So I finally beat Hades (the character) in Hades (the video game) and escaped from Hades (the mythological realm).
It's interesting how this game manages to redefine both the concept of losing and winning so that neither is actually the end of play.
It took me 39 escape attempts. I did it with the shield and my strategy for fighting Hades's phase 2 was to hide behind the pillar and hit him with indirect shots with my shield, doing chill status and decay damage-over-time, then throwing a blade rift at him when he got close.
I almost had to fight him without any damage-over-time but then I picked up the Demeter boon that adds decay to chill in the Temple of Styx, as my last purchase of the run.
I don't really have a great strategy for a lot of the bosses if I don't have the shield's indirect fire function and a damage-over-time status on special.
I also escaped on attempt 40! Very different boon loadout but same basic strategy: hide behind the big indestructible pillars and pelt Hades (the character) with indirect fire, then run and try to tag him damage-over-time when he gets too close.
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Wait... Torchlight 3 is out? Like, for real? Wow, I had no idea it was this close.
Apparently it came out last week. Hee, which means it was out and available for sale when I bought Hades because I was looking for a new action RPG to play.
I've said this before, but in Trump's GOP, it's not the final command. It's his opening move. Remember the inauguration? Remember Spicer the next day angrily issuing "corrections"?
Demand people agree with your lies upfront and you know who you own and who you don't.
Donald Trump & company know that it's easy enough to get someone to go along with a pointless, petty lie because why are they going to burn bridges and capital fighting you over something that doesn't matter. You'll think, "I'm keeping my powder dry for when it matters."
But then it matters and you've been going along to get along for so long that it's habit. More than habit. Deeper than habit. You're invested. You're up to your neck and you're complicit, and if you blow it up now then all your sacrifices were for nothing.
My dad has been going through volumes of old photos and such as he gets ready to downsize his living situation post my mother's death, and he sent me a box of photos. Here's one of my senior pics.
Note the 90s flannel repurposed as a respectable collared shirt for a formal pic!
I've spoken before of my mother's love of sunset photography, which she acquired as a hobby later in her life. I don't have to guess who took this photo!
One of her laments after my siblings and I started graduating high school was that so many of our vacation photos were of places and things with no people in them, so they could have been anyone's photo. After that, while plenty of her sunset photos were just of the sunset...
So now I can beat Hades (the character) pretty consistently if I'm not doing any challenges from the Pact of Punishment, which means I'm advancing the story but not much advancing my character build (as that now requires beating him on a higher Heat/Difficulty level).
It's interesting how many different choices this game gives you. Because I can keep powering through the vanilla run until I have finished out the story, but my character's power level will remain basically at a plateau from run to run unless/until I challenge myself...
...either by upping the difficulty or learning how to escape using a weapon that's not my best/main weapon, which means mastering completely different gameplay.
The guy who not so secretly wants police to just straight up shoot (even more) people in the streets without a trial is really, really, really hoping we'll think that Joe Biden said something about "superpredators" because that worked super well for him against Hillary Clinton.
It's shameful how many Democrats in the mid 90s got scared by bad sociology into passing a fundamentally right-wing and regressive crime bill, but "President Law & Order" and his policy of retribution has exactly zero legs to stand on in this arena.
If the Republicans had this same bill in front of them today their complaint would be that it's too soft on crime. Joe Biden was not my first or second choice for Democratic nominee but I'm more interested in what laws will be passed now than what was passed when I was a teen.
Hades is a weird game to get into in this moment because it doesn't have a normal learning curve. Since so much of your loadout is random and each combination brings its own gameplay, any kind of groove is short-lived.
For me it's consistently just on the right side of the line of challenging vs. frustrating, which is a dangerous place for addictive flow, but it's not a game I can play to shut my brain down.
The game rewards you in conspicuous ways for trying different things. You can power up whatever your favorite weapon is so much faster if you master all of the weapons, even though that's the one big choice you make that does the most to set the game mechanics for your run.