Month: August 2022

If you’ve read some of my previous blogs regarding video games, you might remember that I don’t buy big games on release, and I certainly don’t pre-order them. The last pre-order I was tempted to do was years ago when No Man’s Sky was the big talk, and fortunately Dawn talked me out of it as it became an infamous debacle on its launch. Fast forward a couple of years from that and the big talk was Cyberpunk 2077, an adaptation of the venerable 1980s tabletop RPG Cyberpunk 2020 with an updated timeline considering the world was almost to 2020 with no wetware or flying cars in sight. If anything we got Covid 2020 instead… but I digress. The hype surrounding CP2077 was insane enough it was my turn to talk Dawn down from a pre-order, despite the developer CD Projekt Red having a good rep with its Witcher series. Games–particularly ambitious games–that work as promised right out of the gate are such a sad rarity these days we’re surprised when one does. Besides, the requirements necessary to run the game, much less run it well, were really starting to push what our five year old rigs could handle.

But the game on launch ended up having a distinct lack of “well” regardless of someone’s hardware. The botched launches of No Man’s Sky and Fallout 76 were nothing compared to the crash-and-burn of CP2077, which released in a near unplayable state much less one whose features were going to push gaming forwards to the next level. So much so that even by the time Dawn and I acquired systems (theoretically) capable of playing it, our interest had fallen to “thick shrug” levels.

Because I’m a cynic about these things, I expected CDPR would just cut their losses and move on. But as the article I linked above shows, CP2077 stayed on the radar somehow. People were still playing it. Maybe because as a single-player game it was mod friendly in a way FO76 could never be? And then apparently at some point this year Patch 1.5 dropped, and (at least for PC) fixed and restored a lot of… well, okay, brass tacks would be that Cyberpunk 1.5 seems to be what 1.0 should have been.

I state this because I must justify that it recently went on sale to celebrate CDPR’s 20 year anniversary, and while the sale meant $29.99 rather than $59.99, after some hemming and hawing I bought in at long last. I mean look, I always found cyberpunk to be a cool genre. Take one glance at Santone in Zombie Ranch and you’ll see the DNA of Blade Runner and other such imaginings of future dystopia all over it, even if people aren’t running around with robotic arms.

But I really didn’t know what to expect. I was taking a chance. After all, the narrative since its launch was all about what had gone wrong, what was missing or buggy or half-baked–not what was there, or perhaps more accurately what was there now that the 2022 patch job was in.

What’s there is… actually quite a lot! At least for a guy like me who values exploration, immersion and a good story. Maybe I’ll get more into it in a future blog, but with a pair of good headphones on walking or driving around the main setting of Night City is a great experience, and even if you can’t go into a lot of places the illusion of a bustling futuristic metropolis is there, particularly in the downtown streets at night where your senses are assaulted by holographic ads and diverse crowds in the best way. The voice acting is superb and the in-game models are expressive in form and face enough to make the conversations you’re having feel real. Forget side quests, I can get a thrill in this game just traveling from place to place sometimes.

Now, that kind of immersion would be impossible if the game is crashing constantly or NPCs are sliding around in T-poses, so I’m not going to be any kind of retroactive apologist for CDPR, and I can only hope that maybe, just maybe the industry will slow their roll a bit on releasing games too soon and making paying customers act as beta testers. But long story short, I took a chance on the game and I’m glad I did. Though I’m also glad I waited to do it.

Last December, Dawn and I made our first convention appearance since the COVID pandemic began. It was relatively small and very local and we did okay for the amount of “ring rust” we’d accumulated. Then a few months later we did WonderCon, and that was definitely rough on our stamina at points, not to mention our cat unexpectedly started having epileptic seizures and I almost sent Dawn off solo because of that. But we persevered, possibly thanks in large part to Comic-Con International extending their free drayage program to WonderCon for the first time (that basically means they assist you with load-in and load-out).

Next up was going to be Midsummer Scream at the end of July, which we signed up for back in 2020 to try out after we had been put back on the waitlist for Small Press at SDCC and had decided screw it, we’re just going to go to SDCC as pro attendees and also show our visiting niece around since she hadn’t quite turned 13 yet so was eligible for a free child badge.

Of course we all know what happened next, and as the conventions started poking their heads back out two years later the landscape had definitely changed, as was (unintentionally) reinforced by SDCC when they rolled over our guest badge choices from 2020 and… oh, hey, my mom was one of them. Oof.

My niece was now too old for a child badge, of course, and also not as interested in coming down from Washington State. Just as well since SDCC then also did the thing again where we did get called off their wait list for exhibiting, and even got offered the same placement as we had in 2019. Dawn and I talked and we decided to do something which was probably nucking futs of us, which was accepting that and thus setting up a scenario where we had a marathon convention to do, and then just a few days later would do another three days at the Scream.

SDCC also ended up offering Dawn a table in Artist’s Alley at the last minute, and that offer we declined since we were already feeling pretty stretched thin. We’re considered pros but we’re not pros, you know? We did a circuit but not in the way friends of ours do where they’re going out to New York, Atlanta, Chicago and somehow staying sane and whole.

It’s like, I didn’t even start with the exhibiting thing until I was well over 30, and though Dawn is younger than me she’s still got some mileage on her. Now I’m pushing 50 years old and I wonder if exhibiting is a younger man’s game. Again, we do have good friends of similar age who do the big circuit and make it work, but doing the circuit is their actual job. They’ve literally done things like changing their sleep schedules to acclimate for evening shows, which is not quite like base camp at Mt. Everest but still  above and beyond how the average person would prep. And this year too I’ve seen some people who have been successful for years showing signs of breakdown, either physical, mental, or both. Is convention exhibiting akin to a sport where you only have so many good years in you before you’re out to pasture, so to speak?

I’m a terrible control sample, though. I have bad feet, I’m diabetic, I’m allergic to a distressingly wide range of flora… hell I need a machine just to breathe freely at night. Beyond that I’m not psychologically fond of traveling, either, at least not where I have to pack a bunch of things. Honestly it’s a wonder I get out of the house at all, much less that I came out alive from this recent bout of back-to-back conventioneering. I survived, obviously (or I’d be a literal ghost writer) but I definitely felt beat up.

Likely part of it is a matter of training and conditioning, but man, I sure feel a lot more tired a lot more of the time than I did 10 years ago, to say nothing of my teens or twenties where staying up until 2am playing TTRPGs with my friends was just the time for us all to go out to Denny’s or some other 24 hour venue and have “dinner.”

Anyhow, this isn’t meant to discourage anyone from convention lyfe, but if you can get started sooner than later, that’s probably for the best. And here’s hoping that by the time your mind and body’s warranties decide they’ve expireed, you’re rich and/or famous enough to have assistants!