We climb, higher and higher, reaching new heights and new obstacles. In the moment, all we can think about is the immediate threat, the immediate foe, and how we must dispatch it in order to continue our ascent. It is a struggle for the vain hope that one day, we will reach the top.

But something happens. Maybe we fail to make a jump and plummet to our death. Maybe a stray bullet catches us for that last, fatal blow. Or maybe, just maybe, we fall to our knees and surrender, no longer able to carry on.

Whatever the case, like the tower’s namesake, we fall, back to the beginning, to begin the ascent once more.

Welcome to the Tower of Sisyphus.

So far, I’m happy with this new mode for Returnal, because it doubles down on some of the better aspects of the game’s design. The arenas are big enough to maneuver in without being so big that getting to the next enemy becomes a slog and the rate at which weapons upgrade makes us feel that sense of progression more acutely than we did back in the base game.

I’m also a fan of the scoring system, and how it rewards and incentivizes players to move and fight quickly, taking more risks in the pursuit of higher scores. It’s not just about the climb, it’s about your performance along the way.

This, along with the recently added suspend feature, might just be what the game needed to go from good to great. I can only hope it’s not too little, too late.

Our adventures with one of the most iconic duos of the PS2 era continue, and in a manner that is perfectly legal, using my original copy and PS2 hardware.

So let us join them in their incredible teamwork. Truly, it is marvel how well Ratchet and Clank get along.

You can find the glitch I referred to for bolt farming here.

Now that we’re here, it’s time to talk about one of the most controversial aspects of the first game, which was the relationship between Ratchet and Clank. Specifically, how their interactions make Ratchet, our protagonist, look like an incredible jerk.

And while I agree that he’s a tool, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Every character has to start somewhere, and for them to have meaningful development they need flaws that they can work towards fixing or correcting. For Ratchet, it’s his hedonistic impulse to do what immediately feels good, whether that’s blowing things up or taking revenge, ignoring the long-term damage and consequences of those actions. The intent isn’t to leave him there, though. As we’ll see later, as he starts to recognize and correct his behavior, growing as a person.

Which is part of why the reboot of this same story, through the movie and its tie-in game, rubbed me the wrong way. In an effort to make it more palatable, they made that version of Ratchet significantly more altruistic from the start. By doing that, they inadvertently removed part of the bite and flavor that drew me into the series in the first place. TheGamingBritShow actually did produced a strong video essay on the two games here.

It’s a shame, but that’s part of what one expects of a series that’s gone on this long.

At last, our time with the Master Chief has come to an end, freeing us up for a new adventure. And what better adventure to start than one with one of my favorite mascot platforming duos, Ratchet and Clank.

We’re going back to the PS2 original, the one that started it all.

If you haven’t already, it’s worth checking out the retrospective from The Golden Bolt that I mentioned in the stream.

It’s strange to play the first Ratchet & Clank game when the series was first getting its feet wet. A lot of the basic features the franchise would later be well-known for, like weapon upgrades, experience, and strafing just weren’t around yet. While it still plays well, there’s a roughness in the mechanics that hasn’t yet been shaken off.

Given the tone of the series now, it’s also refreshing to go back to the era where this series had a strong anti-consumerist bite and humor to it. I don’t hate the direction that it went, but it doesn’t appeal to me as strongly its once did back in this era. It’s not an incorrect or invalid choice, just once that caters to another target market.

I look forward to going back.

It’s a new event in the land of Runeterra, and with it another excellent reason to return. The evil mastermind Veigar has returned in order to conquer Arcadia, and it’s up to us to make sure he doesn’t succeed.

So let’s get started.

What you see here is part of the fun of modes like this. There’s a certain joy a taking a power that we aren’t entirely sure of, only to find that due to how it interacts with cards in our deck, we’ve accidentally created an extremely powerful synergy that can easily carry us. Even if we made a couple of mistakes when building our deck, that wasn’t enough to drag us down.

Events like these are also uniquely fun because they take advantage of the world and cast of characters Riot has built up and invested in since League of Legends came out in 2009. I’m still new to the lore, but I’ve grown more and more fond of it the longer I play Legends of Runeterra.

It’s nice to just have fun, even if Riot isn’t the best company in the world.

It’s been some time since we’ve had an old-fashioned Elusive Target, and this one is both old and new: Old in the sense that it is a target from the 2016 Hitman game, and new in the sense that I had missed it back in the day because I wasn’t playing the Elusive Targets at the time.

So let’s take him out.

Thumbnail by Sam Callahan.

It’s difficult to overstate just how profoundly embarrassing that attempt was from start to finish. “They wouldn’t put the safe in Margolis’s room,” I said without putting any further thought into it. That one baseless assumption must have wasted at least a solid 30 minutes of time. And then to follow that up, one the run where I went for the kill is the same one where I forgot to grab my poison from my stash. Just a ton of failures all at once.

And yet, that’s part of Hitman. We can’t always complete the perfect or even a competent kill. That’s just how it be sometimes.

Our adventures with the Master Chief have felt like they’ve been shooting towards an end for a few hours now, and yet they’ve kept pushing forward. Now that we’ve reached the Silent Auditorium, we’re actually on the verge of finally finishing off the campaign.

This is it. Either we finish Halo: Infinite, or we’ll be finished with it.

While I’m not impressed with the story as a whole, I admit that there’s a lot of good character work between Chief and his allies, the Weapon and the Pilot. They have strong chemistry, which is of little surprise since the actors have been in those roles for a long time, but it adds to the depth of their relationship. We do lose something from not being able to see the Chief’s face, but accepting that limitation they do a good job using his body language and voice acting to tell us what he’s feeling at a given moment. It’s easily the strongest aspect of the plot.

The problem is that everything else is completely forgettable. And when the story is trying to set up for another game, that’s a problem. I wasn’t around for the Halo 2 campaign when Master Chief said he was going to “finish the fight”, but even I know how it left fans frothing for more. However, it fell completely flat when they attempted to invoke it here in Halo: Infinite. Even worse, we still don’t know what The Harbinger unleashed in the finale, so there’s no context for us to speculate or get hyped over.

It’s not a bad campaign, but I can’t say it’s going to stick with me the way the original trilogy did. It’s such a shame.

We’ve got the sequence we need to enter the Nexus of the Halo ring, and now it’s time to shut down the repair procedure. And from there, we keep going… and going… and going.

What? We’re not done yet!?

Something I’ve said for years is that most big retail release video games are too long, padded in order to fit an abritrary hour count, rather than curated to better suit the story and experience they’re attempt to instill upon the player. Open world games are particularly bad at this, even when focused purely on the campaign and ignoring most side activities. I was genuinely hoping to wrap up Halo: Infinite in this session, which is why I was willing to take the extra time until the loss of progress from the game crashing.

This feeling only got compounded by the fact that the game felt like it was trying to wrap up and hit the conclusion several times over, and just refuses to hit that finale. The climb up the Nexus, where Chief and The Weapon have their big blowup, and sebsequent heart-to-heart, was the first place that felt like a natural stopping point. Then there was the fight with Escharum to rescue the pilot, which made the point to try and fail to characterize and make me empathize with him before he bit the dust. That too felt like a good place to wrap it up, and then we just… didn’t. I’ve looked it up now, and the Silent Auditorium is truly the last level of the game, but this is the third finale we’ve had to stomach and I was already eager to wrap things up.

Out of all the games in the Halo franchise, I’ve only ever had this problem with Infinite. The campaign would’ve been better had it chosen to make a few choice cuts in the editing room before release. I don’t hate it, but my opinion is starting to rapidly drop. Hopefully next week, we’ll either finish or be finished with Halo: Infinite.

As it turns out, not only does our enemy seek to make use of the Halo ring, but the ring itself has a self-repair functionality that makes their plan possible. Of course, we cannot allow them to succeed. So it’s time to sabotage those plans… assuming we can get the sequence required to open the way.

The more I play Halo: Infinite, the more I realize that the only way to answer the question of whether or not I like it is to first ask if the open-world elements add to the game, and even now I’m not sure if the answer is “Yes” or “No”.

On one hand, it suits the new Grappling Hook, which on its own adds a whole new sense of movement and momentum to each fight, closing gaps and creating distance, or taking the high ground as the situation demands. Having a large map to work with gives the tool even more utility because there’s more space to work with during these fights over FOBs, checkpoints, and key story objectives. There’s also something to be said about the freedom to approach an objective from different angles, even if the execution always boils down to shooting everyone.

The counterpoint is that many of the objectives we’re getting have felt like the open-world busywork I associate with much of Ubisoft’s output. When I’m told to assault three anti-air towers or siege four locations to find part of a sequence, my mind starts to think of it as filler content. We’re not meaningfully advancing the plot, just getting some errands done before we can make headway. And if that same objective is presented as a linear level, or like the semi-sandbox that we had in the first Halo game, it doesn’t trigger that same impulse in my brain. This sense of discomfort is something I only get in the open-world context, and I’m still interrogating those feelings.

Hopefully, as I work through my feelings and continue the campaign, I’ll arrive at an answer.

If you told me that I would be doing Savage content in Final Fantasy XIV when I started playing in August 2020, I would not have believed you. And yet, here I am with a group of friends, gathering twice a week seeking to challenge the current high-end content for Endwalker.

Even more strangely… I’m having fun.

Though I am fortunate enough to have a static to raid with, a lot of people have no choice but to raid with a group of randos in Party Finder. To be honest, I can’t imagine doing that. What’s made this so much fun was just hanging out with the static, learning, joking, and getting better at each fight together. While I also enjoy getting better at playing my class, the experience would be a lot lesser if I had the added pressure of performing for a group of people I will never speak to nor care about.

I’m glad I was able to capture this moment on stream too because we had been banging our heads on P2S for a couple of weeks now. It was a big accomplishment for us, and now we can move on to the third ring.

I’m blown away that this is the very first Final Fantasy XIV content I’ve put on my channel and blog, considering how deeply I’ve dived down that hole over the past year, but I’m happy to finally share my experience with the game. It’s been a wonderful ride.

The Banished have had free reign over this Halo ring for long enough, and now that we’re here it’s time to turn things around. To that end, we know they’re searching for something in an old ruin, excavated by a Forerunner laser.

Whatever it is, it can’t be good for us if they claim it. Let’s beat them to the punch.

We’re starting to unravel some of the pieces of the story, and what’s at play, but we still don’t have a complete picture, if one even exists. To be honest, the villains still don’t appear to have anything particularly interesting going on, and all I can gather is that they’re after some form of “Ascension”.

I freely concede that this might be because I’ve not played Halo 5, but shouldn’t there be some form of Covenent-aligned allies here helping us fight against the Banished. I have a difficult time believing that they would allow a splinter group free reign to just demolish all of the forces of their newfound allies in half a year. It feels like something that was just forgotten by the writing team.

I’m not happy with the pilot yet, but I appreciate character growth and development. Depending on where they go from here, I can forgive someone starting out from a point of abject, crippling fear and slowly growing more confident and assured in their bearing. Even better if it can be done while also giving the Chief a rare moment of humanization. It’s genuinely pretty good.

It’s a mixed bag, but so many stories in the medium are. I look forward to seeing what else the team at 343 has for us.