Category: games

Advent day 7 and it’s a … box ?

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December 7, 2024

9:07 pm

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Hello everyone, what’s behind day 7’s door ?

Picture. Our advent scene now has the addition of a cylindrical object with green and red dots. It's sitting on top of a green 20 sided dice.

Apparently it’s a minikit from the Lego Star Wars games, something you break to get game currency.

Because today’s model has come from a game, I thought I’d talk about games I’ve been playing recently today. First up …

Game screenshot. Euro Truck Sim 2. We're looking at a sunset scene, where our truck in the lower left is going past an embankment to the right. On the embankment, glowing purple bushes ...

That’s taken from Euro Truck Simulator 2. I’ve been enjoying being back in the Truck Games. Something about the set up of taking a delivery mission from a huge choice (I usually pick the one paying the most £/mile) and then going from place to place appeals to me. Opening a bit more of the map and getting money to expand the truck collection gives me a bit of progress from each session.

Don’t know what’s happening with the bushes there, I think a recent mod has broken some textures or a mod needs to catch up. I think it’s kinda amusing when that happens, there’s no impact on gameplay and I’ve been watching the expansion of our new alien overlord purple glowing bushes.

Game screenshot. Cobalt Core. We're looking at two spaceships in the middle, facing each other. Our crew is shown in three portraits to the left, with the enemy portrait top right. A row of different playing cards is below and there is assorted other buttons.

That’s from Cobalt Core, which I first saw DistractedElf playing a little while ago. It’s a Roguelike game, structured around a timeloop mechanic where it takes about an hour for each run. It’s a good one to dip in and out of. Each battle is done with cards, this particular ship uses the Jupiter’s Moons to shoot the enemy. Each ship takes turns shooting the other and hopefully we can demolish the enemy before they demolish us.

I’ve been enjoying this one, it’s a fun little diversion to dip into and out of. Talking of spaceships …

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at an orange rocky planetary surface, with the rust coloured buildings of a base scattered in front of us. In front and low on screen is our ship, it's blue at the back with engines on outriggers to left and right. There is a gold stripe in the middle and the front is white.

I had another little dip into Elite Dangerous again, with fleet flagship Tiamat’s Chariot coming out of the hangar for a new paint job and some trading. I haven’t been interested in the recent Thargoid arc at all but they’re showing info at the moment about a planet colonisation expansion coming soon and … that’s got my attention.

It was a good little session going from station to station taking goods from place to place.

Game screenshot. Little Big Workshop. We're looking down at a factory separated into various rooms, with little people with bobble hats at work stations. On the right, a list of items being assembled. In the centre, a jolly fellow with a santa hat is telling us we did a really good job getting things together for Xmas.

I may have slid into doing another Little Big Workshop run again. I really love this game, it’s an easy to play chilled out factory builder where you buy workstations for your adorable idiot little minions to use to put together various items that you sell for profit. (They have issues with sticking to tasks, hence affectionately calling them “idiot”).

I’ve been playing and enjoying Little Big Workshop for a huge number of hours (1538!) because it’s just so easy to play and it’s also very addictive. I set myself up for challenge runs now to see how quickly I can get them to finish all of the objectives.

Game screenshot. Motorsport Manager. We're looking at the livery design screen and a purple, black and pink sports car.

Of course there’s been a bit of Motorsport Manager in there. This one is another that I can pretty watch play and occasionally intervene. A dinner time game ! I’m in the midst of another very long campaign here. I’ve won the championships with the endurance car, the GT car and the single seater cars and am now in a second single seater racing team, building that one up so it beats the rest of the competition again.

I think I might have a pattern there … I’ll attach to games that I get really, really good at and then not play anything else. I guess there’s a bit of enjoying the games with that too, is that what really counts there ? Variation is good though.

Last one of this set … I rebought Deus Ex Human Revolution last month. This is probably the number 1 first person shooter story style game for me. It doesn’t do everything another game would do … but what it does, it does extremely well with super tight gameplay. And the story is pretty decent too.

Game screenshot. Deus Ex Human Revolution. We're looking out over an industrial city scape at night towards a parking area with wire fencing. There are various concrete blocks to hide behind and a mission marker to the left.

I may have completed all of its achievements in just one single run. I’ll be back for Deus Ex Mankind Divided (the sequel) at some point, I like to space them out to in part reflect there being 2 years game timeline between the two games.

They’re a cracking pair of near future games, where augmentation technology is becoming a big part of life. Definitely worth a look and the games are practically given away at sales time. Like the Mass Effect set !

I dropped a screenshot of Mass Effect Legendary edition the other day so I’ll hold off on doing that again now. These are games from a good few hundred years ahead, first person shooter style games driven by story. Perhaps a controversial one saying that I prefer the Deus Ex games ?

I think that’s it for me for tonight. Oh ! We survived the storms ok ! My bin stayed up too (or was propped up again by CK on his way to/from shops, cheers CK).

Have a lovely evening everyone.

Day 3 ! One for the pew pew

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December 3, 2024

9:47 pm

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Hello everyone, what’s behind door number 3 ?

Picture. We're looking at the snow scene, with red dwagon to the left, Leia figure rear right and the XWing is behind a starfighter with two black hexagonal wings either side of a little pod in the centre.

I think I have a little behind the scenes stuff to catch up on here :-D. I’m seeing a “Generate with AI” button on the picture uploads, which I will never use and kinda object to the WordPress mod people adding there ! Oh dear, just started and we’re massively tangenting already. Only one thing to do there … grab that tangent and dive right on in !

Tangent 1 – AI generated pictures … I won’t call them art because I don’t consider it art in the same way as someone putting their soul into what they make is art. But I have seen some wonderful pictures where people take a number of objects and a theme and weave them together into something that looks absolutely stunning. That’s a bit different from people just putting “a fierce dragon with a sword in a fantasy setting” into a picture generator and getting something out that looks almost identical to something Askren (aka Exploding Dice) has taken days to make and was paid to create.

(Askren is a good egg, check him out, that’s the Twixxer link above which probably won’t last that much longer).

Tangent 2 ! Social media. I’ve been struggling to keep up with these lately. I’ll monitor Instagram closely because I have that tightly curated down to only show me a small number of selected individuals who post content on there that makes me happy. I’ve been enjoying the general vibe on Bluesky, the artist and author community there is fun to keep up with. Twixxer is dying a death due to the policies being introduced to it and … Farcebook is algorithm driven and doesn’t let you keep up with people without spam being introduced.

The main thing there is … social media can be very overwhelming. It can be a bit too much trying to keep up with it all. It’s ok if you need to withdraw from it and go a bit lower profile on it. Look after yourselves. If it’s getting too much, consider dropping the follows of people who don’t bring you joy or otherwise reduce how much you feel obliged to keep up with it all.

Picture. Star Trek Meme. We're looking at two men in overalls, red at the top, black lower down with black shoulder areas. The bald one on the left says "I've never written a trigonometry paper", then "But I cosigned a few". The black haired fellow on the right is now holding his head in his hand.

I’m mostly going to be doing fairly random posts throughout advent (including tangents when they hit) but also maybe getting led by the day’s model … It’s a TIE Fighter today, which is taking me back (way back) to the first space fighter game that had me addicted on PC. It’s TIE Fighter from the days of the 486 based machine. Yep. Last century. TIE Fighter was a really, really good game in its time. Excellent graphics and a tight, responsive flight model. There was a decent story running through as well, TIEing all of the missions together.

Game screenshot. Tie Fighter. We're looking out of an octagonal window into space, from a small fighter ship. The lower part of obscured by a target display showing a boxy shuttle. Top left and top right are a couple of circles with dots showing what is around us.

I went to the X Wing game a little later, I actually enjoyed TIE Fighter more. The missions were difficult but I managed to complete them all. Whereas some of the missions in XWing got me stuck and I couldn’t get past them.

Fast forward a whole heap of years and we get to …

Game screenshot. Star Wars Outlaws. Our character is in the foreground wearing blue jacket and faded brown trousers. In the background, a boxy grey white spaceship pointing left with engines to the right. It's a day scene with hazy clouds in the sky.

That’s from Star Wars Outlaws and has our player character, Kay Vess, looking at a spaceship called the Trailblazer. I really enjoyed this game. I’d effectively rented it from the publisher because … it’s really expensive. I can easily afford the asking price to buy it (£95 for the version with a season pass for expansions), I just don’t want to pay that much for a game. I did massively enjoy it though and will happily play it again when the discounts are low enough. 25% (current Steam sale) is a decent start at a discount but …. I got other games to play first before going back to Outlaws.

It was a lot of fun though and I did love feeling immersed in the world that the developers created for us. They gave us something special here. That’s my honest opinion there, lots of other opinions are out there about this one. If you’re deciding whether to play it, please go by the opinions of people who have actually played it, not the ones who see : female protagonist, Star Wars not what they would have done and all of the other weird prejudices people get.

I think I might be getting a bit too excited there and it’s telling in how my shoulder is behaving :-D. (It’s a little sore and is making my right hand start to be numb again).

I better leave it there, maybe another epic screenshot ?

Game screenshot. Star Wars Outlaws. We're on a desert planet, looking at sandy blocky buildings in the background with mountains behind there. In the foreground, our Kay Vess and lined up behind her are 2 speeder cars and 3 speeder bikes.

That’s from the Mos Eisley space port, first seen in the original movie. I loved seeing the little Easter Eggs that they seeded through the game, including this line up of the various speeders from the various movies.

Also oh look, just under a day to go on the Steam sale. I have the following in the cart and should really buy :

Mass Effect Legendary edition – I enjoyed going back to Deus Ex Human Revolution again and playing this fresh. So the Mass Effect games at 92% off (£3.99) have the attention.

Slipways and soundtrack – a somewhat speculative one at 50% off (£8.08). This one is a space strategy game.

Tank Mechanic Simulator – ok, a weird one but I did enjoy Car Mechanic Simulator 2021. This one is 76% off for £3.71.

Tavern Master’s Pirate Cove DLC – no discount, this one is £4.29 and I did enjoy building a legendary tavern in the original game which looks like its lost its discount early.

Ok, that’s it for me for tonight, enjoy the rest of your evening, see you tomorrow. I’m going to be concentrating on enjoying the rest of Billietrixx’s Twitch (with link) stream, Tessachka (linky) is on the laptop and there’s a Mike Oldfield album playing in the background.

Nite all 🙂

A year in (Steam) games

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December 18, 2023

10:15 pm

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Hello everyone,

There’s been a couple of year recap things come out lately, the one from today is from the Steam games store showing what I’ve been up to this year. I figured, hey, let’s share this one.

Picture. Meme. We're looking at a non plussed looking black dog with a grey muzzle looking to the right. The dog is wearing a flat cap. The captions are "When I was a pup" and "I had one toy and it was a stick"

Games have come a fair way since the early days. The days (hushed voice) of 8 bit microcomputers. I started my gaming on a BBC Micro. Yep, last century, I am old. Oh ! I even did a meme for that a little while ago.

Picture. Cartoon meme. There are 4 panels with a pink figure on a bed talking to a blue figure with a lab coat and glasses. The captions go "Doc, I feel like I'm getting old" "Hmmm, tell me, did you play Elite when it first came out?" "Yeah, I played it as a kid". Last panel, the Doc writes "Patient is basically dead"

Yep. That fits. Elite Dangerous doesn’t appear in the list because I play it through the Frontier launcher but it would have a position high up here as well. I had a peek at a port of Frontier Elite 2 from 1993 too, might go back to that. What’s Steam say about me ? Here we are :

Picture. We're looking at a panel with my gaming statistics for 2023. It says 33 games played, 306 achievements, 787 sessions, 16 new games. My most played games are shown with their store pictures and they are Idle Champions, Little Big Workshop, Motorsport Manager, One Military Camp and Trans Road USA.

There’s a bit more detail on the Steam page itself. The stats are heavily dominated by Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms, which is an idler game that you just set up and it runs itself. So that’ll be running on the machine for many hours at a stretch and it’ll be running in the background of other games too. (For some of the stats, the game has to be running). A good few of those sessions will be from troubleshooting mods for games like Skyrim, where the game is launched, has a crash, the mods are tweaked and we try again. The others in that panel are :

Little Big Workshop – it’s a cute factory game where your little gnomeployees will set about building toys with the workshop tools you provide for them. It’s a lovely little game and I’d thoroughly recommend it. It’s a game I keep going back to.

Motorsport Manager – should really have had its time by now with the release of the frankly not good enough F1 Manager games but I still keep going back to this one. It’s a low interaction game, so I can do a race with the tactics and stuff while I’m munching my dinner.

One Military Camp – this one came out this year and it’s a fun little camp building thing, where you manage the one military camp to survive an invasion. It’s your job to set up the army to push back the evil dictator guy.

Trans Road USA – hmm, an ok game, probably not one I’d recommend. It has nice mechanics for setting up the trucking company but the campaign mode gets very silly. Still, I got my value out of it and it kept me amused for a long time.

Game screenshot. Elite Dangerous. We're looking at a dark area of space, lit by scattered stars. Our ship is lower left in the foreground. It's facing away, pointing upwards. We can see engines on outriggers to the left and right, the hull is lit by lines of red. Top left is a small dark moon. Top right is a ball of a space station, with a ringed section behind.

Like the space trucking game. That one’s from Elite Dangerous, which I have connected to Steam but I just play it through the separate Frontier launcher.

My games seem to have gone more recent than the average, with 70% of them being released in the last 1 to 7 years. The average of that is 52%. Forgetting Idle Champs, the most played style is Management Games, i.e. games where I can mostly sit back and watch and occasionally intervene. 146 of the 306 achievements were from Idle Champions.

Highlights of the year were :

Dredge – a charming little game where you’re a ship captain of a little fishing boat. I’ve mentioned this one before. If you like the spooky vibes from the trailer, it’s definitely worth a look. I enjoyed it.

Skyrim – for the endless variety of mods you can add to it. Plus I like the vibe of being able to set out in a direction and find something new. I still need to finish it.

Deus Ex Human Revolution and Mankind Divided – the pair of Adam Jensen games that leaves everyone who plays them pining for a sequel to finish off the trilogy. They’re set in the grim near future, where cyborg augmentations are being added to our bodies. They’re a good pair of shooter stealth story type games, maybe ageing now but good story games don’t really lose their appeal. I’ll mention another of these in a bit.

Battletech – oh there’s one. Harebrained Schemes (the devs) did a great job with this one and I keep going back to it.

Mars Horizon – was one I played to death and I’ll keep occasionally going back to it. It puts you in charge of a space agency. The sequel due in 2024 will hopefully be a great game.

Old classics – Stellaris and Knights of the Old Republic. I feel these games have aged badly. Kotor was an early game of its type, newer games have made a lot of improvements. Stellaris started great but it lost me along the way with too many patches and gameplay changes. Master of Magic had a good remake but I think it’s stuck too much in the past. I miss the old wizard avatars too.

Fun but I’ve finished with them – Tavern Master, nice little pub builder but I’ve seen all it has. Euro Truck Sim 2 and American Truck Sim, I did enjoy taking the loads to the varied places but … it was hurting my hands to play it. Airport CEO is one where I’ve seen all it has again.

Promising but could be much better – Farm Manager 2021, I got annoyed by the restrictions of a seemingly endless campaign. Pegasus Expedition, this story based strategy game has an interesting take on space Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate but the mechanics let it down. I might go back to it. Final Upgrade, a factory builder but … was finding it a bit tedious.

Mechanic games – Rover Mechanic Simulator is an occasional pleasure where you take Mars rovers apart and fix them. Offroad Mechanic Simulator is a successor to the car mechanic sim games.

Game screenshot. Car Mechanic Simulator 2021. We're looking at the concrete outside a garage with the road in the distance. The foreground has a sleek purple open top car with lots of chrome trim. The background has a bright green little pick up truck.

What’s left ? Lots !

Games I bounced off but need to give more of a chance to : Solasta, a table top style role playing game. Just can’t get into these. Cyberpunk 2077, a future shooter role player. Mount and Blade II Bannerlord is another new one for me. Sky Haven is an airport manager builder game that I tried the other week but Brain said NOPE. Mechwarrior 5 Mercenaries is like Battletech with the big war robots but this one puts you in the pilot seat. Dorf Romantik and Rogue Tower are both fun little additions.

Stuff I completely and totally bounced off : Ticket to Ride, would be a fun board game with friends, very meh solo. War for the Overworld, Game Dev Tycoon, Two Point Campus (on a free trial).

And that’s them all ! Highlight of the year is definitely Dredge.

Game screenshot. Dredge. We're looking towards a deserted looking island with pine trees and huts. In the foreground, a shaggy skinny looking orange furred dog which is looking our way. The options to the right are "Pet the Dog" and "Leave". We of course made the following caption happen "You reach out and gently pat the dog. Its eyes follow your hand, and it seems to understand you're not a threat."
YOU CAN PET THE DOG

Quest of the year, game of the year. (Haven’t bought Baldur’s Gate 3 yet)

Hope you enjoyed this little peek into my gaming life for 2023. Back to cruising next post probably 😀

Technical Difficulties May Delay Cruise

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September 11, 2023

11:02 pm

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Hello everyone,

It’s been a curious few weeks since I posted last time. (I do like that word, “curious”, it covers a lot of meanings.) I’m on leave for a week now, it’s been delayed a little bit by me doing Work Stuff but I’m in chill out mode at the moment.

Cartoon picture, credit to "Regan". We're looking at two dinosaurs sitting on a rock jutting out of a rising ocean, there is the top of a tree to the left. In the background, a ship with pairs of animals on board. The caption "Oh crap! Was that TODAY?"

Yep. Could have been on a cruise this week. The why not is because I’ve been dealing with another flare up with my outsides again. The pattern there seems to be about a week of slow healing followed by a day where it’ll suddenly reset back to the start of that again. I think it’s steadily improving but I’m not wanting to be too far away from the gunk I’m using to medicate it at the moment. Including an overnight away for work last week … It was threatening again on that.

How come it’s bad ? To be honest, not sure. I think I’m reacting to something I’ve been eating again but I can’t localise what it could be. Outside of maybe something garlic related. I know, weird thought. But I did get a reset this weekend after garlic butter infused bread with my dinner on Thursday and pizza garlic bread on Saturday. Need more data.

After living with this condition for over 10 years now, it’s something I have to keep a very close eye on. The psychologically damaging thought is “will it ever get better ?” And that thought does keep running through my mind. That’s partially answered by “It has got a lot better” because I can somewhat remember what it was like over 5 years ago when it was at its worst. I’m not going to go into too much details but one curiosity is that a large amount of my legs is smooth now, hairless. The hair didn’t come back.

Try not to think too deeply about that !

I do need to get myself out of the house for a decent amount of time though. I really need a good holiday I think, not just one spent being lazy in the house.

Picture. Meme. A cute little mostly white with black patches is sitting up on a tiny boat floating on calm water. The scene is just lit by the moon. The caption is "When you're just a cute dog on a boat, looking for a tennis ball"

There were a couple of cruise options I’ve been looking at. The main criteria are : not too far away, not hot, good places. I did enjoy the flying trips in and out of Norway and would like to see more. So … Option 1 :

Picture. We're looking at a map of the coast of Norway. There is a thin black line, joined with many red dots. It's the route of a cruise ship from Bergen in the South, to Kirkenes in the North.

That’s from Hurtigruten cruises (link) although I found that one from one of the cruise search sites. This looks like a very interesting cruise, especially in the shorter one way trip. Must research it a lot more to see if it could be made to work. The problem, is getting to or from Kirkenes in the North. You can fly there … from Oslo. So the travel around the cruise would be Gatwick to Bergen, then on the way back it would be Kirkenes to Oslo to Heathrow. I couldn’t see how I’d make that work. The there and back option would work a lot better.

Picture. We're looking at a map of Northern Europe. It's zoomed in a lot, showing just southern Norway and Sweden, Denmark, the top of Germany and a slice of the UK to the left. There's another route marked for the ship journey.

That’s another, much easier option going from Copenhagen to Molde Fjord and then back again with a side hop to Kiel in Germany. I think the flights worked out to going from Heathrow to Copenhagen, which makes it far easier for things like where do you leave the car. It’s a little awkward getting across from Gatwick to Heathrow, especially after being tired for travel. Better just to pile into the car and then use the remaining energy to cruise back down a hopefully quiet motorway.

Anyway, cruise didn’t happen this time because I was a bit too concerned about going away from home for an extended period where I wouldn’t be able to pop the medication to attack this ongoing skin condition.

Another option is a narrowboat cruise in the UK. This would be really valuable for informing the choices about the off in the future plan to get out of here and live on a boat. But I think I’d need to have a friend along for a narrowboat cruise for a) company and b) assistance with the locks and tying up the boat.

What’s these technical difficulties from the title ? I’ve had a look at another new game …

Picture. Meme. We're looking at an otter, swimming underwater. He's gripping a pair of water pipes quite tightly. The caption is "he needs those parts for his space ship, he's going to otter space"
It’s an older meme but it still checks out

The game I’ve been trying out is the brand new just released Starfield. I’ve been enjoying half watching a series of streams on it and it’s been intriguing up to what I’ve seen on it. I’d quite like to lose myself in it but … and this is a big but. It’s not unplayable when not installed on an SSD but the play experience definitely suffers to the point where I don’t want to open it again until I’ve migrated my system across to a bigger and better SSD.

Jargon buster – SSD is a Solid State Device storage thing. Whereas the older Hard Discs worked by having spinning discs with material that stored what was saved to them, Solid State Devices do that with electronic memory devices instead. Hard Discs take a lot of time to find what’s needed, SSDs just zap over to the data. They’re much faster in both finding stuff and retrieving stuff. But they were also subject to a massive premium on price, such that when Meltdown was built, it got a big for the time 500GB drive. I’ve now acquired a faster 2TB drive, I just need to install it.

The technical difficulties is definitely a TLDR. Basically, I have two suitable slots in my machine but one of them isn’t working. I think I know why … but available mental effort isn’t wanting to fix it that way. I’m having to ration that a bit at the moment. Anyway, instead of trying to make the dodgy slot work, I’m just going to acquire another slot. We’ll see how that goes.

Anyway, Starfield ?

Game screenshot. Starfield. We're looking at the side of a spaceship with all sorts of protrusions coming out of the sides. An orange planet is above us, half in shadow.
I did a space

It’s an intriguing game so far. It’s been heavily described as Skyrim in Space, which is a blessing and a curse. Skyrim was such a successful game with a go anywhere, do anything format. Translating that formula across to space makes for a very promising game from my point of view. Curse ? It looks like it’s inherited some of the user interface awkwardness from vanilla Skyrim. But … this is a Bethesda game, there are already mods out there to improve the user interface.

Game screenshot. Starfield. Our pilot is standing in front of a futuristic city. She's of medium skin tone, with faint blue hints in tied back hair. She's wearing a dark grey jumpsuit. In the background is a selection of people, standing around having a chat.
I did a ground

The thing I noticed a bit later there is the group of non player characters in the background. They’re all in different but lifelike poses. I walked past a different scripted conversation on my way out of the spaceport too. It’s a nice touch, whereas less technically complex games will quite happily do limited, unnatural poses, it looks like there’s more life in the background this time.

It’s a little thing but it’s tickled the geek in me.

Either way, I’m quite looking forward to going back into Starfield, hopefully I’ll be all up and running with the PC upgrade soon.

Time to sign off though – Hoping to enjoy a quiet week off work, it’s been a while coming. No sea cruise this time, I’ll keep that for later.