Over the past week I’ve been feeling like little more than a heaping pile of trash (physically, but let’s not rule out mentally, too), so my gaming hasn’t been prolific or maximized in any way.

However!

I’ve been able to get in many hours of Fallout 76 and I can boast that I’ve yet to complete a single mission! That’s right! No matter how much I play, I wind up collecting things, feeding myself and drinking far too often, and repairing my weapons after hilariously short periods of time. The first set of power armor I found I couldn’t even keep because it weighed too much and space on my person and in my storage stash is restricted to a ridiculous degree.

But, as the title suggests, I was able to buy plans from a very nice NPC for lawn flamingos and now I can craft them for my camp any time I like.

So far, I’ve made four.

That pleases me greatly.

It’s interesting that I find the game so engaging despite the glaring flaws. The game runs poorly to not at all. The game frequently grinds to a halt when navigating menus. I’ve waited a full 15 seconds for my map to pull up. I’ve tried to press a direction in any menu up to ten times just trying to get it to scroll through items. I’ve had those problems when literally no enemies are around.

Speaking of enemies, I can be in the middle of nowhere with no one around, and suddenly there is an enemy attacking me. I can look around again and see no one, then the same thing happens.

I chose a spot to build my camp because I’d been there often and there were never enemies. As I was building my camp, a bunch of enemies spawned and started to attack me. Because the menus are so janky and take so long to get in and out of, I nearly died just from that attack. This would be excusable (or more excusable, rather) if the game supplied me with plenty of healing items, but it doesn’t and I currently can’t craft any Stimpaks. These bizarre out of nowhere attacks make the game even less enjoyable due to the limited resources to bounce back from them.

I was exploring a water park and was in an area I had thoroughly explored. I was looking for a break in the fence to access another area when half a dozen crab things magically appeared behind me and did I mention at the time I was level 9 and they were all either level 16 or 24? As you can probably expect, I died real fast. It wasn’t until I respawned that I figured something out: when you die, you lose all the “junk” items on your person. I had been holding all my junk crafting items and I lost them all. I went back to see if they were still there at the scene of the crab attack, and they were not.

Yuckers.

However.

I’m still finding myself wanting to play just to explore and experience the world. I’ve been taking a ridiculous number of screenshots, even for me.

On paper, with all the issues and the lackluster combat, I should be putting this game behind me and moving on to any number of other amazing recent releases, but something keeps me coming back.

I should probably do a couple of missions at some point.

Oh! And that’s the other thing! I’m not sure how to feel about this game at large. My regular co-op partner had his character corrupted and had to start completely over. I’ve seen reports that people who had the PC version of the beta can’t uninstall it unless they bought the game. I feel really weird about things like that. Who’s to say I won’t reach a high level and then my save becomes corrupted?

Despite all these things, I still want to keep playing. This week I will probably split my time between Fallout 76 and something new. I’m actually open to anything so that should be fun. In theory.

With that I ask: what will you be playing this week?

Please be safe out there, friends. Cheers.