What I Played (And Watched) This Week (10/25/2020)
I actually haven’t played games that much this week, I got a month trial of Amazon Prime because we needed to get a piece for our wall mount before the weekend, so we could install it over a weekend. So while we have a month of Prime, we’ve been trying to take advantage of watching everything we could on Prime Video before canceling it and not giving Amazon any more money. Kay and I watched the 3 available seasons of Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, I’ve been watching Gear Top Grand Tour, and our current goal is to finish all of The Expanse before our trial runs out in early November.
Yakuza Kiwami 2: I don’t have much to say yet about Kiwami 2 yet, I’ve only played the first chapter. The visual upgrade between Kiwami 1 and Kiwami 2 was immediately noticeable. Excited to play more once I finish cramming TV.
Hades: I am now up to 8 clears in Hades, the story is still good, the gameplay is still good. I will keep playing Hades, it is good.
Hearthstone: Hearthstone announced a new Expansion, and an entirely new game mode: Duels. The new game mode is a PvP version of their Dungeon Run solo modes. Each player starts with 15 HP and a 16 card deck which includes a powerful “treasure” card and after each game you add cards and/or treasures until you either lose 3 times or win 12 times. I haven’t actually played this new mode because it’s currently locked behind the expensive pre-order for the new expansion. It will be out of this “early access” state soon enough and I won’t have to play $80 to try it out. Full runs of the new mode seem to take about 90 minutes to complete (less if you’re bad) this makes me much less likely to watch youtube videos of complete Duals runs when they’re the same length as a feature film. I enjoy watching Battlegrounds videos, they tend to be 20-30 minutes long especially when some of the waiting time has been edited out. I wonder how the watchability will affect Duels, even in streams on Twitch.
The Expanse: We have watched up to Season 2, Episode 7 so far. And I generally like it. Most of the characters are fun and interesting, I’m a big fan of Miller and Amos especially. The pacing of the show, especially in the second season so far is SO FAST, a huge thing happened at the end of episode 6, and Episode 7 starts with another huge event starting. The characters rarely seem to get any time to reflect on the bonkers things that happened to them. I can think of one scene where Alex (the mostly boring pilot with a Texan(?) accent) was sad in a bar for about a minute. I want more scenes like that, where I can get into these people’s heads and figure out what they’re thinking about. I will try and finish it out
*Slight Spoiler thoughts below*
I think “the protomolecule” is both a dumb name, and mostly distracts from the stuff I’m more interested in, which is the politicking between Earth, Mars, and the OPA. Especially once it was revealed (as far as I know in 2:07) that it wasn’t really a weapon, but more of a generic Mad Science scheme to “Advance Humanity” or whatever.