pixelazy That #sunset october #sky

8r4d I deferred my evening to a #running adventure with the #runclub even tho I keep threatening that I may not be back this season. The #sunset was the bomb.

gamerdad According to my trusty Playstation App I have logged about twenty hours into this slash-em-up romp in the last week.

I mention it because I mentioned playing this game to LM on the weekend and his eyes got real big and he told me a short cautionary tale about a friend of his who sunk literally thousands of hours in Diablo games of the past and how it was a black hole of attention grabbing and that I should be careful and for gosh sake, brad, stick to Baldurs Gate, dammit.

But I’m making progress, I argued.

And I am. I am playing as a whirlwind barbarian who blurs through enemies with abandon and I’ve been fulfilling all the little side quests and unlocking new skills and levelling up well into the mid-thirties all while I narrow in on completing Act I of the quest story line.

But I get it. Everything is so incremental and there is almost no grind. I mean it’s all grind, but the grind rewards you with a fresh shot of endorphins every couple of minutes. You just keep cooler better stuff and mightier skills and bigger numbers and there is a ceaseless motivation to just keep thrashing about and progressing. In fact, the game seems to know this giving you new quests that sometimes just happen as you stroll by… none of this clicking and choosing, heck, it’s more like hey you, follow me and kill these demons.

So I progress. And I unlock. And the game goes on.

8r4d Our last long run before our ten miler race in two weeks was a very chilly #autumn #running adventure through the creek trails.

gamerdad When I play games like Diablo IV I often need to take a beat and try to remind myself that these games are designed for teenagers. Sure, we lifetime gamers in our 40s still dive into big titles like this and get lost in the fantasy of bashing baddies with our big fantasy weapons, but really, they are narratively simple for a reason.

I’ve been mildly surprised by D4 tho.

I mean, yeah, I’ve been bouncing back and forth between the main story quests and the side-questing (to grow my character) but for a brute force slugfest, the story is actually pretty solid.

Too, the side quests are anything but raw fetch quests. There are entangled narrative arcs and plots with reputational impacts. You are not just running off to find random object X but rather you are, say, replacing objects that got broken in previous quests to help characters with questionable motives, if you so choose.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying games designed for kids can’t be narratively interesting, but often the plot is there as much to force skill grinding or whatever as it is to tell s an actually interesting story.

Heck, sure… maybe D4 isn’t gonna win any writing awards. But it has been pleasantly and surprisingly compelling to pay attention to the story in this one.

squwetchy Day 10 of my #suburbansketching challenge and i sat in the utility corridor and drew electric lines.

squwetchy I didn’t promise daily #suburbansketching updates, but I will post some more of my favorite pics. I made this #sketch over by the little stormwater lake near our house a couple days ago, and I’m more proud of it than I rightly deserve, but only because this particular view is something that I’ve attempted to sketch, paint and capture in its lovely suburban glory multiple times and never felt particularly successful about. This one leans into the simple #urbansketch style with few fine details, but somehow it works… and even feels a bit overworked because of the handful of #005 linework I added. [read more...]

gamerdad All slay and no play makes Brad a dull guy… or so it goes that my forays into playing a bunch of RPG titles should occasionally give way to paying some quality time to my little Stardew Valley farm. By which I mean, I’ve now logged enough hours in this lifestyle sim (yet again!) to make it to year two. You Stardewheads know what that means, right?

As it goes, I’ve made some serious progress on a lot of serious things. I have a mere handful of items to clean up in the Community Centre quest, bottomed out the mine, I’ve got all my skills to a solid 5 at minimum, and I’ve apparently got at least two digital girlfriends. (Don’t tell my real world wife! Or whatever.)

According to the in-game clock either a whole year has passed… or about twenty-six hours. Yikes!

I will plead my case that this game is acting as somewhat of an inspiration for my own coding adventures. I’ve been working on a game that not only aesthetically overlaps with Stardew Valley but takes some of the higher concepts from this title, like passing days, npc interactions, and inventory management. I plead such a case only to suggest that spending some time back in Stardew Valley has been more than a way to pass some time waiting for the phone to ring or for my body to recover from a cold, it can be suggested that I’m “researching” game design… and I’d only be a tiny bit exaggerating to suggest that. I actually kind of am.

Of course, that doesn’t also mean I haven’t been enjoying my return visit, particularly so since I have a to-do list in my head to power through some of the more grinding tasks and challenges. I don’t actually know if it has helped, but I feel more productive. And after all, this game is all about the feels, ain’t it?

gamerdad I am distracted by a dearth of games. Another title I’d been eying for a couple years showed up on one of those too good to ignore massive discount sales and, well…

I was gambling on Diablo. I had dabbled in this game back with the original literally decades ago and knew I had a vibe for action RPG games. The whole mindlessly hacking through waves of enemies and blurring through chaos of it all can be very much its own kind of flow state game where there is almost no thought beyond taking the next few steps, healing, and continuing the battle.

It’s not for everyone, but it turns out (particularly because I’m a wee bit sick and confined to the couch this week) that I can sink six or seven hours into this game and not even blink.

The game looks a lot like Baldur’s Gate, another of those recently acquired wishlist games, but the play style is almost the polar opposite. Wherein BG3 one is strategically conducting battle in turn based order, planning each move with precision and care lest the a careless use of finite action point sour the strategy and doom the fight to failure, D4 is a tank of button mashing, brute bashing and raw force. There is strategy, of course, but it as much about building a powerful character that can take lots of hits and deliver devastating attacks BEFORE one goes out to fight. BG3 is chess, D4 is football.

D4 is also a sinkhole for my attention. I’m not sure what else or how often I will post about a game that is essentially bludgeoning through a world map, but too, I wasn’t sure if this was going to be another one of those games I was pining to play and then got bored with two hours in. It hasn’t been. I can see this becoming a new mild obsession, actually. I’m only on my first build and at level 22. Just wait until things get serious, huh?

8r4d #runforthecure 2025 was another 5k charity #running adventure. We were out there raising money and awareness for breast #cancer

8r4d The #running before the run? We met about two hours before the fun run race Run For The Cure, and did a 10k lap around Mill Woods.

We crossed the tracks, found a #garagesale and travelled some trails I’d never personally run thru.

Oh and the temperatures dropped below zero, so it was a chilly morning.

castironguy #sushi night