Game Reviews

Terraria has long been one of my favorite games. Last year’s Journey’s End expansion, with its inclusion of Journey Mode, saw its popularity grow even more. It came at just the right time when we were all stuck at home and looking for ways to fill our time. I managed to get a few older computers networked together to enable myself and my children to play together. We consistently played for quite a while, but then interest fell off and they refocused on Minecraft....

Game feel Beyond: Two Souls is like a Bond game action scene in slow motion. It has vehicles, a cool underwater base infiltration scene, and you get to save the world from the bad guys. But rather than a playboy with an ever-ready quip, you play an emotionally damaged woman with a unique ability who simply yearns for a normal life. There’s also no penalty for idling (usually) mid-action scene, and seemingly no penalty for doing a terrible job....

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I’ve been playing a lot of story-adventure-exploration games lately (aka “walking sims”), and they really resonate. I played What Remains of Edith Finch with my daughters this summer when it was just us for the weekend, and we all loved it. It tells the story of Edith’s family in journal/diary format that we experience by walking through the protagonist’s childhood home. As we unlock sections of the house, we collect the stories of each of her family members....

This game is beautiful. To be honest I thought the ending was going to be much darker, as the discoveries grew sadder as Lonnie’s departure date neared. Sam kept repeating how she couldn’t live without Lonnie. I’m glad I was wrong. What I found instead gave me a sense of joy and hope. Growing up is hard. Bearing the weight of the world’s and your parents’ expectations is a seemingly impossible challenge....

Who tricked me into playing FFXI again? I’ve been slowly coming out the other side of a FFXI bender. It’s still fun. I like numbers-go-up. But it’s too demanding. This is always the problem I run into with games. I look at ways of optimizing progress, and it turns into me managing a half a dozen or more characters. It was 8 characters this time. I had the idea a couple months in that I should get them all full inventory upgrades so I could hold more stuff....

Tetris 99. Wow. At first I was skeptical. I don’t like competitive games as a general rule. I see games as a way to understand their creator, or myself, or to challenge myself to grow, or to give me material for other ideas. When the content is centered around what other people do and how they react to things, this changes the game fundamentally for me, and then it doesn’t really fit one of the driving reasons I play them....

I took several weeks off from playing games, since before Christmas, after I spent half a dozen weekends in a row playing Graveyard Keeper (191 hours on record; still nowhere near my record for Terraria, FFXI, WoW, Monster Hunter, or FFXIV). Good game, but I probably should have stopped after finishing it the first time. PS4 Collection I tried playing some games on PS4. Humble Bundle had a bundle. I always go for the platform bundles, because they’re usually a good deal....

renewable stock ch.2, 66 trees and such around house - faster (cap. investment) Harvest means further to harvest corpses energy 3 non linear relationships price, regeneration rate, yield per unit capital non renewable stock ch.2, 58 rocks and such around house better extraction methods over time classification of all game systems using system zoo Diagrams, lol

Nope, none left dude, graveyard keeper arbitrary goal has probably evolved too far i’m doing math on efficiency of making one thing over another for maximum profit i’ve got 4 blog posts in progress talking about what to ignore and what to bumrush, and what kind of milestones to hit for certain production targets ok, one talking about that one about the specific church unlock in < 6 days bumrush one about general reactions to the game as a normal person like, seriously considering a gantt chart, right now the quest sequence is in calendar form and still not sure game win in < 100 days is possible I think I’m ahead of the crisis curve, then schedule slip because I’m the facilitator of all these conversations that characters just aren’t available for I think I’m clever for ignoring the garden and grapes, then it bites me in the ass and causes a 3 week delay in the inquisitor quests which gates 2 other questlines Though now that I think harder, I realize i can solve that by just buying wine, but that’s a short term solution, and a larger setback in the game progress as a whole, because money is the biggest blocker