I thought I’d have put the game down by now, but I’m still playing Baldur’s Gate 3. I’m now deep into Act 2 on my second playthrough with the Ghost Recon team. Currently everyone (Astarion, Lae’zel, one hireling, and myself) are level 5 fighter battle masters/level 3 rogue assassins. Since just hitting level 5 fighter, everyone now has access to an Extra Attack, and you can combine that with Sneak Attack, Action Surge, Trip Attack, and Precise Attack to wipe out entire encounters in one or two turns. So far, the only difficulties with this team came at the end of Act 1 (since I was low level in two classes instead of high level in one of them) and at a particular Act 2 quest where you have to defend a portal against dozens of enemies (I just didn’t have enough crowd control for that many enemies, so I broke out Gale for that fight). Other than that, I’m basically only swapping out my hireling for character-related quests, like the one I’m doing right now for Shadowheart. At level 12, I should be level 6 fighter/level 6 rogue with everyone in the squad, and we’ll storm through Baldur’s Gate.

Other than that, I started playing some fighting games again, and I’m not as rusty as I thought. The usual suspects of Skullgirls, Guilty Gear Strive, and Street Fighter 6. I’d probably be playing more Mortal Kombat 1 if not for performance issues and the inability to decline matches against wi-fi players; it’s a shame, because the game is otherwise pretty great.

I haven’t made much progress in the System Shock remake, but I am really enjoying it. I discovered the Resident Evil remake pretty late, and it’s a shame how few of those games there were for so many years, by which I mean that style of RE game, not games with the words “Resident Evil” in the title. Still, we seem to have plenty of them these days, which is great to see. System Shock was 94, and Resident Evil was 96. I’d be surprised to learn that RE was inspired by System Shock, but perhaps both of them took similar inspiration from Alone in the Dark. Hopefully that remake early next year is good too.