Balders Gate 3 and the banging of the Bears

 If you are even just a mild video game player who pays at least a little attention to the media surrounding Balders Gate 3 and its sexual content, you will know that at least to some extant there is, well, sexual content. 

Like me maybe a couple months or so ago you saw a trailer for it where a strapping dude and a bear give each other "come hither" looks and seem to be about to do the deed. The short scene cuts to a squirrel in a tree holding a nut. Then he drops the nut. BTW that is not a euphemism. They don't show if the nut busts when it hits the ground. We never see the actual character to character contact, but when they cut away one is still a bear. I think. It's been a while since I saw that bit, because in the following months much more has come out about the game, and it sounds great. The use of current edition D&D mechanics, plus an old school turned base system. 

Anyway, there ya go. A D&D video game with sexual content. And what the hell, some of that has been part of my gaming experience, such as talked about in these more recent posts:

Post: Edit (blogger.com)

Post: Edit (blogger.com)

But outside the sexy stuff yeah, the game sounds good.  

I don't mind a little CGI boffing. And hell, the bear is a human druid, though not sure how much a diff it makes. If it looks like a bear, and smells like a bear, and drools like a bear it probably kisses and knocks boots like a bear. Those things will mess you up. Ever see Revenant? Or Grizzly Man?

I am guessing any dating and sexy time cut scenes will be a small percentage of that will probably be hours of long ass cinematics that are popular now. Its turn based, so a lot of that will need to be spaced out to build the story. 

I guess the real "bear in the room" though is the identity politics that seem to be heavy in the game. I mean, OK. My only gripe is that so many things have to "present day" us. It's like fantasy worlds or anything else needs to be a reflection of Los Angeles of San Francisco. Maybe it's just an aging straight white dude thing, but whatever happened to escapism? Creativity should be the main goal, but that has been toppled from the number one spot to inject present dayism. I mean, OK, fine. I still might play it (when it comes to XBOX). Because at least you have a choice as to how deep you want to indulge in the Alphabet Mafia stuff. It's not like Starfield, where you are forced to choose a pronoun in character creation. No choice in it. But it would not be a deal breaker for me. Though I think my next space game might be Outer Worlds, because so many people think its way better. 

Anyway, I do hope I get to play Baldurs Gate 3 eventually. I'm usually 3-5 years behind on my games (and more...I'm still playing GTA % here and there). And I look forward to the sexy time in it. With a humanoid. Probably. I can't predict how I'll feel in 3-5 years. 

Getting that dungeon crawl going

 

Around the time I posted last, I started a new job in healthcare. Previously my later-in-life health care career transition from a couple of decades of entertainment business management back in LA included a major regional hospital during the height of the pandemic, but the most recent gig is for a healthcare insurance plan company, and it includes some new perks. More money than I ever made since leaving my home city, and the biggest change of all was working from my home office most of the week. 

But despite this being a somewhat demanding position, I have managed to do a lot of gaming. OK, most of that gaming is video games on the weekend. I play Elder Scrolls Online a lot less, as it started to feel too unchallenging. I will pop in for an hour or two with my old pal T, who is still enchanted by the game and plays a lot of it. But I need variety in my games. I still have a Mad Max game and GTA 5 I dabble in on XBOX, plus I recently downloaded an old favorite side scroller, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild remains a favorite, and I also like to play a little Cuphead here and there on Nintendo Switch in handheld mode while taking a little break in the workday. Man, what a hard game!

My Roll20? Well, I have mentioned my besties "B&L" (currently on the other side of the country helping L's mom run her bar...I will see them in fall and Winter when they come back to town for a while) and also my Los Angeles homegirl "T" who has played in my games on and off since the early 90's. The three of them make up my current little group, playing every couple of weeks. A classic dungeon crawl campaign. 

This is for sure giving me experience in online dungeon creation. I do have a couple of purchased modular dungeon packs from Roll20 (about 5 bucks a pack). I built the first few levels of a dungeon for me very first little Roll20 campaign that went for about 15 sessions. So pretty much reusing that same dungeon, but will be always tweaking. I built the first 4 levels back then, though the party only got to level 2 back then (just like the current things I had about 7 or 8 session working towards the delve...little adventures on the road).  

As it's not exactly a huge labyrinth, I hope for us to more or less get to level 5 at some point, maybe by late summer? But historically I have always ended up getting fed up with a crawl and found a way for the characters to do other things. So it may not make it that far. 

But this little dungeon has a bit of history in my setting, going back decades. So I think I will talk it up a little more next post. 

Cheers

GTA5 - not love at first sight, but love did come

 

At some point after getting the newest model XBOX the other year, I picked up Grand Theft Auto 5. I had seen game play at friends' houses for years and knew I would try it sooner or later. I mean, I was long used to being years behind on my games.  But had gotten into playing with others online in other games, especially with my old friend "T." She had been a Skyrim nut for a handful of years, and I had suggested we try Elder Scrolls Online as a thing to do together, since I had been playing ES since the original Morrowind. Though we could still play together, little dungeon delves and fishing and such, she had been putting much more time into it on her own. She is now in guilds and in far off lands, while I sort of futz around when I play alone. Since she is playing ONLY ESO, and I like to diversify, we will never be anywhere near equals in that game. 

Imagine her as Valeria from the Conan movie. 
Now imagine this is me..

As I was trying to keep up with T for several months, GTA5 only got a little play here and there. Maybe an hour every weekend or so. Though much of it is intuitive, it is also hard at times for a noob. Driving was bad enough, but driving and shooting? Yeesh. Fairly early on there was a mission for main character Michael that had you chasing crooks on a big rig that had stolen his yacht (don't ask), and you drove your sports car on the equivalent of the 405 Freeway, shooting at dudes on the yacht who were trying to kill your buddy Franklin who had climbed aboard. Man, it was hard. Must have played out that mission a dozen times before being successful. 

I figured that even harder missions would follow, and that was intimidating. It may have kept me from playing it as much as ESO. But man, this game setting did appeal to me. So much of it was not just based on Los Angeles, but even parts of my home town Venice Beach (Vespucci Beach in the game), the side streets and alleyways, was spot on. Buildings I had been in and neighborhoods I grew up around were recreated, often in loving detail. My favorite was the Venice Canals, my birth place. Having a gunfight in my childhood neighborhood was mind blowing. 

And this familiarity with Los Santos/Angeles was super appealing to me. But what else to keep me involved? I mean, every time I got in a car to drive I ended up rear ending other cars, and accidentally running over pedestrians. You see, if you don't drive crazy, you are pretty much just stuck in traffic. The main reason I actually Left Los Sant...uh, left Los Angeles. So even just tooling around you are blowing street lights and driving on sidewalks. Otherwise its an LA traffic simulator. Yeah, fuck that mess. Then the cops chase you, and you crash and get out to run as bullets blast into your body. 

Yeah, a bit disappointing at first. But in the last couple of weekends I suddenly went from "meh" to "omigawd I love this shit". Here are some reasons why:

Maybe some 10 or 12 hours into it, I get it. Understanding has come to me. You see, you spend 10's of hours putzing around, driving and walking around nice areas, getting into occasional fist fights and gunfights and wondering what the hell is the point. Well, it finally dawned on me. As I started getting better at driving and other activities, I realized that the game has a grand plan. It is training you for what is to come. Basically, this is the prelude for you putting together your gang of bank robbers. The game is letting you fuck around so you can get familiar with just being alive. The physics of your world. It knows you will be a bad driver at first. It knows you will be bad at shooting people. And it wants you to get better by just plain experiencing the school of hard knocks in Los Santos. It knows that no setback is permanent. You die or get caught by cops, the just try again. 

When I turn the game off and go to bed I imagine
myself as that Mayhem insurance guy walking
away leaving this behind..

I started regularly going to the shooting range to be a better gunman. I started driving at high speeds around the city to be a better driver. I stopped worrying about being a better driver, and just drove at high speeds through the city. And suddenly I was exponentially better at that.  School of hard knocks.

 

Suddenly I could feel the improvement. Not just in my personal skill, but the game engine itself eases up on you, steadies you. A sort of smoothness starts setting in. 

The other night I was playing the main character, Michael. I decided to go down to "Santa Monica Beach" at the California Incline (his psychologist lives down there), and ran into a jogger lady. You know, one of those older, cut, kinda pretty but hard jogger ladies you see who are way serious about it. She challenged me to a race down the incline stairs to the beach, and though I was wearing a suit and dress shoes, I took her up on it. I was doing OK for a middle-aged guy dressed up, but I kept faltering. I clearly did not have the stamina to keep up. So another activity goal; do some jogging to get better at running. I'll probably need that for bigger missions later anyway. And to eventually beat that lady. Oh, sensible shoes probably don't hurt.

The boy from the hood character, Franklin, gets in a street race. All the other racers seem so much better than me. I try and try but just can't win it.  I keep crashing into poles or houses on tight corners. Then around the 6^th try I remember that Franklin has a special ability to go into "slow time" when driving. Boom, I win that race. Again, this will likely be important skills during a heist. The game is prepping you. School of hard knocks. 

OK, also, for whatever reason playing Tennis was unlocked. Michael's big Sunset Blvd house, surrounded by office buildings, has a tennis court. Wandering over to it, the choice to play is activated. Michael's alcoholic, cheating wife shows up to play. I quickly get my ass handed to me, while she chides me and insults my manhood. Ugh. My vow to get better at tennis happens. And there are other tennis courts around the city where I can play other people to get better on the side. And this isn't for nothing. I looked it up, and playing tennis makes your character all around stronger. Hell yeah. School of (kinda) hard knocks. 

Now that's my kind of hard knock school 😍

As an aside, an encounter happened to me playing Michael last week that just blew my mind. I was tooling around downtown, and saw a question mark in the courtyard of some big office building. I got out the car and walked over to see what was up, and some guy had a marijuana legalization table set up by the fountains. After his speech he gave me a doobie. And when I hit it I realized it was clearly sprinkled with some stronger drug, because ugly aliens suddenly appeared in the area. A ray gatling gun appeared in my hands. Suddenly here I am, in the heart of downtown, being charged by weird aliens as I gunned them down one by one with my Buck Rogers blaster. It blew my mind. This was truly when I knew I loved this game. Anything can happen. School of hard knocks.

They have mental powers. I have a Sci Fi
gatling gun. I like my odds.

But yeah, the improvement of mechanics and physics as you go along is something I always loved in games.  The Elder Scrolls seems to have lost that, but I remember loving it when it was present in Morrowind and Oblivion. But it is so obvious in GTA5. I can actually feel myself getting better as I do things. Yeah, the feeling has won me over. 

So Michael's old geek buddy Lester has a jewelry store heist in mind. We staked out the Rodeo Drive jewelry store and everything so far. But before the mission I think I need to maybe put a few more hours into practice to get prepared for the big time. More driving around the city. More time in the shooting range. And of course, more tennis and jogging. For the job. And of course to be able to beat my nagging, ball busting adulterous wife at tennis, and to win a race against that mouthy jogging bitch down by the beach. School of hard...well, you get the point. 

I predict I will be playing the campaign mode for a long time to come. Hell, I'll probably mostly be jogging and playing tennis around the city for the next month. Just driving around there are always nice things to look at as you level up your skill set..

And testosterone level

Cheers