May post #1 What I've been playing lately: Resident Evil 4 OG, Skyrim*, Fallout:New Vegas again again

 More filler content! I played Original RE4 for a few sweet days in April. So good. I didn't play Professional this time like I did before, I just went for Normal to have some fun and challenge. Ashley wearing the suit of armour though made me think I should have tried Professional again. I already have the achievement and am a decent RE4 player so it would have been nice. Next time!

Skyrim I briefly picked up before casting aside again - just not that into it. I pivoted into GTA4 instead and you can see how that went in April.

FNV continues to be quite possibly my fave game of all time, or certainly in the top 5-10 games. I played a very simple challenge game of it: no companions! I always play now on Very Hard and Hardcore Mode but I always make sure to recruit ED-E and various other characters. My small armies would usually wipe out the enemy before they ever made contact. This time, I was on my own.

Resident Evil 4

I've beaten it before at least once or twice on the GameCube, then again on Normal and Professional on the PC. So it had been a while I played it on Normal. Was tough! 

But I had unlocked Leon's mobster outfit which was kind of cool but critically Ashely was wearing armour, so she was invincible and could not be captured by the enemy. Should have tried Professional!

Can't remember how I died the first time, but I think the latter 2 were that damned speedboat at the end.

Skyrim

I played this very briefly. Updates took a MILLION years.

 Like, I did the starting quests and left the burned down town with the rebels this time I think. I got as far as Whiterun and the initial Dragon fight but when they told me to haul myself to some dungeon after meeting the Greybeards I was just like UGH. 

It took a lot for me to finish Skyrim the first time a few years back, I could never get into it but once I got addicted to the smithing and enchanting it sort of worked out and the DLCs were interesting but eh.

FNV: Very Hard, Hardcore Mode, No COMPANIONS No Unique Weapons

I realised that I had never done a 'no-companion' run of this. I usually don't bother with companions in 3 and 4 but I always recruited everyone in New Vegas. More quests to do so more XP but also just nice to have a small army backing me up. I also can't use them as pack mules, human shields or golf caddies.

I did notice on my last couple of Very Hard playthroughs it was harder to keep people alive which was challenging. Some Cazador would poison Boone and he'd die before I could save him etc. Didn't need to worry about that here!

I was watching Shogun at the time so I knew I wanted to get the Katana again in this. So so good. I would want the Slayer perk later so my attacks would be ultra fast. 

Honest Hearts in its entirety (?) :

I did all the DLCs and you must use companions at different stages so I allowed myself to relax my own rules I had imposed on myself. I got to level 50 (with 2 batches of console raiders) but was 4 skill points short of having 100 in every skill! I guess I'll just have to play New Vegas again in a few months...

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I think I'm going to play a chill FFX playthrough, it's been a few years since I beat Penance and maxed out the Sphere Grid and whatnot for all characters. I still haven't won a game of Blitzball in my entire life nor dodged 200 lightning bolts so will focus on that in June, maybe. FFX-2 as well which I briefly started before.

I may also return to FF13 and do its sequels. It's only been 4 years in August since my legendary 120 hour playrthough for 100% completion...

Love/Hate #41 Golden Sun 1 (first full replay since 2013 or earlier???)

I first played this wayyyy back in maybe 2003? 2004? Apparently it released in Europe in early 2002 but I don't think I got a Game Boy Advance until Christmas 2002 or 2003. So anyway, it's been about 20 years since I first played it. I used the Nintendo Offical Magazine 'guide' to find my way through most of the game and most of the secrets. Some were omitted and the 'guide' was not exactly thorough hence my use of  ''. But I cleared it anyway, so added it to my short list of cleared JRPGs in the early 2000's alongside the Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask.

I would go on to complete it a few more times here and there from about 2003 - 2013 and then I stopped playing the Game Boy Advance on a whim from then on. At some stage around 2011 onward I discovered emulators and mainly used them to play Pokémon games at 1000% speed by holding down the space bar. Very handy for a quick fix of old nostalgia games. Around 2021 or so on my desktop PC I had acquired the Golden Sun ROM and played as far as Sol Sanctum. I must have gotten bored and wandered off but RETURNED in early 2023 and blitzed through the old favourite.

I remembered to take some screenshots. I miss having Dropbox on all the time to take screenshots of whatever and save them. Anyway, here I am at level 23 and with most of the Djinni. As numerous sources and videos will tell you, having the Djinn is almost essential to playing Golden Sun. Take Isaac's 7 Earth Djinn away and he loses like half his HP.

One of my fave mute protagonists. But he's not really mute. I must have accidentally cut the 'c' off the end of his name at character creation, oh well. 'Isaa' is the best character, highest attack, good solid spells and stats all-round and great versatility - he can heal, revive, attack and be useful in dungeons. As a fellow Earth Adept, I appreciate him greatly.

The Overworld is so pretty, I always liked it. Even still looks good 20 years later on a 32 inch curved monitor, full screen. That overworld theme is a bop as well, the composer also did Star Ocean and whatnot so no wonder I like it.

Garet, the fiery best friend. I used to use the code at the start to rename him 'Andy' at least once due to character limits. 'Royce' would fit the character limits now ;) I would usually give Garet the cursed equipment and Cleric Ring as recommended. My last playthrough which I still have on the GBA saved I experimented with mixing Djinn; I had made Isaac and Garet Ninja's I think by giving them mixtures of Djinn because the stats were insane. This time in 2023, I stuck with the vanilla setups.

Ivan, the Air Adept. As above, I kept him vanilla so he just mainly casted spells like Storm Ray and Whirlwind to help out the gang. Some Impacts as well as I experimented more with making Isaac attack more instead of constant Earth psynergy. Ivan is the speedster but is frail, he will be downed at some point in the playthrough but nothing some Water of Life or Revive can't fix.

Good old Mia. I think I renamed her 'Aghna' in an old playthrough. As usual I just had her cast 'Wish' over and over to heal everybody but in this playthrough she contributed quite a bit with spells like Tundra and Glacier to kill enemies faster. Often combat can be resolved throughout the game by just having the 4 adepts spam spells for one round maybe two and win.

Mia's selection of Water psynergy for the field. She can cure individuals and the group, remove poison (almost never used) freeze puddles, create puddles and lift rocks.

Ivan's Psynergy is probably the most useful. Whirlwind comes up a few critical times, never an optional spell. Cloak is apparently an optional, missable spell but so handy for the optional dungeons and some sections. Halt is possibly also optional but useful for a few situations. I gave him the spare Frost gem, he has the most Power Points so no harm in him casting instead of Mia. Mind Read and Reveal are great spells: you can assign Mind Read to a shoulder button - A and S on the keyboard - and read almost every NPCs mind. Cool way to double the amount of dialogue of some NPCs, helps worldbuilding and reveals secrets. Reveal is one of the best spells and reveals hidden stuff all over the world.

Garet starts with Move but I gave him the Force Gem as well which you use a lot about halfway into the game and in some select puzzles. He has the least magic so it doesn't matter really.

The great Isaac has a couple of Cure spells and Revive, which is great. Saves you from using expensive items to revive people. I gave Isaac the Catch beads which are handy for some puzzles and collectibles. He starts with Move and Retreat, handy for getting out of dungeons quickly rather than trekking back.

A sample of Isaac's Psynergy. Ragnorok is single target but relatively cheap and does over 100 damage usually so is a nice one. I like Quake Sphere because it targets loads of enemies but the rest are good too. Mother Gaia is the top spell in my book.

I fought Deadbeard at a fairly low level I think. He's the resident superboss of this game and completely optional. With the help of the Djinni who give you raised Resistance and protections his spells did very little damage. Just use them, then a big summon for a few hundred damage and repeat.

After you beat Deadbeard you get the Cursed Mail and can then get out of the optional dungeon. It's mainly comprised of fixed bosses and no battles otherwise, plus a puzzle on every level bar the last one with Deadbeard. As with most of the puzzles in this game, they are laughably easy.

The world map. I always liked how mountainouse and riverine it is. I stole the name 'Gondowan' from the southern continent here. 'Angara' too became 'Ankhara'. It influenced some of my early Age of Wonders maps which I would have been making around this time, 2002-2008.

I recorded me fighting the final bosses but something happened and the recording went black. I'll include it as bonus material below but it's just the audio for 90% of it.

Isaac's only 'words' in the game. Apparently he talks a lot in the sequels. 

The final screen. After the 'point of no return' pictured above there is a short sequence and a lot of shti goes down setting up the next game but other than an extremely brief look at it at some point I have yet to play. Hopefully I cna follow up at some stage with me playing GS2 and Dark Dawn. Have to finish the story, 20 years later!

April 2022 Penultimate campaign update Crystals of Power June 2020-present

 For April I’ll just do a 5e campaign update, probably the second to last one as they are rapidly approaching level 20 and the end of every major and minor plot in the game. Will do a final write-up after the campaign ends in the summer/autumn of 2022 most likely. Hopefully I’ll finish Dark Souls 1 one day soon!

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Last time I updated in October they had just defeated a huge army of demons and were level 13. Now they have just ticked over into level 16.

^Fighting the boss of the crab army in the Water Shrine. I just used an adult black dragon as a template.

While they were fighting the demon army they were made aware of the fact the so-called Dwarflake had started to grow and was now a Dwarfsea, covering miles and miles of the countryside with sterile water. Demon and human alike were drowning though thankfully it was a slow, gradual flow of water and much of the savannah here is lowly-populated at the moment.

In order to get to the bottom of this lake and figure out what was going on they needed a certain magic boat which the wizard in the nearby town had built for just this purpose. Problem was they were being held hostage now by the evil Queens’ armies in the town so they resolved to break in there and take it back.

It was quite impressive how the wizard flew about on his broomstick blasting squads of soldiers, the rogue went about stealthily trying to scout out the boat’s location and the barbarian and paladin and NPCs waited patiently outside the walls. Eventually the wait got too much and the barbarian hopped over the wall and got stuck in!

They managed to find the boat and hostage wizard in the big tavern in town which the Queen’s representative Xara had taken as her HQ. They fought their way in and managed to secure the wizard and the boat and left so it was a sort of tactical draw and retreat. There were a lot of regular soldiers but also a dozen veterans and various heavy hitters, such as an Archmage, a chief assassin and his buddies as well as Xara herself and her Shield Guardian.

Before leaving, the Second Queen, the Queen of the West, appeared before them as an Astral image and declared she would march up and slaughter them all for killing her younger sister, the Third Queen of the East, many moons ago. Fair enough. They left and made their way to the Dwarflake.

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It was a breeze crossing the Dwarfsea, they managed to dodge most of the random encounters though they did investigate the ruins of Andarr, one of the first cities hit by the Confederate-Demon armies. All seemed quiet there until they bumped into the Goristro, a living demonic siege engine. Attempts to parlay failed and they once again skilfully retreated but the wizard player managed to cast Banish successfully and sent them back to their home plane - and they were grateful!

^my plan of the map I wanted to create to show the party what was what. The dark blue in the top right corner is the original Dwarflake location. Pink square in middle with yellow flag is Moonwheat. Light blue mass is the new Dwarfsea. Green are hills and grey are the mountains.

Submerging into the underwater source of the flood, a great Dwarven underwater city, they fought a Dragon Turtle. Once again they tactically retreated but bumped into a Marid and his gang of weirdos. They fought for a brief period and then a three-way fight ensued when the Dragon Turtle got involved. The Marid and his boys fled with the boat and the Turtle made friends with the party.

^The wizard set the vegetation here on fire. Of course. And the rogue hopped on the DT back. Of course.

What followed was a journey into a gigantic Dwarven city under a lake that was filled with magical cannons that would shoot fire, acid, frost and so on at the party if they opened certain doors. They partially smartened up and used mage hand to open it and looked into rooms at angles but they frequently found ways to get shot anyway! This was a recurring source of amusement and rage.

Crabs, lobstrosities, hydras, giant crocodiles… the place was filled with various aquatic enemies. Many fights were had, some were close-run affairs. They also found loads of treasure as well, most of it water-related some not. They had found numerous ways to breathe underwater and walk on water and so on. There was a month-long hiatus here for Christmas and so on but in 2022 we got back to it. They befriended a Naiad who guided them through the city a bit.

They fought a Merreonoloth/Wastrilith/Vargouille alliance only to make so much noise a Lizard army appeared behind them and the Morkoth-Marid-Balhonnoth Trio reappeared too. The barbarian, rogue and wizard along with paladin, sorcerer and archmage NPCs managed to destroy them all.

^The Crystal of Water from the Doomstones Warhammer Fantasy first edition game.

They finally reached the end of the dungeon after 9 sessions, and a great ritual was taking place in the grand chamber led by a Water Genasi. The rogue managed to find the Crystal of Water and ended the flooding of the world. The party then proceeded to absolutely destroy the Water Genasi’s entourage but then something happened when the wizard player went from slinging spells into the chamber and misty stepped inside. The whole world went red and the Flames card of the Deck of Many Things activated. He had drawn it many sessions ago and finally a Pit Fiend emerged along with an Ice Devil. The sorcerer NPC betrayed the party as well, aligning with the devils. Despite all this they managed to defeat the various threats and win the day. The paladin player had returned for the recent sessions but decided to retire her character and gave the Crystal of Earth to the barbarian, which gave him even more HP. Fun!

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Now with 3 crystals in their possession, all crystals seemed to ‘point’ strongly toward the west, Steel Mountain, where the Fire Crystal was. It had been stolen from them in Session 33 when the gunslinger artificer shot and killed the fighter of the party in an arena match. Now at Session 57-59 they began to climb Steel Mountain and fought their way through a slew of Giants and machinery. Some sort of civil war is going on here, the Stone and Cloud Giants have split from the Hill, Fire, Frost and Storm Giants. The Stone and Cloud Giants don’t like all the new technology they were using and the alliance with the Queens so have rebelled. The players sided with them and are now carving their way up the mountain to get the Crystal of Fire.

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Ingame DAYS:	52
Ari/Mo	80002
Ephrim	211913
Erin	211913
Scorch	211913
Kills s59	1337
Current Time	08:00
Wishes cast	Sc2/2 Mo 1/2,

Scorch used his last wish to revive Ephrim the barbarian from death; Ephrim is currently vulnerable to lightning and a Storm Giant Lightning Sworded him to instant death.

Their experience points have just ticked over to level 16.

Just noticed they have an elite kill number as of session 59. Session 60 is going to be a special one...

I keep track of the days as certain things are dependent on it and its fun. For example the ring that summons berserkers will recharge on day 53 and indeed on day 52 an Acid Phoenix they control was reborn from an egg.

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Session 46	50
baba	7200
green hag	1800
sea hag	1100
lakour basics 42	2100
lakour sgts 2	2200
Session 47	30
bheur 1	2900
24 basics	1200
lakour sgts 2	2200
lak vets 2	5000
archmage 1	8400
Session 48	no kills
Session 49	1
water ele	1800
Session 50	14
water ele 3	5400
water ele myrm	2900
hydra 2	7800
archdruid	8400
giant crab 6	23400
giant lobster	7800
Session 51	4
RGBGSlaads5	13600
Session 52	13
stone defs 13	14300
Session 53	16
wastrilith	10000
merrenoloth 4	2800
vargouille 6	1200
lizard shaman 5	2250
Session 54	53
lizard shaman 1	450
lizardfolk 48	4800
mar/mor/bal 3	21600
lizard king 1	1100
Session 55	11
steam meph 7	350
water ele 3	5400
water mym 1	2900

Session 56	12
zikran	8400
water mym 1	2900
steam meph 5	250
giant shark 2	3600
kettle	11500
pit fiend	25000
ice devil	11500
Session 57	11
hill giant 6	10800
turrets 2	2000
fgd 1	11500
cannons 2	4000
Session 58	9
hill giant 7	12600
hellfire 1	15000
fire giant 1	5000
Session 59	8
hill giants 2	3600
fire giant 1	5000
frost giant 1	3900
storm giant quin	15000
parasite behir	7200
berserkers 2	900

You can see above how they transition from attacking Moonwheat garrison to assorted water themed foes and finally back to the giants on Steel Mountain. The future is full of more giants and mechs, assorted humanoids and elementals and hopefully if they make it to the end celestials.

Almost every session is violent now. We are near the end of the road, the final quarter, so it will be a series of fights with less enemies overall but way more powerful. I am very excited to see what happens. I am particularly interested in the end of the Giant saga, the resolution of the Second Queen's challenge and how they deal with the final Queen. Also there is the small matter of the Crystals of Power, the Doomstones, which may pop off in some fashion...

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Session number versus what level the party were at the time:

session #	level
1	1
2	2
3	2
4	3
5	3
6	3
7	4
8	4
9	4
10	4
11	5
12	5
13	5
14	5
15	5
16	5
17	6
18	6
19	6
20	6
21	7
22	7
23	7
24	7
25	7
26	7
27	8
28	8
29	9
30	9
31	9
32	9
33	10
34	10
35	10
36	10
37	11
38	11
39	11
40	12
41	12
42	12
43	12
44	12
45	13
46	13
47	13
48	14
49	14
50	14
51	14
52	14
53	14
54	14
55	14
56	14
57	15
58	15
59	15
60	16

Obviously I'm using experience points and a less combatative campaign might see players roleplaying for hours and go through multiple sessions at certain levels. Still interesting to see how the progression went; they remained at level 14 so long there because they were stuck in that darned Water Shrine. They still have a ton of fights coming up but they should make it to level 20 at just the right time.

^some of the final maps on Roll20. Not many left to go. It's been a blast!

I don't know how many more games are in this, I was hoping to be finished by summertime. Not that I'm in a mad rush to end it but would like a little break followed by a second campaign hopefully. 6th edition might be gracing us by 2024 or whenever so would be cool to get another long campaign in before then.

I'd love to run another tournament in the game but I think they just don't work at most levels, the various classes are too different. Maybe in the next campaign.