Bit frustrated because I am up against my video game archnemesis in Pathfinder : Wrath of the Righteous right now, namely the long hard multi-stage boss battle.
Because they are hard, I end up having to do them over and over again. And because they are multi-stage, I end up having to do the same shit over and over again just to get to the part where I die.
And I freaking HATE that.
I have very low repetition tolerance. Kind of comes with my outrageously high need for mental stimulation. Repetition is by its nature not very stimulating.
I’ve had that overwhelming need for mental stimulation my whole life, by the way.
That’s why I had little use for toys and loved books. Books provided the steady supply of stimulation I craved.
Between that, TV, and eventually video games,. I got by.
Anyhow, this t is frustrating me, though I am glad to know I am not alone in this.
Because the fight is brutally unfair. The first phase is challenging, fighting the baddie Areshkagal as a group. The second is trivial – it’s just a bunch of the exact same enemies you’ve been fighting by the dozens just to get through the dungeon and get to this damned boss fight in the first place.
But in the third stage, Arrest Kegels splits into four equal versions of herself and that’s just way too much to handle because any one of them can shred one of my warriors without even slowing down, and there’s only six of us.
My healer Daeren can bring people back from the brink of death (and beyond), but only one at a time, and when they can take out 4 of you each turn, math is not on your side.
So things are rather rough. I’ve tried optimizing in every way I can think of – and I can think of a LOT – and I have made some progress.
Now, on a good try, I can take out 2 of them. So I am half way there.
Plus, I have two exit strategies :
- The classic : get the fuck out of there and come back when I have leveled up and can bring more firepower and hit points to the game, or…
- The shameful one : Actually just give in to the demon’s demands and agree to be her agent in the world.
And that’s not that bad an option. She mostly just wants me to kill someone I was totally going to kill anyhow, so it’s not like it’s a huge compromise.
So right now I keep going mostly out of sheer stubborn pride. Eventually I may give in and take one of those two options but for now, I keep slugging away.
But that does put me in a kind of low key funk. That’s always the case when I am stuck in a video game. I suppose that’s part of the price of admission, at least if the game is good enough to get me emotionally involved.
If it wasn’t, I’d just play something else.
More after the break.
Bump in the road
Typing this into a LibreOffice document because there has been an oops.
Seems Joe forgot to pay the Shaw cable bill, so right now, we don’t got no internet.
Which sucks, obviously. Them intarwebs is mighty handy. Practically everything I do involves the Net (remember when we called it that?) on some level.
For example, of the five games I happen to have installed on my tablet, only one of them, a goth-y sort of action game called Shadow Hunters, works sans internet.
Even though none of them have a persistent world they need to constantly update, nor do they rely on a whole lot of interpersonal communication.
I wonder if someone has written a “dummy internet” program for Android that emulates an internet connection in order to keep these nervous Nelly games happy enough so you can play them.
It could even monitor what the games are sending and receiving when you play them online so it can replicate it when you are offline.
Um, actually, now that I type that out, it sounds all kinds of shady. Forget I said anything. In fact, forget this entire conversation. If this sort of thing is possible, don’t come after me when someone does it.
I am a science fiction writer and that means I have a license to speculate about technology!
Anyhow, so yeah, no internet for the moment. Julian is currently out on a mission to rectify the situation by paying the lovely people at Shaw the money we owe them.
I played a small part in this diminutive debacle because I have fielded a few robocalls that said they were very important billing messages from Shaw but I hung up on them because, being obvious robocalls, I thought they were scammers.
We get around six to ten scam calls a month here, so it’s not implausible. What was not plausible to me was the notion that Joe wasn’t paying the cable bill.
Nonsense. We are solid, sensible people, and we don’t do that kind of thing.
One of us is even employed.
But I cast no stones. My house is nothing but glass. I have a long history of letting things slide and behaving in an irresponsible fashion in regards to things remarkably like this, so trust me when I say I am not judging Joe in the slightest.
Shit happens, man. Excrement occurs. These things can happen to anybody.
Hopefully it will not be an extended outage. But I admit to grave misgivings. Shaw is kind of a monopoly and they do things when they feel like it.
Actually, forget all that. It appears Julian’s mission was a rousing success and the blesses of the Inter-tubes once more rain upon our domain.
My fears of monopolistic foot-dragging were, it seems, unfounded.
Thank freaking God.
Yup., we are now back in the safety and comfort of my browser and God is in His Heaven and all is right upon the land.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.