I saw Jesse Welles a few weeks back and his encore was almost as long as the show before. He left stage and I figured “that was a decent length show, he’ll probably do 2-3 more songs and call it a night” and then he came back and did another hour or so, it was awesome.

I’ve been using the Zebra F-701 for work for a few years now and it’s suffered getting beaten around a lot and taken it extremely well. It’s a fully metal pen, and you can get metal refills too (which I do). In my line of work, all the plastic pens I’ve used have broken, so in my search for an all-metal pen brought me to the 701 and I love it. I got my wife one too for her at work and she also loves it. Great value for money, too.

I’m not sure I’ve had any boss fight last 10 minutes in Elden Ring and I’ve played through the game 20+ times. Unless you’re doing challenge runs, that could obviously take way longer depending on the challenge run. But a normal playthrough? I’d be surprised to see any boss take 10 minutes to kill. One of you would be dead long before then I think.

I haven’t found the enemies to be bullet spongey in Elden Ring either as long as you’re sufficiently levelling and upgrading your weapons so I’m not sure I know what you mean.

But in Sekiro you don’t really damage health but rather build a stance meter, which once you fill all the way allow you to deal a death blow, but if you stop attacking or deflecting for more than a moment the meter starts to go back down. You can do health damage but it doesn’t usually make sense to do so.

Ah, the roof of Ashina Castle. The boss at the end there is sort of described as the brick wall that basically is the “final exam” that determines if you’re ready for the “real game” so-to-speak. I’d personally recommend doing that boss and Lady Butterfly around the same time, but you could do it in either order or avoid LB entirely if you wanted to. I usually reach both bosses before fighting either, then fight them back to back, that’s just the way that makes the most sense to me, but everyone’s different.

The entirety of Hirata Estate is technically optional, so you could always skip it or save it for later if you find Lady Butterfly for example to be too difficult. Outside of there, how far did you get in the main part of the game?

I absolutely adore Sekiro but going to it after a different souls game is gonna be tough. It plays very differently from every other souls game, to the point that a lot of folks would consider it to not be a souls game. The combat is just so unique and if you try to play it like a souls game you’re gonna have a bad time. With that being said, it also has my favourite combat system I’ve ever played and once you learn it, it’s so satisfying to play. I would still highly recommend it, but don’t go into it thinking it’ll play like Bloodborne or Elden Ring or something.

Islay

Apollo

This is 100% true, most of my family lives nearby there. It was quite exciting that the neighbouring town was getting so much attention! Small town Newfoundland never gets mentioned in the news outside of local publications, so it was quite cool. It did lead to a huge spike in tourism which some people have differing opinions on, however.

I’ve been following the series since probably 2017 (back when they were individual instalments) and I’m still not bored of it so I agree it’s a game you could play for years.

One of my absolute favourite games. It’s actually my second-most played game of all time I believe. It doesn’t get talked about nearly enough on here imo, I’m excited to see someone else playing it.

What OS are you on? I’ve been wanting to try modding Elden Ring but I’m worried it’ll be tough on Linux (I also haven’t had time).