Greetings. I am Stebloke, and I am a bit strange. This website contains my blog, where you can read about the things I create, the games I play, and any other things I get involved in. I make this blog mostly because I like to look back on the things I do and feel nostalgic, but also because it really does help motivate me to keep doing things.
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It's been a long, frustrating time for fans of tabletop action such as I. This stupid fucking pandemic has meant that no dice chuckin', card shufflin', or miniature mayhem has been going on in nearly a year.
Blows. Blows hard.

And yet, one or two occasional things have happened to help me get a little fix here and there.

On the boardgaming front, there have been a few efforts to play some games over the internet. In addition, I've recently picked up a pretty cool game called Detective, which is a deduction game set in 1940s LA. I've been playing through it in solo mode, to varying degrees of success. Looking forward to when we can all get together again, where I will be taking the Chisel role and messing with everyone else while they try and solve the cases.

For something different, we have also tried a couple of online escape rooms. We did a few of these a couple of years back and enjoyed them, so I was looking forward to diving into the web-based equivalents. Unfortunately, the first one, which was called Clue Kingdom, was very disappointing. Didn't really have an escape room feel at all, rather just a series of puzzles on consecutive web pages. I literally could have made it myself.

Thankfully, the one we tried a few weeks later was much better. Trapped On A Train by ClueHQ made it feel much more like an actual escape room, with 360^o environments you can move between, and puzzles that all link to each other. Oh yeah, and a frickin countdown clock! What's the point of an escape room without one of those?
It was actually funny at the end, as the game claimed we had smashed it, whereas in reality we only had 22 seconds left. We cut it so close partly because of me, as just like in the first ever escape room I did in person, my usefulness tanked in the second half. Hopefully I'll do better when we inevitably go back and do their other room.

On the wargaming front, my efforts have died down a little since Christmas, and I need to get back into it pronto. I was supposed to be painting my epic Evil Sunz, but after making my own clan I just had to start painting them instead. I've done them all except the Grots which are mostly basecoated, with the Boarboyz to do after that. If only I could finish something before moving on to something else...

Been spending some more time in Gotham, and have managed to apprehend all the villains and collect all of Riddler's trophies in Arkham Knight. I'm still not sure why I really bother with all the trophies and crap in these games, as I didn't really get much out of it in Asylum or City, and didn't really get much out of it in this. But I just had to shut the annoying little shit up again.
Also, why did they make the Riddler kind-of the end boss in these games, as you spend way more time hunting him than dealing with any of the other members of Batman's Rogues Gallery?

With the main game out of the way I went through the six mini-games, called the Arkham Episodes, which I think had all been DLC when the game originally released. In the episodes, you play as other characters instead of Batman. Surprisingly, the one I enjoyed the most was the one where you play as Red Hood, one of my least favourite characters in this game. There was just something about his play style and no-nonsense attitude that made it that bit more gratifying than the others.

The least favourite episode I did was the last one, which happened to be Catwoman's. The entire series of Arkham games up to this point has rewarded a certain approach to fights, by being tactical and precise. But the end fight in this was incredibly frustrating, and in contrast punishes you for trying to fight in the "proper" way. I tried and tried a bunch of times, with absolutely no chance, until I settled for just spamming the attack button, which easily beat the fight on my very next attempt. I didn't feel either happy or skilful after that experience. Just relieved.

So now I'm all done with Arkham Knight, and therefore, the entire Arkham series. It's been a wild, mostly very enjoyable, ride.

I've taken the chance to revisit one of my favourite game franchises after GOG released the Batman: Arkham series. This was pretty damn awesome as it had been a long time since I had played any of them, and I'd never played Arkham Knight at all.

I scooped up Knight, and also added City, as City was the best of the ones I had already played, and it also came with the stuff I had not played like the Harley DLC. I figured I could always fire up the old PS3 if I ever wanted to play Asylum or Origins again. Not that I would ever want to play Origins again, but whatever.

So it was into Arkham City first, to act as a refresher before tackling Knight.

There's no doubt about it. This is still an awesome game, even more than 8 years later. Though I must admit, it took a little longer to get into it than I would have thought. It was also a little harder in some of the fights. I'm chalking that all up to me being older and slower now. Sad but true. Though somewhat interestingly, the stealth missions were pretty much a breeze this time round. I can't explain that, because I've certainly not become more patient in my old age.

I spent my time fairly evenly between pushing through the story and doing all the bonus stuff. When I got to the end of the story, I first decided to fully wipe the map like I did back in 2012, but only worked my way through the western half of the map before deciding to move on. After all, this was only an appetiser before the main course.

I also tackled Harley's Revenge for the first time. In this, you play as Robin for most of it, as Batman has been captured by Harley. For such a small new mission, this thing had some serious sneaking around, and Robin doesn't come with all the tools to take out gun-toting creeps like Batman does. Yet it only took a couple of hours at most to punch my way through it, and unsurprisingly, it's more of the same. Can't whinge at that.

I never played Arkham Knight when it first released, as I didn't have a PS4, and on PC it was a buggy mess and Steam only. I guess I should have thought of the game when I finally bought a PS4 just over a year ago, but it slipped through my large mental gaps. Never mind. It was meant to be, it seems.

Before playing the game I assumed I would still get some performance and bug problems, considering the state of the game at launch, and the fact that my computer is nearly as old as the game, and was not exactly a powerhouse even back then. The performance wasn't too bad, even with the better graphics in this. The majority of the time I was running around as Batman I was able to keep a stable 60, and only a few times did it drop. Hell, even Arkham City did that at times on my machine. However, driving around in the Batmobile did cause a lot more stuttering, and it's pretty much convinced me I need a new computer some time this year. Urgh, Windows 10 at last. Not looking forward to that.

The game definitely still has its bugs though, that's for sure. I faced some doozies, such as when I went down an elevator, and when it got to the bottom I somehow clipped up and through the ceiling, trapping me in the elevator shaft. In another session, every time I entered combat, the enemies would not attack me, and the camera would constantly rubber-band to look in one particular direction as if fixated on something. But it's far improved from the shoddy state it launched in.

The gameplay, as Batman at least, was more of the same, just more refined and with even more options than before. Overall, I liked the combat a bit more than the other games, but found it harder. I just found there to be a little less time to react, and there were more enemy types to deal with. Though I loved, and greatly appreciated, the new fear takedowns, making it much faster to take out groups of gunmen, and making the stealth missions a little more bearable.

Batman's mostly enjoyable gameplay was balanced out by something though, and if you've played the game you know what it is - simply the worst thing about this entire game, and that is the Batmobile. I would gladly take more bugs and stealth missions if it meant I could play this game without this stupid vehicle. Simply put, I hated it. I hated the way it controlled. I hated its combat sections. I hated how you had to use it for Riddler challenges. And most of all I hated how it felt like I was in the Batmobile for nearly as much time as I was running around as Batman.
I am so very glad I did not think of playing this game on console. On PC, at least I could quickly switch to mouse and keyboard for the Batmobile combat sections, so that I could aim straight, and then switch back to controller for the driving and Batman sections. So much more comfortable that way.

As of yet, I have not reached a full 100% completion like I did for Asylum and City. Don't get me wrong, I've put a lot of work into the side content, but it turns out this game is so freaking huge that it's taking forever. Some of the side content is also a bit of a drag, so I'm still not sure if I'll ever be fully motivated to get that full 100. But for now it's going to stay on my computer, and I'll dip in and out now and again in between playing other games. I think I owe it, and myself, a good try at least.

Speaking of the side content, some of the DLC missions were odd, and threw up some contradictions with the base game. For example, I used the hacking tool early on in the Mad Hatter's DLC mission, but it would not let me use it elsewhere until I unlocked it in the main story. In another instance, I'd already tackled Firefly in his DLC mission several times, but later on in the base game mission where Batman has to save a bunch of firemen, it came as a shock to everyone involved that Firefly was even around at all.

Overall though, barring the Batmobile sections, and a few crappy boss fights against the Arkham Knight, the game is pretty good. I wouldn't put it above City, which remains my favourite, but this still has a lot of good things going for it, like better graphics, slightly better combat, and much better Batman traversal. Well worth the play through I reckon.

A game I saw a bit of when it came out about a year ago was Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. Now I've not really been engaged with Star Wars for the past couple of years, for Last Jedi shaped reasons, but this piqued my interest. Recently I saw its price had dropped enough for me to snatch it up.

Whatever I may think about the gameplay, the experience of playing it was not a smooth one from a technical standpoint. All the way through the game I had weird little graphics bugs, as some of these screenshots can attest. There was also a ton of frame rate stuttering, and even complete pauses in order to load new assets. Later on in the game I even started to get hard crashes, kicking me out of the game altogether. This crash problem was exacerbated by the fact that there is no way to skip cutscenes. I had to watch a very lengthy one just outside the tomb on Dathomir three times, because the damn game crashed twice as I tried to get back to my ship with a bunch of zombie Nightsisters on my tail.
And this was on a PS4 Pro after some patches. I dread to think of the experience base PS4 players had during the game's release window.

The best things about the game were the story and characters, which I quite liked. Though I'm beginning to wonder exactly how many more Jedi will be added to the ever growing list of Order 66 survivors, when the original trilogy made it seem like only Obi-Wan and Yoda made it. In this game alone we learn that Cal and Cere are still alive, and that does not even count Malicos and the two Inquisitors, who all used to be Jedi as well.

When in battle, sometimes I would feel awesome, and sometimes I would get incredibly irritated. That's because the combat in this felt more tactical, forcing me to be patient and focused, rather than allowing me to just run around swinging my lightsaber like I would have preferred. The reason for this is that there was no attack cancellation, so I couldn't swing my saber, then immediately change my mind to quickly block or dodge an incoming attack from another enemy. This kind of combat may work for some people, and in other games, but I've never really liked it, and it makes no sense when playing as a Jedi who is supposed to have split-second reactions. I mean, if I can see an attack coming, then surely he can, right?

The level design was also what I can only describe as janky. To get around each environment, you (a Jedi, no less), have to jump and climb all over the place and do all kinds of fancy shit to reach further into the level. But when you get there, there are always simple enemies already populating that area. If Cal had to go through all that trouble to get there, then how in the galaxy did a simple Stormtrooper manage to get there? It was dumb.

As what usually happens when I play a game like this with a controller, I got annoyed at the camera rotate speed, and the fact that I couldn't turn the camera and hit any action buttons at the same time. So out came the KX adapter for another try. For the most part, it worked better than it did for Horizon, as I did not need precise aiming in this game like is required for that game. But in the end, the KX's lack of rebinding meant I still couldn't figure out a comfortable control scheme (and plus I wanted to save my mouse-clicking fingers a bit more), so I switched back to the controller to finish up.

I can see why a lot of people liked the game, but for me it was somewhere in the middle. In conclusion, I would consider the game to be simply "alright", and it has done very little to interest me in anything new Star Wars has to offer.
Some of the older things though...
Yes. I might get back to those at some point...

The first game I tried to play for this 'ere blog entry was actually an early 2000s game called Virtua Tennis. I think I played it back then, but I can't remember whether I finished it or not. Even though it is quite old, it installed fine on my machine, and yet I was still unable to play it. First up, the game would not let me configure my controller, and I could not do it in the config file as it was an encrypted file not a plain text one. Sucks. In addition, I couldn't seem to get the game to run in a window, and with no widescreen option available it was constantly stretched to the full screen and looked really weird. Double sucks.

So as much as I'd like to try it again, I instead had to uninstall it and put it on the back burner. There's a slim (very slim) chance I'll recover an old XP machine from the loft one day and try it on that, just in case. But I doubt it, as I've got far too many games to get through as it is. I've recently been through all of my games, and as far as I can tell I've only completed just over 100 games in my whole life, which is not a lot considering the time I've spent playing them over the years.
Even worse is the fact that I have an ever-growing list of just over 200 games that I've either not finished yet, or haven't even played at all. This does not even include the list of games I want to play that don't even need finishing, like sports games, or games I have already finished that I want to play again, like The Witcher 3.

I think next year will have to be a big one for games. My sore fingers will just have to suck it up. Little bitches.

The game I've just finished playing through is an interesting little beast called A Plague Tale: Innocence. This came out a little while back and recieved quite a warm reception, so I thought I'd pick it up. I wasn't in any great rush to play it until I started to download the installer, as the files are fracking huge. Seeing this, I figured I'd better play it so I can get it off my hard drive and get some space back.

The game is set centuries ago in a land ravaged by the plague and infested with rats. You play as young French girl Amicia, with the aim being to protect and aid her younger brother, who is wanted by the Inquisition for some nefarious reasons. In addition to the Inquisition's henchmen, who you have to avoid, trick, or kill, the game constantly pits you up against the hordes of ravenous rats, who will feast on any meat they can find, with your only defences being fire and bright light.

While there are some light action and puzzle elements, the majority of the gameplay in this is pure stealth, and deciding when to act. Now, just to get this out there up front, I'm not a fan of stealth games. At all. This type of gameplay has tarnished otherwise great games for me in the past, such as the Batman: Arkham games, and The Last Of Us, so it will come as no surprise that I did not enjoy this as much as many other people seemed to.

That being said, I still found myself eager to push through the game, even if I did let out many sighs during the more frustrating parts. I think my desire to complete it would have been massively eroded, if not for the idiot enemies who actually made several of the encounters much easier to succeed in.

The story itself ended up being kind of strange, especially from the very realistic and gritty way the game started. The Inquisition's master plan just seemed to be really silly, and the end fight way too far-fetched, that I could no longer take the game seriously come the end. Some of the supporting cast, like Melie and Rodric in particular, ended up being characters that I grew to like. But Amicia's brother Hugo was really annoying, and whoever voiced their mother was so uninterested and lame that she really spoiled that character also.

Even with all the stealth though, I would say the game is worth a play through, especially if you like this kind of game. For me, it could have done with being a bit shorter, as it just started to drag a little by the last couple of chapters.

I haven't even so much as loaded a computer game these past few months, as I've been waiting and waiting for my fingers to feel a bit better, only to find that they still don't feel any better. So I hit upon the idea of again trying to emulate some games from my childhood that I never finished, as a lot of old games on early computers didn't even need a mouse, and I would not need to click any such buttons.

Rewinding the clock back about as far as I can personally take it, the first computer I ever used was an old ZX Spectrum 48K with rubber keys. It was upon this machine that I played such awesome games as Horace Goes Skiing, Jetpac and Mr. Wimpy. This was the only computer in my family through the 80s until the arrival of my Commodore Amiga 500, which I'm guessing was either in 89 or 90.

Of course, because I was so young, and had absolutely no idea what I was doing, I don't remember completing a single game on that computer. I don't even remember trying to complete any games on it. I thought it was about time I changed that.

Before going into full-on Spectrum completion mode, there was one game I needed to play first. This game is a football game called Match Day. This was easily the game I spent the most time on, and is also the one I have fondest memories of.
I remember being at school one day, and deciding that when I got home I was going to play a full 90 minute game of Match Day. However, I returned home only to discover that the Spectrum and all its games were gone. My mom told me at the time that my cousin had borrowed it, whereas in reality she'd actually sold it to help pay for the Amiga I would be getting that Christmas. I didn't even find out the truth about this until some time afterwards, and though I loved my old A500, I always felt a bit sad that I never got to play a full match on the Spectrum.

So I was quite glad when I managed to get this running after a bit of tinkering with RetroArch, and I got my lads jogging out onto the pitch for the first time in 30 years. However, after I got the little taste that I wanted, and discovered that the game wasn't really anything like I remembered, I lost that tiny bit of desire to play a full game that still existed deep down in my soul.

For my 3 games, I instead stuck to 10 minute matches. In my first game, I managed a 3-3 draw, even though I had no idea what I was doing. After reading some instructions, I thought that I would easily dominate the computer, but my efforts to play the game properly saw me get absolutely destroyed 0-4. For my third and final game I took a hybrid approach, combining my play styles from the first two games, and managed a 3-1 win.
Good enough for me.

The first Speccy game I was going to try and complete had to be the Trap Door, which is based on a kids TV show that I used to love when I was little. In this puzzle game, you play as Berk as he runs around the castle preparing food for his master, The Thing Upstairs.

I remember not having much luck with this as a kid, and its not hard to see why. Though the mission objectives aren't too hard to figure out after a bit of exploring and experimentation, the exact method of success for each dish is far more troublesome to find. There are a few objects that need to be pushed into just the right spot for them to work right, and monsters that must be lured into exactly the right spot, and so on. With the controls being so clunky and unresponsive (this is a Spectrum game after all), these things can be a pain to pull off.

Thankfully, it was only a short game, and the availability of save states made finishing this far easier than it would have been.
My main disappointment is that there's no Rogg, who was clearly the best character in the TV show.

I didn't play this game much back in the 80s, as it was mostly other family members that took on its challenges. But whoever played, I don't think any of us got very far. We were more interested in jumping on the enemies and receiving the "PARALYSED AN ANT !" message than we were in actually trying to rescue anybody.
Yes, this is the very old game Ant Attack.

Those poor people had been stuck in this very blocky city for more than 30 years, so after a bit of tinkering to map the keyboard controls to my controller with antimicro, I got stuck into doing my duty at long last.

Though using the controller and using save states made this a lot easier than it used to be, it was still infuriating. The game itself is very sluggish, so sometimes when I pressed a button nothing happened. And sometimes when I pressed the button to turn, my character turned twice, sending him running back into the jaws of the ants that were in pursuit. Poop. As you can imagine, it also made the more platform-y elements quite awkward.
The camera was also a pain, as it would regularly move so the character was no longer on screen. It was easy enough to reset, but it was still weird. Though I guess it is quite an achievement that such an old game even has a camera like this, that can be rotated the way it can.

I'm glad I've completed another unfinished game that I played years ago, but I'm even more glad I'll never have to play it again. Though in a way it was cool to go through quite an important game in the industry's history.

This game, called Nightshade, is one of the very few Speccy games that I have managed to retain some clear(ish) recollections of. You play as a dude who has to go running around a city to rid it of four demonic entities that stalk its streets and buildings. In order to kill them, you first have to find the enemy-specific weapons to take them out, which are also laying around the city in random locations. And in order to get to the weapons, you have to dodge a swathe of annoying creepies and critters who constantly spawn directly in your path.

Me, my bro and my next door neighbour used to try our hand at this game fairly regularly in the late 80s, but always found it very difficult, and only occasionally managed to kill one of the main enemies. After playing through it recently, I can fully understand why we found it hard. I had to heavily employ the save state feature of the emulator to get through this one, as it was almost impossible to avoid the monsters that appear directly in front of you and hit you before you have a chance to react. Even though you can get hit 15 times before it's game over, there's no way I would have managed to get through it with the sluggish controls of a spectrum game. To be fair, the controls were more responsive in this than the other Speccy games I've played recently, but that's not saying much.

It's taken a staggering amount of time, but finally my epic Eldar army is stripped, re-assembled, and ready for some paint. This has been without doubt one of the most time consuming and frustrating projects I've ever had in wargaming. There was so damn much paint on the large army I bought, that I don't think the previous owner even used a brush. I think they used their fingers.
Still, at least I was able to get all the paint off that army, eventually. The smaller army I bought, though only undercoated, was undercoated in a paint that I have been completely unable to remove. So I have no idea what kind of weird paint it is. It didn't all come off even after several dunks in the stripping pot. I could have spent hours with a small pin or knife and tried to scrape all the small details clear, but I've already spent way too long on this, so I'll make do without.

I just never want to have to strip any models ever again, and I'm so glad it's over.

Now I just need to wait for this stupid pandemic to be over so I can go and look for some new undercoat for the little pointy-ears.

A little while back, I decided to get all of my Epic miniatures out at the same time to see how much I actually own. It already looks quite eye-opening to me, to see all the painting work I still have left to do. But this picture was taken before I had fully prepped my Eldar, and before my recent efforts to get even more of my old spare models battle ready. The means the image does not contain a further box of Eldar, or the new Ork clan I've just made.
Sheesh.

Speaking of the Ork clan, here they are: Gwapstik's Boyz. They are based on my small 40K collection, so are a traditional Ork mob like the Snakebites, who also have access to Imperial vehicles like the Blood Axes. This is because they sometimes team up with other armies to attack Warboss Gwapstik's nemesis: Warlord Smashgrot, who is the ruler of my entire Epic Ork army. As the name would suggest, Smashgrot likes killing Gretchin, so all my Epic scale Grots hang out with Warboss Gwapstik.

I've also boosted the Orks even further, with some special characters from the old Epic 40,000 box set, as well as some battlewagons and pulsa rokkits for the Bad Moonz.
Counting my spare Chaos models that I didn't use a couple of years back, I realised I could put together another squad of Chaos Marines. I had so many heavy weapons that I've put two on each base, and will use them as Havocs.

But now all that assembling is done, it's time I got back to the painting, picking up from where I left off last time with the Evil Sunz.