gamerdad There is a frustration I have with RPG games that comes in the form of the difficulty curve. Oh, sure. You may be one of those people who likes tough games, but here in my late-40s I’ve realized that I play games for the zen story and flow vibe and not the epic monumental challenge.

That said, I still enjoy games like Fallout and Skyrim for their vast worlds and complex mechanics.

So, back to that frustration. The frustration is the early game when your weakaf character is constantly getting his backside handed to him and I, as the gamer, needs to revisit dungeons or fights or quests that I’ve already attempted six times but have failed because I don’t have a strong enough bit of gear or high enough stats to deal with some random boss at the end of an hour of effort working through a challenge. I call this the early game reluctance of replaying a game: knowing I’m gonna need to grind through both the tutorial stages and the weakling phase until I get to the fun beefed up phase where I can just push through and only suffer character death occasionally. It usually lasts about ten to fifteen hours in these games, a time through which I punch with impatient grind trying to up my stats in any way possible (without amping up the difficulty too much) so that the balance is better for all that zen vibe flow yadda-yadda.

I’ve been replaying Skyrim for what seems like, I wanna say, the sixth or seventh time and last night it finally started to feel like I was creeping out of the early game phase. Better loot. More manageable fights. Fewer surprise death scenes. Scumming my way past this is never my proudest of achievements, but I’m just too old to want to trigger crunch an enemy to the redline of mutual death. I just want to sit on the couch and listen to a podcast while I effortlessly thump a few baddies. Is that too much to ask?

8r4d A chilly morning #running off the 201st edition of our local #parkrun also turned into a milestone for AD. The #rivervalley looks chillier than it actually was tho, as e had a bit of a weekend reprieve from the brutal #winter cold.

bradsalomons It’s been a weird week of snow and stuff and such and I haven’t done much #writing or had many #coffee sessions, but with Friday here and the month settling into some end of year finality, I made it out to get some words on the page. Of course, I’m sitting here posting this, so you can speculate on exactly just how well that is working out, but—

adventuredog #winter #sunset #walk

8r4d One of the few perks of living on a bus route is that we are first in the queue to having our streets cleaned after the #snow falls.

gamerdad I’m reluctantly optimistic that my first year on this farm will be productive. During the tutorial the game encouraged me to plant for crops of canola. I did. And now in later November with the threat of snow just one game cycle away, I’m not sure the canola will do much more than wilt in the field.

I hate to be nitpicking but this is just one of the little details in the game that could use some work from the developers.

About 32 hours into my save I’ve encountered a lot of great things, but a few other not so great features. The driving AI for example is laughably bad at navigating the town. If—big if—it accepts my request to drive from point A to a carefully selected point B often just roughly in the vicinity of where I need it to go—if—if—about half the time it will crash into a bridge railing, get hung up on a fence, or try to drive through an arch for which fitting would be an optimistic dream.

I get the little message—or don’t get any message—and drop what i’m doing to go supervise.

Ugh. Is like a management job or something.

8r4d Scenes from some ordinary day in November. Part 3.

8r4d Scenes from some ordinary day in November. Part 2.

8r4d Scenes from some ordinary day in November. Part 1.

adventuredog This again, huh? #snow

gamerdad Another sick day and yet another day on the couch exploring the land of Skyrim. This one may almost think from looking at my screenshots today that I was in full on tourist mode.

In fact, I worked thru a good chunk of the opening act, made it all the way to a second major city, and bought myself a home in the first one. Even so, there were a lot of pretty sights along the way.

The last time I played this game was on the Nintendo Switch, a lesser console but very portable. And even that was an update from my first play thrus on PC and PS3. I knew there had been upgrades applied for current generation consoles, but while a lot of the little things blend in I do think the spectacular landscape showcases the improvements from that effort.

I’ve written this here before but I’m not a graphics-first guy. I will play graphically inferior games without hesitation if the gameplay is good. So, while a lot of folks lose their minds over frame rates and resolutions and such, those things are more of my cherry on top.

Even so, everyone loves a cherry. And between slaying rogue wolves and picking potion ingredients and sneaking up on bandit camps, it’s nice to get a great view too.

gamerdad In an effort to balance out some of the farming simulator stimulation I have been bouncing between the world of Skyrim for what I am going to call my sixth official attempt to play this game. I have made real progress in the past, but have actually never beat the game.

Can it be beat? I mean, does it actually have an end or do you just eventually run out of things to do? I honestly don’t know.

The Special Edition with a bunch of packaged DLC was on a crazy good sale a while back and I couldn’t resist a new attempt. So. Here goes…