I love video games. Or, at least, I think I do. I don’t finish very many of them. I either play them for a few hours and forget to come back or I hyperfocus and get like 75% through the story but lose interest before getting to the end. This summer, I’d like to make progress on my backlog of unplayed games. I’ll start with Baldur’s Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077. These both fall into the 75% category and I last played them recently enough that I won’t be completely lost with what’s going on in the story. After that I’ll dig into some indie games, stuff like Hades, Hyper Light Drifter, Hotline Miami 1 + 2, because they are shorter to complete and do a lot of interesting things. Then I get back into AAA games and beat one beginning to end, just to prove to myself that I can. I’m thinking one of Persona 5 Royal, Spider-Man, Ghost of Tsushima or Final Fantasy VII Remake. A challenge I face with this goal is that a lot of first-person and third-person games trigger my motion sickness, so I can only really play for an hour at a time until a build up a tolerance to them (which I lose if I don’t play for a few days). Usually I stick to top-down games like strategy and simulation games to get around this, but I really want to play these games, so I will try my best to persevere.
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This week, Riot Games announced they are bringing their Vanguard anti-cheat software to League of Legends🔗. Previously introduced with the release of Valorant, Vanguard is a pretty typical kernel-level anti-cheat software, which is to say, a security nightmare. It runs at the highest level of permissions possible on your system.
A lot of people seem concerned that, because Riot is owned by Tencent, Vanguard serves as a backdoor for the Chinese government. Honestly that seems ridiculous. Not that it necessarily can’t be used for nefarious purposes by the Chinese government, but Chinese spying has a much lower possible material impact on U.S. players than American spying. In the video🔗, Riot said that Vanguard “does not collect or process any personal information differently from our current Anti-Cheat software,” which I guess is something, but that can change at any moment. The bigger concern, in my view, is if Riot suffers from a security breach (again) and hackers are able to deploy malicious code through Vanguard. Truthfully, I’m not totally sure how feasible it is for that to happen, but it is certainly possible, which is worrying enough.
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The last time I played Cyberpunk 2077 was shortly after release in late 2020 on the PS4 version, which was a rough experience🔗, to say the least. I had been excited for the game since the announcement almost ten years ago now, so the disappointment was quite painful. As a result, I left the game alone for the past 2.5 years, even though I heard the patches fixed a lot of issues. I just couldn’t convince myself to try again.
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Normally gacha games aren’t my thing, but I downloaded Honkai Star Rail on a whim and now it’s consumed so much of my time. I know basically nothing about the lore, but regardless I’m really enjoying the story and characters. The combat system is really fun and I like getting to try different characters. It’s so weird because I’ve tried to get into more “traditional” turn-based RPGs to no success but this game just scratches an itch in my brain.
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