Anyway, I started playing the New Colossus, when I realized that it was a sequel to The New Order, so I went back to this, only to realize that I had played it back in the XBOX 360 era... Since I was about a third of the way through the game, I thought I would just finish it so I could get the entire story fresh in my mind before I switched gears to play The New Order.

Plot summary from Wikipedia:

In July 1946, Blazkowicz and his comrades take part in an air raid against a fortress and weapons laboratory run by Deathshead but are captured and brought to a human experimentation laboratory. Blazkowicz escapes from the laboratory's emergency incinerator, although he is severely injured. He is admitted to a Polish psychiatric asylum where he remains in a catatonic state. In 1960, the Nazi regime orders the asylum to be "shut down" and executes Anya's parents when they resist. Blazkowicz awakens from his vegetative state and eliminates the extermination squad before escaping with Anya. Blazkowicz and Anya drive to her grandparents' farm, where they inform him that the Nazis had defeated the United States in 1948 and that the members of the ensuing anti-Nazi Resistance have been captured. Blazkowicz interrogates a captured officer from the asylum, learning that the top members of the Resistance are imprisoned in Berlin's Eisenwald Prison. Anya's grandparents smuggle her and Blazkowicz through a checkpoint in Stettin before they travel to Berlin. During the train ride, Blazkowicz encounters Frau Engel for the first time. When they arrive, Anya helps Blazkowicz break into Eisenwald Prison, where he rescues the person he spared fourteen years prior (Fergus or Wyatt) and finds that the Resistance movement is led by Caroline, who was left paralyzed due to an incident at Isenstadt in 2009's Wolfenstein.

The Resistance executes an attack on a Nazi research facility in London, bombing their operations base, and stealing secret documents and prototype stealth helicopters. The documents reveal the Nazis are relying on reverse-engineered technology derived from the Da'at Yichud, which created such inventions as energy weapons, computer artificial intelligence, and super concrete; however, it is revealed that someone is tampering with the super concrete's formula, making it susceptible to mold deterioration. The Resistance discovers a match with Set, who is imprisoned in Camp Belica. Blazkowicz agrees to go undercover inside Camp Belica and meets Set, who tells him that the Nazis have co-opted Da'at Yichud technology to mass-produce and control robots, and offers to help the Resistance in return for the destruction of the camp. Blazkowicz finds a battery for a device that controls Camp Belica's robots, which he and Set then use to incapacitate Engel, destroy the camp, and liberate its prisoners.

Set reveals that the Nazis' discovery of one of the Da'at Yichud caches, which included advanced technology centuries ahead of its time, allowed Germany to surpass the Allies in military might. Set agrees to assist the Resistance by revealing the location of one such cache but states that the Resistance requires a U-boat to access it.[19] Blazkowicz obtains a U-boat but discovers that it is the flagship of the Nazis' submarine fleet, and is equipped with a cannon designed to fire nuclear warheads, which requires keycodes from the Nazi lunar research facility to operate.[20] Blazkowicz uses the Spindly Torque—a Da'at Yichud spherical device capable of destroying super concrete—to steal the identity of a Nazi lunar scientist and infiltrate the Lunar Base. He succeeds at obtaining the keycodes, but upon returning to Earth, he discovers that Engel has mounted an assault on the Resistance base, capturing some of its members on behalf of Deathshead.

The Resistance use the Spindly Torque to break open Deathshead's compound. After liberating the compound's captives, Blazkowicz travels to the top of the tower, where Deathshead's workshop is located. Inside, Deathshead reveals to Blazkowicz that he possesses the preserved brain of the soldier Blazkowicz chose to die, putting it in a robot. The robot comes alive and assaults Blazkowicz, who defeats it, destroys the brain, and puts his friend to rest. Commandeering a larger robot mecha, Deathshead attacks Blazkowicz, who gets the upper hand and destroys the robot. He drags Deathshead out of the wreckage and attacks him, who pulls out and arms a grenade which kills himself and gravely wounds Blazkowicz. As he crawls towards a window, Blazkowicz mentally recites "The New Colossus" as he watches the Resistance survivors board a helicopter. Believing they have reached safety, Blazkowicz gives instructions to fire the nuclear cannon. After the credits, a helicopter is heard approaching.

Overall thoughts:

Obviously, I'd play this again...because I did! I really like this game and the story didn't feel repetitive. I had obviously forgotten some bits and pieces of the story over the years, and I feel like, from a story-telling perspective, that it was worth the replay. I wish I had remembered to take a nap every time I went to the safehouse because that seems to be the way to permanently incrementally increase your overall health.  The choice of who to save (Fergus or Wyatt) was the same across both attempts: Fergus.  I wonder what my choice would have been had I not associated Fergus with Simon Pegg😹 (the actual voice actor for Fergus is Gideon Emery).  As much as I liked the replay, I would not keep playing to unlock all the combat options.  I eventually got tired of trying to get the various dual-wield, slide, headshot kills (etc.), and opted for a straight up "don't disturb the horner's nest" approach (aka stealth), but if push comes to shove blow it all up.

My big "aha!" while playing this game is that my gaming style has changed a lot over the years.  I used to hate stealth games. I remember playing Splinter Cell and not liking having to sneak around (preferring a "blast everything" approach), but in this game I saw that my gaming style had totally shifted. Better to work in the shadows than be out in the open.

Overall Stats from the Xbox dashboard:

• Gamerscore: 400/1000
• Achievements: 19/50
• Commander kills: 43
• Steal Kills: 60
• Dual-Wielding Kills: 64
• Total Kills: 929
• Hours played: 16

Trailer

Both Google Photos and Flickr got into the "year in review" trend.  I decided to include them both here because they are both photo-related.  Flickr is a bit more basic with some stats, whereas Google creates some nice videos for you.  If you've gone through and have tagged people in your photos, one of  the recap videos it creates is your most photographed people (which is basically members of my household 😹). I did like the Year in Colors idea (first video) as well as the overall photo stats, which include photos with people I don't often take photos with (vis-a-vis my dad who lives abroad).

Flickr does tally the number of photos you've taken, but since I upload everything as private, and then selectively release them into public viewing, I think the viewing stats are really impacted. Not to mention that I don't have that many people that I follow (or that follow me) on Flickr.

Catching up on writring a little bit about TV and video games I watched (or played) this past year... To kick it off, I thought I'd write a little bit about Motherland: Fort Salem.  For October I meant to watch themed movies and shows (you know, horror and witchy stuff), but I only managed to binge this series 🙃. I finished it just before Halloween so I was within my self-imposed time frame 😹

I originally came across this on Hulu (I think) back in 2020, but it didn't catch my attention back then. Having a little more time, I thought I'd dive into the show (and yes, spoiler alert, if you haven't seen this yet).  The premise of the show is that witches are real, and their persecution in Salem was a real thing, but that came to an end with an agreement known as the Salem Accord, whereby witches would have a compulsory draft into the continental army (which later became the US army). While this agreement spared witches from persecution, it conscripted them and future generations as a military force. This agreement was binding in both legal and supernatural ways.

So...witches go into the military, other nations have witches too, there appears to be a global witch council of some sort (made up of top generals) so the peace is kept at a global level by the time the show starts. However, not everything is honkey dorey.  There is a group of dissident witches, The Spree, who coordinate terrorist attacks around the world in an attempt to end the conscription of witches. That's where Season 1 begins. Without spoiling too much of the series, the series continues with a good old-fashioned witch hunt (the Van Hellsing/Castlevania kind, not the political kind) when the Camarilla (and ancient order of witch hunters) enters the scene again, there's a kind of magical fungus (fungi were popular in the 2020s it seems...), and in the end there's no reason the persecute witches because.... (you're just going to have to watch to find out).

Overall, this was a 7/10.  The storytelling behind it was very WB/CW for my liking, but not too CW that it posed an obstacle to the binging.  The world that the series built out seemed interesting, and I would have liked to see more, but the plot device used to explain how witches exist (maybe this didn't need explaining), and how everything got resolved seemed too convenient.  Still, worth a watch IMO.

Trailer (season 1)

 Well...this one was a suprise... Grammarly is doing a Year in Review, and I guess by whatever metrics they've collected and measured from the emails, proposals, and papers I've written in 2024 I am an "inventor" 😹

It's a truism that I don't play a ton of Steam games. I have Steam, GOG, and Epic (and Amazon) installed on my Windows Partition on my MacMini, and while I spend about half my computing time on Windows, I don't really play enough to make a dent in statistics for some kind of year-in-review algorithm to give me something interesting.  The only thing you can tell from this is that I like Star Trek and that the games I played were Star Trek related ;-).  I saw Star Trek Legends on sale this past year, so I got it, I binged it, and perchance, I tried Timelines again, but with the main story completed a while back, the seasonal grinds for more character cards didn't appeal to me.  Maybe in 2025 I'll be playing more Steam games. 

The one thing I wish for, when it comes to these types of services, is interoperability.  GOG Galaxy allows me to see and launch the games I have on Epic and Steam.  I wish achievements were shared across services, so if you got something in Steam, it posts on GOG and Epic, and vice versa.

Microsoft is doing a Year In Review for Xbox again! Woohoo!!!

This one (compared to TrueAchivements) gives you your playstyle. No surprises there, I play a lot of FPS games, but the surprise is that casual card games overshadow my more console-y games.  You can still see Assassin's Creed Mirage, and Wolfenstein: The New Order in my top games, but Star Trek Resurgence didn't make it.  I think Microsoft needs a Top 5 listing ;-)

I checked out my TrueAchivement's YearOnXbox summary first this year. Similar to Untappd, they have a billboard-style summary, and a rolling video, which I used SnagIt to capture. I was surprised that I spent THAT much time on a casual game! It started with a round of Wordle (which is untracked) Solitaire every evening while watching TV, and by the end of 2024 it was Wordle, MS Solitaire, MS Wordament, and MS Mahjong. MS Sodoku is still not there. I haven't been able to get into that kind of puzzle. When I ran this two weeks ago (still in 2024), the animated version was better, but I still had "TBDs" for December.  When I ran it again this week, there were a lot of TBDs (despite clearly showing data from 2024) and a lot of  "?", so I think something broke on their end.

Reddit has the weirdest measuments for how long you've been on their platform.  They measure time spent on there as "bananas scrolled" - which brings to mind jokes like "Americans will use almost anything to measure things, except metric" 😹.  After being presented with communities like ForgottenTV and MartialArts, I joined those.  Nostalgia is a powerful drug, and old TV shows, and my interest in doing martial arts again won out 🙃. You can also tell that it was an election year, with important ballot questions for my state's ballot measures. The HighStrageness subreddit also made it to my front page this year, but that's one I haven't joined, and I actually haven't seen on my feed for a while now.

2024 was the year that FourSquare stopped having a separate product and they open-sourced their location database.  Swarm remains their check-in social network, which I and a few contacts still use.  The verb "to swarm" was something that was popular back in the FourSquare days, but I doubt anyone is swarming these days. I still call the app/service foursquare, and wish they'd change swarm back to foursquare ;-)

This past year I actually traveled a bit, and you can see that in my recap, but I am surprised that a roadside café stop made it to the list, but actual ancient and medieval sites did not...weird. I hope 2025 brings more travel.

I don't drink as much beer as I used to, but I still check into Untappd periodically to mark which beers I have consumed and rate them, so I don't fall into the trap of ordering a beer that I have tried in the past and disliked. Untappd had both a billboard style Year In Beer, and a more animated version.  Only the billboard was downloadable, so I used SnagIt to do a screen capture of the video.

I am surprised that there are so many styles that I haven't tried. I hope they aren't all sours 😹