Tag: No Man’s Sky

Gaming: Xbox Series X/Steam Deck

There’s nothing unusual about me playing different games and “at the same time,” like, I’m fighting with Borderlands 4 on the Xbox as well as having just completed the latest Expedition for No Man’s Sky – more on this in a moment. I’d started the Expedition on my Steam Deck and completed the latest Community Goals for Elite Dangerous: Odyssey and pocketed a cool 122,000,000 credits and getting me close to being back to having over 4,000,000,000 credits.

I do stuff like this because I can and it’s always an exercise in (1) remembering what I was doing in whatever games I’m playing, (2) being aware of the fact that the Steam Deck is not the Xbox Series X and (3) when any game I’m playing starts to piss me off, I can go play another that’ll hopefully let me decompress before jumping back into the gaming grinder.

“Breach” is the name of the latest Expedition that expands on creating a Corvette to galivant around the galaxy doing stuff – and some stuff that’s been done in past Expeditions, like, going fishing which, honestly, wasn’t something I expected to be doing but, spoiler alert, it was the next to the last task in the Expedition and probably the easiest thing I had to do. There are a couple of such “old” tasks and it had me wondering if the folks at Hello Games ran out of ideas of things to do for this Expedition and dragged out the old stuff, gussied it up a bit, and probably sat back and laughed their asses off.

The Expedition calls for a lot of space walking, which is pretty cool even if trying to get back into your Corvette can get interesting at times – but not as interesting as being on dry land or in the water and trying to get back aboard but the coolest thing I’ve done in No Man’s Sky is to… space walk into a black hole.

I’ll admit that I was… suspicious when I got to Rendezvous 4 and there’s a black hole right in front of me and, in other Expeditions, I didn’t remember ever seeing one upon emergence into a system but I kinda shrugged it off and went to the rendezvous point – but the black hole stuck in my mind and, as it turned out, for good reason. I get to this task and my first thought was, “Space walk into what? A black hole?” and now, seeing that black hole in the now-previous system is making sense and there’s that part of my brain that said, “I’m not doing that!” since, um, you know, light isn’t safe around one of those things but it’s a task and if it wasn’t going to be survivable, we would have to fly into it and as usual.

That was really and seriously cool. I emerged… somewhere else and without my ship, which I wasn’t thinking about until my suit mentioned that the temperature was dropping and now I’m having an “Oh, shit!” moment until, duh, just summon the Corvette – and it appeared before me and I jetted onboard, sighing a sigh of relief to hear that the temperature was stabilizing.

The fucked-up part is a “trap” that Hello Games has used before because once you finish this task, you’re supposed to head to the Rendezvous 5 system and the normal thing is to open the Galaxy Map and follow the Expedition Route which I actually did until I thought, “Wait a damned minute! This is like the old Living Ship task!” In this main story mission, you eventually have to get to the location of the living ship, and you’re so involved in the game at this point that you can easily miss the fact that you need to teleport to the living ship’s location and not warp to a location.

Yeah, I wasn’t falling for that, but I did go to a space station – and one of the deserted and partially destroyed stations that populated the Expedition – and teleported back to the Rendezvous 4 station and went on to Rendezvous 5 from there. Black holes in the game tend to drop you off thousands of light years from the point you entered the black hole and, in this Expedition, it’s no different.

I sighed and took a deep breath upon completing the Expedition and my next thought was, “Now I gotta finish it on my other two [Xbox] profiles and the Steam Deck…” and went back to playing Borderlands 4, only to pick up where I left off trying to kill a beast that was stomping a mudhole in my ass and pissing me off because I’d get the fucker down to his last bit of life and… then I get killed, respawn, and have to start killing it all over again and this time I said, “Fuck this…” and went to do something else while knowing that I’ll have to come back to this task at some point because there’s no way to cancel it.

The problem is typically Borderlands: I need better weapons to kill this fucker and the ones I have aren’t all that good and there’s no Gun machine at the respawn point and the little critters who are adding to my demise aren’t dropping anything helpful when I kill them. Even if there was a Gun machine, I’ve already learned that chances are very damned good that any weapon in that machine won’t be as good as the ones I currently have unless I get lucky and the daily offering happens to be a Legendary but, as you can imagine, that doesn’t happen very often and the last few Legendaries I’ve seen in the machines… were less than the weapon I currently had.

My brain was thinking that I’m stupid enough to play this game with all four characters across three Xbox profiles. The easiest thing I did gaming yesterday was collect my credits from the Elite Dangerous Community Goal that, honestly, I had forgotten I was a part of even though, the day before, I made a bunch of runs for the stuff the CG was asking for and that was pretty tame. One button click and I’m 122,000,000 credits richer. Borderlands 4 is being a pain in my ass but, again, I expected it to be since, duh, I have to learn how to play this game.

I see players posting stuff on Facebook and X and they’re Level 40 and above, talking about the Legendaries they’re finding and making it sound like doing the stuff in the game is a no-brainer and, I dunno, maybe for them it is but as I saw in a review of the game, the UI for the game isn’t all that intuitive and moving around the very large map can be a pain and mostly because you really can’t zoom in to look at a place you think you need to go to. I was looking for a particular safe house and while I knew where it was on the map, I was having a bitch of a time selecting its icon so I could fast travel to it because there were other icons piled up on top of it and they wanted to get all in my way and… who the fuck thought of this clusterfuck?

It kinda galls me to see stuff about the game from sources like Gamers Rant and they’ve got this “all you gotta do” thing about an aspect of the game that (a) I haven’t come across yet or (b) yeah, I wish I had known this when I had to do it. Apparently, there are some folks on Reddit who are having a field day playing the game and kicking it all in the ass and chances are they’re PC players… and there are probably mods for the game already and Microsoft doesn’t allow mods to be used on the consoles even though I’ve heard rumors of people being able to hack the console so they can download mods for whatever game they’re playing and… I don’t have the time nor the patience for such crap and if I did, I still wouldn’t use a mod because, as I’ve been learning, this version of the game makes you use any or all knowledge you’ve ever learned about playing Borderlands.

I still can’t imagine someone who never played any of the other games trying to figure this one out. Playing the game twelve times makes me have to be patient; it makes me have to focus while having fun killing Rippers and blowing up shit which is so relaxing that I’ve checked my pulse via my Apple watch when I’m in the middle of a massacre and… it’s 62 when, normally, my pulse is like 80. So, I’m going to finish scribbling this and go to the living room so I can begin my daily torture playing video games.

I still have to get back to No Man’s Sky on the Steam Deck and there shouldn’t be that many problems completing it since I’ve already done it – I’m just kinda not happy that this Expedition didn’t have any new ships other than having to build a Corvette. But doing so will keep me occupied and that just works. I’m debating with myself about whether or not I want to do the Expedition on my other two Xbox profiles and… I kinda don’t want to but the Expedition is running for three weeks so, yeah, I’ll get around to doing… because I can.

As far as I know, there’s no new CG for Elite Dangerous yet and I still have to work on my Federal and Imperial navy ranks so I can get the ships I already have on the forgotten Xbox version of the game… because I can.

Xbox X Gaming: No Man’s Sky – Expedition 14 – Final Thoughts

I spent yesterday checking all of the bases I’d created for the Expedition and across all three profiles and too many of them were wooden constructs because, in the heat of playing the game – aggressive Sentinels and stupidly stormy and lethal weather – I was proud of myself to have been able to throw them up quickly but now, those wooden constructs had to go and in favor of modular constructs so I went to each base with wooden structures and rebuilt them… after doing some running around to get the stuff I needed to do the rebuilding.

I was “appalled” at the lack of certain things, like I had two pieces of Carbon which is needed for building stuff and fueling certain weapons and the Exocraft Minotaur’s engine and I’m wondering how I let my supply of Carbon get so low – and there were similar shortages in my other profiles that, had I been in dire straits, I would have been in major trouble.

I’m not being pressed to do any tasks so outside of wiping out some nosy Sentinels who wanted to take offense to my construction efforts, I could take my time and build the modular structures I usually build and with a feature that I discovered during this Expedition and then, purely by accident: Incorporating a Storage Module into the actual modular part. I recall rapidly throwing together a modular structure and in a barebones kind of way and just to see if I could do it while a nasty storm raged around me. I’d gotten things laid out the way I wanted them and thought that now would be a good time to put down the two Storage Modules I had but as I ran around with the module and looking for a fairly level piece of ground to sit it on, I accidentally came into contact with one of the modules and… the Storage Module dropped right into place!

What deviltry is this? I run inside and to the module in question and, sure enough, I’m looking at the face of the Storage Module and it’s connected to the module like it’s one of the doors! I couldn’t test opening it yet because I hadn’t made the power stuff I needed – solar panels and batteries – but through the storms that kept coming every four minutes or so, I got power to the base and… I could access the Storage Module!

Every modular construct now has Storage Modules incorporated into them. This was probably something that was possible all along and I just didn’t know about it, but it does come in handy and as noted when I had Sentinels swarming all over the place and I needed to get some stuff out of storage and, in previous iterations, I would have had to go outside to access the storage and run the risk of getting blown up by the Sentinel swarm but now? I’m going through the storage and grabbing the stuff I needed and in comfort… then I went out to take care of that swarm.

With that out of the way, I’m just sitting and waiting and kinda/sorta killing Sentinels to help flesh out the optional tasks that are, again, more like a Community Task than it is an individual one – and this is something different from how optional tasks were prior to Expedition 14. When I got done messing around in the game and on all profiles, the Level 4 optional task was 62% complete so when I get done here, I’ll take a peek to see if there’s been any progress and maybe spend some time killing stuff to add to the totals.

In other Xbox X news, I am… dismayed at the lack of games that I find interesting. Xbox, true to its word, is adding new games to Game Pass right regularly, some big-name games and a lot of indie games, which Microsoft has been really big on for the last couple of years or so. I was looking at Call of Duty – Modern Warfare II (or was it III?) and I have never played the games in this franchise, but I thought that maybe I should give it a shot until I happened to see the reviews for the game and the best review that I saw for this game was two stars. One reviewer said that if they could give negative stars, they’d give the game a -10-star review and the reviews were rather pointed and exacting in what the reviewers thought was wrong with the game.

So, no Call of Duty for me. I went through the updated catalog for Game Pass and did not see one game that I would remotely be interested in playing. None. A lot of the games are indie games and a lot of them are “Final Fantasy” type games with dragons and magic and I have never liked that kind of games and games done in a style where the two sides are face-to-face and battling it out and… I’m not a fan of those kind of games, either.

As I’m scrolling through the catalog, I’m thinking that I paid a lot of money for a console built with cutting edge technology and it’s not like the subscription for Ultimate Game Pass is all that expensive but it’s pricy enough for me to not want to play a game that looks like the games I used to play on the venerable Sega Genesis 16-bit console. If I wanted to do that, I have those games on my Steam Deck.

The indie games are… uninteresting; the games from some of the big-time developers and studios are getting slammed for not being as good as advertised – like how Starfield is for me, as an example and I’ve seen some reviews for this game that makes me feel good that I’m not the only one who doesn’t like this game. I want to challenge myself by playing games that aren’t my usual kind of games, but it would help if the games were interesting or looked like they’d present a challenge. I have some indie games in my library so it’s not like I don’t play them, but those games are not of the “Final Fantasy” variety.

Journey to the Strange Planet is one such game and it’s kinda cartoony and rather humorous… and not an easy game to play; I spend more time getting killed in this game than I do making progress in it, but I have beaten the game and I’m replaying it because (a) the game really is fun and challenging to play and (b) I’m a glutton for punishment.

I checked in with Elite Dangerous and, well, not a lot going on with the console version since Frontier abandoned it and in favor of the PC version of the game and the version that’s getting all the updates and cool shit like the new Type 8 ship by Lakon, which makes the Type 6, 7, 9, and 10 ships and the new ship became available yesterday and you can get it if you have the 16,000+ Ark (in-app purchases money) to purchase a ship although they say that the new ship is available in the various shipyards across the Milky Way – and not all stations carry all of the ships and there’s like three or four stations that do carry all ships and I imagine that the Type 8 is going to carry a steep price at the stations that will have it.

It’s just a damned shame that Frontier gave up on the Xbox and PS4/5 version of the game. It’s still playable and some guys who are deep into PvP fighting and going up against a brutal alien horde still play on the console, but a lot of the console users bailed out to transfer their console version to the PC version and… I didn’t do that because I didn’t think I’d be playing it on PC… until I got my Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally which are, in actually, both handheld PCs and especially the Asus.

You should have seen my face when I powered up the Ally to set it up and… it’s Windows 11 Home that I’m setting up. I plunked down the price of the PC version so I have both versions and I like that I can leave my ship and there are jobs where I can travel to a planet, leave the ship, go into a facility to do… something as well as do my favorite freight hauling stuff but, yeah, I wish I had ported my Xbox stuff over to the PC version because I would have all of my ships that I have on the console, like my Type 10 (which is a beast of a ship) and my Federal Cutter (which is no joke) but shoulda, woulda, coulda… didn’t.

I’ll just have to work hard to get the money to buy the ships and like I had to do on the console version.

Last night, I played Borderlands 2 with my daughter, who was playing one of the DLCs for this version of the game and it was fun running around with her and killing shit – and listening to hear laughing manically as her powerful Siren character is laying waste to bad guys. I honestly had forgotten about this particular DLC because at the point where I entered her game, I didn’t recognize my surroundings and, for a long moment, wasn’t sure if I had played this DLC or not but as we got into it, oh, yeah, now I remember it and I had played the DLC when it first came out and I had beaten the DLC – but since she hadn’t played it until now, my being able to remember key stuff about the DLC came in handy.

Rumor has it that there will be a Borderlands 4 coming out after the movie debuts and, if so, it’s been a very well-kept secret – I have not seen Gearbox say a word about a fourth game on X (formerly Twitter) and that’s been a good source of game information for me but, hey, maybe it’s gonna be a big surprise or the game – if it really exists – is still very much in the development phase and there’s nothing to see or talk about. Only time will tell on this one.

I think that I’m almost at that point where I’ll get tired of playing games and give the console and other devices a break, but I’d defer the break for a game that might be interesting and challenging…

Xbox X Gaming: No Man’s Sky Expedition 14

I have completed Expedition 14 on all devices and profiles. I did check the Rog Ally, and it’s connected to my primary Xbox account so there’s no need to do the Expedition on it or my laptop. You might be thinking, “Damn, he must really like that game if he has it on all those devices!” and you’d be right – I do like it and it’s one of the games I’d want to play when I take a handheld on the road. Oddly enough, I do not have any of my favorite games on my Samsung tablet and only Minecraft hangs out on my iPad and that’s because I’m not that good playing my games on a touch screen only – I can just barely play Minecraft with just my fingers.

The last thing I’ll say about that is I can connect an Xbox controller to both devices, but I wouldn’t want to bring a controller or, worse, shell out the money to buy a “traveling controller” or two and, no, I will never buy a controller that isn’t genuine Microsoft and despite how expensive they can be. It’s also a reason why I learned to not throw my controllers when a game pisses me off. So, now to the conclusion of Expedition 14 on my third Xbox profile.

It took me longer than it should have to finish the Expedition because I saved the ‘hardest’ thing to do for last: Find and kill those four Sentinel Walkers and going into yesterday, I had killed one out of the four already and had used a break in the killing to gather enough buried salvage data so I could build a more permanent base on the planet instead of the “wooden” structure I fought Sentinels in order to build and then the wooden one was faster to build while Brutus took care of my lightwork and kept the Sentinels busy while I got that done.

The break I took advantage of was knowing that I had to go to a Sentinel Nest and access its programming for a new multitool and to read some logs and until I go do that, all Sentinels are disabled which was okay with me because I had to do a lot of running around to get the buried items I needed. I had honestly thought that I had remembered to gather them up but, oh, wait – that was in my second Xbox profile and when I made sure that I had loads of the salvaged data before getting to the endgame planet and Sentinel smiting.

Duh.

I got 95% of the permanent base built before two things happened. The first was that I ran out of salvaged data and was about twenty pieces short to finish what I was doing. The second was that I got attacked by Sentinels that should not have been there because I hadn’t done my thing at the programming terminal that would wind up resetting the Sentinels. I saw the white directional icon on the screen telling me that there was a Sentinel off to my right and I blurted out, “Where did you come from?” and as I jumped into Brutus and made sure he was ready for war.

That lone Sentinel was joined by three more and we just kinda stared at each other and I had guessed, during my initial playing of the Expedition on my primary profile, that Brutus must confuse the Sentinels because I was getting my ass shot off while running around trying to find Brutus who literally had a mind of his own and he’s off shooting Sentinels but when I caught up to him and climbed aboard, the Sentinels… stopped attacking for a long moment which gave me (a) a chance to catch my breath and (b) blast them into smithereens.

Good to remember this. Now the four Sentinels and I are having a Mexican standoff, and I really am debating on whether I want to blow them away or not and muttered, “Ah, why the hell not?” and blasted the four Sentinels and the battle to conjure up a Walker is on… and not really a contest because by this point in things, I’ve done this exact same task multiple times already and I’ve gotten rather adept at wiping out wave after wave of Sentinels and without Brutus taking a lot of damage.

Walker #2 showed up and… got his ass handed to him in short order. Gee, I do love killing these things! Well, now I do; there’s a task in the game’s normal mode of things where I need a Walker’s Brain to finish making a needed device and as many times as I’ve done that particular task – and so many times that I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done it – the Walker has shown up and kicked my ass and sent me running away a few times before I finally got it destroyed.

Not this time, though. Brutus, my Exocraft Minotaur, kicks serious ass and better than the “normal” version of this Exocraft and once I got used to using his weapons, oh, it was on! I’m not even running around all over the place and like I was while working my first Xbox profile’s version; now I’m pretty much standing still and just turning in place and as needed to shoot the shit out of these red fuckers and laughing when a wave shows up, I start blasting them out of the sky and the ones that I haven’t shot up yet… are backing it up and in a damned hurry. The first time I really notice they were doing that had me laughing my ass off because even when I was trying to chase one of them down to end that particular wave, it kept running away from me until I finally killed it.

Sentinel Walker 2 of 4 is now in the books and I’ve got some more digging to do to get the salvaged data I need to put the finishing touches on my base; I also have quite a bit of refining to do and I’m kicking my butt a little because I don’t have any Copper to refine into Chromatic Metal and… why I didn’t notice this before now and this isn’t the first time playing this Expedition where I needed Chromatic Metal and didn’t have any Copper and now I gotta go get my hands on all the Copper I can find – and I’m just lucky that all of the planets in this particular system has Copper so I don’t have to go anywhere… but I do have some running and flying around so I can load up on Copper.

I even took advantage of the break to go do a task that, when I first did it, I flat out hated doing it: Find a crashed Sentinel Interceptor, repair it, and add it to my inventory. In the game’s regular mode of play, there’s a whole series of tasks that surround doing this very thing, so I’m used to running around to find the things I need to fix the ship and bring it back to life… but in the Expedition, I have to do it on a planet that has little to no flat lands – it’s all mountainous and stupidly so and there are barely places to land my ship and, by the way, the game itself has been pissing me off here of late because when I want to land my ship in a specific place, I get a “can’t land here” message that says the area isn’t clear when, um, unless my eyes have really gotten bad, the area I wanted to land in was, in fact, clear.

Now imagine sheer mountaintops with character killing drops if you fuck around and fall off the mountain and you’re trying to land your ship on a tiny patch of land that might be flat and the game’s telling you that the area’s not clear and you can’t land – but there’s nowhere else to land because landing somewhere else and trying to get there on foot… well, no, not doing that because that’s suicide. I’m cursing the game’s programmers for making this task harder than it already is and the fact that I’ve done this several times before has not made doing it now any easier because I already know that it’s going to take me at least fifteen minutes of flying around and landing to use my scope before I even get close to the structure I need to destroy so I can get the piece I need to wake up the ship’s brain that I’ve been carrying so I can take it back to the ship, install it along with the other stuff that was easier for me to get, wake the ship up and place it under my command.

And to make things worse, the Interceptor in question is one of the dinkier ones – a C-class ship so, in a way, it’s not really worth going after but the Expedition gives you the means to find one, which isn’t all that easy in the game’s normal mode of play but, yeah, mountains. But I complete the task and fly away in the Interceptor before the biological terrors get to me and… it’s back to my base, Vanguard 4, to entice Sentinels to show up so I can off their big brother, Walker.

I go to the programming terminal – and it’s the same one that I’ve already been to so there’s actually nothing for me to do except to “log off” and get back to my base and… wait for a Sentinel to show up. There are Gravino Balls in my base’s area and, usually, collecting one is enough to bring a Sentinel down and in attack mode, but I collected like, shit, almost twenty of them and… no Sentinels. I even added another piece to my base because when I had started building the permanent base, I had just gotten the first building down and given it a foundation when the Sentinels attacked so maybe, if I add on another building, it’ll bring a Sentinel and then, the killing can commence.

Nope. Not. I went to have dinner and came back to the game and still couldn’t find a single Sentinel. I’m standing outside my completed base and thinking about what, if anything, I want to do at this point when a Sentinel finally shows up (out of nowhere) and immediately attacks me and… let the killing begin anew. Walker 3 of 4 goes down in a heap and in about a minute after it showed up and I clean up the rest of the smaller Sentinels and… time to wait again only this time, I didn’t have to wait very long after logging off the programming terminal before a Sentinel showed up and I quickly wiped-out wave after wave until the Walker showed up and I destroyed it in less than a minutes.

Expedition task complete. Level Five of the Expedition complete. Expedition complete. Not really because each of the five Expedition phases had an “optional” task surrounding killing all of the biological terrors, Sentinels, and the new “bug” monster in a Community Goals kind of thing so even though I’ve completed all five levels of the Expedition, I probably won’t get the “Expedition complete” message that I’ve gotten used to seeing after completing other Expeditions until all five of the so-called “optional” tasks have been completed.

Fine. I can continue to do my part to kill these things because killing them is fun. I can stay at Vanguard 4 and kill Sentinels to add to the total and I know which planet in this system has the grubs for the new bug monster; find a grub, crush it, Momma Bug shows up and she’s not really that hard to kill and neither are the “little bugs” she hatches that want to act like the biological terrors and moves in a flanking motion and, well, nice try, fellas – you fuckers have killed Brutus one time too many for me to be messing around with you.

The good thing about this part is that everyone who is playing the Expedition is contributing to these optional tasks so it’s not like I have to do it all by myself. Now I can kinda kick back, build up my other bases, kills some stuff, and wait for the second part of the major update to the game to come along.

Stay tuned!

Xbox X Gaming: More of No Man’s Sky

Playing Expedition 14 the way I’ve been doing it is really a confusing pain in the ass and as I was reminded late last night when I went to tackle the last task and the one that’ll end Expedition 14 on my second Xbox profile: Hunt and destroy 4 Sentinel Walkers and I’ve only offed one. This is, I think, because the Expedition has been coded to limit their appearance compared to if you get into protracted battles with Sentinels.

I’ve been battling Level 5 Sentinels and waiting for the Walker to show up and, I dunno, maybe he didn’t get the email, his ship broke down or something but while I notice that a Walker hasn’t shown up, I don’t have time to dwell on it as the Walker’s buddies keep coming at me and from all directions… but I play Borderlands so fighting mobs that are coming from everywhere is par for the course. I thought that the previous task – find a level 12 predator – was tough and believe me, it is even though there’s some stuff out there that will tell you where such a predator is supposed to be and… I didn’t find one where others said there is one.

I didn’t find it until I left that system and picked a desert planet randomly from the five planets in the system and I climbed out of my Iron Vulture to scan for creatures and… immediately found and scanned the level 12 predator and I was only on the planet for about a minute and if that long. No, I did not note the planet I was on or the system I went to because this is a procedurally generated game which kinda and basically means that what you see on the screen is being generated in real time – and sometimes, you can see when PG screws up, i.e., your whole base is hovering in mid-air or when you left the game, the area you built your base was clear of stuff but when you came back, your whole base is buried in rock.

And the creature I found yesterday probably won’t be there today. This is the third time that I’ve done this particular quest, and I have not found this evasive and elusive predator in the same system or on the same planet. Three shots at the quest, three different resolutions. I’m not even surprised by this.

So, all I have left to do on my second profile is to find and destroy three more Walkers and the last two times I did this PITA task, I had built a base – and seriously fast because I was being attacked by Sentinels the whole time – and this is where I was going to start my attack on the Sentinels in a major battle royale… except, when I traveled to the base, um, it wasn’t the base I thought it was.

I was thinking about the base I’d built and fought… on my Steam Deck profile. The base’s configuration was the same, which struck me as odd because I hadn’t realized that I’d built two bases in the same configuration but it wasn’t the configuration that threw me – it was the location or, I wasn’t on the planet I thought I was to fight this last fight because since I’d been on this “second profile base,” I haven’t seen one Sentinel and I haven’t seen anything I can mess with that would get their attention so I can kick their asses and kill Walkers.

Damn it. This isn’t a fatal mistake – just one that I shouldn’t have made and, again, a problem when you’re doing what I’ve been doing and playing the same Expedition on two different platforms and three different profiles and, oh, yeah, that’s right: I have No Man’s Sky on my ASUS Rog Ally but I’m not sure which one of my Xbox profiles its attached to or it has its own profile for the game… and I’ll take a look before I go on a Sentinel hunt on my second Xbox profile and I’m not going to bother with working on the third profile until I’m done with the second.

I’m glad that this Expedition is six weeks long but don’t let that length of time fool you because if you don’t have the time to just sit and play – and like I do – that six weeks will blow by you pretty fast and now you’re trying to have a marathon session to finish the Expedition or give up on trying to finish it and, as I mentioned yesterday, this Expedition… doesn’t really have any cool-assed rewards other than a Minotaur that can kick some serious ass and unlike his pre-Expedition predecessors and even that isn’t much of a biggie for me when playing normally because while there are tasks where I’ll wind up getting the plans to make a Minotaur, it’s like I’ll make one and… it sits on its shelf and mostly unused because it’s no help in a Sentinel fight and as far as I’m concerned – and even when I have bothered to outfit it with all the stuff I can cram into it.

Because I kinda screwed the pooch getting my bases confused, I should take the day off and if I’m going to play games, play anything other than No Man’s Sky… except the Expedition clock is running; I’ve got the second profile to finish and the third profile isn’t all that close so I have some work to do to get it finished and I might really have to hustle if the version of the game on my Rog Ally is different from the other profiles – Xbox or Steam.

Why would I even bother to put myself through this? Because (a) I can and (b) I’m a gamer and I like games that challenge me and can hold my attention and (c) it’s oddly relaxing although, um, if you were sitting and watching me play, I might not sound like I’m relaxed, but I really am. You see, playing this Expedition on one device and with one profile… would have been “easy” since my focus would have been singular… but where’s the fun in that? Yep, it’s the same tasks done the first time but in these other times, what can I do differently this time or how not to screw up like I may have done the first time or on certain planets, there’s no need to rush – take a moment to look around, restock necessities, take my time building a properly outfitted base and even mess with different configurations.

When No Man’s Sky does get on my nerves during this Expedition, I… just go play one of the other games I have. Or watch some Olympics or read or do anything other than play this damned Expedition.

Xbox X Gaming: No Man’s Sky

So, I finished Expedition 14 on my primary Xbox profile and on my Steam Deck and to make shit unnecessarily harder on myself, I was playing the game on both devices at the same time and, um, sometimes, confusing myself as to what planet I was on and what I was supposed to be doing since I’d actually gotten more done on the Steam Deck than the Xbox but that’s not surprising since I was taking what I was learning on the Xbox and applying it to the Steam version.

Overall, this Expedition… sucked. I went through a lot of shit and, uncharacteristically, got killed more doing this Expedition than I have playing the entire game and… basically, for nothing other than some chitin armor pieces that, honestly, look like shit on one’s alien of choice.

I get to the end of the Expedition on the Xbox first (the Steam Deck was updating) and it was pretty anticlimactic and had me saying to myself, “I went through all of that for… nothing?” Well, not really for nothing because I completed another Expedition and one I felt, in retrospect, wasn’t a whole lot of fun – well, other than now having an Exocraft Minotaur – mech – that proved to be pretty bad-ass in the heat of battle with the swarms and especially taking care of Sentinel mobs including the gigantic Walker that, if you’re on foot and fighting one of these fuckers, well, good luck. Hope you have the best weapon you could configure.

Shit, the last two Expeditions gave us some cool new ships that made doing the Expeditions worth doing; this one… well, I found myself getting aggravated with being on planets that always had the worst fucking storms or when you looked at a planet’s info, you didn’t see anything about Sentinels and in the game’s normal mode, if the info doesn’t say anything about Sentinels, that’s because there are no Sentinels on the planet… but not true for this Expedition so you might think you can land there, maybe set up a base, take a much-needed breather from fighting the horde and weather but, nope.

I’m somehow low on Carbon and I really do not know how that happened, but I’d went to build a wall to the new base I made and… no Carbon. Not a problem because where I was, there were plenty of Carbon sources and I’m laughing to myself as I’m deforesting the area and thinking about my daughter and Minecraft and how she read me the riot act for cutting down all of the trees and not replanting them and, yeah, girlfriend was seriously and really pissed off about it.

No replanting trees in this game but I do have fun wiping out all of the trees in an area. I’m in the process of doing just that when I see the “scanning beam” of a Sentinel and, okay, where the fuck did he come from? The planetary info “lied” but I really should have expected that. I stop what I’m doing so I can eyeball the Sentinel to make sure it goes on about its business and stay out of mine when it suddenly turns towards me, scans me and its scanning beam goes from white to red and, sheesh, I don’t have time for this shit! Fortunately, my Exocraft Minotaur – that I named Brutus – is following me like a lost puppy so I climb onboard and take out the Sentinel that sounded the alarm on me… and proceeded to lay waste to all of his friends which also satisfied an Expedition requirement to hunt down and take out 4 Sentinel Walkers.

In the process, I wound up with more Carbon than I probably know what to do with. Taking care of this particular requirement on the Steam Deck version was even easier because I had learned how to battle the Sentinels in this “special edition mech” on the Xbox. I have to admit that I had a ball killing them and that I’d settled into a “killing zone” that’s not all that different from when I’m playing Borderlands and, um, I like blowing shit up.

I pretty much blow through the rest of the Expedition on the Steam Deck but I’m fairly bummed out because, again, other than facing a new kind of thing that wants to kill you and unusual swarms of biological horrors and Sentinels, this game really didn’t reward me for the effort I had to put out other than a cool Exocraft Minotaur named Brutus.

And I still had to do the Expedition on my other two Xbox profiles, which I’m in the middle of doing now and knowing what to do doesn’t make this Expedition any less tedious and I know that Hello Games programmed this Expedition to be a pain in the ass and not really easy to take on so it’s a grind and, oh, yeah, before I forget…

I wound up in one hell of a fighting mess with some Sentinels and… I wasn’t even messing with them. I had landed at the third Expedition site and before I exit my ship – the Iron Vulture from won doing Expedition 13 – I know that the biological terrors are going to swarm big time and this is going to be busy and messy because I’m in a new system and planet and I haven’t established my Exocraft base for Brutus so he won’t be around for this fight but not a problem because the terrors, once you see their attack pattern, are easy to take care of but somewhere along the line, Sentinels showed up and joined the fight and, really, I don’t have the time or the patience to be fucking with them right now but to the battle before us!

I’m emptying and reloading my Scatter Blaster (think shotgun) as fast as I can pull the controller’s trigger and the X button for reloads and these red fuckers just keep coming. I’m deep into the third swarm and this one has those grasshopper-like fuckers that I’ve learned not to like all that much and two of them almost take me out before I can duck inside a building on the site and I’d long since learned that if you’re inside a building, the Sentinels can’t get you unless you’re standing in the door and they’re in front of you but I’m inside and ducking and diving to take the third swarm out.

I have 8.52 seconds before the fourth and seriously bad swarm shows up – and with a Sentinel Walker that I don’t need to kill (because I already took care of that requirement) and I am really too through with these fuckers so I dash to my ship and blast off into orbit and… run into the “new” Sentinel freighter I’d read about but until now, I hadn’t seen and when I say that I ran into it, I literally flew into it because it procedurally generated itself right in my flight path.

I have no idea how to fight this new fucker; a little info panel pops up and mentions that if I take out the Sentinel freighter, the four Sentinel ships will stop chasing me and shooting holes in me and I really just want to get away and regather my thoughts after the battle on the planet and, yeah, the Sentinel freighter almost kills me four fucking times before I said, “Fuck this shit!” and made a beeline to the system’s space station which, thankfully – or just dumb luck – was close enough to fly to without using the pulse engine, which got shut down when the Sentinel ships arrived to shoot holes in me – it’s just going to take me just over four minutes (in real time) to get to the station and, hopefully, I can outrun them… but these Expedition fuckers are still on my ass and blasting away at me until the station’s tractor beam grabs me and pulls me inside and… I save the game and just fucking stop playing.

That whole sequence was… exhilarating. Seriously pissed me off, too, and like how I had jumped to a new system and right into the middle of pirates attacking a freighter, which is good because I don’t have a freighter of my own and this is my chance to get one – and the big swarm of pirates ain’t gonna be a problem to deal with.

I’m blasting them out of my sky when… the pirates and beleaguered freighter… just vanish and like they were never there. What the dooflicky fuck is this shit? Okay. It happened once and I’ve been gaining an interesting take on Hello Game’s idea of procedural generation, so I’m not surprised that one second, I’m close to wiping out the pirates and literally the next second, there are no pirates. Ah, but I’ve had that happen several times in both of my other Xbox profiles and it’s like the game said, “Oops – you’re not supposed to be doing this, so I’ll just remove this for ya! You really didn’t want that freighter, by the way.”

I really need that freighter because at the point where I am in the Expedition, I don’t have all of the resources I need to (a) set up a planetary base and (b) I do not have my Minotaur yet, so the freighter becomes a base and safe haven. It’s just making shit harder having to do this with having a place I can call home right now but as soon as I’m done here, it’s back to the grind because I want to finish the Expedition on both profiles today.

Xbox X Gaming: No Man’s Sky – The Solution

So, I went right to work on the problem I wrote about yesterday. Cranked up the X; woke up the Steam Deck and I chose this because… I hadn’t powered up my laptop and I wanted to get right to solving this problem.

And I could get myself to join myself in a game and I know that this game plays nice with the X and Steam Deck so it wasn’t a issue of it being a cross-platform disconnect. I friended myself using my Friend Code for both iterations of the game and for the life of me, I just couldn’t get to… play with myself. I had thought that, okay, both iterations of the game are online and connected so might I be able to find myself and travel to the spot where I’m stranded? That idea sounded better in my head than it did trying to do it although my first thought was that I wasn’t going to find my “distressed” self because we were in two different galaxies, but I returned to the default Euclid galaxy and… realized that trying to find myself and the system/planet I’m stranded on was going to be impossible.

Yeah, one good look at the Galaxy Map told me that I’d lost my mind to think I could look at the map and say, “Oh, there I am!” and go get myself out of trouble. So, after a rather frustrating thirty minutes of trying to hook up with myself (I’ll be here all month, folks!), I did the one thing that (a) I didn’t think of before and (b) didn’t really want to do: I changed the Normal game to a Creative game. Fixed all of the problems with my suit and ship and flew the fuck away like nothing had been wrong. As I’m headed for the system’s space station, I was still pissed that the game had totally and completely fucked all of my shit up and given the conditions on the planet, it was a good thing that my ship’s shields were working because it gave me a place to stay out of the fierce storms that would have just kept killing me repeatedly.

Sigh. It’s one thing to create a game in Creative mode; it’s another thing to change a Normal game into a Creative one although I can change it back to Normal and I’m miffed that I couldn’t figure out how to play with myself – this is something I really need to investigate. I was laughing to myself and thinking that I did a Jim Kirk: Changed the conditions of the game so I could save the ship. One of the reasons I was reluctant to delete this game was that when I started the game, I got the “dinky” starting ship we’re given and on my first trip to the space station, the S-class ship I have now landed next to me, and I scrounged everything I could so I could buy it.

The game is known to make the much-cherished S-class ships show up, but you never know when or where they will so when one shows up – and you want it – you’d better do what you gotta do to get it. I wasn’t feeling good about deleting a game that I easily got an S-class ship so, yeah, change the game mode to Creative, save the ship (and my ass), change it back to Normal.

Problem solved. On to updating the next game in need up updating…

Xbox X Gaming: No Man’s Sky – A Continuation

As you may recall, I’m getting all of my existing games “up to date” and I was starting to work on one of the two games that I haven’t touched in four years.

Everything was going smoothly until I took that damned trip through a portal (think “Stargate” and you understand this) that just destroys my suit, ship, and multi-tool functions and it’s a part of the game’s quest that I just fucking hate because I’ve had really good ships and equipment get trashed to the point of not being salvageable but, yeah, I’ve painstakingly did what I had to do to not throw the whole game into the trash.

One of the things I’ve been doing is upgrading the Personal Refiner to the 2.0 version of it that lets you combine two elements to get a totally new one and a function that you needed a medium or large refinery to do. I actually caught a break on this one because I had all of the stuff I needed to do this upgrade and it was all good until I went through that portal and… it totally destroyed every aspect of my ship. Okay, pain in the ass but not a problem; I’ll just call for another ship and the broken one will be stored on my freighter until I can get around to fixing it… but I don’t have another ship and it took me a bit of time to realize that this is the game where I had to sell all of the ships I had stored so that I had the units (money) to get the ship that is now totally fucked.

I sigh and try not to roll my eyes; I have work to do and beginning with repairing my ability to launch the ship; I learned that with busted ships, I just have to get them capable of flying so there’s like only three things I need to fix: The launch system, the ship’s shields, and the main engine and… I don’t have the wiring harnesses I need and that’s when I also discovered that in my exosuit’s main functionality, my Personal Refiner 2.0 got destroyed and… I can’t make the things I need to do to fix it or a couple of the things I need fixed so that my ship will fly!

I thought about calling my Rover exocraft and finding a trade outpost where I might find the stuff I need or, possibly, just buy another ship albeit a “cheap” one since I only have like three million units to spend… but no exocrafts; I hadn’t gotten to this point in this game where I had to “build” the Rover (think really big enclosed four-wheeler) and… fuck. There’s nothing I can do but, hmm, maybe there is if I can… friend myself.

You might recall that I have multiple gaming profiles and platforms that I can play this particular game with and on so while I’m doing my laundry, I’m going to try to see if I can join this particular game from another profile and give myself the stuff I need to fix the stuff I need to get off of the hazardous planet that fucking portal dumped me on. I think it is possible, but I’ll have to figure out how to hook it up since, um, I’ve never played with myself before and… no, don’t even go there, okay? I’m talking about the game!

If I can do this successfully, disaster will be averted; once I can get my ship capable of flying, there’s a lot of shit I need to fix in my gameplay for this instance and ditto for a couple of other games I was working on where… I don’t have a home base built. I have my freighter, which the game considers to be a base but not nary a base constructed on a planet anywhere and in any of the galaxies… and I’m still wondering how I managed to screw the pooch on this one. I did try to build a base where I’m stranded… except I don’t have all of the recipes for the stuff I need to find the stuff I need to build the stuff that could, at the very least, get me and my busted-ass ship off the planet.

So, I’m down to trying to do something I’ve never tried to do with this game; otherwise, it’ll have to be deleted because if I can’t fix anything or not allowed to build something where I’m sitting, there’s no point in keeping the game. I had closed this game out and went on to the other one and I was getting that one “up to date” without a lot of problems but just like the game I’m stranded in, this game, too, reveals that I only have one ship and no planetary bases and I’m wonder just how the hell I managed to be in this situation not once but twice… but it’s water under the bridge and all that.

No sense crying over spilt milk and all that. Like I said, I’ll either figure out how to play with and give myself the stuff I need to fix things, or I’ll have to kiss this game goodbye. No real loss since I do have other games to play with but, still – to have to maybe delete a game because of some mistakes that I obviously made (and don’t remember making) just irks me a little.

I’m in the kitchen fixing myself a much-needed cup of coffee and it hit me that my lady, who’s in the next room, can probably hear me asking myself, “How the fuck did I manage to fuck this up?” and, um, repeatedly and I honestly do not know how I did it but the one thing I can be sure of is that I am, in fact, the one who screwed the pooch. In my defense, with this game, I hadn’t learned “the trick” of calling another ship to me and, preferably, one I don’t give a shit about or maybe one that I found and fixed up enough so that it’ll fly – and go through that portal – then, upon arrival, send for my primary ship, which is pristine and ready to fly, kick ass, take names, and chew bubble gum – and I can get to a space station, the Anomaly, or a base to get the stuff I need to fix whatever else that portal trip broke.

Indeed, I had to do that with the third oldest game under this particular profile and, in fact, I didn’t even bother to look at the damage to the substitute ship (I will later) – I just sent for my primary ship and flew away to go work on the other broken stuff. I took something that I learned in one iteration of the game and applied it to another but, I wish I knew then what I know now as far as the “busted” game goes.

By the way, this is the first time that I’ve gone through a portal in the “break it” phase of the game and everything on the ship got broken… and the Refiner I need was broken, too. I didn’t have the materials I need to create a medium or large refiner because the mining laser on my multi-tool… got destroyed, too, and ditto for the advanced mining laser… because they both need “parts” that I need the Refiner to make and… what a clusterfuck.

So, I have some work to do and I’ll let you know if I managed to get this fixed or not…

Xbox X Gaming: No Man’s Sky

One of the things I immediately liked about this game when I stumbled upon it lo those many years ago was that I could create multiple games for all three of my Xbox profiles. It was like, okay, I don’t want to fuck around and mess up this game but let me start another one because I want to try something and if I meet my doom in the “sandbox” game – or I can’t do what I was thinking – then no harm, no foul as far as the “main game” goes.

Then came the Expeditions and, to my gaming shame, I have not done all of them or I started one and… forgot about it and the game or like the Expedition that just recently got finished, I was about to throw in the towel on it because of the nearly impossible situation the Expedition starts in but I didn’t give up on it and I learned some stuff about the game that I didn’t really know about before.

What I found out was that I could open all of the games under my profiles and… get the Iron Vulture ship and a few other nice Expedition goodies so I’ve been spending some time getting those goodies – and the ship – for the games on my other two profiles and, um, uh, some of those games are games that I haven’t touched in four years. I really started to delete them but accepted the challenge of trying to figure out what the hell I was doing before I stopped playing that particular game and the results have been interesting as I’ve gone from game to game, profile to profile, to update them to the same “point in time” as the primary games for the three profiles.

Why all this redundancy? That’s because I found that as with some other games (like Minecraft), I can take what I learned from playing a game on my primary profile and use that knowledge to play the same game on my other profiles and play it better than I did on my primary. NMS is great for being able to do this even though you never start a new game on the same planet – but the opening conditions are the same. Starting a brand-new game tend to be fun – and a good time to apply the stuff I’ve learned from starting other new games; the first time I played the game, I died before I even located my ship, leaving me sitting and looking at the screen and asking myself, “What the fuck just happened?” Well, I was caught out in a storm and what I should have done – which I learned by starting a new game – was to duck in the cavern that was nearby and a cavern that had some… stuff in it that I was going to eventually need.

The game has made amazing strides since I first played it with exciting things to do, like checking out the outlaws and the systems they’ve taken over or the quests regarding the Autophages which is a pain in the ass but the kind that can be a lot of fun and, again, I’m working on getting all of the games on all three profiles up to the same level that my primary profile is.

I haven’t mentioned playing the game on my Steam Deck and, recently, my laptop… which has had the curious thing of creating two different iterations and while you might think, “Duh…” for a moment, the game connects to my Xbox profile and especially on my laptop… and now I have five profiles with five different instances of games. The good thing is that on my Steam Deck and laptop, there’s not a whole lot of catching up I have to do, not like I have to do on my console and it’s proving to be an interesting respite from the summer re-runs on TV and there not being anything on Netflix or the other streaming entities that I feel like watching.

On one day, I had the game up on my Xbox, Steam Deck, and laptop and I did it to see if there was going to be a conflict… and there actually was one! I had had the game open on my Steam Deck and when to re-open it on my laptop and got a message from the Steam app that I was already playing the game on my Deck and did I want to proceed or cancel the game I was trying to open – and that was fine but it doesn’t change the fact that the games on my Deck and the couple of games on my laptop… are not the same.

I’m on my Xbox and working on the games in my second profile where I encountered the two games that I hadn’t played in four years – and I’m trying to figure out why I had stopped playing them but gave up on that fruitless endeavor and focused on getting both games up to current stuff, which meant completing the Artemis quest that everyone gets tossed into when they start a new game… and a quest that I’ve done so many times throughout my profiles that I’m sick and tired of having to do it – and that’s on top of having to get all of the secondary quests completed and… that’s a lot of work but when you’re nice and retired and you have nothing but time on your hands, I found myself making quick work of the first outdated game because I learned a lot of stuff from doing all of this on my primary profile’s primary game and, yeah, writing this sounds confusing but it really isn’t, well, not to me because now that I’m on a quest to update all of these iterations to the same current level of play, it’s on me to be able to keep track of every instance.

It keeps the mind sharp and focused; it requires a modicum of patience since going through the primary and secondary quests have instances where… I can’t stand doing them. It seems to me that in all of the quest-based games I play, there’s always a quest or two that makes me groan and thinking about not doing them but, again, the challenge is to suck it up and do them and, hopefully, using stuff that I’ve learned from other iterations of the same game.

I get to one such quest and my first thought was, “Oh… it’s this one…” and while I didn’t actually groan, it felt like I did but, again, I’ve learned some shit having done this quest… a lot. It’s not that the quest is hard but because there’s a lot of parts to it; it’s like, do this and instead of going on to the next part of the task at hand, no – I gotta call up the Anomaly and go talk to Priest Nada who, at this point in the game, is totally useless as far as workable information goes. I can’t stand that the game automatically does this switch, and it just irritates the shit out of me since, again, Nada has nothing useful to say other than some annoying versions of, “Do what you think is best…”

One of the things I noticed the other day was that as I’m working my way through getting an iteration up to date, my resting pulse has been… lower. Like in the 60s lower. Hmm. Like I said, there are parts of the game that just annoys the shit out of me, like getting tossed into battles with pirate ships that, honestly, I don’t want to be bothered with but it’s part of what I have to do and it’s time to go on a killing spree. Or yesterday’s pain in the ass was the quest that updates my Minotaur exocraft with Sentinel components and that means doing battle with the Sentinels and, inexplicably, getting my ass killed, which really pissed me off because I had to reclaim all of my stuff while dodging the Sentinels that were still shooting holes in my ass.

I eventually killed them all off… but it was close. The first time I did this quest, I didn’t like it; having done it repeatedly? I hate doing it but if I want all instances of the game to be at the current levels of play, it has to be done. I should have all iterations of the game across all profiles up to date by, oh, maybe Tuesday or Wednesday of next week and at the latest. I’m hoping to get them all done before the newest Expedition goes live and as a part of the latest update to the game.

Yes, I can go and delete all but the main games on all devices and profiles and, believe me, I thought about doing just that but wouldn’t it be a nice challenge to leave them and bring them all up to date? Yeah, that sounds like fun! Yeah, no, not really but I have tons of experience from doing all of this stuff before so I’m able to work through things better than I did the first time I did all of this stuff. Like knowing that I’m going to need to craft certain items and using certain materials that I know I have to get from other planets in other systems so when I’m on such a planet, yeah – let’s stock up on Copper because I’m going to need to convert a lot of it to something else; or, yeah, lemme go stock up on Ferrous Dust because I’m going to need to craft a lot of Metal Plates; or looking at my inventory and seeing that I don’t have enough Cobalt on hand that I’m going to have to convert to Ionized Cobalt and since there’s a cave right here, let’s go mining!

Knowing what I have to do and what I’m going to need really does help. One of the reasons why I have so many games on each Xbox profile is that when you start a new Expedition, you have to create a new game and you get the choice to keep the game after you finish the Expedition, or you can delete it at your leisure and… I keep the game since I put so much work and effort into the Expedition and especially the last one – it had me cussing and talking to myself a lot, but I got through it on all three Xbox profiles as well as doing Expedition 13 on my Steam Deck and laptop.

Which was made easier to do because… I already knew what I had to do from doing it the first time and, er, fucking it up at times. One of the things that gamers talk about is whether or not a game has… replay value. Some games you get, you play them, beat them and… you never play it again or you don’t want to. Then there are the games you get you play and beat them and you have no qualms about going back and starting a new game or playing the same game with a different character because the game really is a lot of fun to play, and No Man’s Sky is one of those games for me.