Fantasy Critic League – Like Fantasy Football, but for Video Games

In addition, Fantasy Critic League opened up a new feature that allows a league to have multiple drafts over the course of the year long season.  I heard this described as something aimed at groups who enjoy the draft portion of the game but who otherwise tend to lose interest over the year long cycle of the season.

You could, for example, setup a season with four quarterly drafts and no bids or drops.

Anyway, that is what I get for listening to the Hype Factor podcast, which is dedicated to Fantasy Critic League.  I hear about different league options to consider.  But that will be a discussion for the 2027 league I suppose.

Meanwhile, we have a week to look into, starting with where we left off last time.

Week 28 Scores

As stated, we had two titles on tap this past week, both of which were set to go in the first few days.  So, on Monday night once we got past midnight eastern time the first notification went out.

• The Incident at Galley House has released!
  • [Picked by Rodent Entertainment (Arhanta)]

There was no Open Critic score right away, but a couple of reviews were available, scoring the title at 95.

The Incident at Galley House

That appeared to bode well for the game, though it still needed to get three top critic reviews before it would score in the league.

Then, the next evening, we got the announcement for the second title.

• Denshattack! has released!
  • [Picked by S Class Warfare Studios (p0tsh0t)]

As above, it too lacked enough reviews to get a score immediately, so the week was off to a bit of a slow start.

Denshattack!

For a brief time our league owned all four of the top titles on the most wanted review section for the league, both of this week’s titles joining Deltarune Chapter 5 and Ghost of Yotei: Legends.

For Denshattack however, that situation changed pretty quickly and by the next morning enough reviews had arrived to get it on the scoreboard.

• Denshattack!
  • [Picked by S Class Warfare Studios (p0tsh0t)]
  • Now has a score of 86.9

Denshattack no doubt benefited from releasing across all the major consoles and on PC simultaneously.  Its very solid score was enough to lift Potshot up a rank on the board.

• Publisher Score Updates
  • S Class Warfare Studios (p0tsh0t)
    • Moved from 9th place to 8th place
  • Neutical Publishing (Cyanbane)
    • Moved from 8th place to 9th place

And then things went pretty quiet.

The Incident at Galley House gained three more good reviews over at Open Critic, including two top critic review, by the time Saturday morning rolled around.  But

For our other scores in waiting, Ghost of Yotei: Legends remained at six reviews, only one of which was a scored top critic review.  Deltarune Chapter 5 managed to get a second scored top critic review, leaving it one away from getting on the board as an very strong pick… one that will absolutely destroy me in the other league I am in, where I counter picked it.

And, while we’re there, Beastro also lingers with five total reviews, only one of which is a top critic review.

As Friday rolled along we got a review update for Doom, which took a hit.

• Doom: The Dark Ages – Revelations
  • [Picked by Rodent Entertainment (Arhanta)]
  • Score has gone DOWN from 90.0 to 88.5

Still a strong pick, but somebody rolled in with a 7.5 out of 10 review to ruin the love fest.

Then on Saturday morning, with no score change pinged, there was a publisher score update.

• Publisher Score Updates
  • Neutical Publishing (Cyanbane)
    • Moved from 9th place to 7th place
  • Pretty Blue Fox Games (Bhagpuss)
    • Moved from 7th place to 8th place
  • S Class Warfare Studios (p0tsh0t)
    • Moved from 8th place to 9th place

I suspect that EA Sports College Football might have climbed up a bit.  But all three of those in the change are within a single point on the scoreboard, so even small changes have the potential to upset that ranking once more.

On arriving at 17:00 on Saturday, the scoreboard looked like this.

Week 29 Scores

We had one title in play this week for bid, Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, which Archey dropped last week in order to pick up Nocturne.

• Bids in TAGN League
  • Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls
    • Won by Corr’s Creative Collective (Corr) with a bid of $15
      • Dropped game ‘Sunkissed City’ conditionally
    • TAGN HQ (Wilhelm)’s bid of $2 did not succeed: Publisher was outbid

This weeks updates and Corr winning that bid changed up the league projections, even if the board did not change all that much.

Shintar is still projected for first place and I have the nod for second from the league, but now Corr, who was slated for fifth, has jumped up to third place based on his new pick.

Of course, the league still thinks Deltarune Chapter 5 is going to come in with a score.  We’ll have to wait and see if it comes to pass.

On the news and updates front, we did get one item.

• Hela: of Mice & Magic
  • [Picked by Green River Gaming (Nimgimli)]
  • Estimated release date changed from ‘2026’ to ‘Q4 2026’

That at least narrows down the time frame, though Q4 games have been known to land in the following year.

All of which leaves the next ten titles as follows.

Week 30 Coming Up

Next week we have two titles coming up, Splatoon Raiders, a spin off from the popular Nintendo franchise, and Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game, which strikes me as a bit of a dark horse in this run.

For openers, after actually looking it up, it turns out to not be based on James Cameron’s Avatar movies, but is built on the Avatar: The Last Air Bender series.  Being able to battle using the various elemental bending methods sounds kind of neat (assuming that is what you can do), and the series is popular enough that they keep trying to remake it.  But is it strong enough to break through?

We’ll see next week I guess!  Meanwhile, we’re still waiting for more reviews on a few titles.

Related:

• TAGN Fantasy Critic League
• TAGN Discord Server
• Fantasy Critic Site
• Fantasy Critic How to Play
• Fantasy Critic FAQ
• Fantasy Critic Most Desired Reviews
• Open Critic Review Site

Welcome to 2026

That means it is time to get out my spreadsheet and see what the totals are up to the halfway point of the year.  And it does look like I have played a few things in 2026.

1. EVE Online  – 30.30%
2. World of Warcraft – 12.97%
3. No Man’s Sky – 11.71%
4. Project: Gorgon – 7.61%
5. Valheim – 7.44%
6. Guild Wars – 6.94%
7. Stardew Valley – 6.64%
8. Forza Horizon – 5.20%
9. Windrose – 3.43%
10. Pokemon LeafGreen – 2.81%
11. Civilization II – 2.51%
12. Blue Prince – 1.14%
13. Stars Reach – 0.34%
14. Outbound – 0.31%
15. NetHack – 0.27%
16. Monsters & Memories – 0.26%
17. LOTRO – 0.07%
18. WoW Classic – 0.04%

That is out of about 550 hours to total time played if you’re keen to do the calculations, and I am ahead of the curve in total titles played, at least relative to past mid-year check-ins.  The title count for past years at this point was:

• 2025 – 13 titles
• 2024 – 21 titles
• 2023 – 13 titles
• 2022 – 16 titles
• 2021 – 9 titles

I didn’t do a post in 2020, but it was a busy time with the group still doing strong in WoW Classic and World War Been opening up in EVE Online with the first of my 59 weekly summary posts.  I had lots to post about during Covid it seems.

Anyway, for 2026 I am at the 18 title mark, which isn’t the highest count, but also isn’t far off the mark for that target.

Now, of course, you might consider the threshold for what counts as actually “playing” a title.  You could make a strong argument that anything past the 12th slot, Blue Prince, probably shouldn’t count… though I am going to say that if I got a blog post out of my play time then it counts.

With that metric we can knock LOTRO and WoW Classic off the list, but everything else is pretty solid.

I usually zero in on the top five as a key indicator of how the year is going, but that isn’t flying so well for 2026.  Project: Gorgon, Valheim, and Guild Wars I have pretty much stopped playing for now, and even World of Warcraft and EVE Online are in a bit of a slump.  CCP running the exact same cookie-cutter event for the third time in five months is not getting me to log in, so absent a war in null sec I am not putting much time into New Eden right now.

Meanwhile Stardew Valley, Forza Horizon 6, and Windrose are all still gaining time on my spreadsheet.

Looking forward into the back half of the year, it also seems likely I’ll be back into No Man’s Sky for whatever they have planned for the 10th anniversary event.  Potshot and I still have some distance to go in Windrose.

I also expect to log at least a bit more time in retail WoW, if only to get my main to level cap.  Since I have rarely had much interest in end game stuff… I think Wrath of the Lich King and Mists of Pandaria were my primary exceptions on that front, getting to level cap will be enough for me in Midnight.  My subscription there ends in September, so I have a bit of time on that front.

Then there is  EVE Online, which I keep playing even when I am not playing, if that makes any sense.  I have a minimum threshold of activity each month… I get on my one strategic fleet every month and get on at least a couple of kill mails to prove I am alive…  as well as keeping my PI farms going.  Though I have even been letting those fall fallow of late due to low motivation.  Some of this is that CCP/Fenris has been focused on their shooter while also back on the trail to punish null sec for… existing I guess.  That hasn’t been motivating me at all.  It is starting to make me feel like playing a game for 20 years might be enough.

Of course, I write that and then I break out Civilization II for an evening.  Can’t stop, won’t stop.

Even Forza, my light, low commitment, distraction title, has been slipping.  I have another wrist band to earn and one more mascot to crash into, but the map available to me looks pretty thoroughly explored 30 hours into the game.

I am in a bit of the summer doldrums really.  Having hate played through the last No Man’s Sky expedition… that sounds unhealthy, but it does invoke some passion in me to do that sort of thing… I really don’t have anything driving me on the game front, nothing that is keeping me up too late on a week night because I just need to keep going.  I am often a goal oriented player and I have no real goals currently.

I feel like I want something new to dig into… but I am also a bit tired and not feeling like I can commit to something new.

Ironically, while I am feeling like that I have a plethora of posts sitting in drafts.  I am not playing much but I have tons to write about.

Anyway, the world keeps on turning, tomorrow is another day, and I am sure that next thing will arrive eventually.

Steam Early Access

Early access is… well… I hate to use the word “controversial,” at least in an age where the mealy mouthed editorial board at the New York Times has decided the word is a synonym for “brazenly corrupt and obviously unlawful” in the paper of record, if only because early access rarely rises to that level of malfeasance.  But it does get some push back.

It gets some push back because it is yet another method by which developers seek to get paid up front for work they say they will deliver down the road.  Steam has a whole page trying to describe what it is.

For video games early access tends to be viewed more favorably than a Kickstarter campaign, where we are often being sold a tenuous vision by either somebody we know nothing about or a name from the industry who hasn’t had a success in more than a decade.  Rare is the title that has more than a vague plan or a glorified tech demo.  Project: Gorgon is one of the few instances of there being something like a playable game available during the campaign.

In contrast, early access does force the team to have something playable up front.  It isn’t always great.  There have been some flops on that front.  And anybody who thinks doing a Kickstarter campaign AND and then doing early access is a good look might consider some self examination.  But early access alone has seen some pretty huge successes.

Valheim, often criticized for how much time in has spent in early access, delivered a solid, fun, playable title with its early access launch.  That alone washes away a lot of since.

However, the journey hasn’t always pleased me.  That the team decided the game needed to be a lot more difficult, something that turned off some players.  There is the game up through the plains biome and then a vibe shift thereafter.  But it is still a solid title.

Likewise, Enshrouded and Palworld brought fun, playable titles to market for early access.

Now however, those three titles are exiting early access.  Palworld did so already while Valheim and Enshrouded are doing so later this year.  And, as they do so. I am interested to see how this plays out.

Palworld’s launch saw the active player count spike dramatically as concurrent players, which has been running between 20K and 50K, spiked up to nearly 860K.  A big endorsement for their 1.0.

Palworld three month steam activity

That is great for them and probably driven by the fact that their 1.0 release included a ton of changes and updates.  The game changed with launch and a lot of people want to go back and see what is new.

However, as that chart shows, 860K isn’t even half of the all time peak which was back when they went into early access initially, where concurrent users exceeded 2.1 million.

This seems to favor my own pet theory that you get one launch date, that launching in early access is it and that exiting early access in and of itself is almost a non-event.

Palworld bucked that a bit by making large changes to the game.  And titles that wait until they exit early access to launch on additional platforms might also see a boost.  But I will be interested to see where Palworld sits on the Steam sales charts for July.  If it made it into the top ten I would consider my theory refuted as a general rule of thumb.

Pocket Pair, the studio behind Palworld, also had the good sense to not raise the price of the game on going 1.0, no doubt having read the room after the Valheim team said they would absolutely be charging more once they hit launch in September.

Beyond that, for myself at least, there is the question of whether I want to go back and replay titles I ran through in early access.  Of the three Palworld is the one with the most changes with launch as well as being the title I played the least.  So there is maybe some room in me for another run at the game.

On the flip side, while there are base building and crafting elements to the game, it also felt fairly linear and settled.  While they seem to have eluded the Nintendo lawsuit, collect ’em all and battle a series of bosses is a game I’ve played over many regions with Pokemon.  I am not sure their open world vision of that has me hooked.

Likewise, I enjoyed Enshrouded quite a bit.  Unlike Palworld, which just missed the cut to make it into my top 20 most played titles on Steam, Enshrouded is in 5th place with close to 300 hours spent.  Clearly that clicked with me, and that was largely due to its base building mechanics and its lush, hand crafted world.

The problem is that the hand crafted world, while it has been updated, remains as it was when we first explored it.  I have my doubts as to whether or not the group would have the stomach to do that again and it doesn’t have enough appeal for a solo venture for me right now.

That brings us around to Valheim, which at just shy of 700 hours, is the most played title in my Steam library, ahead of Civilization V and RimWorld.

As I said back when they announced their intention to finish up the Deep North, ignore the ocean biome, and raise the price as they declared the 1.0 version in September, I am somewhat inclined to go back and play it one more time.

It is my top game on Steam for a reason.  It is, in many ways, the archetypal co-op base building survival title for me.  The procedurally generated world, the base building options, the boats, and the exploration all added up to give the game a lot of miles.

That said, I have also played through to at least Yagluth five times.  I have done the exploration thing, I have tromped all across the world, built bases and portals and sailed thither and yon, such that any sixth venture into the game would likely require all the mods I’ve grown used to since the fourth outing plus causal mode settings and probably an optimal world seed and a map to location so I don’t have to explore quite so extensively as in the past.

We shall see.  September is a ways away yet.

And I will also be interested in how the game fares when it hits 1.0 and increases the price to play.  I suspect that it well get less traction from that move than it might hope… though mostly because it has sold so many copies already.  (And you can get the game for $10 right now, versus the $30 it will be when it hits 1.0.)

In the end, the experience with these three titles, while I have enjoyed them all, along with a few others, has made me less likely to jump in on early access.  Though I say that even as Potshot and I are sailing around in Windrose.  So maybe I am just kidding myself.

EVE Alliance Tournament XXII

For example, here we are in the middle of July with the initial announcement and timeline for a tournament that won’t actually wrap up until the weekend of October 31st… and the official rules for the whole thing are still a week away.  I feel like the initial investment in the company by the Icelandic post office left some indelible bureaucratic mark on CCP in it infancy.

Or maybe the boot.ini thing made them more cautious.

Either way, we have months of build up ahead, with the current announced timeline as follows:

• 14 July – Tournament announcement, backlog of Thunderdome invites starts, talent applications open, ad submissions start.
  
• 23 July – Main tournament rules announced, team registrations open, Thunderdome is patched to mirror Tranquility, and the server becomes available for tournament account holders.
  
• 28 July – Talent application deadline (11:00 UTC)
  
• 30 July – Team registration closes (11:00 UTC)
  
• 31 July – Teams announced, roster lock 1 opens, and merc registration begins. Prelims seed broadcast
  
• 10 August – First look: ATXXII prizes
  
• 17 August – Prelims roster lock and ad submission deadline
  
• 19 August – Team rosters announced
  
• 28 August – First weekend reminder and prize update
  
• 29 August & 30 August – Prelim tournament broadcast weekend 1
  
• 5 September & 6 September – Prelim tournament broadcast weekend 2
  
• 12 September & 13 September – Prelim tournament broadcast weekend 3
  
• 16 September – Roster submission 2 opens
  
• 2 October – Post-prelim roster lock closes, and flagship submission begins
  
• 5 October – Revised team rosters announced
  
• 9 October – Flagship lock deadline (ad submission deadline for the main tournament)
  
• 12 October – Flagships announced
  
• 31 October & 1 November – Alliance Tournament XXII finals broadcast

Those are the dates as laid out, though I would give it a 20% chance that the final weekend gets pushed out by a week due to Halloween being kind of a big party and travel weekend.  It isn’t like when they have scheduled the tournament on a major US holiday in the past, but this feels like there is an outside chance they might want to give the tournament some space to itself.

This year the tournament will be sponsored by the Amarr empire, those happy, smiling, slave holding religious fanatics who believe Pi is equal to 3 because it says so in the Orange Catholic Bible.

And now a big smile from our sponsor

This primarily means that the prize ships from the tournament will be built on Amarr ship hulls, with the Sentinel and the Curse being selected as the foundation hulls for the prize ships.

While the tournament rules are still a week away, the company did provide some insights into where they were headed.

• In Alliance Tournament XXI many of the battleship-end ships saw a decrease in value; subsequently, battleship core-comps became increasingly commonplace. A few adjustments are being made to address this:

  • The maximum number of ships of a given hull that a team can field was adjusted from 4 to 3 in Alliance Tournament XXI. 3 will remain the maximum number, with the exception of battleships, where 2 will be the maximum number.

  • Their point value has also increased a small amount (greater than Alliance Tournament XXI but less than Alliance Tournament XX)

  • All battleships will be allowed to fit a maximum of 1 Armor Plate or 2 Shield Extenders of any size

  • Navy Ships, which are traditionally discounted for the sponsoring faction, will have battleships excluded from this range.

• The Amarr Empire prides itself on its passive armor fit ships and their capabilities. A ship not conducive to that philosophy is the Cenotaph, which has been banned for this tournament.

• The Odysseus and recently released ORE ships will also be banned.

• The recently added Navy Destroyers will be available.

• Points for Caldari ships discounted last year will be restored to levels comparable to their peers. Several Amarr ships will be discounted as part of this years ship sponsorship deal.

• An adaptation to last year’s point inflation rule will be applied. For every additional duplicate of a ship, points will be added depending on the ship’s specific hull’s point cost, varying in range depending on hull size.

• The “Avalanche Ban” system introduced for the best-of-series in the Anger Games, will be adopted for this tournament.

• The Imperial Navy contributed to the creation of the Zarmazd and recognized its capabilities as an incredible armor-repairing platform. To reign that in somewhat, the only high-slot module allowed on the ship now is a single mutadaptive repair module.

In addition, they are looking into how to allow tournament prize ships to be part of the tournament without creating a self-reinforcing system where you need to have prize ships to win.  I suspect that this will go badly if the company is not careful.  But when do they ever make balance mistakes?

Anyway, that is all we know at the moment.

Related:

• CCP/Fenris – Announcing Alliance Tournament XXII
• Reddit – Alliance Tournament XXII Announcement Thread

Stardew Valley Splash Screen

But I was also getting into the rhythm of the game and wanted to explore some more.  So I decided I would create a new save that I would run on my own.

My first though was to go play my copy on Steam.  I purchased the game on Steam back during the 2016 Steam Winter Sale, played it for a very short stretch, then never went back.

So I finally went back.  And, despite being a couple of PCs down the road from 2016, my save from my initial run of 29 minutes was still there.  Steam Cloud Save for the win I guess.

That actually seemed like a good place to start, bypassing the intro sequence which is cute but I really didn’t feel the need to sit through it again. (There maybe ought to be a bypass option.  Or maybe there is and I missed it.)

I was also somewhat keen to play it on the PC because for me mouse and keyboard is the preferred input control method for about 99% of what I play.

Much to my surprise however, playing for a dozen hours or so on the Switch 2 had habituated the use of a controller to play the game.  I had grown so used to the controller that it felt bizarro world strange to play with keyboard and mouse.

Fortunately, I have a controller setup on my PC, an 8BitDo SN30 Pro+ Blluetooth gamepad .

The gamepad in question

It has generally been used for Forza Horizon titles, which is what I bought it for specifically.  I have tried it for a few other games, but it hasn’t really stuck.  And even with Forza I tend to use the mouse and keyboard for a lot of menu navigation stuff, leaving the controller mostly for driving.

So I got that going and… then I remembered the whole thing about Nintendo and XBox having their buttons swapped on their controllers and it felt like a real possibility that I might break my brain.

I mentioned this somewhere in a past post.

But since that mention I had found that Steam has an option buried in the settings, under controllers, that let’s you swap the button layout so you can have the Nintendo button pattern.

This got me going… though I feel like that last word should be plural

That got me up and going and I was able to pick up where I had left off nearly a decade back, parsnips ready to be harvested twelve days into spring.

Harvesting parsnips

I will say, in some ways it was nice to play on my PC.  My monitor, the resolution of which far exceeds either the Switch 2 screen or our TV, ended up showing a lot more of the world as I moved through it.

On the other hand, the once big thing about the Switch 2 is that I can play it elsewhere in the house.  Not that I mind gaming or writing or whatever in my office at my computer.  But I also spend all day there for work and there are times when I would like to be some place besides my office chair after the work day is through.

So I went back to the Switch 2 and made a new save there as well.  Starting off I had to go through the intro, but I also decided to try a different land layout, going with the lake setting, which puts your farm on more as an island, or among some island.  Maybe I’ll get better at fishing with all that water close by.

The other thing I learned is that playing co-op is something of a force multiplier.  Well, having two people sharing a wallet means that you can divide tasks and get more things done, though you do have to pay to upgrade tools on both accounts.

Having my daughter playing, who is familiar with the game, is also a force multiplier in itself.  I learned enough from her to help plot my initial path in the game, ending up with a chicken coop and four chickens producing eggs along with getting my tools upgraded… except the watering can, which will wait for winter… by the time the luau rolled around.

So I am off and going on another save… two saves really.