Here’s a list of the best budget medium-format cameras in 2024; I’m happy to say I’ve put film through two of these and have a third waiting for a test. I used and later sold my Rolleicord, but still have my Yashica-D and a very early Zeiss Ikoflex. I’d love to try out one of the SLRs but I’m just not shooting enough photos anymore to justify the cost.
I’ve played Starfield over several nights and gotten the hang of the way the game is structured, and I’ve got a couple of takeaways. The first is that the mechanics are almost a direct lift from Fallout 4 and Fallout 76—which isn’t a bad thing, but isn’t necessarily great, either. The structure is the same, the menu and inventory systems are the same, and the mapping system is expanded to include local, planetary, galaxy, and universe views—which don’t always work the way they should. Crafting systems are the same inscrutable mechanic, where you run around gathering junk to break down at a special bench to upgrade your suit or weapon, and you’re always running up against what you are strong enough to carry vs. what you can drag back to your base (in this case, your ship). So it’s a ton of inventory management. Which isn’t a bad thing, when done correctly, but when I’m constantly humping shit back and forth to build some stupid thing that’s step 3 on a 10 step quest, I’m gonna get pissed off real quick. And as with Fallout 4, the rules of how to build stuff is a black art you need to spend hours on a message board studying, which is also not my cup of tea.
So I know how the game designers think and how they’ve structured the game. What I’m hoping to avoid are the issues that led me to drop their previous games. Fallout 76 lost me when the difficulty level of finishing a quest to get a legendary item skyrocketed past what I was able to build after hours of grinding through levels of experience and avoiding in-game purchasing. Shooting a giant beast eleventy billion times to no effect when they can kill you with one swipe gets irritating real quick. And if this game forces me into situations where I can’t complete tasks without joining up with a bunch of other players, they’re going to lose me pretty fast.
I also soured on the crafting/building/management aspects of the game. I craft, build and manage enough crap in meatspace. When I boot up a game I want to be challenged with a fun shoot-em-up, not a grocery list and errand run. While I don’t expect to be able to carry three tons of gear around in-game, they’ve prioritized survival by the number of different sets of armor and guns a character must own to complete different tasks, and those possessions need constant care and upkeep, and this requires one to continually run around and pick up every goddamn thing you see in the hopes that it will fix your stuff. At a certain point the task outweighs the reward.
However: the boot time is pretty negligible, which is some kind of black magic voodoo shit when you see how rich the environment is. The storylines are familiar and sort of comforting in a nostalgic way; I spent all of chemotherapy playing through Fallout 4 and the vibe is very similar here, which isn’t a bad thing. Flying through space and shooting up spaceships is fun as shit, and their mechanics there are very well designed. Last night I explored a mining base on Venus and then traveled to a space station orbiting the Moon to clear out a group of pirates. In between I had to chase down a spaceship and disable it. It was fun! So I’ll keep at it and see if things have gotten better.
I booted up Starfield on my Xbox Sunday morning before the girls were awake and started playing through the introduction. Being a Bethesda game, it shares many of the same game mechanics as Fallout, so much of it was familiar immediately. I built a character, shot some space pirates, jumped into a spaceship, and landed on a different planet. One thing that’s wildly different is that it’s not a giant download of a game; I selected it in the menu and almost immediately I was playing. There are some network glitches where it drops out for a second or two and then comes back, which is a bummer when you’re in the middle of a firefight, so I’ll have to ensure my wired connection is still stable.
I’ve been playing The Division 2 for quite a long time now, and it got stale months ago but I haven’t seen any new games that I’ve been interested in trying—until now. Bethesda, the developers behind Fallout 4, are about to release a new game called Starfield, which is a space-based explorer/shooter/dogfighting game that sounds amazing by all accounts. I tried another well reviewed space-based game a while back called No Man’s Sky, which wound up being very repetitive after about ten hours or so, so I’m hopeful this one has the detail and storytelling I enjoyed in the Fallout series. It’s out next week, and I do believe I’ll give it a shot.
With the re-opening of our local library, I’m able to check out and sample video games without making expensive mistakes. I’ve been bored with Starfield, which I’ve played through completely, and casting about for a new challenge. One of the titles the library had available was Star Wars: Fallen Order, which was released five years ago to decent reviews. I loaded up all eleventy-billion gigs of files, had it run the updates, and started playing last weekend. It’s a fun game so far, and a lot different from the Bethesda-style games I’ve been playing lately: a third-person puzzle/action game leaning heavily on exploration and jumping, punctuated with lightsaber combat that I haven’t really gotten the hang of yet. I’m at the point where it’s still very challenging to get past the basic bosses without dying because I haven’t gotten the hang of the controls, but I’m enjoying the puzzles and exploration. I’ve got another couple of days to keep it and then I’ve got to decide if I’m going to purchase it, and I’m leaning towards yes.
Longtime readers are bored of me talking about the Fallout game series, but I’ve dipped my toes back in after binging the web series on Amazon, which was, remarkably, pretty good. While not sharing quite the expansive feeling the game series did, I thought the character development and careful attention to detail was done exceptionally well, and they nailed the tone of Fallout 4 really well. They’ve already committed to a sequel in the series, which is nice to hear.
I’d already been replaying Fallout 4 for a month or so, having grown tired of the repetitive nature of Starfield, and had grown tired of replaying the same levels in that over again. In a rare moment of clarity I figured I’d check to see if Fallout: New Vegas was available through Game Pass, for which I am paying, and I was surprised to see it was. Loading it up for the first time, it’s really clear that it was released in 2010: the graphics are pretty blocky, the lighting is junk, and it’s easy to see the limitations of the original platform. That being said, it took me about an hour to adjust to that regression, and now I’m enjoying the game. The base mechanics for the later games are there, so it’s a lot like making the jump from Fallout to Starfield, but backwards—the fundamental controls are present minus all the stuff they added later. Apparently this is the best of the whole series, according to the interwebs, so I’m in for a treat.
Apparently Starfield is supposed to get some sort of expansion pack later this year, which would be nice; I’d like to go back to that and do something different, having completed all but the last main quest. And I chortled to read that No Man’s Sky is getting another in a series of updates, which will make a supremely repetitive and boring game…a little less repetitive and boring? I’m shocked anyone is still playing that game.
Finn and I got our COVID booster yesterday, and I woke up this morning feeling as sore as I did on Day 8 of the welding project. I thought I’d be OK to get some stuff done around here but I also feel like my feet are about an inch off the ground, so it’s probably best not to be driving or operating heavy machinery. I took a nap at noon with the dog and I’ve been playing Starfield since 3, but part of me is itching to get up and get something done.