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 motivates me to keep doing things outside of my otherwise boring and mundane existence.

Quick Blog Filters:
News Computer Games Wargaming Board Gaming Old Stuff

The "Filters & Pages" button in the top right will give you more control over what blog entries will be displayed.

Stebloke's Website ©2008-2024

Just got done with a short 2019 game called Little Misfortune. I say "game" in the loosest sense, as there's not really any gameplay here at all.

This is mostly a storytelling game, that pretty much just gives the player occasional choices to make along the way.

In it, the player takes control of a little girl named Misfortune, who heads out on an adventure to find the Eternal Happiness as a gift for her mother.

That little description makes the game sound all fun and sweet, but it most certainly is not. It's actually super dark, and really quite twisted.

As she begins her journey, Misfortune starts to hear a strange voice inside her head. Along the way, she has brushes with some real adult issues, like depression, suicide and drug abuse. She also starts to encounter an elusive bipedal fox, who appears to be a mage of some sort, who may or may not be from another reality.

If all of this weirdness wasn't bad enough, it soon becomes apparent that a malevolent force is looking to manipulate our little protagonist, but for what reason?

Despite all of its dark and depressing themes, the game is also fun of charm and bizarre humour. I think a lot of this is due to the writing and voice acting of Misfortune in particular, the little girl who is forever the optimist in the face of all kinds of messed up shit.

I wasn't always convinced by the other main voice actor in the game, who takes on the role of "Mr. Voice", who only Misfortune can hear. He has a very odd sound for the role he is cast in, and can't say closer properly, always saying clozer instead. That always just seemed weird to me.

If there's any big problem with the story of the game, it's that it becomes apparent far too early what is actually happening, at least for the player, if not for Misfortune. It would have been better to maintain more of a mystery, at least until the latter half maybe.

It was only short, but it was worth going through, and it's another game ticked off the very long list.

Fanceh!

Got to play our first game of Castle Panic recently when we visited a board game cafe in Birmingham.

In this, the players must work together to trade and use the right type of cards in order to kill off an encroaching horde of enemies. Said attackers have just one goal: to smash up the castle in the middle of the board.
If at any point all 6 castle towers are destroyed then the game is over and the players have failed.

This is an absolute classic game, and a pretty simple one at that. I'd seen gameplay of it a few times on Youtube over the years, so it was good to finally give it a go.

We definitely weren't trading cards correctly early in the game and we came under a lot of pressure, before we got our shit together and finally turfed those monsters out of there.

It seemed to go down really well, and I've managed to secure a copy from ebay for a measly £12. I just hope it's in pretty decent nick and all the bits are there, as the photos were a bit lacking in that regard.

---

Probably the board game I've been most obsessed with over the last few weeks has been the puzzle game Cryptid, which I have delved into on Youtube quite a lot recently.

This is a competitive game played on a grid of hexes, where players are attempting to find the lair of the mysterious cryptid, which can only exist in one single hex. Each player is secretly given some information that eliminates some of the hexes. They then have to figure out what information the other players have by asking questions of them and performing searches, with the first player to successfully search the correct hex being crowned the winner.

We had a little muck around with it on our recent trip to a board game cafe. As of yet, I'm not sure how well it went down, so I'll have to float the question to the group as to whether this one is worth me picking up.

---

The whole issue with Viking Raiders not having a big enough box for sleeved cards was getting on my nerves.

To that end, I had a think about what I could possibly do to fix this problem, and came up with a strange solution.

Using some cereal packet card and some foamcore, I created kind-of like a "sleeve" for the original box to sit in. This means that all of the cards can live together in one box with the lid fully closed, as one of the card decks can live down in the basement.

After the recent debacle of trying (having) to play Star Trek Online again, the tiny remaining bit of the MMORPG addict in me was awoken.

But which one to play? I wasn't going to play STO again, and The Old Republic was out of the question because of its IP. I wasn't going to play more free WoW, and Tera was no longer a thing.

There was however one huge MMORPG that I had not played yet. And it made sense to at least give it a test run.

Yes, at long last I have started to dip my toes into Final Fantasy 14. In fact, I first downloaded this way back in April 2022, and created my first character. But back then, I did nothing more than view the opening cutscene and pick up my first quests.

Upon logging back into it for the first time in two years and five months, I was greeted by a 52GB update that said it was going to take eight hours to download. Thankfully, this did not turn out to be true, but still took a whopping four hours. British internet, I suppose.

It had been so long that I couldn't even remember the name of the character I had made, and while I assumed it was some form of Kreethen, it turned out to by Vilton Sydor. It also turns out that he's a Gladiator, which is a form of tank character. Odd choice for me, but I'll roll with it.

As I couldn't remember any of the little starting tips, it took just a little while to remember where I was, what I was doing, what icons meant what on the minimap, and so on.

But as this is an MMORPG with a very typical MMORPG style, it really wasn't hard to pick it up. Auto attacks: check. Triggerable actions with cooldowns: check. Auto-running: check. Teleporting back to home base: check.
Yadda yadda yadda.

And the quests. Boy, the quests. Go kill 5 of these. Bring me back 5 of those. Go deliver this letter to so-and-so. So-and-so has gone missing, and you've got to find them.

Straight up, full-on typical MMORPG fare indeed. The only thing I haven't seen in the first 11 levels is an escort quest. I'd heard the base game was supposed to be a bit of a drag, but sheesh.

The music so far is pretty good, but not really good. I know I'm not far into the game yet, but mostly the music seems to just make you think of other music from the rest of the series.

So far I'm not a huge fan of how the voice acting is implemented, though I guess it's no different here than in other games like WoW or STO. It's just so weird to sometimes have spoken dialogue, but mostly just text. Hell, this mix can sometimes happen even in the same cutscene. It's pretty jarring.

After just my 2nd play session, I was already getting bored of the typical MMO fetch and kill quests. To really brighten up my day, I tried some creative jobs, being goldsmithing, as well as mining to actually find the raw materials.

This was about as exciting as you would expect, so after another couple of hours doing the typical MMO fetch and kill quests, I thought I'd log off for a while and try and get some other games done.

So how's it been, playing a game with a very typical MMORPG style once again? Well, as you might expect, it's just like playing any other. There really is nothing else I can say on top of that.

I'd like to comment on the story at least, which is supposed to be the best thing about this game. Problem here is that it's not supposed to kick in until much later in the base game, and only really gets going in the expansions. All I can tell you so far is that there are a lot of people and places with a lot of weird names, and I think a crystal spoke to me.

Odd.

But what is it with eastern developers and these weird little childlike characters? It's so creepy. It's the same problem here I had with Tera, and I really don't like it.

I guess I'm really not sure whether to carry on with this. Even if I really got into the story, to play all of the expansions I would have to subscribe. Man, I just don't do subscribe games any more. It's such a dirty payment method when I would only be able to dip in and out of the game at irregular times.

But still, for now at least, it's free. So I could always just play a few hours here and there and see where it goes...