Month: August 2022

To zoom or not to zoom ?

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August 29, 2022

9:32 pm

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Hello everyone,

A fortnight has gone by again ! It’s been eventful. Kinda. Perhaps not quite as eventful as some weeks but let’s see … 2 parts to this post again today, update first then a bit of game related musing later …

Meme picture. We're looking at two cats, a grey one and an orange one, apparently frozen in mid air, jumping from right to left. The caption is "Hover Cat to Base ... Requesting Purrmission to land."
Safe landings kitties

So … stuff happened – One of the things on my lengthening list of stuff I need to sort out has been to replace my computer chair. My hand kinda got forced there. I’d been managing it being down to 4 legs instead of 5 for a while but hadn’t taken the hint that I should be kinda urgently replacing it before another leg disappeared and I couldn’t manage the balance. (It was also partly down to unfamiliarity with what the local tip takes – gotta clear space before getting new stuff at the moment).

So after a second leg broke at about 11.30 pm on a Monday night, I had a moderately uncomfortable half day working from my sofa followed by quickly acquiring another chair. I bought an ADX Firebird 21 from the local computer place. It’s ok but I now know a little bit more about what to get in a comfortable chair. The good is that it’s comfortable to sit in with a normal posture and the cushions are firm but comfortable. That’s in contrast to the Razer chair which felt like an unpadded bench. It’s also got arms that go up and down, which I need to support my arms. What it also has though, which causes awkwardness, is bucket seat style high side bolsters which aren’t good if you like to fold your legs on the chair.

I’ll adjust to that :-D. I nearly bought the Corsair chair (thinking that they didn’t have the ADX one) but they didn’t have one in stock. This is where not having it end up being an urgent buy would have been handy …

Oh – there was more drama involved … When the last leg broke, I got pitched sideways into a set of shelves which have my printer on top. My printer landed on my head … softly because it was being suspended by its power cable. Still a bit of a struggle though trying to remove it in a compromised position with arms in angles that don’t support having any leverage to move stuff.

I think I also have a compromised thyroid, which I need to talk to a doctor about. The symptoms lining up include extreme tiredness, no control over internal temperature (building the new chair was a sweat drenched trial!) and there’s a few more which could explain why I have on / off struggles with swallowing food. (I’m ok, I just need to actually see a doctor for a change).

Meme picture. We're looking at a dog, sitting up with paws on a table. The dog is wearing a blue shirt with a stethoscope. The caption is "The good news is I was able to reset his broken leg." "The bad news is I buried it somewhere in the back yard."
Oh no Rover !

The other news is that I’ve been out of the country again … Can’t say anything about where because it was work related. But it was a good successful trip with good people meeting lovely people. Bit short though, in the notice given and the days away. Like, we found out on the Thursday before traveling out on the Wednesday. That’s not many working days to sort it out but our travel system and people are pretty good. Travel is easier if you set everything up before hand so you don’t need to wing it so much while you’re on the way. That was one thing that annoyed me two years ago because there were important variables with that which the people on the other end should have been sorting out. Pandemic and quarantine related things. (I didn’t do that trip two years ago for a bunch of reasons)

Yep ! Good trip, good place, would totally go there again, can’t say anything about it.

I hope there isn’t a repeat of the travel back though. Getting to UK was fine, they’re very efficient over where we went. However, taking 5.5 hours (including about an hour for lunch stop) to get from London to Bristol is not fun. There was an accident on the M25 motorway around London so everyone’s satnavs was diverting them into clogged up roads.

Meme picture. We're looking at an orange and white cat who is looking at us with intense eyes. He has his paws up as if gripping an invisible steering wheel. The caption is "Invisible race car"
Zoom zoom

I have a gaming quandary at the moment … There’s a new motor racing manager game out. After a long sequence of jumping from game to game in this genre, when Motorsport Manager came out it was a game I stuck to. I have 2035 hours in Motorsport Manager now and still enjoying it. However, I am getting to the end of a fourth phase in a campaign that’s been going for I think 46 in game years now. (Each phase is winning the top championship with a team built up from being last). So the arrival of a new game in the genre is being something of a big temptation right now.

Let’s see – it’s F1 Manager 22 and the early impressions from watching people’s gameplay streams and from browsing the forums is that it may well be a Motorsport Manager 2 by another name. A lot of the bugs and issues are familiar from Motorsport Manager. What I think may have happened is that in the genesis of the development, Frontier (the publishers) went on a hiring spree bringing in devs who previously worked on Motorsport Manager.

I don’t have any issues with this. They had a proven track record with MM and it’s given them well earned employment working on a game that they were being denied working on at Playsport, who brought us Motorsport Manager. And it looks like they’ve brought us a very promising, superbly presented game in F1 Manager 22.

So why don’t I own it yet ?

There’s a bunch of reasons. The big one is that it’s shackled to the F1 licence, which limits it in a bunch of ways. It’s limited to the 10 teams with their 20 cars that are in current F1. There apparently isn’t a Create Your Own Team option and the thoughts of F2 and F3 to climb through haven’t made their way into the game. One thing I like about Motorsport Manager is starting with a rubbish team anchored to the back of the grid and building them up into being winners. In a strategy game like this, your input has to matter. Hopefully it’s possible to get Williams to the front in this game.

Oh and it also has commentary in there from a person I can’t stand from the Sky team, so that would be getting turned off. Annoyance from hearing it live (and varied) would lead to NOPE if the commentary is drawn from an apparently very limited selection of massively repeated soundbites. Yeah, mute that rubbish. It’s part of the price though, which brings me to :

Motorsport Manager was I think £20 on release and had expansions come out later for GT and Endurance racing costing £6 each. That makes a 3 tier league for open wheel and 2 tier leagues for GT and Endurance each. F1 Manager 22 only has one tier and it’s costing £45 (currently has a 10% discount).

I’m very tempted by the game … but not at that price. I can keep playing Motorsport Manager for a while, soak up more opinion about F1M22, see if the people streaming it now are still playing it in a month and wait for a price point that I’m happy to dive in to. That’s the beauty about having lots of viable games around, we don’t have to obey that temptation to go for the new shiny just as it comes out.

I can very happily afford it. I just don’t want to early adopt at a higher price than I think it’s worth. It does make me think back to when Elite Dangerous came out. I was being very wary about the track record of the devs, due to how many bugs and issues were in Frontier Elite 2 (way back in the 90s!). Reports from the beta of the latest Elite were very promising, so I dived in to buy it on release. A key difference there is that it hit a gap in the market, offering a very playable space game hitting a gap in the market. (The X games have been there, I just immediately bounce off them for some reason).

There isn’t a gap in the market this time, Motorsport Manager is old now with a release in Nov 2016 and the last update being in Nov 2017. But it’s one of those rare ones that delivered what it did superbly and it still works incredibly well as a game now. It would be nice to have new features and new tracks but it still stands up very well now.

Not so sure about the new one, although I see its acquisition as an inevitability come sales time.

For now though … back to stream watching and continuing a reading streak that’s nearing 90 days now with John Scalzi’s The End Of All Things. I wonder if there was a book after this one …

Stay safe, be well !

(Addon – Green Man Gaming had the F1 Manager 22 game on a 35% discount, so I own it now. Not played it yet 😀 )

Thinking about the games I want

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August 15, 2022

10:52 pm

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Hello everyone,

I mention playing the games a lot. Probably too much :-). But there are a couple in my head that are games I think I’d really like to play, if they existed.

Picture. Meme. A grey and black striped cat is sitting at a laptop keyboard, with paw on the mouse. The caption is "...and I have extensive experience writing computer code, including but not limited to OIC, BTW, BRB, IMHO, LMAO, ROFL, TTYL
TLDR 2 many TLAs

I’ll start by going way back … and this goes all the way back to the sci fi sensational mini series (well, it was back then – it was heavily sold by ITV) V. This saw Visitor aliens come to Earth with a promise of uplifting our technology in return for specially synthesized chemicals to ward off environmental collapse at their home planet.

Of course, they had a more sinister motive and it’s up to our heroes (the core characters) to lead a rebellion to get the Visitors to leave. There was a recent remake series which was pretty good … but was cancelled before it got a chance to tell its tale all the way through.

Anyway – the game back then would have been about flying a shuttle up to the mothership and then getting off and fighting through it to take control. A bit ambitious on the home computers of the day, with those being the BBC Micro, Spectrum and Commodore 64, with V coming out in 1983. It’d be a rare game that would combine all those now, although they’re getting more common with released games like No Mans Sky and Elite Odyssey, with Star Citizen offering that in the future. Games like Space Engineers and Empyrion probably come close too but they’re limited by being crafting games and those tend to hit a point where they grind into unplayability.

Starfield, a coming soon from Bethesda, might offer some of this gameplay. It’s a future scifi with spaceships from the same stable as gave us Skyrim for poking things with swords and the post apocalyptic Fallout 4. From what we’ve seen, I think it’ll have a well developed run around and shoot game but it may be more limited on the flying. But we shall see there.

Picture. We're looking at a very curvy little red sports car, with a couple of headlights popping out from the wings. It's an older car, with a hard top covering the bit where the driver goes.
Racy in red

I play a huge amount of Motorsport Manager. They did an incredible job with this one when it came out in November 2016. I am currently at 2016 (coincidence) hours in it and that’ll easily crack 3000 probably. Why so many ? They got the gameplay level just about right, with a nicely developed way of improving the cars. The racing is good. It’s nicely varied with the F1 style, GT cars and the endurance racing. It keeps some of the unwanted complexity away from the player. It Is Very Easy To Play. In fact, that last is why I have 2000+ hours in the game. I can have it running while having my dinner or when my hands or arms just don’t want to support more active types of gameplay.

But whereas Motorsport Manager is all about racing around different tracks, my idea turns that round. Instead of running a racing team, how about running one of the tracks ?

You take the park crafting ideas of games like Jurassic Park or Coaster games and make a race track instead. Maybe have multiple variations of track available. Make sure the track keeps busy. Upgrade it so your track can run bigger events.

I dunno, could be a nice variation and I don’t think it’s been done before. There’s been track editing in games (I’ve never played) like Trackmania and there’s a new one called Race League (which doesn’t look too good from the reviews) but I haven’t seen one that’s about managing a track.

4 Pictures. Each picture has the viewer looking out of a pile of snow towards the happy face of dogs who have dug through the snow to find them.
Good Doggos

My third one (which is about as much as my Brain can think of today with the end of the heat!) is a rescue game. There are a few of these out there. Like Rescue HQ which has you setting up a Ambulance, Fire and/or Police HQ. Or Stormworks where you build rescue vehicles and go out on missions with them. Rescue HQ looks curious actually, I might look more seriously at it when it’s on sale again.

What I’m thinking of goes back to Thunderbirds. What about a game that lets you run International Rescue ? That’d be pretty cool. To be a typical game in this genre, you’d have to start small and build up to the suite of specialist vehicles that we saw in Thunderbirds. But I think it’s something I’d like to have a look at.

Stormworks sounds like it could eventually be on that scale. It’s a game where you design and build your own rescue vehicles, starting from small limited purpose boats. But it also looks very fiddly and doesn’t really pass the “I’d enjoy that” test. I’ll have a look at Rescue HQ when it’s on sale again but I’m thinking more about the rescue end of it, not the police side of it. You know, the varied and interesting disaster scenarios that were a core of Thunderbirds.

Meme Picture. We're looking at 3 Star Wars Stormtroopers in their white helmeted armour sitting at a table drinking blue milk. The caption is "It was an insurance scam. I mean, come on, the guy who blew it up was the dude's son. Like, I know they say they're estranged but they were clearly in on it together for the insurance money. There were delays during construction and Vader knew it had design flaws - it was never going to make back its investment so they staged a rebel raid. And Vader was the only one to survive. It's so obvious.
Hmm …

It is suspicious when you think about it. Our rescue inc would have to do better :-D.

How about other games that are definitely on the way ? What am I looking forward to ? I mentioned Starfield already but there’s a couple more in particular on the list :

Cosmoteer – this is an indie game that’s all about building starships and throwing them into battle with other starships. I’ve played the demo of it from a few years ago and it is very promising indeed. It has a combination of simplicity with variation. The simplicity makes it easy to understand, the variation between shield and weapon types opens up the strategy element of figuring out what the best approach will be for your starship brawler.

Airport games – I’m curious about these. They’re like the race track thing in that you build up your facility and upgrade it to handle better flights. But the ones out at the moment Airport CEO, Sim Airport, Sky Haven all have flaws which keep me away from them.

Deadstick – this one looks sadly dead and it’s a shame. It was a flight simulator built around small bush planes. You’d take small parcels and bigger passengers around an Outback style map, doing deliveries. I think I’d have absolutely loved this game. (And should really try out the similar but sci fi Frontier Pilot Simulator again)

Nebulous Fleet Command – is a space tactical combat game. There’s a few of these coming soon.

Jagged Alliance 3 – I loved playing Jagged Alliance 2. It was a real time / turn based tactical battle game with a great strategic layer on top. The mission was to recapture a 3rd world country that had been taken over in a coup by an insane Evil Queen. Fantastic game and the more recent game didn’t cut it. Hopefully the just announced JA3 is a good one.

Last one – Starship Simulator – this one has you as a crew member (of any rank) on board a starship that’s going to feel very similar to the model set up by Star Trek. It looks absolutely stunning, with a fully modelled starship to wander around in. Hopefully they pull off a good game with it too.

That’s it for today I think – really struggled in the last heatwave but hopefully we’re through that now. It wasn’t a dry heat like in July, it was a muggy hammer of conditions with the atmosphere feeling twice as dense as it should do. We haven’t had a proper thunderstorm here today but there’s still chance later in the week.

Hope things are tolerable where you are !

Stay safe everyone, be well.

Reading, Gaming, Thinking Diverse

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August 9, 2022

12:12 am

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Hello everyone,

Had a quiet week off last week, which was pretty much the plan. I did think I’d find my way over to Cardiff or otherwise out of the house. I’m a little disappointed in myself that didn’t happen, although when I think about going to places like Cardiff, I’ll go to regular haunts, see what I didn’t buy before and … don’t buy it again. It would have been good to get out and about though.

Picture. Meme. We're looking at a sad grey cat with blue eyes looking over the top of a sofa to left of picture. The caption is "I spent all day sleeping ... Now I'm tired."
Why does this always happen ?

So what did I get up to outside of hiding indoors all the time ? Lots of gaming. Lots of reading. Lots of music listening. Thinking about the next laptop, although the trojan scare I talked about last post is resolved. The warning popups haven’t been back. Phew ! So the laptop will hang in there for another little while. It’s let me catch up a bit on the new music, which includes acquisitions from a recent steam sale in the Skyrim, Rimworld and Fermi Paradox soundtracks.

Still not played Rimworld.

I did have a look at this one though :

Game screenshot. Frostpunk. We're looking at a dark scene where snow covers a barren land except for a circle in the centre which is bare and thawed. In the centre, there is a tall cylinder structure with a fire coming out of the top. There are tents clustered in a circle at its base. The words are "Our city. Day 1. Population 80."
Chilly out

That’s Frostpunk, which is a survival base builder strategy game. A new ice age has hit the Earth and your ragged band of survivors are huddled around a steam generator that is the only thing between them and a frostbitten demise. It’s a hell of a game, superbly balanced (I’ve watched a few playthroughs of the scenarios) and really, really hard. I got my city up to about 300 people and almost the end of the Londoners storyline before abandoning that run. I couldn’t get them harvesting coal fast enough to keep the generator running and could see the inevitable death spiral coming.

I’ll probably be back in this one. Other first looks for me include Fermi Paradox, which is a very simplified thing where you have a cluster of star systems that independently evolve intelligent life. Will they survive ? Will they thrive ? Will they embark on conquests of the stars ? A curious game, maybe not ready for a recommendation though.

I also completed the last achievements on Car Mechanic Simulator 2021, so I’ve been looking at CMC 2018. It’s ok, the newer game is better in pretty much every way and it has mouse acceleration which can’t be turned off. Never put mouse acceleration in your games people … I’ve also been looking at Rover Mechanic Simulator, which is the same thing with a limited number of rovers that you rebuild from your pod on Mars.

There’s something about the mechanic games … and other simulator type games have carved out their own little niche too. With the car one, it’s that feeling of progress as you tear down a car and rebuild it into something shiny.

Sacrificed some of the life in my neck to Rogue Tower – I could do with looking at my chair and replacing it with one that still allows it to raise. That’s an odd thing that … The posture I’m in at the moment is ok for eye height with my eyes being roughly level to the top half of the screen. That’s ideal … But when I’m in a game like Rogue Tower, I’ll lean forwards which lowers my head so I’m looking up and wrecking my neck. Oops.

Oh and there’s the truck games too. I’m enjoying these again now having recognised and gotten used to some of the irritations with the AI of the other vehicles.

Game screenshot. Euro Truck Sim 2. We're in the cabin of a lorry, looking right towards our passenger. He's the yellow of a Pikachu (small cute animal with a lightning shaped tail).
Where to Pikachu ?

I’m doing that thing again … Where I thought I’d rattle through some stuff fast and not have that much to talk about :-D. Reading ?

Finished The Human Division by John Scalzi, it’s book 5 in the Old Man’s War series that I would happily recommend. It’s like an inspired by Starship Troopers book, where the lead character in the first 3 books finds himself leaving Earth as a 75 year old to be reborn into a super starship trooper body that’s then thrown at Humanity’s enemies. Of which there are many. Yet there’s more nuance here, as they’ll talk about what’s actually going on in the universe. And you steadily get a feeling of “Are we the baddies ?” I’m curious as to where it’ll go in the last book, with its foreboding title of The End Of All Things. But not yet, because I’m indulging the diverse reading thing by going into Elizabeth Bear’s Ancestral Night.

I mentioned diversity … a comment in a conversation got me thinking about the people I follow and support through things like twitch subscriptions. I like to try and keep myself honest there with a little bit of internal watchdogging. I have a little concern about what I’ve spotted there …

First up is the subscriptions – I’ve moved these around a little bit. I’m down to 9 Twitch subscriptions now, they’re all actually women now. I was actively subscribing to a bloke but ended that because he wasn’t doing the interesting content any more. Similar with another lady streamer. And the other bloke streamer lost my sub due to behaviour in his community. They’re all white too, none are people of colour. Not sure what that says about me to be honest. There are a couple of threads there :

The streamer communities I’m involved with don’t raid into people of colour streams much at all, so the exposure to hook me in doesn’t happen. However, I will mention Nathan Whatiskiss who I know as a wonderful roleplayer (but I haven’t seen his gaming content) and TrooperSJP who is another wonderful roleplayer. I don’t follow Trooper because he misbehaves with how he self promotes his own streams (he breaches rules on discords that aren’t his).

I think that’s the main reason why my follows are missing the people of colour, because the rare times people raid into them, I’ll quickly skip into a stream done by someone I do actively follow. Maybe I should give the raided a bit of a chance more often. Perhaps it’s a problem more on Twitch’s end, where people of colour might not be getting the same exposure.

The male female split is slightly deceptive too, as I actively maintain Patreon subs to 1.5 men. (The 0.5 is shared between Tashnarr and TheWanderingInn for the 40k layers model painting show).

The question someone asked was actually more about LGBTQIA+. The split on there for my subs is 3 straight, 1 bi, 1 pan, 2 lesbian and 2 where I have no idea. And that last ? is something I’m very ok with because we should only know where people are on those categories if they want to tell us, it’s not something that really should matter. Oh and there’s a trans person in that list too. And a person who would quite happily be first in the queue for the Probing when the aliens land.

Personally, where people place themselves on the LGBTQIA+ doesn’t really matter to me. I’ll go back to the series Another Life there (scifi series, in space, very tense and atmospheric, dramatic) where the character I was most interested in was Zayn who is played by the non-binary JayR Tinaco (imdb link). The character was interesting from an intelligence and challenging dialogue point of view. They also came over as knowing what they were doing, which was key in this particular series.

That’s the thing about diversity – our differences make us strong. And interesting. They give different perspectives on how to live, laugh and love. And what people get up to in the bedroom and with whom really isn’t any of our concern. If people love each other, they should have the chance to explore that without prejudice.

What really matters is (easy geek points on offer here) being excellent to each other, in all ways.

Picture. Meme. A sad looking cat with big eyes is laying down looking at us. The caption is "It hurts when someone you love says mean things like..." "It's time to wake up"
One more minute ?

It was definitely a bit of a wrench this morning switching from the time off timescales to a work from home timescale where I’m actively working from 7.50am.

I think I’ll leave this one there. I’m a little concerned as to whether a bit of prejudice has crept in with the stream watching, although that’s mostly down to who I get raided into (A stream raid is where a person finishes and takes their audience over to another person to watch). I should give the raided a bit more of a chance, it’s how you find fun people to watch. That said though, of the channels that twitch is showing in the shortcut list at the moment, none of them look like people of colour. (Oh wait, there’s Caustic Phoenix coming in with the Pink Pixels show – there’s one !). There are none being promoted on Twitch’s front page at the moment. I’m not watching the lovely Caustic because I was watching Tashnarr already and Ashlinaa (new name !) on the laptop and the Pink Pixels show will run on too late.

Perhaps it’s twitch that has the problem.

Stay safe everyone, be well, be good to each other.