Meanwhile, in my alt-reality gaming life, I'm nearing the end of my Witcher phase.  I actually finished the story line and the DLCs for Witcher 3 - The Wild Hunt last month, but the open-world setting of the game is so compelling and fascinating that I've been hanging out in the game world, finishing off the odd quest or two that I missed on my first pass through and exploring the remaining undiscovered locations. 

You know that feeling when you've finished a really great book and even though just like all things in life it eventually had to end, you didn't want it to, and when you're done you re-read the back cover and copy on the cover sleeves and everything you can find on line just to keep the experience going a little bit longer? My recent Witcher experience was kind of like that - any additional experience in the Witcher world seems preferable to the mundane reality of daily life.

So now it's time to download a new game.  So far, in addition to Witcher 3, I've been through Fallout 4 (liked it, a lot), Skyrim (ditto), Far Cry 4 (pluses and minuses, and ultimately never finished it), and Wolfenstein II - The New Colossus (silly but entertaining).  People have offered me some suggestions as to what to play next, but as I was shopping around on line, I saw that the first DLC for Wolfenstein has been released, so I downloaded Freedom Chronicles - The Adventures of Gunslinger Joe.

The Wolfenstein series is based on a premise that Germany won World War II and Nazis occupy America, and you play as a revolutionary, underground-guerrilla freedom fighter.  Mostly, the game is you running through the streets of an occupied New York, New Orleans, Roswell, and assorted other towns (and the planet Venus, too, for some reason) shooting Nazis, Klansmen, fascists and thugs.  What I like about the game is that the good guys are ethnically varied and include Black Panthers, jewish intellectuals, radical feminists, and other groups Fox News viewers have been taught to hate.  However, the game never takes itself too seriously (which generally is more good than bad), and the plotlines are pretty threadbare (your assignment is to kill some Nazi commander, you shoot him and a lot of collateral enemies, end of story), but that seemed like just the cathartic mindlessness I needed after months of Witcher 3.

Freedom Chronicles - The Adventures of Gunslinger Joe is the story of Gunslinger Joe (duh), a former NFL quarterback who refused to throw a soccer game for the Reich and escaped to hunt down and exterminate the commander who captured him (and apparently his father, too).  The problem is that the whole DLC is just that one quest, no side-stories or alternative missions, and I played through the entire thing in just a couple of hours this afternoon.  At $9.99 for the download, it seemed far to brief.  There were some rousing gun battles to be sure, especially the climatic last fight, but the game takes over at the end and the actual death of the villain occurs "off-camera" - the player doesn't even get the satisfaction of pulling the final trigger after killing scores of nameless soldiers and robots to get to that point.

Really have to say a bit of a let down.  I was hoping for a little more comic-book-style shoot-'em-up to help make me forget Witcher 3.

Don't know yet what I'll download next, but I'll soon be talking about it here, I'm sure.