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March 2025 Retrospective

Starting off with posting another YouTube video so we can forget about the tanks that are about to cross into Canada.

The Pitt

I started watching The Pitt this month and it is undoubtedly one of the best seasons of television ever produced. It is a medical drama centred around a fictional emergency department in Pittsburgh where every episode represents an hour of a shift. What differentiates it from other acclaimed medical dramas (such as ER, House, or Scrubs) is that The Pitt tries to be as realistic as possible. If you are squeamish I do not think The Pitt is for you because they do not shy away from showing everything. You're going to see compound fractures, gunshot wounds, psychotic episodes, and a complete childbirth where you are looking straight down the barrel. I imagine that scene is already being shown in medical schools.

The only negative thing I can say about The Pitt is that it has backslid into typical medical melodrama a few times and it takes away from the magic of the show. I don't want to spoil anything but there have been a couple of "big twists" and friction between the characters that I couldn't bring myself to care about. I am not saying that characters cannot have baggage which drives their daily actions. Just that a couple times they've strayed over into hyperbole and that is not what makes the show interesting. I got absolutely hooked based on the apparent realities of working in a trauma centre and I know there has got to be no shortage of those sort of harrowing stories to tell.

So if you can stand the sight of A LOT of blood and gore, I highly recommend you watch The Pitt.

Beat Monster Hunter Wilds

Elsie and I beat Monster Hunter Wilds in a shockingly short amount of time.

I honestly thought this was going to be my game of the year that I would easily play for 100+ hours. But after about 30 there really isn't much more for me to do. I hate to say it but I think that the Monster Hunter franchise may have hit that level of popularity where Capcom is developing it for the "normal" gamer and is leaving us veterans behind.

Unlike previous games in the franchise there is basically is no challenge in Monster Hunter Wilds. Elsie and I were able to defeat almost every monster in less than five minutes. Sometimes it took longer to get to the monster than it did to fight it because of the needlessly expansive "open world". This simplicity also carried over to the weapons and armour. I crafted only a single weapon (the bone charge blade) and barely had to upgrade it. I think I only made three different armour sets and even accidentally used low-rank gloves to beat the final boss. My skills, attack, defence, or resistances never seemed to matter.

I am making it sound like I hated Monster Hunter Wilds which is not true. I enjoyed the time I put in but I would have enjoyed it the same if I played at the end of the year versus at launch. If you look back at the Game of the Year articles on this blog you'll see that Monster Hunter is always near the top because I am so excited and want to play for hundreds of hours. But I could have just skipped Monster Hunter Wilds and played it when the inevitable DLC is released next year.

Oh, something I did hate about Monster Hunter Wilds is how you play with friends. It is physically impossible, on any platform, to highlight a friend and invite them to play. First you need to join the same lobby. Then you must invite them into your "link party" which allows you to join the same posted quests. If you want to explore the "open world", one of the supposed selling points of the game, you need to invite them to your "environment link". I do not understand Japanese game developers fascination with hostile multiplayer UX.

Read Boss Fight Books: Goldeneye 007

As a child of the 90s, Pierce Brosnan is my James Bond and Goldeneye will forever be one of my favourite films. I also chose Nintendo 64 over PlayStation so GoldenEye 007 defined my childhood. I have vivid memories of playing split-screen deathmatch with my cousins for hours.

I am giving you this context so you understand why I was thoroughly enjoyed reading Boss Fight Books: GoldenEye 007. It was a fantastic peak behind the curtain as to how Rare managed to make such a genre defining game. Without it we may not have gotten Halo or Call of Duty. The idea of first-person shooters on consoles was seen as asinine. That was the domain of PC gamers who had a mouse and keyboard.

Beat Cyberpunk 2007: Phantom Liberty Again

I did a third playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty with the intention of finally seeing all of the games possible endings. One of them had a specific segment that I wanted to call out because it really annoyed me.

Most role playing games are about power fantasy. You create a character with a specific set of skills and you enhance them until you are effectively a god when compared to most other beings in the game. Unfortunately in Cyberpunk even if you max out a specific attribute you're never really considered the best. Whenever that specific skillset should allow you to easily overcome a problem, other characters will talk about how you need to get someone who is even more specialized than you.

In this third playthrough I went for a full netrunner build. I wanted to melt peoples' brains with my mind from the shadows. No technology would be able to withstand my hacking prowess. That is until one of the ending sequences of Phantom Liberty decides that you are no longer playing a power fantasy, you're now in a survival horror a la Alien: Isolation. A maintenance robot that was built 50 years ago is now hunting me down and I cannot hack it. To make matters worse if the robot catches me it instantly kills me. I am now role playing a helpless piece of meat against my will.

One of my favourite quotes about game development is "The Player Should Have the Fun, not the Designer or the Computer" and it seems that the developers at CD Projekt Red forgot this.

Season Two of Severance

Gonna make this short and sweet. After season two I no longer care about Severance. It has gone the route of other great shows like The Bear where the writers seem to enjoy jerking each other off rather than actually creating a story that progresses.

I'll bet that season three will be more of the same but there will finally be pushback on how the show isn't going anywhere and they will end it after four seasons.

Review March Goals

April Goals

#MonthlyRetrospective