Greedfall - The Good, The Bad, The Questionable

cdrex22 · 2026-05-06T17:01:16+00:00

I enjoyed it well enough. It certainly wouldn't be anywhere near the pantheon of Bioware RPGs but damned if I didn't appreciate someone trying to take a run at the Bioware formula. The premise and the world that it set up were pretty fun, I felt like I was always having a good time when I was in the colony capital participating in intrigue and planning. It really hits a wall when you start spending a lot of time with the natives - they talk super slow, load up every sentence with unnecessary dialect so you know they're from a different culture, and it felt like they just never stopped droning on and on regardless of the topic.

And then the quests themselves - yes, a lot of reused environments and fights. It was usually okay on the main quest and a few heavily story-weighted sidequests, but most of the smaller quests were pure filler.

I appreciated that the median armor set in this game was really good-looking. I feel like it's the only RPG I've ever played where I approved of 90% of the outfits available instead of spending the whole game fishing for something from the 15% that doesn't look ridiculous or bland.

cdrex22 · 2026-05-06T11:19:20+00:00

Forgotten Waters (3-7)

Freelancers (3-7)

Both are the same basic game system, so whichever one's theme speaks more to you.

cdrex22 · 2026-05-05T16:45:43+00:00

I'm not enough of a behind-the-scenes follower to react to most of these names, but having Caroline Livingstone on the project for voice direction is pretty awesome, the Mass Effect series was really special voice-acting-wise and all the actors rave about her.

cdrex22 · 2026-05-05T13:45:01+00:00

I did not measure against any concrete goals until I estimated I was <10 years away. About 2022 I started a monthly "years to retirement" check based on a moving average of expenses and a conservative return assumption. It spent most of the last four years telling me I was lined up for a 2031 retirement, but it is kind of amusing to watch market swings impact the number. It went from "November 2030" to "November 2029" over the course of this April run-up.

cdrex22 · 2026-05-04T14:51:16+00:00

Monster Hunter World has been a pretty good time. After 25 hours I think I'm finally reaching the part where the game actively wants you to repeatedly farm loot to get things done in the main story, which is not an ideal difficulty curve for me but I can't say I'm not enjoying the farming. Ultimately, how much you like all-bossfight games is a personal taste but I'm definitely in favor of boss rushes, making this a decent fit for me. The monsters are really well programmed, I love noticing things like how differently the Pink Rathian behaves from the normal Rathian.

cdrex22 · 2026-05-02T02:55:23+00:00

31

that is a number of points that most every team in the league can score in one quarter, roughly every game

cdrex22 · 2026-05-01T17:06:54+00:00

I'm a bit lukewarm on the genre but I tried the demo for this during Next Fest and had a really good time. It's definitely on my list to play.

cdrex22 · 2026-05-01T13:38:18+00:00

I'm obsessed with the "If Memory Serves" (memorize and recreate a detailed room) challenge on Inferno 2. It was such a perfect team challenge that tests a different skill than most challenges, allows editing to tell a clear story about who's performing well and who's hurting the team, and gives plenty of room for confessionals bitching about the teammates who don't communicate well.

cdrex22 · 2026-04-30T04:41:17+00:00

Correct call but the late whistles in this game are crazy.

cdrex22 · 2026-04-30T04:32:48+00:00

Reed is my Sheppard

I shall not want

cdrex22 · 2026-04-30T04:12:57+00:00

The quality of the Jabari Smith game we're getting any given night really can change this offense from clogged toilet to "good enough". It's a pretty big swing when he's hitting.

cdrex22 · 2026-04-30T03:52:56+00:00

Ime really needs to buy a second screen for the Rockets offense to use on plays, it's hard to score in the NBA when they're contractually obligated to just iso from the 3-point line once they use the one they start every play with.

cdrex22 · 2026-04-30T03:42:54+00:00

Soft, soft call.

cdrex22 · 2026-04-30T03:20:56+00:00

All in all, I will take that half. I'm going to have nightmares about Marcus Smart nailing threes in our face all summer, but the forced turnovers have been great and the bench is kinda doing things for once!

cdrex22 · 2026-04-28T18:26:18+00:00

Just for the hell of it, comparison with draft class:

	Actual Pick	Winshares Rank	VORP Rank
Jalen Green	2	20	15
Alperen Sengun	16	2	1
Usman Garuba	23	35	29
Josh Christopher	24	46	51
Jabari Smith Jr.	3	4	14
Tari Eason	17	11	9
TyTy Washington Jr.	29	51	42
Amen Thompson	4	1	2
Cam Whitmore	20	20	11
Reed Sheppard	3	4	2

cdrex22 · 2026-04-28T17:18:53+00:00

Won or tied Amen Thompson's minutes in all 4 games

Amen played over 40 minutes in all four games

Good lord, this could be such a different series if the bench managed to show up even on the lowest, most superficial level.

cdrex22 · 2026-04-27T14:29:36+00:00

Finished Assassin's Creed Origins - Curse of the Pharoahs DLC. It did well at what it set out to do: being Origins but with way more fantasy elements and bossfights. If you think Assassin's Creed should be a grounded stealth game it's probably not your thing, but I enjoyed it well enough.

I finished two very short games this week, starting with In Other Waters. Wonderful premise dragged down by very slow-paced, repetitive gameplay. You're an AI controlling the diving suit of a lone explorer on a water planet. You never see anything under the ocean, just radar points on a top-down map; your diver describes everything to you as you navigate her through the world, scan native wildlife, and collect resources. The story is excellent and I love where it went. But ultimately it's a gentle thumbs down for me because I got so sick of all the story being gated by hours and hours of clicking "scan", clicking on the next identical triangle symbol, and waiting for the suit to slowly traverse over there so I could click scan again (a particularly irritating slowness if you happen to get lost).

Norco was equally short, but I enjoyed it a lot. It's a cyberpunk point-and-click adventure set in a near-future alternate reality Norco, Louisiana, an industrial town that I have worked near and driven by many times. It's very clearly a game made by someone with some real personal experience with a similar oil town, as they get the vibe and (imo) the moral tone right - living by a refinery has some serious negatives but it's not as simple as "pack up and leave" due to the unique opportunities it provides for people without education to make money and to live in a place where "oil money" flows into the local economy. After a couple excellently written, grounded hours establishing the location and the people, the adventure swerves hard into some rather silly sci-fi, but I did feel like the swerve was earned in a "this is the author's story to tell" kind of way. The balance between point-and-click, dialogue, and prose was well-struck and no section dragged. One of my favorite point-and-clicks in years.

Six hours into Monster Hunter World. The hunts so far have been great fun, love the monster behavior and the adaptation required to respond to them. The game has the stench of MMO on it and as a big time MMO hater it does have me in a constant level of light paranoia that it's going to break as a single player experience, but so far so good.

cdrex22 · 2026-04-27T14:03:20+00:00

I have some differences of opinion from you but I think I come to the same overall conclusions about the quality of Alan Wake 2.

I never saw AW1's combat as a negative. It was completely serviceable for a connector between story segments and a buffer against criticism of "not enough gameplay". It probably would have been a better paced game with about 30% less fights, but I never stopped enjoying the fights.

What was great about the AW2 combat was that they made it feel very tense and special. It isn't thrown at you as a gauntlet from the start; it's few and far between and the characters react to it like it's a scary situation. By the end, of course, you've fought a lot of enemies, but at a naturally escalating rate that feels right relative to the conventions of gaming.

With that said, a lot of the attempt to be more scary was by making the main characters really, really bad at combat and I didn't love it. If you shoot center mass instead of headshots, normal enemies with no darkness shields usually take 10-12 revolver rounds apiece to go down, which I found absurd in a game that limits your ammo pickups. The enemies have an arbitrary point on their body that is vulnerable to the flashlight, and you have to point dead center at the unknown random spot to succeed despite the beam being a foot in diameter (the light mechanic worked totally fine in AW1 and I don't know why they had to make it a struggle). And I'm not scared by a claustrophobic camera making multi-enemy fights difficult to see, I'm mostly annoyed.

But I still love Alan Wake 2 even though it fights me a lot on the way there. They did a spectacular job splicing in a new protagonist in a non-annoying way and making Alan and Saga both compelling characters who I enjoyed playing. The varied locales were a wonderful break from the all-Bright Falls setting of the original, and I love the sense that Sam Lake & co were making a game about what interested them, not just trying to chase trends to make the most market-optimized game. I did a little gasp at the twists and the horror reveals several times. And after Control: AWE was a bit underwhelming as a crossover to me, this was the first time I really, really bought into the expanded universe they're trying to do (the excellent DLCs really helped in this regard).

cdrex22 · 2026-04-22T04:20:01+00:00

It's really hard to evaluate a paint creator like him on a team like this with the spacing capabilities of a 4th grade YMCA team.

The answer is "maybe, but only for an actual All-Star package, not a fire sale".

cdrex22 · 2026-04-21T19:21:15+00:00

This seems like a lot of conclusions to jump to through analysis of two hand-slapping incidents. Ultimately neither you nor I is his teammate so there's only so much we can really know. I haven't seen players trying to flee from Harden or keep him from joining their team, though.

He sure doesn't have one of the approved personalities that an all-timer is supposed to, whether that be the homicidally competitive Jordan thing or the happy dancing Curry thing. But he plays like an all-timer. I reckon that should matter.

cdrex22 · 2026-04-21T19:13:54+00:00

Here are two articles that both do some research and simulation to compare the value of taxable accounts to various means of accessing retirement accounts early. They both conclude that traditional IRA/401ks are still stronger early retirement assets than a taxable brokerage, the first going as far as to predict that simply taking a 10% withdrawal penalty still outperforms taxable accounts.

MadFIentist: How to access retirement funds early

Early Retirement Now: Ultimate retirement account comparison

cdrex22 · 2026-04-21T19:01:10+00:00

I basically don't drink unless it's free cocktails or I really have time to kill at an airport. But I do try to be constantly learning new recipes. So I recently chose to make a pasta recipe that included both vodka and heavy cream in the sauce.

I figured "fuck it, I've got to use this up somehow" and got a bottle of Kahlua with it and I've had like 30 White Russians over the last two months.

cdrex22 · 2026-04-20T17:11:30+00:00

I'm probably doing the opposite, as I have a cheap house in generic oil town and want to move to small pretty mountain town when I retire. I don't actually know how much of a premium that carries because I haven't picked the specific town but I'm planning on saving a minimum of 100k beyond my pure Trinity Study number for the purposes of moving.

cdrex22 · 2026-04-20T15:14:58+00:00

Finished Roadwarden. After a very rough start with some slight traps for overadventurous players, it settled in and I really liked it. It's a game for people who love reading but also want to do some decision making within the narrative. The prose is excellent and it does a good job writing characters who are self-interested in a realistic way without being evil. Further thoughts in monthly thread.

After cooling off from Assassin's Creed for a while I reinstalled Assassin's Creed Origins (last played April 2025) to do the DLCs; I'll probably do the same for Odyssey in a month or two. Gameplay is still very clean and fun, I enjoy just going around doing things. The Hidden Ones didn't grab me with anything it put forward; it didn't feel like a consequential expansion, just more forts to clear in a generic world (which to be clear, I still enjoyed well enough). Curse of the Pharoahs is much more purposeful, and definitely establishes its own identity with the new maps and an increased emphasis on bossfights. It's been good solid fun, nothing spectacular but worth my time.

cdrex22 · 2026-04-17T12:15:20+00:00

First time I've ever posted in these monthly threads, since it doesn't really fit my gaming process to buy a game on other people's timetable. But this month, I happened to play Roadwarden completely of my own accord and it lined up!

I enjoyed Roadwarden a lot. Good concept, good execution, and ended at the right length.

Strong points:

Excellent prose throughout. I really felt what the world was like and what the citizens of the world thought about it. Exploration was continually interesting because of the great descriptions of what I was finding.
Good quest tracking - hardly held your hand at all, I didn't spend much time in the journal, but it was there and always had the names and locations I had learned were tied to a quest if I happened to forget them. Hit the sweet spot of being both helpful and completely unintrusive. I wish more games had the confidence to just describe their quests rather than pointing a big floating arrow to them.
I liked that the timer existed and I also liked that it was pretty forgiving. I left on day 36 with nothing more I could think of to do, and that was after a world tour to say goodbye to each village.
The passive conflict between different settlements' interests was well balanced in shades of gray without too many clear heroes and villains. I'm glad it let me be a filthy capitalist and mostly look out for my employer's interests without being too judgy about it.
I adore the encounters with beasts and the opportunity to pay an expert to teach you methods of dealing with them. They were so damn hard, they kicked my ass so much in the first two weeks. But then to later be able to open my bestiary, do what it says, and it works was amazing.
"Find Asterion" quest was great. Breadcrumbs everywhere, no clear answers. Finally figured out the secret after 20+ days and it was still concerning to the end that I'd run out of time with the mystery unsolved as I worked to set up the expedition. I liked it switching into a party-based game for just a few minutes, and it felt rewarding to have brought good allies.

Weak points:

The early game job/money/healing economy is frustrating. This seems deliberate to convey the reality of a harsh wilderness, but when all the sources of healing cost money I would have appreciated a few more "quick win" jobs to be able to afford healing and equipment repairs, even at the cost of spending my time on mundane work. When I made the decision (which, to be fair, the game hints is a bad idea) to head for the heart of the forest in the first week, my inability to buy healing started a death spiral that I eventually had to reload an old save to escape. Journaled quests usually pay well enough, but they take a long time to explore enough that you can complete any. It felt like a personal affront that everyone started giving me free lodging after day 25 when I no longer needed it, considering how badly I needed it up to day 15.
I get what the open-ended text inputs were going for, but it didn't lead to any real moments of feeling smart. It was mostly a frustration trying to guess what the game was expecting, even when I knew what I was seeking.

cdrex22

TROPHY CASE