Posts

What are a couple of post-apocalyptic psionic kids gonna do when all the extraterrestrial invaders in the world try to tear them apart?

When all the bosses are dead, building is all that’s left.

How long has it been? It’s been so long that I forgot how to log in to the blog. How long has it been? It’s been so long that I forgot I changed the theme. How long has it been? Well, long enough. I got back into blogging a bit over a year ago because of Belghast’s vast network of blog-friends. I always struggle with blogging because it takes a lot of time, and I don’t really have any insights into gaming. I’m just… a gamer, and old enough that I can raise my kids to be gamers and old enough that my grandchildren are gamers. I’m at the place where I’m not old enough to be a boomer but not young enough to be anything else. I’ve never felt I really fit in to any group or demographic; I just lurk at the edges. ...

I probably should have waited one more day to blog about Valheim, as last night we took down the Goblin King, Yagluth, in an epic fight.

I don’t really play survival games. I liked Minecraft until an update broke my roller coaster. I spent a lot of time on that. I tried that Age of Conan one, but grew bored. I never thought I would play another tree puncher. But Team Spode got to talking about Valheim on one of our DCUO nights. It was blowing up – it still is – and we all very much liked the option of not having murder hobos crashing the server, killing everyone and blowing stuff up. ...

Square Enix’s new co-op third person shooter RPG, “Outriders”, doesn’t have anything to do with the Marvel heroes. Just, the last demo I played of this sort was Marvel’s Avengers, and I didn’t have a great experience with the co-op features, and this title was just there, for some reason. So, what is “Outriders” if not Marvel’s Avengers? I hadn’t even heard of this game before a couple days ago, when it exploded all over my Twitter timeline. I (being at work at the time) demanded someone patiently explain to me what kind of game it was so that I could join in the fun. ...

It’s a game about rolling up a character for a tabletop fantasy RPG. You just roll up the character. That’s it. It’s amazing, though.

When you REALLY want to play DCUO, but all you have is the Switch…

Okay, I have been working on EXAPUNKS the last few weekends, and dreaming about it most nights. But I’m done with the main plot; got the achievement for proof, and I’m going to exorcise the game by writing down how I solved each puzzle. First, some of my solutions are optimal, some are terrible, most fall somewhere in between. The first rule of programming is to get something working. Once you have an implementation, then you can go back and refactor; many times, your first pass is good enough. My boss used to tell me not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good; a good solution that produces the desired results is better than a perfect solution that is never finished. You’ll see what I mean by that when I get to some of my solutions. ...

I was looking for something light and frothy in the Switch eShop’s list of new games that they thought I might like. I only glanced briefly at “The Innsmouth Case”, a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style text adventurer set in the Lovecraft mythos, and then went past it to look at more graphically intensive games. But I kept thinking about it. The writing in the screenshots given was pretty funny. The trailer advertised twenty seven different endings. The characters looked to be a huge and wacky departure from the grim madness of unimproved Lovecraft. It was cheap. I took a chance. ...