Stardew Valley – Through the Fair, Spirit’s Eve, and into Winter

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I left off last time with the end of summer with reference to the Moonlight Jellies event and my daughter and I moved on the autumn and the change of crops.  Because we are playing co-op and I hold the save, we tend to play together only on Sunday (though we did sneak in a Monday session) and then over the course of the week I play on the save some, mining or tending crops or just getting incrementally better at fishing.

Stardew Valley Splash Screen

However, when I get notice of an event coming up I hold up and wait until we can both be on.  So when I got the notification that the next day would be the Stardew Valley Fair, I held off for when we could get on together.

The notice said that part of the fair was the grange table, where one could display quality items one had obtained.  We had already been socking away gold star items so we had an array to choose from when we were both on and getting ready.  You can only display nine so there was some discussion as to what the best nine might be.

9am arrived and the fair began, so we took our nine and went in, arranging them in the display area provided.

Our grange table setup

However, our entry was only rated at a 73 by Mayor Lewis, getting us third place out of four displays.

It is hard to compete with that giant cheese wheel…

Later I read that a diversity of types is the key to winning, so that our concentration on fruits and vegetables no doubt held us back.  Next year.

Third place got me 250 tokens, which can be spent at the shop stall during the fair.  My daughter set our goal as the stardrop, but 250 coins was not going to get either of us there.

The shop at the fair

So it was off to the fishing and shooting events where you can earn tokens.  Each go costs some gold, but that stardrop wasn’t going to just walk home with us.

The fishing event was just… well… fishing.  As long as a fish isn’t too chaotic I have a decent chance of a catch.

Fishing event at the fair

You just fish from a static pool with a time limit.  The time limit was my biggest burden as I would inevitably see-saw with some fish for half the clock.  It is probably better to just let the wild fish go and get a perfect on a more tame catch, as getting a perfect will get you a bonus.

The shooting event used the slingshot, which I had not used up until that point.  We each picked up a slingshot in the mines, but my daughter was not a fan of ranged attacks.  But it turned out that it wasn’t so bad.

Shooting targets at the fair

It is the classic press to aim, release to shoot that co-op survival titles have trained me in, so I did okay with that as well.  The targets are moving, but there is a big wave (shown above) where you cannot help but hit many.  Also, unlike the slingshot in the wild, you don’t need ammo… which was good because I left all my stones at home.

I did both of those a few times, got past 800 tokens, then went to the wheel of fortune and bet 600 on orange.  And lost.  Later I read that the wheel favors green and that the strategy is to bet no more than 40% of your tokens on green.  Live and learn.

I went back to the games and, with some effort got myself up to 500 tokens again, which let me purchase the fedora.  So I am that guy now.

My daughter bought us the rarecrow, because collecting those is a thing and that about wrapped us up for the event.  The day is over when the fair is done.  From there it was time for bed and a new day.

At that point we were in the back half of autumn and headed towards winter, so it was time to prepare.

I had gone to Robin to have a silo built and had already collected up some hay.  Next up was to get a chicken coop built, something I managed, though my daughter called into question its placement.  Fortunately, once built, having buildings moved by Robin is a free service.

Once that was straighten out and the coop correctly walled off and the four chickens were fed and happy, she ran off to buy a heater so the chickens would stay safe during the winter.  Then she build two mayonnaise machines to process the eggs from the chickens as selling jars of mayo is more profitable than selling eggs.

In the hen house, need to feed them

Then we harvested the last of the crops as winter drew closer.  We had decided to play through to the first day of winter, which sent us to Spirit’s Eve at the end of autumn.

I managed to make my way through the hedge maze, helped considerably by the small glow ring I had picked up in the mines.

In the maze, fedora equipped

Honestly, at least the fedora covers my hair and keeps the rain out of my face.

I made it through the maze and claimed to golden pumpkin, which among other things, can be used to create the witch hat.  Not quite sure how that works, but there we are.

Golden Pumpkin obtained

I’ll store that away for later.

Once we were done there, which included buying another of the collectable scarecrows, we were done for the day.  We cleaned up on the last day of fall and, when the next day dawned winter was upon us.

Winter down on the farm

Now to keep the chickens fed, the mayonnaise machines running, the preserves jars full, while I look for things to do in the final season of our first year in Stardew Valley.

June 2026 in Review

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The Site

I have been looking through my WordPress achievements again.  That I earned these two is probably no surprise.

Perfectionist and Time Traveler

These two likely go together because while I usually press the publish/schedule button too early… everything is a first draft here on day one of it being published… so I do often go back and tune up or fix my more awful mistakes when I spot them.  Often that comes years later.

I was also wondering on the future, a future where Google has destroyed itself as a source of search traffic, wed as they seem to be to AI and just letting it go steal stuff and present it to users without sending anybody traffic.  We’re not there yet… and if anybody from accounting has a say, we won’t get there for a long time.  I’ve seen estimates of the costs of AI results.

Anyway, I went poking around Bing’s search console, in part because they provide results for most of the alternatives.  Your results on Bing look the same as the results on Yahoo or Duck Duck Go.

Bing was recommending a WordPress plugin for me that would auto-load indexing to them, and not only can I now use plugins with my hosting plan, but that plugin was available.  So I tried to get WordPress.com to load it and… no dice.  You can’t do that if you’re using the WordPress.com domain.  You need to register your own domain… which I get for free with my plan.

The problem remains, as always, the idea of changing URLs 19.75 years into the blog’s run and breaking so many links and my RSS feed and all… that feels like a bad choice.  At least so long as Google is still sending me traffic.  That could change if they break everything with AI.

So I overthink these things?  Well, I probably have the achievement for that too somewhere.

One Year Ago

There was the usual Steam Summer Sale… and GoG.com had one too.

Rumors landed that Pearl Abyss was planning to sell of CCP!  Could they find an actual buyer? (Spoiler; no.  Hilmar and his crew, who ended up with the company, don’t really count unless we’re including Jita scams in the mix.  They most certainly did not double anybody’s won.)

CCP was fixing some little things as part of the first update for the Legion expansion.

The Imperium’s invasion of Insmother took a step forward, to the gates of the region.  Our foes were trying to stir up trouble in Delve while we attacked.  There was a big fight to cover the anchoring of a Fortizar on grid with a PanFam Keepstar in the Great Wildlands, on the flank of our advance.

By that point PanFam was starting to give up, not even contesting events at two other Keepstars.  That led to both Keepstars being destroyed with very little interference.  We were soon setting up shop in C-J6MT, our new home.  That meant leaving Delve and Querious behind.

Then it was time for more MOVE OPS as we started to haul our stuff out of those regions for good.  We made it through the “big scoop” without much interference and kept moving stuff to Insmother even as PanFam decided to retreat even further away from us into the Drones.  I still can’t image a situation where we would let a foe do so many move ops without trying to get in the way.

It was announced that the Keepstar in 1DQ1-A, long the home of the Imperium, would be given a Viking funeral.

In LOTRO my drive towards Mordor saw me in Helm’s Deep after midnight fighting the siege.

Having survived the siege, it was off through the fearsome paths of the dead… which ended up being easy, barely an inconvenience, after which I made it to Minas Tirith.  You can practically see Mount Doom from there.

In Minis Tirith I mucked about doing various trivial tasks for the various city luminaries through the siege.  Then I was in the post-siege version of the city, where there was an accounting out on the Pelennor.  I then made it through Ithilien and laid eyes on the black gate.

Then I fought before the black gate, saved Frodo, and was pretty much the hero of the story.  Not sure how Tolkien left me out of the books.

Meanwhile, I had recovered all of my dark server characters, transferring them to Glamdring, one of the new 64-bit servers.  I got in before the rush when SSG announced that all 32-bit servers were going to be shut down.

EverQuest II was taking another run at making PvP a thing with the Dozekar special rules server.

Oh, and some EQemu called The Heroes Journey was totally making money off of the EverQuest IP, which meant lawsuit time.

In Pokemon Go we had hit level 48 and were eyeing level 49.

I was trying to fix a performance problem on the blog.

Finally, I wrapped up some more of our binge watching.

Five Years Ago

The inevitable Steam Summer Sale arrived again.

It was no surprise when Facebook announced that they would be forcing Oculus users to login with Facebook credentials eventually.

In old Azeroth renewed, all eyes were on the Dark Portal because Burning Crusade Classic was launching.  The masses poured through the portal, leaving Ironforge and Orgrimmar empty.

While we went through the portal, we still had some things to finish up, so Ula and the replacements went to Stratholme.  Even a week later I was still working with alts back in vanilla.

Eventually though we got on our way and took a run at Hellfire Ramparts.  It did not go well.  And neither did our second run, though we were doing the instance with a group of four.

But there were other things going on in Outland.

Amid all of that, I was wondering where “classic” would actually end for WoW and what were the general prerequisites to even launch a successful nostalgia server.  Of course, even with success, Blizz was somehow letting the air out of the experience.

We also got the word that Diablo II Resurrected would be launching in September.  A lot of hopes were pinned on that title. (Hopes well rewarded in my opinion.)

Elsewhere, it seemed like Enad Global 7 was actually advertising for EverQuest, a change from the Daybreak era.

And in EVE Online the pace of World War Bee seemed to be slowing.  All my New Eden posts in one list:

And on the telly we watched Army of the Dead on Netflix.  We were also binge watching more series.

Ten Year Ago

Daybreak’s Landmark finally went live just a few days short of summer.  However, it was the end of the road for PlanetSide and Legends of Norrath.

There was also the launch of the Isle of Refuge free trade server for EverQuest II.

There was a Newbie Blogger Initiative, for which I put up a post.

It was reported that Minecraft had sold more than 100 million copies.

Minecraft put out the Frostburn Update, version 1.10.  I was building the last stretches of what would become the 22km rail loop.

I also reflected on a year of playing Minecraft, then added in some statistics.

Blizzard had the Warcraft Movie open.  I didn’t like it, nor did that many people outside of China.

Blizzard was also explaining that WoW expansions were just going to take time.  While WoW Legion was still weeks away, my daughter and I went back to finish up Warlords of Draenor and get ready for the new expansion.

Meanwhile the whole Nostalius thing was still simmering, now with survey results.

And I was playing EVE Online.  There was the YC118.6 update, which brought us more overview tabs and the Shadow of the Serpent event, among other things.  Recurring opportunities, in which you could earn some skill points by undocking and shooting an NPC, were removed after their short run.  DX9 was also dead in EVE.  And there was Blog Banter 76, which was about FC’s and how vulnerable they should be.

But mostly I was flying in fleets out of Saranen as we kept up the tempo of operations in what would become the final full month of the Casino War.  There were just too many posts about that to try and sting them together in a single paragraph narrative, so I will just list them out:

Fifteen Years Ago

I had to get out my Monty Python and the Holy Grail DVD.

Team Fortress 2 went free to play.  Begin the hat-based economy!

I was wondering if people were picking on Lord British.  This was before he started talking about his “ultimate RPG” and other loony things which made picking on him a very entertaining sport.

We were not playing WoW, but guild accounts were being hacked.  And we were not even among those 600K WoW players that supposedly went to Rift.

LOTRO announced the Rise of Isengard expansion and offered up an exp boosting item for pre-orders.

I was wondering what launch conditions would be like for SWTOR.  Of course, I sort of figured it might launch before mid-December.

LEGO Universe announced it was going free to play.  At our house, my daughter enjoyed it for a bit, but eventually dropped it for Animal Jam.

CCP began a slow and deliberate campaign of alternating between shooting itself in the foot and sticking said foot in its mouth, all in the name of the Incarna expansion.  And my sentry drones were still boring.  And then LulzSec brought them down.  At least they had finally made it much easier to find an agent in the game.

SOE announced a new version of Station Access, its “all games for one low monthly price.”  Called SOE All Access, which had a price of $19.95 a month.  This was a welcome drop from the previous $29.99 a month price.

However, by this point, SOE had dropped The Matrix Online and had just announced they were killing Star Wars Galaxies, so there were certainly fewer games to play.  Of course, that was also back when they had some games that were not free to play already.

At least SOE was up and running after the PSN/SOE outage.  A pity they fumbled the marketing opportunities offered by their make good plan.

The instance group had finally gotten out of the damn starter zone in EverQuest II Extended, but the game still wasn’t sitting well.

On the Fippy Darkpaw time locked progression server, the Ruins of Kunark expansion was opened up and then “finished” in short order.

And finally, on June 29, 2010 I created a Reddit account so I could reply to something on /r/eve.  It was all down hill from there I guess.

Twenty Years Ago

Sonic the Hedgehog turned 20, which I guess means it is 35 now.  Maybe I shouldn’t do call backs to birthdays in these posts.

Bill Gates announced that he was planning to relinquish his remaining full time positions at Microsoft in order to focus on his foundation and hang out with Jeffrey Epstein.  Though Steve “Uncle Fester” Ballmer had been CEO since 2000, Gates was still Chief Software Architect and Chief Research & Strategy Officer (along with being chairman of the board).

EverQuest II got the Fallen Dynasty adventure pack, the last such pack until 2015’s Rum Cellar.

Nintendo finally shipped the Nintendo DS Lite in Europe, though $3.2 million worth of them went missing en route from China.

Half-Life 2: Episode One was released as Valve briefly tried to pay attention to the core of their biggest franchise at the time.

Titan Quest, one of the great post-Diablo II ARPGs launched.  It even got a remaster way before Diablo II.  Titan Quest II too a while however.

Twenty-Five Years Ago

Anarchy Online launched in what became one of the more tragic opening day break downs in early MMO history.  I mean, they were always bad back then, but AO had to introduce a free trial program, which eventually became a free to play option, to recover, making it one of the early free to play conversions.  The game survived and carries on to this day, but it was a shaky start.

WWII Online launched as well and was also another troubled title.  And yet somehow it is still around despite the occasional near death experience.

Most Viewed Posts in June

  1. Stardew Valley – The Luau, The Train, and the Green Rain
  2. No Man’s Sky Expedition 22: The Swarm – Why Would I Run These Missions?
  3. A Brief Survey of MMORPG Subscription Prices in 2026
  4. Stardew Valley on Our TV
  5. No Man’s Sky and Getting Started with Expedition 22: The Swarm
  6. Microsoft Embraces Layoffs and Enshittification for XBox Games
  7. Planning my Platinum Medal Strategy for Pokemon Go Level 49
  8. Forza Horizon 6 – Open World, Open Road
  9. Building My First Corvette in No Man’s Sky
  10. Stardew Valley: Co-Op, Mines, and Fishing
  11. No Man’s Sky – Playing with Friends
  12. The Swarm Update Arrives in No Man’s Sky

On the one hand, that list does include some posts I wrote this month.  On the other, it does feel like No Man’s Sky and Stardew Valley are dominating that list.  I guess that tells you what people want to read about.

Game Time by ManicTime

ManicTime and Nintendo of late.  While I am not tracking time spent on my phone after last year, I do feel that time spent on the Switch 2 ought to be tracked.  And Nintendo lets me do that… sort of.  It doesn’t like precise numbers, but I can kind of figure it out.

  1. No Man’s Sky – 27.19%
  2. Stardew Valley – 25.42%
  3. Windrose – 18.83%
  4. EVE Online – 13.37%
  5. Forza Horizon – 12.37%
  6. World of Warcraft – 1.55%
  7. Stars Reach – 1.16%
  8. LOTRO – 0.11%

Somehow NMS hit the top of the list, while Stardew Valley came in second.

EVE Online

We had the Cradle of War expansion and I did the login rewards for it and got my free seven days of subscription time and I did the AIR daily rewards for twelve days and I went on two ops in the first week of the expansion… and then I tended my PI and did little else.  There was nothing in the expansion for me so I just minded the store and cancelled the renewal on my second account because there isn’t anything going on I can’t just do on my main.

Forza Horizon 6

I came into this month thinking I would be playing a lot more of this than I ended up playing.  It was still there when I needed it… there are some things in game that are time sensitive, but overall you can do all the things whenever you want… I just had other things going on.  I’ve got another wrist band to unlock and some more of Japan to see, but there isn’t any hurry I guess.

No Man’s Sky

On the flip side, I wasn’t actually planning to play this.  The Swam expedition looked silly and possibly a complete mess.  And yet, here I am, having started as a sage and they ended up as a weaver, doing freaking missions three times a day if only to just help move the whole event along.  The reward at the end better be good.

Pokemon Go

Another month of modest progress.  I am still four platinum medals short of what I will need for level 76, and that will take me more time than any of the other three tasks for sure.

  • Level: 75
  • XP Progress: 86.8% of the 203,353,000 xp needed for level 80
  • Tasks for Level 76
    • XP: Done
    • Platinum Medals: 34 of 38
    • Defeat 100 Team GO Rocket Grunts – 87 of 100
    • Explore 300 km – 165 of 300km
    • Catch 200 Pokemon in a single day – DONE
  • Pokedex status: 935 (+3) caught
  • Pokemon I want: Basculegion
  • Current buddy: multiple as I work on parallel buddies

Stardew Valley

I spent a lot more time on this than I though I would, in part because there is a lot more to it than I thought there might be.  Also, it feels vaguely like Palia was strongly influenced by it, though SDV itself was openly an attempt to recreate Harvest Moon, so there is strong family history of borrowing ideas in the genre.

This past Sunday my daughter and I had a four hour “last day of freedom” blow out session with the game, because her summer classes for her masters program started on Monday.  We might not get as much time to play together for a while.  But it is a good enough game that I might crank up my own save to play ahead while preserving our progress on its own thread.

Windrose

Potshot and I have been playing this, though he has been playing a lot more than I.  For me finding time for it has been squeezed between the other titles in this post.  Still, I have made progress and have figured a few things out.

World of Warcraft

This kind of fell off the map for us.  Again, summer came, people got busy with travel and vacations and other things and now I have a few months left on my six month subscription and it feels like we’re all kind of done for now.

Coming Up

All sorts of things are popping off in July.  Aren’t they?  Well, out in the streets they are, and the cats do not love it.  But there are also video game things coming.

For openers, Pokemon Go is going to hit its 10th anniversary.  There ought to be a sizable event for that milestone, right?  RIGHT?  I will also have some words about the game, having played it for the full ten years.

We might finish the interminable Prismatic Core portion of The Swarm expedition and move things along in No Man’s Sky.  Also, this too will be hitting the 10 year mark in August, so perhaps we’ll get some hints as to what is coming for the big day.

EverQuest Legends will be launching.  That’s right, isn’t it?

Hell, maybe we’ll get a date for the Stars Reach early access launch as well… or at least some parameters around what it will actually be.  If they are sticking with the plan to pwipe the servers though, that will be a disaster as well as a pretty thorough misunderstanding or what early access has come to mean for most people.

And in EVE Online… well, it is summer and the devs will all be on vacation so maybe we’ll get the dates for the next alliance tournament… or the next CSM election… or some bit of trivia worth writing about.

There will probably be more of Stardew Valley and Windrose to write about, along with a bit more Forza Horizon 6 and No Man’s Sky, and who knows, maybe I will bite the bullet and get my main to the level cap in retail WoW.  How long could it take from 87 or wherever he is?

Windrose – Upgrade All the Things!

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Potshot and I were out exploring, seeking out the place where the next of our quest update points was marked on the map and… I kept dying.  A lot.  Like an embarrassing number of times.  I was snuffing it with a regularity that was becoming a hindrance , getting knocked off in nearly every battle with more than two opponents.

Windrose – in Early Access

I was really feeling it too.  I was hitting a new depth in the “how bad am I at video games?” self examination.  It isn’t as though Potshot never died, but he seemed to shuffle off this mortal coil considerably less frequently, and generally when we faced a host of bads and I had already been sent for a dirt nap.

At one point after a particularly unlikely death he politely asked, “When was the last time you upgraded your armor?”

My response was, “You can upgrade your armor?”

And a whole new level of my incompetence was revealed.

I am not sure how I missed that whole aspect of the gear situation, except to say that we seemed to be getting a lot of gear drops so I assumed that it was more of an MMORPG “upgrade through loot” sort of thing, supplemented by spending some talent points now and then.

It is not.

You absolutely need to upgrade your armor, your weapons, and probably a few more things, and I had been running along with Potshot still wearing the level 1 rags I had picked up along the way.

I wonder still at how we got through that first boss battle with me equipped as I was, without either of us dying.  My tactic at the time was to run around screaming like Ruby Rhod during the battle scene in The Fifth Element, occasionally turning to get in a kidney punch when the boss was facing away from me, before resuming my hysterics.

Anyway, we had been building up supplies back at our base… by which I mean mostly Potshot had been doing that… so I was able to go back and upgrade literally every thing to something more appropriate to the level 6-10 fights we had been taking.

This made an extremely noticeable difference and the rate of my demise fell off dramatically.  We were able to close out a couple of island quests pretty easily once I had mended my ignorant ways.

The upgrade thing also apply to your ship.  And I had been struggling a bit there as well.

Those Blackbeard baddies sank me again

You can upgrade you cannons, your hull, and the weapons that your crew uses when doing a boarding action against a damaged foe.  That last one doubled up to help with my personal gear problems, as dying on an enemy deck is might inconvenient.

So I upgraded all of the above and went out to test the change.  Picking on some small groups of level 2 foes, blowing some up and boarding others.

A hostile deck awaits

This worked out so well that I decided to keep going on the upgrade path.  And the next step is a bigger boat.  A brig, which is a step up from the ketch.

But to get that you need plans, and those plans come from a vendor who is part of the Brethren of the Coast faction.  Potshot told me where to find them, but said I would need to increase my reputation with them in order to buy the plans.  I loaded myself up with rep drops that we had been socking away at our base and went for a visit.

When I got there though I found that I was already in good with them, my reputation already up to level 4.

Pre-Screened by the Brethren of the Coast

That meant going back home to put all those reputation drops back in the chest where they came from.  Then I withdrew enough cash to get the ship design.  Fast traveling back, I found the vendor and grabbed what I needed.

Brig and Frigate designs available

I was tempted to get the frigate design too, but decided that could wait for the time being.

Back at our base I went down to the warf and looked at what it would take to craft a new ship.

The plans for a brig

You get three variations on the design, but I decided to go with the balance middle of the road design.

I built it out, armed it with upgraded cannon and hull bracing and boarding weapons and was quickly able to admire my new boat.

Introducing “A Brig Too Far”

You can’t really read the name in that screen shot, but the caption has it.

Having built out the new ship I had to set sail and test it out.

Heading for the open sea

I passed through a few small groups that I destroyed quickly, then fast traveled myself to some more dangerous waters in search of a target better able to test my new toy.  This new hull might move at a sprightly for the time 21 knots, but the sea remains large and my patience is not.

Once further out a target hove into view fairly quickly.

Blackbeard Interceptor spotted!

The interceptor put up a good fight, but I was able to best it and the next two that showed up without much in the way of drama.

So it looks like bright new times on the horizon now that I have kind of caught up on some of the things I should have been doing all along in Windrose.

My new brig at anchor

I suppose I could try to claim that I was trying to ironman my way through, but who would believe that.

TAGN Fantasy Critic League 2026 – Week Twenty-Six with Eyes on Deltarune Chapter 5

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We are at the half way point for the 2026 season.  It is all down hill from here… though some say it has been down hill since the 90s.  But what can you do about it?

Fantasy Critic League – Like Fantasy Football, but for Video Games

Having reached the turn-over point, we were looking to have two titles show up this week.  But first, where we left off with the scores.

Week 25 Scores

With that we started the week waiting for something to happen.  With Summer Game Fest over and done and just two titles on the calendar for the league it looked like it might be a quiet week.

The first thing that popped up was late on Tuesday evening, which was the Wednesday launch for Deltarune Chapter 5.

  • Deltarune Chapter 5 has released!
    • [Picked by Corr’s Creative Collective (Corr)]

As foretold by prophecy and all that, it arrived.  But there was no score.  There wasn’t even a link to a related Open Critic page.

Deltarune Chapter 5

But it isn’t like that doesn’t happen regularly enough that another occurrence should cause a panic.  So the week went on.

The next day we started to get scores for Star Fox.

Star Fox

It is a Switch 2 exclusive title, which can limit the number of reviews it get, but it seemed to have no problem meeting the minimum threshold.

  • Star Fox (2026)
    • [Picked by TAGN HQ (Wilhelm)]
    • Now has a score of 81.7

Not stellar, but well within the mid-range of titles scoring this season, and enough to push me up into first place on the board for now.

  • Publisher Score Updates
    • TAGN HQ (Wilhelm)
      • Score has gone UP from 78.9 to 91.4
      • Moved from 2nd place to 1st place
    • Anthania Interactive (Ula)
      • Moved from 1st place to 2nd place

The league is still confident that Shintar will come out on top at the end, but we’ll get to that.

Meanwhile, more reviews were coming in for Dave the Diver – In The Jungle, driving it down enough for Arhanta to drop down to seventh place.

  • Publisher Score Updates
    • Neutical Publishing (Cyanbane)
      • Moved from 7th place to 6th place
    • Rodent Entertainment (Arhanta)
      • Score has gone DOWN from 35.8 to 34.5
      • Moved from 6th place to 7th place

However, that seemed to be working in both directions, as the next day it got a review score boost.

  • Dave the Diver – In the Jungle
    • [Picked by Rodent Entertainment (Arhanta)]
    • Score has gone UP from 91.1 to 92.2

That was enough to put Arhanta back up into sixth position, but Cyanbane remains close behind still with less than a point separating the two.  And Dave the Diver only has 20 reviews as I write this, few enough that some volatility can be expected.

And that brought us to the end of the week with the scoreboard looking like this.

Week 26 Scores

Not a lot of changed there, though not only did I get to first position, but the league changed its projection for me, suggesting I might come in second.

There were three bids this past week that played out like this.

  • Bids in TAGN League
    • Rayman Legends Retold
      • Won by TAGN HQ (Wilhelm) with a bid of $25
      • Dropped game ‘Total War: WARHAMMER III – Lords of the End Times’ conditionally
      • Rodent Entertainment (Arhanta)’s bid of $7 did not succeed: Publisher was outbid.
    • Witchbrook
      • Won by Rodent Entertainment (Arhanta) with a bid of $7
      • Dropped game ‘Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis’ conditionally
    • Doom: The Dark Ages – Revelations
      • Won by Rodent Entertainment (Arhanta) with a bid of $13
      • Dropped game ‘Persona 6’ conditionally

Arhanta, looking to clean up their pick selection, won two out of three, both of those with an accompanying drop.  I managed to get Rayman Legends Retold by putting down a $25 bid, my biggest bid this season.

It isn’t like I have any inside tips.  That is purely vibes that a nostalgia Rayman title might find a receptive audience.  Also, I still have $55 left and you don’t get any points for leftover budget.

In addition we had one release date change.

  • Lords of the Fallen II
    • [Picked by Green River Gaming (Nimgimli)]
    • Estimated release date changed from ‘2026’ to ‘Q1 2027’

Moving out into 2027 means it is time to exercise another drop.

That leaves the next ten titles on the release schedule for the league as follows.

Coming Up for Week 27

We only have one title slated for week twenty-seven, Rhythm Heaven Groove, a Bhagpuss pick.

Otherwise I’ll be keeping an eye on Deltarune Chapter 5 to see whether it garners any reviews.  Past chapter drops did get scores over on Open Critic, and the current chapter got a pretty glowing write-up over on Kotaku, but so far no numbers.

For now it has passed Ghost of Yotei: Legends as the most desired review. Picked in 65% of the leagues in which it was eligible, there are a lot of people out there waiting for a score.

Related:

Friday Bullet Points on Saturday about Video Game Business, Money, and Consequences

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It is Saturday, but I wanted to get the Steam Summer Sale post out yesterday and didn’t really have another post queued up for today… well, I did actually, but I’ll save it for another time.  Besides, I’ve done Friday bullet points on Saturday before.  Some stories from the wild that caught my eye.

Did anybody think it wouldn’t be $80?  And the ultimate edition will be $100.

There has been a whole meta narrative about GTA VI needing to be at that price point to “save the industry” or whatever.  Remember that analyst who got roasted because he said it needed to be $80.  Well, now we know that will be the price point.

Grand Theft Auto VI

So what?  Mario Kart World was launched with an $80 list price a year ago.  Will this game being $80 save the industry?  Raph Koster will tell you that making a AAA gets 10x more expensive every decade, meanwhile the industry itself is in decline. (Obligatory Matt Ball State of Video Gaming presentation for 2026 link.)

Probably not.  It will sell.  Probably very well.  But that will be due to the reputation Rockstar and the franchise has earned over the last 30 years.  That won’t sprinkle any magic fairy dust that will make it okay for everybody to charge $80.  And the world will keep turning.

There are other aspects to noodle on around this topic, like the fact that you’ll be able to buy the box at GameStop, but there won’t be a disk in the box, just a code to redeem, that pre-orders are leaning towards PlayStation over XBox by a factor of 6 to 1 (the PC release will be at some later date), that the online world aspect that has kept GTA V alive and making money for a decade won’t be there at launch, and how Rockstar is going to those GTA V players onto the new game, each of which could turn into a few thousand words of text.  Just not from me.

I actually own GTA V and, according to Steam, played it for 95 minutes.  But it was never something that really grabbed me.  I’ll go with the take from The Onion.

XBox Games can’t even buy a good headline it seems.  Already poised for a dramatic restructuring to meet Satya Nadella’s 30% profit margin mandate and still reeling from the disaster of the XBox Game Pass price hike fiasco, somebody decided they might as well put a hardware price increase on the shit sandwich buffet that is the division right now.

Sad Xbox Games AI slop logo generated by Co-Pilot

I guess this is understandable at least.  As noted over and over, the grasping desires of billionaires to never have to pay anybody ever again has caused them to throw all their resources at data centers in order to inflict LLM hell on society means that prices for RAM have gone way up.  Sure, it still seems cheap to 1988 me who spend $400 on two 1MB SIMMs, but we’ve had nearly four decades of Moore’s Law in play which usually makes things cheaper.

Now LLMs are making everything more expensive while trying to put us out of work.  Also, Satya Nedella is pouring money into the whole data center thing, so is at least incrementally responsible for the problem that led to the price increase.

Maybe MSFT felt empowered to raise the price after the Steam Box came in at a $1,049 price point?  The gaming press seems to be living on that Steam Box price point this week, which is still more that the most expensive remaining XBox option.  So MSFT has that going for them.

Is Destiny 2 the industry’s destiny?

Massively OP – Destiny 2 layoffs have affected around 300 workers so far

As previously noted, Destiny 2 is winding down into maintenance mode as Bungie moves on to other things.  So it was just a matter of time before the other shoe dropped… that shoe being layoffs that drops straight on the head of those affected.

Destiny 2

There is a temptation to make the comparison between film and video games in that both are ventures that need a lot of work done over a specific period of time, after which the need for many or even most staff goes away.   It just feels like maybe big old Hollywood has figured it out while the little video game industry is still struggling.

Except, of course, depending on how you measure, the video game industry brings in a lot more revenue than film studios… also, Hollywood has most definitely not figured it out for current circumstances.

But both industries seem beset with corporate avarice and timidity that leads to and endless series of sequels and attempts to cash in on somebody else’s success.

I’ll take “MMOs I Have Never Heard Of” for $200 Alek… and only in the loosest definition of “MMO” I suppose.

Wildgate

Wildgate, which launcher last year under the umbrella of Mike Morhaime’s Dreamhaven studio, is pulling back into an effective maintenance mode, the news of which made me wonder why I hadn’t looked into this space based title.  And then I went to the Steam store page (where it is currently $7.50, marked down from $30 for the Steam Summer Sale and saw it described as a PvPvE extraction shooter… and that was why.

I found I already had a tag for it on the blog, but that was due to it being picked by Shintar in last years Fantasy Critic League.  It ended up with a review score of 76.4.  Not bad, but not high enough to make people take notice.

So it goes.  Extraction shooters are thick on the ground and PvP drives away a lot of players.  And this means more people out of a job as they cease development and only need a team capable of maintaining the game for the time being.

  • Stars Reach Client Access Revoked

Bhagpuss has a post, linked right above, that goes into the details, but the high level is that after the Kickstarter Playable World gave us a second Stars Reach client.  I don’t know why.

Stars Reach

With the coming of their premature, need the money early access for their planetary colony sim, they decided that having two clients was confusing.

I had two clients, and since they both seemed to work identically, it didn’t seem all that confusing.  Both logged in with my Steam credentials, so there was effectively no difference I could detect.  But what do I know?  I just kept using the one I had been at it kept working.

But then Playable Worlds went through the effort to revoke access to one of the clients, giving everybody this charming message that you had to acknowledge.

Revoked!

I had never seen this before, and I have been in a few Steam based betas.  Somehow everybody else managed to avoid this and transition to another state without yoinking a registered client on which most of your play time has been recorded.  I had 30 hours on that client and an hour on the other one.

This seems like it might cause more confusion than it resolved, especially if you only had the one client.  But not everything Playable Worlds is up to makes sense to me from the outside.

I could write about this for days, but I don’t really want to expend that much effort on another shitty billionaire who believes the only way to save the industry is to make him richer.

And that is always the common thread in everything he says or does.

This time around his claim is that the “only hope” for new games is to connect to older, successful games, by which he means Fortnite.  This will, of course, let him collect rent on those new titles.

In order to make this as easy as possible, connecting with Fortnite and locking your game into its ecosystem so you must pay Tim forever, is a big part of the new Unreal Engine 6.  He hopes that the popularity of the engine will give him a lock on the ecosystem.

He is also reviving the dead on arrival idea of sharing assets across games.  You get a hat in Fortnite you can wear it in other games in the ecosystem.  He can’t be that dumb in reality, so this has to be a pitch to investors who don’t know any better.

Also, because he hates paying other people, even the people who work for him and make him obscenely wealthy, UE6 is going all in on AI slop, something certain to appeal to industry CEOs everywhere.

Finally, he is mad… again, still, moreso, or whatever… at Valve because Steam requires you disclose AI use on its storefront.  He hates that, and nothing says you feel confident you are doing a completely legit and acceptable thing than getting mad when people mention it.

But EA is on board for it all… and there is an endorsement that really tells you you’re on the wrong side of history.