G'day, posse, hope you're all doing fantastic.
Off the top, to my American friends among you, the election raging and it's inescapable on social media. Whatever happens, stay safe over there. It sounds like a highly charged event and not in a good way. No preach from me, just hope that you're all safe and well.
The Dragon Age: Veilguard drama is in full swing as I write this. I'm so tired, and I don't even have a horse in this race. If you play it, tell me what you think. I never had an interest in it and the discourse has quickly become a dumpster fire on 'both sides'.
Moving on to greener pastures, I'm almost finished the Blood West video, there's only a few minutes of video left to edit. I lost a chunk of time this month which meant I couldn't quite squeak it over the line before November, but we're almost there.
The next indie preview will be on Monomyth. I've had my eye on this for a while, and it's shaping up to be something special. A little Arx Fatalis, a little Legends of Grimrock; I can't wait to get stuck into this one. I was originally going to preview Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, but apparently it can take 20-25hrs to get through what it currently has to offer, and I don't want to spend that long on an indie preview.
Stalker 2 releases this month, and I have already planned for release day by taking the week off. I'll be recording a longplay for the Blondefire channel and will probably play it offline simultaneously. I may also take a hiatus to finish it seeing as I don't get excited for many new releases these days, but I'm not 100% on that yet. Either way, I may also record footage and take notes for a Stalker 2 analysis video. Don't expect that project to release until sometime early next year though.
What is Blondie playing
This is a new section which I'm playing around with. If you hate it, let me know. I just started playing Pacific Drive. Survival, looting, crafting; yeah, it's my bag. I've only explored the first location but I'm already enjoying the direction this is heading. That old jalopy will be upgraded in no time.
I also started playing Witchfire earlier in the month which is a lot of fun, though I hear that there isn't a huge amount of content for it yet. Amazing polish and fluid gunplay, it feels really to dash around and shoot bad guys.
What are you playing? Got any recommendations that I should put on my radar? Drop a comment and let me know.
Until next month (amidst the Christmas mayhem), pardners.
G'day Pardners,
What a cracker year we've had so far. Some huge titles have dropped and we're not even half way through 2025. My backlog for this year alone is already piling up, and Doom: Dark Ages is just around the corner.
The video on Dustborn is in the script outline phase which, thanks to the new level of detail I put into it, is basically the first draft. I'm about 2/3 through and it's coming along quickly. Even though it replaces what would normally be an indie spotlight video, the Dustborn video might be a little longer, maybe 15 minutes. I have 20 hours racked up in this game so I feel I've earned the right to talk about it.
I'm not expecting the Dustborn video to do numbers, no-one cares about the game and the initial furore died out months ago, but it's a great case study and a good test of impartial analysis, or as close to it as one can get. Admittedly, full impartiality is impossible given the subject matter (and that's by design), but I aim to give this game as fair a go as possible.
What's...
The Stalker 2 vidya is live for the early birds. It'll be released to the public 24 hours or so from now.
March was a hell of a month. Despite the silver lining of my birthday on 19th, it was stressful.
First, my workplace has been issuing redundancies for the last 6 months which culminated a bunch of people resigning this month. Morale is at an all-time low and everyone is concerned for their job, more so this month than any other.
Next has been the hassle of getting our house cleaned and ready for inspection to put on the market. Thankfully we got another option recently which means we won't have to do this, but that was still weeks of work and sleepless nights worrying what could go wrong if it somehow fell through.
Third, work has been exceptionally busy this month and has eaten into my YT time.
In short, it's been a confluence of stuff I could have done without and has impacted the Stalker 2 video.
Currently most of the voice work is recorded, but I've also been editing the video as I go, and there's already 50 minutes of footage laid. I estimate that the video will be around 80-90 minutes long. It's not far off ...
