Showing posts with label Blog Post. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blog Post. Show all posts

Thursday, March 14, 2024

The Video Games I Played - February 2024

This is the second new monthly games post.

I'm not feeling very settled in what anything means. The book posts have some basic stats about the books which don't really get into the nature of what I'm choosing to read and why. For January and now February I've tried to divide games into "Games I've played intentionally" and "Games I've played to feel something moving" -- which has gone by a few different names. Given that I'm trying to do everything more intentionally that makes it harder to see what I'm doing and also leaves me in a strange place with games like "Final Fantasy XII" which I seem to be playing mostly to get through it.

You'll also notice this update is coming kinda late into March and that's largely due to me not really having a good feeling for what tracking the games I play means to me in 2024. Still I won't to remember what I've played, so we'll keep going and see what's next.


The Games I Played in February 2024

Two arcs, a smaller blue inner one and a larger green outer one. In the inner blue arc are `Final Fantasy XII`, `Wildermyth` and `Hollow Knight`. In the out green arc are `Into the Breach`, `Mario Kart 8`, `Sunless Sea` and `Pikmin 4`.

I had planned to focus on playing Final Fantasy XII, as the game I'm playing to enjoy the story and chill out with. The problem with this is that I'm finding FFXIII to be profoundly boring. I just don't really want to play it and it doesn't seem to have a ratio of story-to-gameplay that pushes me to keep playing. (I'm not sure what the ratio of story-to-gameplay is nor where it pushes me to play games, but it seems like a workable metaphor, is there something good enough to make you want to play even if something else makes you not want to play.)

I also trailed off Hollow Knight, as I often do. Honestly February was not a month where I wanted to play games much.

Wildermyth I played a bit of and think it looks interesting, but I think it's a think I could play with my partner and we could have a lot of fun with it, so I've been holding off looking closer.

The games in green have all been games I've played for the joy of making stuff move -- as I constructed above -- and they've all done that admirably. I'm regularly struck by just how good Pikmin 4 is.

Saturday, March 02, 2024

The Books I Read - February 2024

I've made a few more slight adjustments to my infographic for February and cleaned up a few things that seemed to sneak over from last year. It's still a bit manual, but I have a spreadsheet doing my math now and so I only had to copy stuff and make the updated entries bold. One other change I'm making from last year is that I'm handling multiple authors as a single unit, so you'll see Brown, Roediger, McDaniel as a single unit and if I were to read a hypothetical Brown and Roediger book, they'd be listed as another entry.


Stats for February - (Year to date)

Reading Stats

Books Read - 12 (24)Pages Read - 3793 (8535)

Authors

Unique Authors: 9 (13)

Author - books read - pages read

Andrea Penrose - 1 - 369 (2 - 739)Daniel O'Malley - (1 - 688)
Deanna Raybourn - 1 - 346 (1 - 346)Elly Griffiths - 2 - 703 (8 - 2910)
Hanna Hagen Bjørgaas - 1 - 258 (1 - 258)Ilona Andrews - 1 - 335 (2 - 668)
Jacqueline Winspear - (1 - 352)Katie Mack - (1 - 237)
Martha Wells - 1 - 424 (1 - 424)Mary Robinette Kowal - 3 - 841 (3 - 841)
Brown, Roediger, McDaniel - 1 - 293 (1 - 293)Suzette Mayr - 1 - 224 (1 - 224)
Vernor Vinge - (1 - 555)

A word cloud of all the authors above. Mary Robinette Kowal is large in the centre, Elly Griffiths is large below her and the others are clustered around in a spiral, roughly in the order I read them.February 2024 Author Cloud


Publication Range

Earliest Book - 2013 (1999)Most Recent Book - 2023 (2023)

Publications by Decades

2020s - 5 (7)2010s - 7 (16)
1990s - (1)

Source

Borrowed From Public Library - 5 (15)Shared with Friends - 1
My libro.fm Library - 1My Physical Library - 1 (1)
Audible - 3 (3)Author's Website - 1 (1)
Borrowed From Friend - 1 (1)My Kobo Library - 1 (1)

Formats

Audio Book - 4 (9)eBook - 5 (12)
Blog Post - 1 (1)Hardcover - 1 (1)

Friday, February 02, 2024

The Books I Read - January 2024

I enjoyed making the infographic style reading updates in 2023 and I'm continuing on in 2024. I've automated a couple of things in my tracking process, so I'm going to update a little bit about how I track and organize these this year.

One thing I'm adding is a count of "pages". I'm trying to keep them kind of even between books so I'm taking the "Kindle Edition" page count for each book. (Although my brain does not like the fact that Daniel O'Malley's Blitz is *longer* than Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky"). I'm using the page count for the weights for the Author infographic, but I'm not sure that does a great job of balancing all the authors. Katie Mack seems at a huge disadvantage.


Stats for January

Reading Stats

Books Read - 12Pages Read - 4742

Authors - 12 (50)

Author - books read - pages read

Andrea Penrose - 1 - 370Daniel O'Malley - 1 - 688
Elly Griffiths - 6 - 2207Ilona Andrews - 1 - 333
Jacqueline Winspear - 1 - 352Katie Mack - 1 - 237
Vernor Vinge - 1 - 555

A word cloud of all the authors above. Elly Griffiths is very large in the centre and the others are clustered around in roughly the order I read them.January 2024 Author Cloud


Publication Range

Earliest Book - 1999Most Recent Book - 2023

Publications by Decades

2020s - 22010s - 9
1990s - 1

Source

Borrowed From Public Library - 10Shared with Friends - 1
My libro.fm Library - 1

Formats

Audio Book - 5eBook - 7

Thursday, February 01, 2024

The Video Games I Played - January 2024

So this is the new monthly games post.

At this point I've captured two things. Which games I've played and which games I've played "intentionally". I'll probably expand this as I go, but I wanted to do something a little different and give myself a bit of an interesting look. I'm not quite sure I've achieved a look I like either, but again here's a starting point.

Which games I played is self explanatory. Which games I've played "intentionally" is a thing I'm not that clear on myself, but Sea of Stars and Final Fantasy XII are the two games I made time in the evenings to sit down and play. Other games on this list, I didn't choose as an intentional activity, so much as thing to do to rest for a short or long moment. That's a thought I'm still working on and I'll see what makes sense as we go. Games are more-or-less in order of when I started playing them from top to bottom.

I finished and "completed" Sea of Stars, so I tried to add some iconic indicators; an end dot (from sequence diagrams) to signify hitting credits and a "golden" glow to show "complete". 

(Complete goes in quotes because I could probably do more, but in this case I found the "true ending". True Ending goes in quotes because what is truth in a video game.Golden goes in quotes because I'm not great at finding colours and faders in Omnigraffle (which I used to make this).)


The Games I Played in 2024

Tiles representing video games laid out in two rough semicircles, an outer green one and an inner blue one. In the blue one, the Sea of Stars link is attached to a circle with a golden glow. There is also a tile for Final Fantasy XII. In the outer circle there are tiles for Mario Kart 8, Invisible Inc., Super Mario Odyssey, Dicey Dungeons, Europa Universalis, Into The Breach, Prison Architect and Hollow Knight.

As I mentioned, I finished Sea of Stars and wrote up some things about it. I've played quite a bit of Into the Breach especially as a background thinking game. It's (sort of) easy to dip into and out of, especially while I'm working on a project. I've really picked up the rhythm of it and I'm really having fun with it. As always Mario Kart is great to sit down and quickly jump into something to redirect your brain and your hands. ... Also "Vroom".


Like I said, this is evolving, but I kinda like the shape. Does it make sense? Is it interesting? Is there something else that would be good to know? Feedback is appreciated.

Friday, January 26, 2024

Things about Sea of Stars

When I saw the first trailer for Sea of Stars, I thought, “That looks like they were thinking about Chrono Trigger”. Having now played a few dozen hours of Sea of Stars, i can tell you that the creators were thinking about Chrono Trigger and a lot of other SNES era games as well.

Loading Page: Valare and Zale standing in a neon fantasy landscape with the moon behind them. Magic whisps glow around their weapons.

I’ve talked about this a bit in my Games of 2023 post, but when Chrono Cross came out, I was always disappointed that it didn’t expand the things I loved about Chrono Trigger. Sea of Stars plays pretty much like how I wish a 1997 sequel to Chrono Trigger would have played. The world is beautiful it’s fun to run around in, the combos and the combat make sense and you get to root for your heroes to succeed in an easy, uncomplicated way.

I really recommend Sea of Stars to anyone with SNES nostalgia, but I think anyone can love the game and it seems to me like it’s a pretty good game for a younger person, although it does touch on things like death and loss.

Here are a few things I thought about Sea of Stars. Please beware of spoilers, both for the whole of this game and for a little bit of “The Messenger” as well.


Things I Liked


I’ve mentioned that Sea of Stars is a Chrono Trigger tribute, but moving through the world actually feels like an evolution of "Illusion of Gaia". You get to move fast, drop long distances, mantle up cliffs and hookshot (sorry, “graplou”) across bottomless pits. Just moving around feels really good and traversal is always interesting.

The puzzles in the game aren’t particularly taxing, but they feel like just the right amount of challenge. You almost never have to stop moving forward, but there’s enough resistance that you always feel accomplished as you run. The challenges always felt fresh and I didn’t feel like there was much that was reused from other games. They use a lot of block pushing puzzles, but these feel the same way, interesting, not too hard, and always clever.

Screenshot: Valare, Zale and Garl keep their balance as they walk across a rope stretched over a tall waterfal.



The combat in Sea of Stars really shines. In a lot of turn based RPGs it can be easy to develop a strategy that’s good enough for most of the fights and spam that over and over, at least until you get to a boss. Things like attack type or conditions aren’t often worth factoring in, but in Sea of Stars they really shake things up and make each fight in the game interesting.

The game uses “locks”, which are stronger enemy attacks, that you can stop by hitting the enemy with the right combination of damage. You might have sharp and blunt, or lunar and poison or three sharp, three blunt a solar and an arcane. If you hit all the types of the locks, then the enemy doesn’t attack that round. At the same time, other enemies are just counting down to their turn to attack and you can’t stop them.

This makes the combat decisions important. Do I hit the lock and stop the big attack or go for the weaker enemy and get it out for future rounds, do I go for the one that’s about to hit us next. There’s also a well designed push-pull between using your regular attacks to charge up your special attacks and keeping resources in reserve so that you can hit the locks.

I was pretty much never bored in combat and this system made it so that fights with mobs in the middle of the world need as much attention as the boss fights (and are sometimes harder). Different combinations make different fights feel different, and when a boss trots out a 10 point lock you really feel like you’re about the get crushed.

Screenshot: Valare, Zale and Serai fight a witch who has a huge lock with many types of damage needed. They're in a dark and gothic looking place.

Combat also serves to reinforce the characters in the game. Garl, who is your heart and plot driver, is a “Warrior Cook” and he loves to meet people and feed them. In combat, he’ll heal you with a snack or if he has to fight he’ll whack them with his pot lid or a pressure cooker bomb.

Overall I find the characters quite likeable, one of your team is hoping that you’ll come back to her planet and save them -- which turns out to be what you need to do to to beat the big bad. Another from that other planet is basically the kool-aid man and he’s here to punch things as hard as possible.

You have two playable protagonists Valare and Zale and you can choose which one of them you run around as in the world -- although you control everyone directly in combat and they’re both present in all of the cut scenes. They’re both good and good people, but they tend to have the same emotions at the same time and while not, silent protagonists, a lot of the feeling of adventure and travelling the world is left to the rest of the playable party (especially Garl).

In your party you also have a ninja/pirate/cyborg from another planet, who is often the character who has the knowledge necessary to save the world that Valare and Zale lack. You also have the soul in an unbreakable glass body (named B’st) and The Alchemist, who has lived so long as to be basically god, and is the brother to the big bad “Fleshmancer”. The Alchemist despite having made the world -- at least I think he made the world -- has to limit himself to your level for story reasons and later on has to step out and leaves you with an identical puppet of himself.

Still they’re an interesting group and they’re surrounded by a good group of people, such as the non-ninja pirates, some of whom are ghosts, and who are in every tavern in the game playing music from around the game -- because this is an indie game you can collect and give them more. You also have a travelling historian, who is able to tell you stories when you find significant artifacts. One of the moments of the game I found touching was very late in the game where she asks you to record your histories.

Screenshot: The whole party and their friends are gathered at a banquet with several roasts and cakes spread out on the long table.

The game is also really beautiful. The backdrops are lush pixel art and feel like the perfect successor to SNES games. I don’t know that I love the style, but I appreciate the style and I really like the way the world feels and how everything works together. They also play a lot with lighting and that just serves to make the game look even better.

Screenshot: Valare and Zale stand on an old wooden ship which has been repurposed as a bar. Palm trees, lights and flags are hung all around and it seems like a core part of the town.




Things I Didn’t Like


To be totally honest there’s not much I don’t like about Sea of Stars. It took me a while to compile this list, but I found a few things that I didn’t really like.

The first is that there’s no fast travel. The world is small and you eventually get the ability to traverse it very quickly, but if you are standing in one town and you want to be in another town you have to leave town, fly across the world, land, walk into town, and go to where you needed to be. If you need to switch worlds you also have to land on your ship, travel in to the wormhole, travel out of the wormhole, and fly again.

I’m usually a happy proponent of having the travel be as authentic in world as possible -- especially if it’s interesting, but there are some treasure hunting things they want you to do in the late game and it really became a slog to get anywhere, especially if you had to travel back and for several times, and especially especially if you didn’t quite do the thing you had to do, so you don’t even get what you’d expected.

Screenshot: In a desert with techno vibes, Valare and Zale and Resh'an's puppet are looking at a huge speedball capsule.

That has a very silly additional point in that when you are on the world map, you walk *very very slowly*. I don’t know why, in the dungeons and towns you get to dash around and the movement feels awesome, but on the world map you trudge along. They’re trying to call back to the world map of Chrono Trigger, which is cute, but for some reason it’s just slow. The map is pretty though...

Screenshot: The map shows the sleeper, a dragon wrapped around the mountain and the Town of Brisk visible off to the east.



The last thing I didn’t like is that the townie non-playable characters don’t get much personality or even names. When your heroes leave town, Villager 1, Villager 2, and Villager 3 tell them how loved they are and that everyone in town -- basically identical clones of each other, of course -- will miss them.

I know the developers had a lot to do, but having a little more personality in the background characters would have helped make the world feel bigger and richer and also maybe helped make the story feel a little stronger and more connected.




Things I Noticed


I found the story of the game interesting, I didn’t love it, but it has a lot of appealing qualities. In short it’s a good fit for a game version of a Young Adult novel, which again if you look at the SNES games it reminds me of seems right. Chrono Trigger, Illusion of Gaia, Secret of Mana and even the Final Fantasies have stories that are meant more for younger people. So  I think this is a great game for a younger person to play and it’s a lot more upbeat than “Eastward” even if they have some similar vibes and influences.

Where I think there are a few more problems is that the game is also tied into its predecessor “The Messenger”, which is set in the same world (more-or-less) but thousands of years into the future. A character goes in exile so as to avoid the problems of the world, they’re not forgotten, they’re in “The Messenger”. On the other hand, Valere and Zale are forced to learn to weave (or sew?) at the beginning and that’s just never mentioned again. I’d rather figured there’d be a part of the final boss fight, or the real final boss fight where weaving turned out to be key, but it’s just a “miserable thing we had to learn in magic warrior school” that’s out of the plot a few hours in.

(Spoilers intensify)


Where I think the creators of Sea of Stars really got things right is the death of Garl. In a Chrono Trigger reminiscent scene Garl sacrifices himself to protect Valare and Zale and he dies. And he stays dead. Until the ending. Valare and Zale mourn and the world mourns, everybody loves Garl, and the game lets you sit with that sadness.



I find that unusual, there’s a lot of games where they do a “Haha, only kidding” death, and your character pops back up an hour later and who are you to have even worried about it. Here they stick with it, they make it meaning full and I appreciate that.

I also really appreciated that they gave a lot of warning in the story. There’s a cloud … mist .. which can tell the future and he warns Garl and tells him what he needs to do get more time. There are other things as well, but once Garl realises its the moment he’s able to ask The Alchemist who’s there with them for more time, from then on for as long as Garl has purpose he will remain in the world, but he’ll pass away as soon as his mission is accomplished. Garl uses that time well and intentionally and with his usual charm and grace, but then job finished, he dies and Valare and Zale take him back home and bury him under his favourite tree.

You then travel on, meet new people and sometimes talk about Garl and they say they’d like to have met him. You finish the game and Valare and Zale go off to protect the universe, but they come back home once a year to visit Garl’s grave. The ending feels satisfying, but definitely sad.

(SPOILERS INTENSIFY)


Then, as you start thinking about New Game+, the game challenges you to finish up. You don’t have to complete everything, but there are a bunch of important side quests and collectibles that you need to go find and if you finish all of the objectives you get the option to open up a hole time in and space. Valare and Zale and their unbreakable glass buddy B’st, end up right back at the moment of Garl’s death. B’st trades places with Garl, but being unbreakable just pretends to die. Garl returns with Valare and Zale and they go and dig up B’st from Garl’s grave. And now Garl joins the whole party as a Warrior Cook who really kicks ass -- seriously he’s functionally more powerful than everyone else in the game. Like when Garl died, the game gives you a moment to absorb and celebrate, and then you get to go wrap things up again.

Now when you get to the end of the game, rather than letting the big bad wander off. Garl gets in his face and you fight the true boss and get the true ending. It’s a hard fight -- although I may just be bad at it -- but very fulfilling, plus there’s just something very funny about Garl being able to just toss this guy who’s been an existential menace for the whole game.

So it might feel like an ass pull, but for me, especially the extra work they make you do and the fact that you have to finish the game once without Garl really made the story feel right to me. Now when you see the guardians return on Garl’s birthday, Garl gets to enjoy it too.



The other thing I’ve thought about a lot is the designer’s choice to use timed hits -- did I mention they called back to SNES RPGs?. They open saying that the timed hits are totally optional, but they’re not quite. I found that if I missed the block or the bonus damage, or primarily the extra hit to the lock, it was a big deal. I think they’re a good choice, but I wish they’d be acknowledged more and the optionalness been managed in a different way.



I have some concerns about choosing the difficulty generally. As I said, I found the game to be just a little easy, except for the bits that were hard. I’m 40-something now and my hands don’t work as good as they once did, disability is a changing thing and I’d like to see that acknowledged by more software. I think there are parts of the games that other people might have found harder or easier.

The developers address this, in a way I almost like. You can buy or find “relics” which allow you to turn things on and off, so you can turn on a relic that automatically allows you to do the timed hits, or you can get one that makes the enemies significantly tougher. Those are great, and they have quite a few, but they’re found in the game and I feel like those need to be in the hands of the player up front, or when the game says, there are timed hits, but they’re optional, display a list of options for how you can modify them. Finding them in shops, even if they’re cheap might make sense from the perspective of story telling or immersion, but I think we need to put all of the game play options we have in the hands of the player and trust them to make the right choices from the start.

This feels a bit low, but I’ll also point out that they wouldn’t need a relic to tell you if you got the hits right if the sprites animations read just a little bit more clearly.


Things I’d Include in a Game

 

The biggest thing I’d be influenced by in Sea of Stars is just how great the traversal is. Playing games like Hollow Knight or Super Mario Odyssey always make movement a joy, but it’s not a thing that I’d thought about in conjunction with RPGs before. Sea of Stars is just a really fun to run around and they do a good job of giving you interesting places to run through the whole game.

The other thing from Sea of Stars is just how great a great typed combat system can be. I’ve written about how much I like the way conditions work in Secret of Mana and how typed combat has always been a bit of an after thought, or something that’s included in a game because it’s expected not because it makes it more fun. The typed combat is one of the things that makes the combat in Final Fantasy X so good. Most designers have left it out of newer games or minimised it, but I absolutely love the way the Sea of Stars team pushed it to the fore and used it to make every moment of combat meaningful.







Final Things


I really appreciate Sea of Stars, it hits all of my nostalgia buttons and I think it’s a great game on its own. I also love that it feels like an entry point to games and RPGs that echos the early / mid 90s games that I entered games with. I really appreciate the time and the effort that the team has put in, they’ve made a game that fits together perfectly and I appreciate that the size is just right to appreciate how the game fits together.






Sunday, January 07, 2024

Books of December 2023

Reading

Here is my updated infographic for the books I've read in 2023 - December Edition.

Stats in December - (Year to Date)

Reading Stats

Books Read - 15 (128)Pages Read - 4919 (42550)

Books Read

The Anatomist's Wife by Anna Lee Huber Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree
Blood Bound by Patricia Briggs Knife Children by Lois McMaster Bujold
A Perilous Undertaking by Deanna Raybourn A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark
A Treacherous Curse by Deanna Raybourn Proof of Guilt by Patricia Briggs
A Dangerous Collaboration by Deanna Raybourn The Stone in the Skull by Elizabeth Bear
A Dying Fall by Elly Griffiths Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree
The Heroic Legend of Arslan, Vol. 18 by Hiromu Arakawa and Yoshiki Tanaka The Outcast Dead by Elly Griffiths
Translation State by Ann Leckie

Collage of the covers of the 15 books listed above.December 2023 Covers

Authors - 12 (50)

Adrian Tchaikovsky - (4)Agatha Cristie - (1)
Alexander McCall Smith - (2)Alexandra Rowland - (1)
Angeline Boulley - (1)Ann Leckie - 1 (2)
Anna Lee Huber - 1 (1)Anthony Horowitz - (1)
Becky Chambers - (1)Brandon Sanderson - (1)
Carlene O'Connor - (2)Charles Todd - 1 (11)
CLAMP - (1)Connie Willis - (2)
Dan Moren - (2)Daniel O'Malley - (2)
Deanna Raybourn - 3 (4)Ed Yong - (1)
Elizabeth Bear - 1 (2)Elle Cosimano - (1)
Elly Griffiths - 2 (7)Emma Newman - (1)
Fatima Ali - (1)Hiromu Arakawa - 1 (3)
Ilona Andrews - (7)Isaac Asimov - (2)
Jim Butcher - (1)Lois McMaster Bujold - 1 (5)
Louise Penny - (1)Martha Wells - (1)
Mary Robinette Kowal - (1)Matt Parker - (1)
Mur Lafferty - (1)N. K. Jemisin - (1)
P. Djèlí Clark - 1 (1)Patrica Briggs - 1 (10)
Rick Riorden - (1)Robin McKinley - (1)
S. A. Chakraborty - (1)Scott Hawkins - (1)
Sherry Thomas - (6)Stephen King - (1)
Tasha Suri - (2)Timothy Zhan - (1)
Tomohito Oda - (17)Travis Baldree - 2 (2)
Ursula K. Le Guin - (1)Waubgeshig Rice - (1)
Xiran Jay Zhao - (1)Yoshiki Tanaka - 1 (7)

A word cloud of all the authors above with Tomohito Oda in the largest size. Patricia Briggs, Charles Todd are also very large and Illona Andrews and Yoshiki Tanaka, Elly Griffiths and Sherry Thomas are notably larger than the rest.2023 Author Cloud - December Update

Publishing


Publication Range

Earliest Book - 2007 (1951)Most Recent Book - 2023 (2023)

Publications by Decades

2020s - 5 (45)2010s - 9 (48)
2000s - 1 (24)1990s - (4)
1980s - (4)1960s - (1)
1950s - (2)

Books

Source

Borrowed From Public Library - 9 (73)Borrowed From Friends - (2)
My Bookshelves - 2 (2)My Audible Library - (3)
My libro.fm Library - 3 (19)My Kobo Library - 1 (25)
My "Kindle" Library - (5)

Formats

Audio Book - 6 (62)eBook - 6 (41)
eBook (Comic) - 1 (22)Hardcover - (1)
Paperback - 2 (2)

Monday, January 01, 2024

2023 in Games

I've been tracking the games I play for a long time now and partly that's so that I can write a post that looks at how I played from a ten-thousand foot view. I've reached a point where that's less important to me than it was and my priorities have changed. I'm going to keep tracking in a way, but I think that's going to look a little more like what I'm doing with books now. I've written a bit more about that in an update earlier in December. but my longer term goal is to make sure that everything I'm producing is fun to make and makes me happy, so that's going to inform how I capture playing data going forward.

I also got very clobbered by COVID in November so my tracking, which has been spotty all year got even worse and I haven't written down a single game I've played since December 10.  That really helped me see what was and wasn't important to me. Earlier having very detailed information mattered to me, but now it's just not a priority for when I play or what I do. If I'd finished that software to track playing time, that might be different, but I haven't, I don't really want to and I'm looking to focus my time differently going forward.

That being said, I do know a few things about the games I played this year, so here they are.

I played 31 games this year for approximately 500 hours. That's slightly fewer games and significantly fewer hours than the last few years. My gaming PC broke a while back and between pandemic and other things fixing it was never my priority. Mostly I've been playing on the switch, but that's felt a little less fulfilling this year so I've started to broaden out again, finding the things I can play on my ancient Mac Book Pro and since my birthday on SteamDeck.

Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - Screenshot - Link is looking at his data pad which looks suspiciously like a Switch.
Fortunately the Switch and Tears of the Kingdom, which is a great game, even if you play Tears of the Kingdom on your Switch in the game!

 

Important Games

The five games I think were really important to me this year were:

  1. Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
  2. Tactics Ogre: Reborn
  3. Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age
  4. Pikmin 4
  5. Sea of Stars

I also played a lot of Mario Kart 8, Dicey Dungeons and Into the Breach, but in less intentional / important ways. 

I've merged time and favouritness this year, at least partly because I haven't tracked well and as I'm looking forward, I'm thinking a lot about what I play for the experience of the game and what I play for managing the moment.

I will say that Tears of the Kingdom is a masterpiece and I've love it to bits. It builds beautifully on everything in Breath of the Wild and is just in general a great game to play. Pikmin 4 is also really good and honestly fills in almost every need I've had in terms of a Pikmin game.

I'm also deeply in love with Sea of Stars, although because it is very much an homage to Chrono Trigger it may not be as great an experience for someone without my rose colour glasses. Still if a modern polish of 90s RPGs is something you want in your life, there's really nothing better.

Sea of Stars - Screenshot - Valerie, Zeke, and Seraï face off with some rock things in a rocky tunnel.
Sea of Stars, home to every thing I've kinda wished SNES RPGs would do, and more.

 

Finishing Games

I didn't finish any games this year. There are a bunch of games which I've started and which I think I will finish with soon, but soon is as good as it gets.

Again with my overall change in how I'm going to track things and think about game playing generally, I'm much less interested in what I've finished. I may keep track, but honestly looking at a lot of the games that have come out in the last few years few of them really even have definitive endings, where you aren't encouraged to go back and play. Even if there's not a New Game + mode, for me the space ending a game leaves in my head often leaves me going back to play a game over again right after I finish until my attention shifts to somewhere else.

Finding What Works on The Mac

Since I did open Steam again for the first time in a year or more, I thought I'd mention what out of the games I like worked well and what didn't. Overall, Steam and most video games don't work well on an 8 year old Mac (Steam has stolen focus from me 8 times writing this paragraph so far, just for example).

Smaller windowed games have been great, so I've played a good chunk of Dicey Dungeons and Into the Breach and a bit of FTL: Faster Than Light. I tried some Civilization VI and some Stardew Valley, but neither was a huge technical success. 

Invisible Inc. was probably my favourite Steam game this year (obviously not from this year). It worked well on the Mac and had the right amount of tactical thinking for me.

Getting some desktop gaming back was nice, but I want to play with a lot more intention next year.

Into The Breah - Screenshot (Mac command bar included) - The defenders of humanity, equipped with giant robots, plan out their turn trying to minimize the damage from the giant bug-like Vek.
Into The Breach, because throwing giant bugs into lakes (sometimes of acid) is a good way to relax.

 

Cataloguing Screen Shots

This is probably dumb, but I learned the correct way to get screenshots off of the Switch this year. You may recall that in past years, I very slowly passed them out via Twitter. That was a slow and laborious process, but I wanted to make sure that I had a lot of screen shots of a game in case I wanted to write about it later. As it turns out you can hook your Switch up to your computer and so long as you have a manageable number of images you can just copy them over. So I now have a fairly good archive of screenshots that I found interesting this year.

Tetris (Game Boy) - Title Screen - Tetris above a view of a towers topped with onion domes.
Because some day I might need this...


Sunday, December 31, 2023

New Year Resolutions 2024


Looking back at my resolution posts over there years there are certainly some themes that have developed, be happier, do more things, go on adventures, move. They also feel like they’ve gotten a little less happy each year as the weight of everything piles up. So this year I’m going to try to be happy and well, I’ll be following on my themes because I don’t do these things as much as I’d like to.

So here are the things I’d like to work on this year:

  • Choose happiness: I want to laugh more, and do light things and be light. I talked last year about finding happiness inside myself (as that’s the only place it can be found), and that’s a goal to continue for this year. There is pain in the world, I have fears that are justified, but I want to push back on the greyness that sits in my mind and find joy again.
  • Be more intentional: This is something I’ve been working on for a while, but the way my brain works, I often find myself doing things that I didn’t mean to do. As part of my other resolutions, I want to do what I mean and mean what I do. So I’m going to try check in on myself regularly to see if I’m doing what I want to be doing.
  • Do: On that note, I’m putting one of my old favourite resolutions back on the list. “Do” means I want to have a bias towards action. I often struggle to separate my sense of self and self worth from my productivity, but at the same time I feel better if I do things. 10 minutes of cleaning or half an hour of writing make me feel better and I want to remember that.
  • Finish (small) things: As I mentioned in my review of last year’s resolutions, the big thing I ended up working on this year was another novel and I certainly didn’t finish it. Some of my projects are big, and they need to be finished. That being said, finishing the small things, like a scene or a chapter or a bit of a coding project or tidying part of a room or building a thing are all important too and I want to get in the habit of finishing. More importantly, is that I would like to get in the habit of finishing and feeling accomplished rather than just looking at all of the things I haven’t done.
  • Read more non-fiction: I’ve read a ton of fiction in 2023 and I think it’s been good for me. I have a big pile of non-fiction books that have been sitting around and it’s time I developed the habit of reading those too.


So 2024 is certainly a follow on to my themes and I hope I’ll be able to use this post as a reminder when I’m feeling unsure about what I want to do.

2024



 

Friday, December 29, 2023

Games of 2023

Looking at a lot of year in review lists, 2023 is another year like 2017 where a lot of very good games were released. I’ve started playing more games on “PC” now, although I went back to long time favourites (not least because the old Mac Laptop I’m playing on is not exactly a modern graphics powerhouse).

So of the five 2023 released games I played all were on the Switch and three of them were from Nintendo.

As is traditional, I've organized the games I've played into a few rough categories:


The Alright


Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp

Advance Wars 1+2 Re-Boot Camp

 We’ve established that a) I like strategy games and b) I’m not *good* at strategy games. This leaves me with the exact position of “I kinda liked Advance Wars, but it’s harder than I think is fun,” so it’s alright. I’m also just hitting a point right now that I’d like to play strategy games that aren’t combat / warfare based. What does that look like? I’m not sure yet, but it’s making me think.


Mineko’s Night Market

Mineko's Night Market

 

I picked up Mineko’s Night Market hoping to play a light crafting / store management game. It is that, but honestly the technical problems on the switch are keeping me from enjoying it. It does an alright job of the crafting and store management, but it’s maybe a little too self aware for it’s own good and when it’s not being self aware it seems a little short on charm and personality (the only interaction with towns folk is them demanding things from you, often stuff you have to buy). The game feels a lot like the art took the lead (and the game is gorgeous) and game play and technical functionality got lost.

 


The Very Good 


Pikmin 4

Pikmin 4

Pikmin 4 might actually be great. It certainly hits all of the things that make me happy about Pikmin games and there is a lot of it. Sometimes Nintendo accidentally irons out the fun when they polish their modern games, especially those based on older series and I think they’ve done that here. They added in a lot of very good fun as they went, but it’s just less charming than the nonsense that was Pikmin 1, 2 and 3.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder

Super Mario Bros. Wonder

 I’m not super in love with the 2D Mario games and Wonder has kinda followed along. There’s something in the mode of 2D exploration that just doesn’t make me want to spend a lot of time, the way I did when I was a kid. Based on Dan's PlayFrame Let's Play, I've tried to slow down and really explore the world, but I just find compared to exploration in something like Odyssey, or even 3D World, I’m not that engaged.


The Great


Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Tears of the Kingdom is great. I think this it’s actually two great games which is kind of what keeps it from being excellent. It takes all of the things that were excellent in Breath of the Wild and improves on them. The game play is better, the story is better, the experience is better, the side characters are better. The Zonai building mechanic is amazing and a ton of fun.

When I play Tears of the Kingdom, just like when I played BoTW, I am totally absorbed in a way almost no games absorb me. Each moment of game play is fun and fulfilling.

The thing that holds me back, just a little but from totally and unreservedly loving this game is that it doesn’t feel like it matters. Riding a horse across Hyrule felt like a feat in BoTW, but in ToTK it’s a dumb thing to do because you can just *fly*. I played the game wrong, and hunted down the side quests when I should have just pushed through the main story, loved it and then delved so deeply into the world flying around on my flying “Akira” bike. I did it to myself, but there’s just that tiny bit of how much more I could have loved this game.

Sea of Stars

Sea of Stars

Mountains’re nice.

Chrono Trigger is still maybe my favourite game of all time. (No I’m not writing down a list, it’s more fun to warp it to whatever I need.) Chrono Cross was not the sequel that we wanted. However people feel about Chrono Cross (I myself feel at least 3 ways about it), at the end of the day the feeling and the heart of Chrono Trigger aren’t there.

Sea of Stars is made by people who understood that feeling and that heart. I spend so much of my time playing saying to myself “Yeah, that’s how that’s supposed to be”. So you meet a monster in the first bit of the game and he tells you not only that “mountains’re nice” but also that “this is the life,” and “man, you’re noisy.” Your teammates gather around the campsite and chat with you about what’s going on. You team up and combine your powers to clobber enemies that you stunned on the screen.

If Sea of Stars had no references to Chrono Trigger, it would still be a great game. Traversal is fun and the puzzle solving is just the right level to be satisfying without being boring or frustrating. I also think that a lot of the puzzles are unique to the game. I think the story is just a little shy of brilliance, but that’s because I’m 40-something now and I read a lot of stores.

Sea of Stars is a great game for anyone who likes turn-based JRPGs and it gets better if you liked Super Nintendo turn-based JRPGs and better still if you loved Chrono Trigger and wanted that true sequel of the heart.



Friday, December 22, 2023

Looking back at 2023's New Year's Resolutions

I liked how my 2023 started, and then I feel like I lost focus on the things that mattered to me. I think I made progress on a lot of things, but I also feel like I didn’t move the needle on some of the things that matter to me. Certainly ending the year getting flattened by COVID hasn’t been a really great experience.
 

I write a resolution post as part of finding focus and I don’t always do a *great* job of checking on my resolutions throughout the year, but writing a post to check in on what I wanted to do and where I’m at in my life now is helpful as part of that focus.
 

For 2023 I had six resolutions:

  • Finish Projects: Specifically I said I’d like to “plan out reasonably sized projects and finish them”. Instead I started writing *another* novel and then got hung up and didn’t work on it. Still over the last couple of months I’ve been thinking about what I want out of my life next and hopefully some of that will translate into getting more things done.

  • Read more text: I did this. I read a lot of text and felt good about it.

  • Move: I’ve started moving more, but have a long way to go. Just going in to the office opens up how much I walk and I try to remember to get out of my chair. Still I'm no where near where I was at my fittest or even at the start of the pandemic, but I feel like I'm on the move.

  • Adventure: I started on being more adventurous but I wasn’t very good at it. Similarly to moving, going into the office more has been a big help in seeing more of the world and we did actually take a trip all the way to Victoria and back. Still I've tended to opt towards staying home rather than getting out there and adventuring.

  • Choose Happiness: This is probably going to be a life long goal. I’ve started to find ways to think that make me feel happier and I’m slowly untangling my sense of happiness and self worth from my productivity and the world around me.

    At the same time, one of my COVID symptoms was a prevailing sense of doom and as I write this I’m still finding it hard to feel any way other than “here and alive”.

  • Sleep Better: I guess I’ve started on this, but I am still not a person who is awake and happy about it. On the plus side the quality of our bed is really good now.

So 2023 was a year, not one I was super intentional about, but I think it can stand as a launching point to do better.


A winter sky between trees and over hourses. Very smooth white and light grey clouds are smeared across the bright blue.

Friday, December 15, 2023

What I Did About The Books I’m Reading and What I Should Do About the Games I’m Playing

Back at the beginning of the year, I posted about wanting to change up the way I was keeping track of the books I read. Previously I posted a book post every few days with the new books in a big list. I was inspired by Sharon Lee who does that and it seemed like fun.

I wanted to make the changes for a few reasons. First off as technical task it was surprisingly frustrating to maintain a list over a series of posts and it was a bit redundant as my GoodReads profile is public and you can see the list there. The other reason was that the book posts were inflating the number of posts I was making in a month and taking time away from working on other things. I though, as a next step, making a monthly “infographic” update might be fun and interesting and maybe teach me a few things at the same time.

As someone who has worked in post secondary education for a while now, I can assure you that nobody (including myself) has any idea what an infographic is. So I settled on an answer that was high on info and maybe a bit low on graphics.

All of the posts are under the Books in 2023 tag and they look more or less like this:

A screen shot of the top of the Books of November 2023 post.
A screen shot of the lower middle of the Books of November 2023 post.

I’m pretty happy. As I said, it might not be as pretty as it might be, but at least for now I’m enjoying making it. I learned, for example that for some reason I haven’t read a single book published in 2023, which seems weird, but now I know.

More technically, I learned a bit about getting formatting to work properly. I also learned that books are almost never in a 2:3 ration. I mean, I shelved books for years, I knew this, but until I tried making a grid of book covers I hadn’t realised just how wacky the world of book cover sizes is. I also messed around with hand crafting a word cloud, mine is certainly not as pretty as some, but I kinda like it.

A word cloud of authors from June 2023 (listed fullin in that post). Tomohito Oda is very large in the centre and Elizabeth Bear is barely visible below her. Other authors include Charles Todd and Patrica Briggs a little bit smaller that Tomohito Oda.

I’m doing a very simple translation where the author’s percentage of the books translates directly to the font size the author. So in the June example above, Tomohito Oda represented 26.4% of the books I’d read to that point in the year and her name is in 264 point font. Elizabeth Bear only accounted for 1.6% at the time and so she’s in 16 point font.

From a production point of view, it takes me about 3 hours to put together the post and certainly requires more hand done portions than it might. When I set out that was fine but as the year went on, I hand wrote more HTML than I really enjoyed, especially when it came to keeping the two column tables balanced. There’s also still some book keeping that’s duplicating Good Reads.

So eventually, I want to either automate the process or make it more manual. I still like the idea of hand building my infographic, but also creating fewer points where I can get in my way seems helpful too. For the time being I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing because it’s fun enough and kind of meditative, without taking up all of my time.

I’m having enough fun with it that I’m thinking about how I can modernise my system of video game tracking. I think those posts are alright, but they have a few problems.

The top of my November 2023 in Video Games post (I do appologize for the low quality alt text for this post, I wasn't sure how to illustrate it and I'm just short of time to put all of the text from those posts back in).

I’ve had a lot of trouble this year keeping track of what I’ve played and when and so the data going into the posts is a lot worse than it was. This has happened before and I might get better about it again, but I’m also a spot right now where games are less important to me than they were. I’m not sure I need to be quite as granular about it as I have been.

There’s also a problem that a lot of games show up every month. If you read those posts regularly you’ll know that my nuanced view of Mario Kart 8 (Deluxe) is “Vroom Vroom Beep Beep” because I really haven’t had that much to say about it in the … almost decade since it game out (the first time). I don’t mind doing a new review for something new or a point about something interesting, but I think those posts are some of my worst writing and I want to put that energy somewhere else.

One of the things I’ve always meant to do with game tracking is build one of those theme river diagrams. At the moment for me capturing the very large things about what I’m playing is important. For example: “The summer of 2023 was the the summer of Tears of the Kingdom” is the kind of insight I’d like to hang on to (and I’m not sure is even that apparent in what I’m doing).

I’d also like to make sure that I have a picture in my head of what I played in a year, new and old. Like right now I know I played Hollow Knight at some point in the last year, and apparently a lot of that was in the winter, and then I played a little bit of Breath of the Wild just before Tears of the Kingdom came out.

Overall, it’s time for a change, I’m just not totally sure what the change is going to be. Writing it out this way makes me think something similar to the book infographic might be the right way to go. Here’s what my 2024 in games looks like at a glance updated each month, with a few insights to spice up everything else.

I think I can also dial back the tracking. I’m not sure at this point that it’s doing me any good and while I don’t think it’s doing much harm if I can streamline to “Here are games I played a little and Here are games I played a lot” that might be what I need. That’s going to be weird and I might end up continuing just because it’s an ancient habit by this point (and imagine all the data I won’t have if I want it later!).

Anyway, those are my Updates updates. Making infographics is fun, if a little bit tedious and even I, after doing something for seven years, can make a change. I don’t know exactly what you can expect in terms of my media consumption nonsense in 2024, but I, at least, intend to have fun with it.

Monday, December 11, 2023

Blog: Video Games of November 2023

I spent a lot of November down with COVID, so I don't really remember the month and certainly didn't have a lot of energy to play. I'd planned to pick up Sea of Stars around my birthday and that turned out to be a pretty good speed when I had the energy for it.


My top five games (by play time) for November were:

  1. Sea of Stars - Sea of Stars is a lot of fun. I think it stands up on its own, but it's also the modern extension of great SNES role playing games. It's certainly made with a lot of Chrono Trigger in it's heart and kind works as the sequel I'd been imagining, rather than Chrono Cross.
    Screenshot: The three heroes talk to a wanderer on a mountain top at sunset. The Wanderer says 'Mountains're nice'


  2. Dicey Dungeons - Dicy Dungeons has been the thing to play when I don't want to use my brain too much.
    Screenshot: The Inventor, an orange D6 faces off against Beatrice, a vampy bee woman. The invetor has a shocked card, which they can't use without adding a die, a two handed sword which will do at least six damage plus another die's worth and a jackhammer where when you push the button your opponent's equipment will be shocked.


  3. Tactics Ogre: Reborn - I started a new playthrough to look at the differences of the routes. I'm finding the overall story a little flat, and some of that is due to them trying to keep a dark and gritty tone. The game play in each mission is always fun, so as long as you don't think about the war crimes you keep committing, it's fun.
    Screenshot: Our heroes, lead by the Hawkman Canopus, fight their way up a large rough fortress on a dark and stormy night. The battle seems to have turned with only a few opponents remaining.

  4. Stardew Valley - I found it hard to come back to Stardew Valley. It's still a good an enjoyable game and the core farming is enjoyable, but I found having played through all of the story years ago, I just didn't really connect.
    Screenshot: Our farmer looks at a patch of Kale in a rather patchy looking farmyard.


  5. Mineko's Night Market - I thought I'd try this out as something new in the farming / store management genre. It's fun, but not quite what I'd hoped. It's slow on its own and then has some fairly severe technical issues on the switch that make it frusterating to play.
    Screenshot: A closeup of a white cat, looking bewilderedly at the front of a van which has been made to look like a snail.


Here's my total play time for November:



And here's a chart of how much I've played over the month:




The Video Games I Played - February 2024

This is the second new monthly games post . I'm not feeling very settled in what anything means. The book posts have some basic stats...