Gaming

I may grab that when I'm at my PC.
Smaller older games make a nice change from those enormous 20GB things that I can't be bothered to install yet.

Banj wrote:

You aren't supposed to play Skyrim, you are supposed to spend a month modding it, then never touch it again.

It seems I'm the opposite of that. I have no mods yet and I can't stop playing it. I should ration my play cos I really don't want to get through the story quickly even though it's trying to funnel me to the main quest. That's the great thing about Morrowind, the way that Caius Cosades keeps sending you away, forcing you to do other things, whereas in Skyrim I'm having to make that effort myself.

Speaking of Morrowind, I'm a bit stuck on a quest at the moment. I have to open a chest with a 65 point lock and my Security stat is not even close to being good enough. Even with a good lockpick it says "lock too complex" and I ended up wasting all my unhinging scrolls waving my hands around in that universal "I'm doing magic" gesture with no apparent effect. (Actually reading the scrolls reveals that they only open up to 60 point locks. )
After a bit of googling I found out that you can actually make custom spells (who knew?) but I'm not good with them either. Spell failed. Spell failed. Spell failed. Etc.
Think I'll have to leave it for now and come back later.

Torchlight is grabbed and installed!
And look, Limbo is gonna be free soon!
(I paid a whole pound for that! )

Had a quick runaround in Torchlight and I kinda like the look of it. The style of graphics is lovely and clean in a fun way, and you get a pet! (I chose cat, obviously.) Unfortunately I've never played one of these top-down style of games before so I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I kept thinking that the right mouse button would move the camera and then ended up "shooting" (?) at things. I could use a dumber tutorial.

So until I google to work that out I instead was dragged back to Skyrim again. Still no more quests done but the walk into Falkreath is lovely. Forget the dragon and the war, it's just a walking simulator, isn't it?

And I can't cast a spell in real life either.

Just spent a grand of Morrowind gold getting my Alteration stat up to the mighty total of ...erm... twenty.
Then it was time for an infinite cycle of failed spell, failed spell, failed spell, magicka potion. Repeat until patience and boredom meet.

Enjoy your thunder, Charlotte!

But lightning is fun to watch!!


Late last night I was having a browse for Skyrim's DLC, seeing as on Steam it's hidden away and horribly overpriced due to Bethesda trying to push the Special Edition. I have no intention of buying it yet but as I'm enjoying it so much I can't help but think ahead and I quite like the sound of Dragonborn. After not finding anything that's both legal and acceptable I remembered that I have a Bethesda launcher due to that Morrowind freebie. Maybe that will have a link to it, I thought foolishly.
As soon as I clicked, it started to download and install a Morrowind update that I didn't want. (And why? It's not as if they're still developing a near 20-year old game?!) Even more annoyingly, the update killed all my mods. I had to go through each one to reinstall or re-enable before it'd run without a cascade of error messages.

Torchlight is still fun though in a shallower way. At least I'm getting the hang of the controls. Shift-click for ranged attack!

Still a-walking in Skyrim...
And on my travels I encountered a couple of giants and a mammoth!
(There's actually a quest that involves a mammoth so I couldn't resist firing off a couple of arrows. It charged and killed me immediately, so back to walking. )
It's quite addictive to try and find little spots in the landscape where you can swing the camera round and take a screenshot. (My current favourite "photo" is the Talos statue in Whiterun with Dragonsreach extending upwards in the background.) There was a recent trend on Reddit where people did traditional paintings based on Skyrim screenshots and I can see myself doing that sooner rather than later.