July feeling a lot like last year. Everything is opening up locally, despite the very real and immediate threat of Covid-19 in conjunction with people no longer wearing protective articles of clothing. Admittedly I’m pretty frustrated by the situation even if I do have both of my vaccines. At the rate we’re going Covid-19 is going to mutate so many fucking times that’ll it’ll wipe us out while a bunch of billionaire dickheads escape to a moon base.

Anyway, video games.

Blog

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Best Performer: The Awesome Combo Trainer of Them’s Fightin’ Herds

As I’m sure my fellow bloggers will know, creating content for your blog is a constant challenge. May and June put me on the backfoot in July, but I was still able to put out everything that I wanted to. Now I just need to stay focused and hopefully I can get back to having articles prepared more than a day in advance of when they go live. Though August isn’t looking great as every project I’m on at work is going live in August so I’m pretty sure I’m just going to pass out from exhaustion between that and Chives.

The big ticket item this month was my post about Them’s Fightin’ Herds. It did very well for me, though the majority of my engagement for it happened offsite. That’s fine, but does make the comments metric for this month look a little sparse. I was very happy to get that out the door and finally talk about Herds outside of the podcast as I think it’s an outstanding game. My hope is that more people will give it a shot, but I still think the art-style being so My Little Pony is a barrier to entry. That’s a real shame because there is a lot of good in Herds once you get over the art-style.

I’m also swapping my reviews back to being called reviews. For the last little bit I’d been doing “you should play” for short form reviews and “that one about” for games with full reviews. While that does give them a little more unique flavor, that doesn’t exactly help with SEO and reviews are already the content I have the hardest time promoting so I’m going to do myself a favour and just use a straight forward naming scheme again. I don’t expect it’ll change much, but at least I won’t be shooting myself in the foot when it comes to SEO.

Gaming

Enter the Gungeon

Anyone who listens to Frosty Canucks or who read my published review will know that I really enjoyed Gungeon even if I want to punch the developers in the face sometimes. It’s was such an enthralling experience and I’m glad I finally gave it a shot. Go read the review if you haven’t already for my full thoughts.

Having said that, I am done with Gungeon for now. I’ve finished the true ending for the four starting characters, which has left me satisfied with my playtime. There are a few unlockable characters and some more secret shenanigans to mess around with, but I think it’s time to move onto other games from the enormous pile of stuff I bought during the Steam summer sale.

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

Lesser known fact about me: I’d never played a Resident Evil game before. When I was younger the age rating kept me away from the games and by the time I was old enough to purchase the games they had fallen out of public favour. I also hate zombies. They’re just fucking lame.

Anyway, Jason convinced me to pick up Resident Evil 7 on the basis that we could play it together so I could finally experience a Resident Evil game. While I had a lot of fun chatting with Jason as I worked my way through the game over a Discord stream I can firmly say these games are not for me. I think Biohazard does a lot right, but I don’t exactly enjoy the ways that it chooses to make the player feel stressed out. The whole ending hour or two could also be entirely removed and I think it would be a better game.

Ending withstanding it’s a fairly well paced experience and the campy story was really entertaining for all the wrong reasons. It’s probably good that Jason and I weren’t live streaming the game because a lot of the jokes we made were inappropriate given the current state of the world. Who knows…maybe some of you out there would have enjoyed our bleak sense of humour.

Deep Rock Galactic

I’ve actually got a mini review for this game coming out later this week so I’d recommend checking back here in a few days time to get my full thoughts on Deep Rock.

For those who don’t know anything about it: it’s a co-op shooter where you and up to three other people go on a series of missions where you collect minerals and resources from an alien planet. While you’re doing that you’ll be attacked by waves of alien bugs. It’s a bit like Left 4 Dead or Vermintide, but the focus is on exploring and objectives rather than making your way through a linear level.

There’s a handful of really cool things Deep Rock does that make it a must play for anyone who has a group of friends they regularly play games with. Definitely give it a look, especially if you have gamepass. You won’t regret it.

Them’s Fightin’ Herds

I know I wrote an article about Herds already last month, but I wanted to speak more personally about the game. I’m still having a lot of fun playing it and think I finally reached a point where I’m hitting my stride with it. I won’t say I’m playing optimally and there is a still a lot of things I struggle with, but more and more often my matches aren’t one-sided and I’m getting better at doing motion inputs. Speaking of, I think those are still my biggest weakness, but I enjoy that they’re in the game. There’s something kinetically fun about doing them versus the simplified system that Fantasy Strike uses.

The other reason I’ve been playing more Herds is because I really want to pick up Guilty Gear Strive. After looking into Strive a bit more I found out that it is super buttrock and that very much appeals to my sensibilities. Despite that I don’t really know if I want to spend eighty dollars on a new fighting game when I have a perfectly serviceable one that is more feature complete. So whenever I’ve been thinking about playing fighting games I end up booting up Herds and having a ton of fun playing it.

This probably reads like the ramblings of a completely insane person, but that’s just the way it is.

Art

I actually did an art. Continuing on from my thread about Strive, while looking into it I came up with a great art shitpost and…well I decided to act upon it.

Y’all know Sol Badguy? What about Smol Badguy.

I spent so long being envious of other artists artwork that I completely killed off my motivation to actually make any art. While there is some fun in improving your artistic abilities I had lost sight of the fun I felt while creating art. This goofy ass doodle is by no means my best piece, but lord knows it was the most fun I’ve had drawing in a long, long time. Really glad I decided to pick up my tablet to extract this from my head, doubly so because a lot of other folks seemed to also think it was funny.

Community

As with every month in review we have five posts from around the blogging community that y’all should check out if you haven’t already.

Naithin | Time to Loot – Extracting Value fr-SQUIRREL!

Solarayo | Ace Asunder – WOW, I guess it’s buh-bye Blizzard!

Athena | Ambigaming – This Game Wasn’t Made For You: The Interesting Impressions of Cyberpunk 2077

Kristirose88 | Kristi Rose’s Repertoire – Cross Code is the Single Player MMO that I’ve Always Dreamed About and Never Knew it

iniksbane | In Search of Number Nine – A Memorial for My Dog

A note: I don’t normally say anything about the posts I link, but the final one is one of the sweetest tributes I’ve ever read to a passed away loved one. I think now that I’m a pet owner myself made it hit a lot harder.

If you managed to make it this far thank you for reading. Stay safe out there.