Gaming

Terraria has long been one of my favorite games. Last year’s Journey’s End expansion, with its inclusion of Journey Mode, saw its popularity grow even more. It came at just the right time when we were all stuck at home and looking for ways to fill our time. I managed to get a few older computers networked together to enable myself and my children to play together. We consistently played for quite a while, but then interest fell off and they refocused on Minecraft....

Game feel Beyond: Two Souls is like a Bond game action scene in slow motion. It has vehicles, a cool underwater base infiltration scene, and you get to save the world from the bad guys. But rather than a playboy with an ever-ready quip, you play an emotionally damaged woman with a unique ability who simply yearns for a normal life. There’s also no penalty for idling (usually) mid-action scene, and seemingly no penalty for doing a terrible job....

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This game is beautiful. To be honest I thought the ending was going to be much darker, as the discoveries grew sadder as Lonnie’s departure date neared. Sam kept repeating how she couldn’t live without Lonnie. I’m glad I was wrong. What I found instead gave me a sense of joy and hope. Growing up is hard. Bearing the weight of the world’s and your parents’ expectations is a seemingly impossible challenge....

Who tricked me into playing FFXI again? I’ve been slowly coming out the other side of a FFXI bender. It’s still fun. I like numbers-go-up. But it’s too demanding. This is always the problem I run into with games. I look at ways of optimizing progress, and it turns into me managing a half a dozen or more characters. It was 8 characters this time. I had the idea a couple months in that I should get them all full inventory upgrades so I could hold more stuff....

Tetris 99. Wow. At first I was skeptical. I don’t like competitive games as a general rule. I see games as a way to understand their creator, or myself, or to challenge myself to grow, or to give me material for other ideas. When the content is centered around what other people do and how they react to things, this changes the game fundamentally for me, and then it doesn’t really fit one of the driving reasons I play them....

I took several weeks off from playing games, since before Christmas, after I spent half a dozen weekends in a row playing Graveyard Keeper (191 hours on record; still nowhere near my record for Terraria, FFXI, WoW, Monster Hunter, or FFXIV). Good game, but I probably should have stopped after finishing it the first time. PS4 Collection I tried playing some games on PS4. Humble Bundle had a bundle. I always go for the platform bundles, because they’re usually a good deal....

Corpse feng shui This is the first time in my life where corpse quality is my #1 priority. Graveyard Keeper was a good experience overall. It hooked me in all of the right ways and the trickles of progress were enough of a dopamine hit to make me lose sleep and cause my family undue stress with my general unavailability. SPOILERS AHEAD Real moral ambiguity without any real consequence Harvest corpse meat....

Planning More gamepad updates today. This time, specifically for Robotron. I plan to integrate the controls pausing and twinstick shooting. Pause updates Updated pause to handle both spacebar and the + key. I should probably find an XBox controller and see if the indices of those buttons are the same as the X-input (they should be; the indices don’t change between D- and X-input, only the dPad location does, and X-input includes a few extra buttons....

It starts out deliciously creepy. Every kid’s afraid of that thing in the shadowy corner in the middle of the night. So they huddle under the covers and pretend it’s not there but they know it’s there. When the game asked me to choose between call for Mom and Dad, hide under the covers, or get out of bed, I cowered under the covers! There’s something foggy/cloudy in front of the window!...