March, 2022 - Sleepypete's Pillow

Hello everyone,

It’s been a while again ! I really must get back into the habit of posting reasonably regularly again. I may have been diving into some game addictions again … Oh and cricket’s been on (it hasn’t been great to be honest) and I’ve been diving into the work stuff.

Game screenshot. Skyrim. We're looking up at our character. She's pretty much just a silhouette against a sky which has orange aurorae fading to yellow and green. There is also a ribbon of stars to the top right. We can see a few tree tops as well. — Head in the skies ?

Yep. The new Skyrim save happened and I’ve been collecting mods again. I’ll never share the full collection of mods (most modded Skyrim installs will have a LOT of mods) but some of the big ones are Caliente’s Beautiful Bodies Enhancer which makes everyone prettier. Apachii Sky Hair adds great hair styles. There’s a map enhancer, some quality of life type things like the achievement re-enabler and a thing that tells you what books you haven’t read yet. Realistic water, weather and better road signs amongst other texture improvements.

There’s a Death Alternative mod in there which changes what happens when your character is defeated. Normally, you just reload a save. But with mods like Death Alternative Your Money Or Your Life, things happen like being ransomed off, robbed, left for dead and other things that you can actually recover from. Sounds odd doesn’t it ? But it does let you recover from a situation without the reload and another mod sets up having to rescue the people who were with you which gives a reason to explore more. Oh and there’s an Alternate Perspective thing, which alters the cliched start.

Game screenshot. Skyrim. We're looking at the back left of our character. She's wearing an orange dress top above a light green skirt. Behind, is a medieval city type scene with stone brick buildings to left and right. A sign to the top left says "Winking Skeever" — Solitude in Solitude

In my case, I started my character as someone stepping off a boat at the Solitude docks and we’ll see where it goes from there. You can even go into the main story if you choose to. What adventures will she have ? She’s already in the garb of one who likes to hit things with a big sword. I haven’t got the mod set complete yet though. Seems like most of the time I spend in Skyrim isn’t so much the adventuring, it’s checking whether mods do what they’re supposed to do and sorting out incompatibilities.

It’s a game I’ll keep coming back to. It’s very easy to play, they’ve scattered interesting things to do all over the rather extensive map and the mods just add more to that. Oh and I’m being very curious about Elden Ring as well because a lot of people are really enjoying that. It’s another open world adventuring while bashing things with pointy things game.

There hasn’t been much Elite lately. To be honest, it’s an extremely pretty game but the hold there isn’t as much as it was. I do enjoy the space trucking though, which brings me to …

Don’t mind me, being on the hard shoulder

Since acquiring another gamepad controller, I’ve been enjoying the driving games again. Forza Horizon 5 is one, I’m a bit relieved that I got that on Game Pass instead of shelling out the £50 for it. It can be a hugely fun game … but it also has a lot of annoyance and shallowness to it. I think I’m getting bored with what it wants you to do already. Fun while it lasted but shortlived fun. The screenshot above is from Euro Truck Simulator 2 which I’m being very happily addicted to. Just one more run … honest. Oh and it’s also from the early days where I was getting used to the actual driving on a controller.

I do like games that have a story unfold as you play them. The story this time is starting as a journeyman driver who does jobs in other people’s trucks. After a while, you earn enough to buy your own truck …

Game screenshot. ETS2. We're sitting in a left hand drive truck, looking left our of the driver's window. We're currently going over a bridge and we can see a wide river channel stretch out into the distance. — Pretty river

Not actually my truck. I couldn’t resist taking that screenshot though. The map is very extensive, potentially covering all of Europe. I started off in Cardiff but the character hasn’t been back there for a while. As you do more runs, you get more experience which lets you carry more varied cargo and go longer distances.

It’s been compelling so far and I’ve enjoyed going from place to place across Europe. I said “potentially”, because a decent amount of the map is hidden behind expansion downloadable content which you have to pay for. So that’s half of France, all of Spain, Romania, Bulgaria, part of Turkey, Scandinavia and other parts of Eastern Europe. There’s a huge map there and I’m invested enough so far that when the game goes on sale again, I’ll buy more of the DLC and roam to more places.

Oh and this is perhaps going too much into the geeky but you can link up your game to a World of Trucks service and have your progress logged and jobs given via there. Here’s my link and I’ll pop it in the links to the right as well.

That’s the thing. There’s games that you enjoy for a few hours, there’s games you can get really invested in. There’s games that transport you to somewhere else for a while. Games that have a story open up as you play them. I like the story games, whether that’s a finite scripted story like Horizon Zero Dawn (must go back to that), the building up of the Sleepy Star Fleet in Elite or starting from nothing and building up a trucking company. Or being a tough lady with a sword sorting out the bad people in Skyrim.

Tonight though, it’s watching the ever lovely Tashnarr in another story game, Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve played that a bit … but I kinda bounce off the massive multiplayer game playstyle now. It’s fun watching though. Especially if you have a good book to dive in to as well.

Time for the Armageddon Inheritance !

Has it been a week again since last time ? Time’s flying by at the moment isn’t it …

I’ve actually been out amongst people, although it was just a run into the centre of Bristol after a necessary trip to do some recycling. (Too many plastic bottles) A Lego McLaren nearly came back with me … although at £160, it feels a bit pricey for me. That’s one thing about watching the build videos, you get an impression of what’s in the box before laying out the money. It has some smart bits in there for the suspension but … I think it’s a hype kit more than a wow kit to be honest. I also had my eye on the Globe but at £175, that’s a bit rich for me too.

Thumbnail for post ?

Picture. We see three pocket dragons in a line. On the left, he's sniffing the air. The centre one has a bib with "Feed me" written on it. The one on the right has a slice of pepperoni pizza almost as tall as he is. The caption on top is "The three types of dwagon". From left to right at the base it's "Smells Pizza" "Wants Pizza" and "Has Pizza". — Someone mention pizza ?

There’s been a 3 types of Pokemon meme going round at the moment which people have been borrowing and adopting and that creativity part of my brain sparked into making the picture above. It’s felt good that those creativity ideas have been coming back in and I’ve mostly had the physical stuff to make them happen. 2 things there :

I think my creativity was being heavily damped down by the Work Stuff that was going on last year. It was a rough year, despite getting stuff done. Or perhaps we were getting stuff done despite the new guy who came in. That’s in the past now though, the new role has been building into something that should also be getting Stuff done while being enjoyable. But I won’t talk about that too much here.

I’ve been having physical issues again … It’s part shoulder, part arm plus some digestion issues in there as well. Nom trouble aside, the physical issues have been limiting game time at the same time as that more active creativity side wants to do gaming. I think I’m finding somewhat of a balance with it and using a controller for driving games will help. I managed to do a fair bit of Elite flying again since Thursday … Let’s see :

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at two starships, with the lower segment of a brown moon above. The closest ship is all curves and purple at the back fading to white at the front, with two engines coming out of the sides of the centre fuselage. She's perhaps a third of the screen wide. Behind her is a much larger ship in a mixed livery of blue and white. There is a flat section near the front. This ship is perhaps 80% of the picture width. — Behold the Herald

Thanks to lucrative trading opportunities in Elite, I had just about enough to cover the acquisition of one of the big Fleet Carriers. These aren’t ships you fly about in direct control like the rest of the ships, they’re more like small mobile starbases. The flat section disappearing off to the right has the landing bays. It has 8 big enough to accept the big Tiamat’s Chariot, 4 medium sized and 4 small. One of the opportunities with these ships is to make it far quicker to haul the commodities needed for the community goals. So instead of making 5-6 jumps to go from place to place (maybe 30 minutes round trip), I could park it near a station and just have about 5 minutes round trip instead if that. They’re a pretty powerful tool but they cost 5billion credits to buy and have a steady upkeep.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. The off-brown moon dominates the upper part of the picture, with the ribbon of the Milky Way stretched across the lower half. Our ship is pointed away from camera, engines flaring purple as she heads towards the Herald floating in the distance with all of the rectangular landing pads illuminated. — Tiamat arriving

That’s Tiamat’s Chariot heading into the Herald of Bakunawa (that’s the name of the carrier). Where did the name come from ? I figured it had to be something suitably epic and I wanted the dragon theme to continue as well, so I went to a name list for mythical dragons. The name Bakunawa stood out (wiki link). Bakunawa is a Philippine Dragon God, believed to be responsible for eclipses. I.e. a dragon god that eats the Moon. Perfect. And Herald seemed right because the fleet carriers mostly spend their time hovering in orbit around moons.

A good few sessions in Elite over the past few days. It has massive flaws and I keep spotting more (like terrain errors around an engineer base and shadow errors) but it’s been good to have there as a chill out space trucking game. It does help that Tiamat’s Chariot is an after end game level ship that combines massive cargo capacity with defences and armament that can take on nearly all comers. (I run if a fighter gets involved).

Picture. It's a print out of my reading dwagon. He's sitting on his bottom pointed towards the right of shot. His tail is up in the air, the wings are taut as if he's enwrapped in the book that he's holding. There is also a pair of glasses perched in front of his eyes. The dwagon is mostly green, however there are regular vertical bands of yellow throughout. — Ermm …

When you see something like that coming out of an inkjet printer, it’s usually followed by an “oh bugger” because it’s the main sign that you haven’t been using it enough, the jets have clogged up and that’s usually terminal for the printer. What makes it worse is if the built in cleaning processes kick out a test page which has pretty much nothing on it. However …

Picture. We have a good quality version of the one above (with the reading dragon). There is a book on the right by David Weber titled "The Armageddon inheritance" and above the book, there is a tan leather bookmark with a line picture of a dragon burned into it. — I think he’s eyeing up that book

Ahhh the relief that I hadn’t killed a printer that’s just 6 months old :-D. The book on the right is the next book. It’s the second of three in the Dahak sequence, which starts with Mutineer’s Moon where Colin the astronaut finding himself in the middle of a 51,000 year mutiny where the mutineers have been exiled to Earth from a starship that’s actually Earth’s Moon. Oh and the ship has become sentient over that time as well.

Armageddon Inheritance starts up straight after Mutineer’s Moon and covers the other threat … There’s an apocalyptic sized battle fleet that circles the galaxy wiping out all intelligent life in its path and it’s almost back to Earth. And so Colin, Dahak the Moonship and the collective resources of Earth have to try and survive in the face of that threat. There’s some epic stuff in the book, like the aliens getting so fed up with how resilient Earth’s defenders are that they essentially give up on conquest and just throw one of Jupiter’s Moons at the planet.

I thought it was good enough for a re-read. That Moon thing was a big a OMGWOW book moment as the Project Orion starship reveal in another book. That’s not the lander type ship which is the current Orion starship. It’s the cruiser propelled by nuclear bombs. Super cool concept, achievable (maybe) with current technology, incredibly nuts. Here’s the wiki page. Hell of a concept.

Anything else ? I enjoyed a little more Forza. I have a Pikachu Lexus in that game now and I was enjoying the dirt racing far more than I thought I would. I was even getting smooth and fast race driving going on my flawed (50% travel gives 100% output) controller.

Time for book now though. I try not to game too late in the evening nowadays … although Skyrim mod testing happened yesterday. I’ll be restarting my game again there as the last character was saddled with mods that aren’t completed and have a fair few issues. So I’ll reset with the defeat mod replaced by another that ties into a mod called Caged Followers. It’s a curious one, if your party is defeated then instead of Game Over, stuff happens to your character like being ransomed for money or becoming a prisoner of vampires. With Caged Followers, your companion gets taken off somewhere and you have to rescue them. That’s going to be an excellent excuse for exploring the Skyrim world more …

Must go back to Horizon Zero Dawn, finish off the Car Mechanic Simulator achievements and enjoy the other games too. They’re a good chill out and let me block out the world for a little while. Like books !

Stay safe everyone, be well.

Month: March 2022

Been Truckin’

Carrier, Book, Printer, Meme