To be perfectly honest, I’m not perfectly honest.

Or to put it another way, I am far too honest to claim to be totally honest. I know that, while I am a naturally honest person with little intent to deceive, there are times when I have lied to cover my ass and that, ya know, counts.

I also know that no matter how hard I strive to be honest with myself, my self-exploration has proven, time after time, that I still have entire continents of delusion and madness left to discover and exploit.

So while I might fool myself into thinking I have achieved some kind of existentially rugged mental clarity, deep down I know I am just another fool.

just one of seven and a half billion blind and dazed mud-faced monkeys bumbling through the dark alleys and blinding side streets and dead-end cul-de-sacs of life thinking they know something despite constantly stubbing their toes and barking their shins against the hard surfaces and jagged corners of our painful ignorance.

Or maybe that’s just me.

Today’s been OK so far, i guess. My back pain issues seem to be solving themselves. The brutal agony has dulled back down to hard twinges.

I’m still getting me some massage therapy though, if I can wrangle it. As far as i am concerned, that prescription for it is a golden ticket and I am totally cashing it in.

Besides, the problem is not completely gone. And it could come back at any time.

So I am getting a professional massage out of all this, god dammit.

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Hey, some games

Got one of those packages of games off of Fanatical today.

it was a bit more expensive than usual. $20 for 5 games, as opposed to my usual like $8 for 12 games.

Then again, these are all top level games. Maybe not AAA, but A. A and a half.

There’s five but i have only played three of them so far, so I will only be reviewing the ones I have played.

I find that to be way easier on the imagination.

So, with only 21 more words of ado (long story), here is the ones I have played one two three four five six seven eight :

Undead Horde. The premise : you are a necromancer freed from the stained-glass vessel a paladin trapped you in by the peck of a curious chicken.

Whom you immediately kill and make into your first zombie slave.

There’s gratitude for ya.

As you can tell, it’s not exactly a totally serious game. It’s basically an RTS game with some fun features and a dry, droll sense of humour I adore.

And for what it’s worth, it does give me the feeling of what it is like to be a real zombie-raising necromancer, at least strategically. So far, my job consists mostly of hovering around the periphery of the fracas between the forces of “good” and my ever-growing army of the dead, ready to resurrect the casualties.

So far I am quite enjoying it. We will see how long that lasts. Generally speaking, RTS is not for me. I always do great at the beginning and then hit a brick wall where my brain cannot handle the computations in realtime and shuts down and that’s the end of that.

Still, the macabre elements might inspire me to persevere yet,. So the jury is still out on this one for me. Even if it ends up not being my cuppa, it’s still a fine cuppa indeed.

Shadows Awakening. A Diablo-type game (lord knows what those are called now) with a fun twist and an enjoyably grimdark tone.

I am totally down with the grimdark. Love it. Couldn’t be such a Witcher 3 fan if I didn’t.

This game’s version is a little more cartoony, but still my cup of meat. Full of demons and death gods and necromancy and sigils and all that wonderful stuff.

Plus a complication. You play a demon called the Devourer, and your main gig is possessing mortals and making them your Puppets.

What it amounts to is a dual-realms setup where you, the Devourer, live in the spirit realm and your Puppet lives in the world of the living and you can switch between them when you like.

And you will have to do so often to solve puzzles. Which is tiresome, to be honest.

So I don’t know if I will last with this one. Depends on how hard they harp on this whole realm switching thing.

Otherwise, it seems quite good. The sort of game I have been looking for, to be honest.

But this whole switching thing could really get on my nerves real fast. I don’t want to solve puzzles, I just want to kill stuff, dammit.

Tower of Time. In this game…. I have no idea. I haven’t tried it yet.

Yup, I messed up. Thought I’d installed four and tried three, but i installed three and tried two, so, here we are.

All that word counting for nothing!

Well what else. Oh, Rigmor of Bruma. Skyrim mod. Review.

Don’t go there. Seriously. I played through the whole fucking thing and so i can definitively say it wasn’t worth it.

Basically, playing it is like being trapped in bad fan fiction written by a teenaged girl. You spend way more time listening to her angst about her life than you do fighting evil, and I don’t play games to listen to scene after scene of melodramatic monologue.

Oh, and when there WAS combat, it was seriously unbalanced. It’s like it wasn’t playtested at all. Like someone just said, “Um, and then ten dudes attack you”.

Well there’s a reason you don’t usually fight ten enemies at once in the main game and that’s because it’s really fucking hard. The game isn’t build for that kind of combat. There is no way to defend yourself against that many enemies at the same time.

It maybe would have been fair if I was a mage with big area of attack spells, but I ain’t. I’m just some schmuck with a sword and a shield.

I only finished the thing because I am a compulsive finisher. And for what it’s worth, I did grow attached to the titular teenager.

Which made the final scene (SPOILER ALERT) where you have to tell her to go on without you all the more brutally devastating to me.

Do you know how hard it is for me to send someone I love out into the cold and dark alone? Gouge my heart out with a rusty grapefruit spoon why don’t ya.

Then I started playing the sequel, but luckily this time common sense and survival instinct kicked in and I ragequit the fucking thing.

So don’t go there unless teen angst is your fetish.

And if it is, this mod will probably cure you of it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.