactors watching from across the galaxy.

And then finally, I read this as “Do you like dei ex machina? We’ve got 'em!” Can’t say I do.

They call it Dungeon Crawler World. But for Carl, it’s anything but a game.

It just sounds like it’ll all be intolerable reddit-humour. Am I wrong? Sure, probably 🤷‍♂️ But with essentially infinity books to read, I’m fine with judging them by their covers sometimes. And again, I wouldn’t have gone into detail because I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum, but I did get asked.

I just finished The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie after bouncing off a couple of times over the years, and I enjoyed it.

While looking for my next book I decided to try this Dungeon Crawler Carl everyone’s constantly banging on about, but reading the synopsis reminded me why I always change my mind at the last minute and find something else. I know you all love it here but man it sounds awful.

I kind of enjoyed BotW, but once the awe factor of the landscape wore off it was just a load of mostly unrewarding traveling to too many shrines that were too small. Combine the 120 shrines into like 20 that were 6 times longer each and they would have been cool mini-dungeons that I would have happily done, but as it was I was so bored. The main dungeons were good and I still put 80 or so hours in, but unlike everything pre-Skyward Sword I’ll never revisit the game.

Then Tears of the Kingdom was like hey here it all is again but there’s three times as much and this time there’s no WiiU version to emulate so the performance will be so much worse. Nah.

I’m most of the way through Cat Mail Co, it’s a nice time waster. I’m also trying to get into Medieval Dynasty. We’ve got a tiny group of 4 people so far, there’s a lumberjack who collects like 1 log a day, a dude who allegedly gets buckets of water from the well, and a hunter I’ve literally never seen do anything. It’s uh… fun.

I might start another run of Elden Ring. It’s been about a year and a half since I last played, so a nice slow-paced game with a new weapon type might be a bit of fun. I didn’t like the expansion at all, but for the most part the main game is pretty chill.

Since last week’s post I’ve finished Battle Ground (plus Christmas Eve, Little Things, The Law) & Twelve Months from the Dresden Files, and Risen from Alex Verus. That just leaves the last few novellas from both series to cap them off.

After that, it’ll be the latest Incryptid book I missed from earlier this year, then I dunno maybe back to finishing Mercy Thompson before taking a break from urban fantasy for a while.

I finished up the Lord of the Rings trilogy today, loved it. Now I’m about a third of the way through a reread of Battle Ground (Dresden Files) so that I can get to Twelve Months, probably starting on Thursday. I also listened to ~40% of the last Alex Verus book, I’ll be finishing that in the next two workdays too. This is the one good thing about working night shifts in security.