gamerdad I couldn’t help myself. I usually play the most games when the weather is either too cold or too hot to be outside. For mid-July the weather service ordered up a week of 30+ days, so… too hot to be outside. Instead, I continued my adventure eastward and fled Alberta in my still shiny new orange plane. I spent about 45 minutes flying deep into Saskatchewan and landed at the tiny little town of Biggar whose motto, if I recall correctly via a guy I knew back in University who had grew up there, is “New York might be big, but we’re Biggar.” I have been flying with the landing approach assist on, something I didn’t do in my original attempt to fly around the globe. It doesn’t do anything to control the plane but instead projects an idealized series of gates through which a good landing attempt can be made. To be fair I only crashed the plane while landing once back in those early days, but also to be be fair I had turned on that feature at least a year ago when I temporarily got interested in the #flightsimulator life again and now I just haven’t bothered to turn it off. I’m not so proud.

gamerdad After flying from Edmonton to a little hodunk town to the East called Tofield last night, apparently my imaginary self bought a new and faster and oranger plane on facebook marketplace while visiting because I hopped into that new plane this afternoon and picked up off and onward. It may be worth asking if this spells the start of another #flightsimulator adventure, if in fact I’m planning on setting out and seeing where one little virtual aircraft might take me. And while it is not NOT the case, I haven’t made any specific plans to do anything but maybe try to work my way across the country or down into the states and earn some of those lovely out the window views rather than just clicking on the old depart from airport X button and doing a few boring flybys. Y’know, like it’s hard to explain the difference, but there really is something to flying a plane across a scale model of the planet to earn those sightseeing flights. I mean, that’s kinda the whole point of those missions and such, for people who don’t have the imagination to plot an adventure on their own, and here’s me with a whole imagination going on and this simulated planet at my disposal. What a time to be alive, huh? Don’t expect much of anything but a quickie log tho, like me telling you that this afternoon’s flight took me from Tofield to Lloydminster on the border of the province where I made a slick landing in partially cloudy sunshine. East it is then.

gamerdad When the not-so-new-anymore MS Flight Simulator came out in late 2020 in the middle of the pandemic, I bought it on day one and decided to justify my expense by becoming a youtube creator: that is, I recorded about thirty #letsplay videos of myself setting out on a round-the-world adventure in a Cessna. It was fun, but at some point two things happened. One, an update made it trickier to record video due to something on my configuration probably, and so I lost a bunch of footage and lost a bunch of momentum on my trip. And two, people started to get really engaged with my trip, offering advice and feedback and, well, it stopped being fun. I’ve dabbled in #flightsimulator a bit since, but nothing like that 150 hour stretch of flying up the west coast, over through Alaska to Russia and ending up in Japan.. in a prop plane. I took a short trip from Edmonton to rural Tofield this afternoon to see how much I missed it, and I kinda do, but I don’t think I’ll be reprising the youtuber effort anytime soon.

gamerdad As much as I flip flop around with my reading habits, when I really get into a book I tend to stick with it. Sadly, that wasn’t the case when I bought this tome of a non-fiction book over two decades ago. Something compelled me to tackle it again recently though and I’ve made some serious progress—I mean, not enough to offer a coherent opinion yet, but certainly enough to state here that I’m actually reading this one now. Officially, like.

gamerdad I think this was my fifth full play thru since installing this classic on #ps5 a couple weeks ago. I kinda found myself getting into an obsessive groove trying to win this thing on some measure. I would play a great game and then some group I’d barely met on the other side of the map would come up the middle for a culture win or something out of left field. My concession to my own sanity was to turn off all win conditions except for a total point victory. Managing this thing on a console with a controller versus a keyboard makes juggling five different win conditions almost untenable. That said, I still tried to play a balanced game. I founded a custom religion and defended my cities against evangelical takeover. I completed the space race and settled Mars. I built a whole bunch of cultural districts and created nearly twenty works of art/culture. And when some group picked a fight with me and declared war against one of my cities, I took the real low road and started nuking and razing their cities until they begged for a peace deal. I think the only thing I really didn’t excel at was Wonder building, but when the ideal time came round for that I happened to be quite busy trying to keep up a holy war, so… excuses excuses, huh? Overall, I think I might shelf this one for a while now that I trounced at least one round. We’ll see. It is a pretty zen game for those quiet days at home.

gamerdad Sometimes you need to play a game with no other objective than making something interesting.

gamerdad About a year ago the digital version of this 1990s drama-comedy came out on Apple iTunes, but I’ve been reluctant to purchase it at full price not quite sure of if I want to sit down and watch all 110 episodes of this quirky series I remember enjoying as a teenager. Luckily I located a copy at the local library, though only the first season and (due to my forgetting that it finally came up on my reservation list and there are a half dozen people behind me waiting for it so I can’t renew it) I only have a couple days to watch the first 8 episodes that was the first season before I need to return it. I sat down this evening and check off episode one, the pilot, and yeah… I can see myself making the effort. For a few more eps at least.

gamerdad I think I remember why I played this game so much and for so long: it has a way of sucking you into that #justonemoreturn mentality. You will be be sitting there trying to accomplish some particular micro-task, working on putting a particular structure into a city or build a military unit or to move that group of explorers to the other side of the plot of land so that you can plan your next move, but the thing is that you are doing dozens of those little micro-tasks, not sequentially but in sort of this staggered overlap so that you’ve always—always—got just a couple turns until the next bit of action happens. There’s never a natural pause. That might be a long way of saying that I played this for like two hours this afternoon tho I only really set my mind to open it up for a few minutes. *sigh*

gamerdad I probably own this game on a couple other platforms but it is honestly one of those awesome titles that doesn’t hurt to keep handy for when one needs to dive deep into a game zen state. So when the platinum edition showed up on sale on #ps5 (well, technically ps4) this week for like 80% off I thought I should add it to my library and (of course) play a few hours. I’ve been playing Civ since version 1 and I’ve killed so many hours of my life building and defending cities that I should probably call myself a Civ veteran, but I’ll keep things updated as I dabble in a console version of this classic for the first time ever.

gamerdad Though the mines I spent my Saturday morning plunging. Greatly expanded from the original where traversing the mines wasn’t much more than an animated story beat, this time through some of those same beats were tapped but the game went on rails (sometimes literally) for about a ninety minutes of play while Barret took lead and I had to learn some new fighting tactics. I burned though a supply of potions in another big boss fight and crossed over into Chapter 4 where the city of Junon awaits on the horizon. [read more...]

gamerdad I pressed onward. Crossed the swamp. Fought the beast. Entered the mines. And I saved my game on the doorstep of chapter 3. [read more...]

gamerdad I’m only about a quarter of my way through Murakami’s ten year old novel #1Q84 a work of surrealist magical #scifi that I consumed as an audiobook shortly after it came out, and decided to read the old fashioned way this summer. The author #murakami has been on my shortlist of favoured novelists for a long while and I’ve read most of his library at this point, and in many ways he has served as something of a personal literary inspiration for the types of stories I try to write. The style may not jive with my own writing style but definitely the bigger ideas and plots are a fascination to me and I dig the word surrealism of the journeys they take the reader on. Being a mere 250 pages into 1Q84 it’s escaping my memory where this particular plot is leading, but that just makes the discovery that much more satisfying.

gamerdad I crossed the ten hour mark in the game last night and I’m digging into the multiple side quests as an homage to my classic play style in the original: grind until your characters are overpowered enough to plow through the main plot. [read more...]

gamerdad Of course it may just be a case of new game syndrome but I played another couple hours into the story until I rightfully found myself in the true open world part of the gameplay. As it was there was another hour or so on rails as the story plodded you through a couple more quick tutorials on a few more of its myriad of systems. There are the standard mechanics of levelling and item management, but there’s also a little card game with odd and tricky rules to learn as you challenge npcs in the world. Luckily I won my first real game so I must have followed the explanation well enough. Either way, a few more rails guided me out into the plains and now I’m doing the usual stuff like fighting random encounters and collecting ingredients for portions as I reveal chunks of map. Onwards.

gamerdad I relented and as the second instalment of the Final Fantasy VII remake series went on sale this week I decided to take the plunge and begin my inevitable journey. Ive read and listened to a few reviews by this point so my understanding is that the first act is very much a transition from the on-rails story of part one into the more open world adventure of part two, so playing for the first couple of hours of the game, finishing the familiar story of Nibelheim, I think I’m almost into the open world play that I’ve been hearing so many good things about. I’ve played the original so many times in the last 25 years there was little surprise in the story, though as usual it was pretty neat to see it fleshed out so much more as a kind of extended tutorial rather than just a mid game exposition stage. I was a little confused at the outset by the into step with Zach so I may need to read up on what I missed in bailing on the last game half way thru. But either way, I think I’m enjoying it so far… more than part one as far as my initial vibe check goes.

gamerdad As far as five dollar games on #steam go, Beseige will probably make it back into my pay rotation soon. I read a little review of this that popped into my feed the other day and it caught my attention enough to look it up. It's a little sandbox game where you build little structures to attack the army or camp or castle on each stage. Kind of a hundred different tactics to try kinda simulation, and it sparks that puzzle solving vibe. It’s too bad it is very much not a steamdeck game, definitely a little too clunky for that on the control pad and touchscreen, but as a hide in the basement and play games on the desktop selection, definitely a solid 8 out of ten.

gamerdad I have been playing this dang Simpsons game for nearly 2 years now and if you look at my donut count in the status bar you’ll see that such dedication has paid off. I have not cheated nor done anything unethical to reach that level, merely scrimped and saved and played with a regularity that is the envy of my digestive system. I managed to unlock the various buildings and characters that amplify cash flow and premium currency, and after that it pretty much just flows into place.

gamerdad In between bouts of Fallout, I’ve taken as tour back through Middle Earth and I’ve been listening to this audiobook of the making of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. There’s quite a lot I didn’t know, but even more interestingly it has rekindled my delight in the films again and so I’ve been digging into those and some of the bonus content on my Bluray copies.

gamerdad As I continue my adventure thru the commonwealth slaying beasts and robots and ghouls and super mutants I’ve been trying to break some of my gaming habits, like the rainy day rule, that itch in the back of my head that begs me to be frugal with weapons and ammo rather than just having fun and using the big guns more often. I too often find myself saving up all my precious resources only to find that either I’d way over-prepared or just getting bored of some game before I ever used them. So sure, I was stomping around in my power armour launching missiles at robots, what’s your point. They make big explosions. As a progress note, I took the Castle this afternoon and now we’re cooking with gas.

gamerdad Another few hours and I moved into some deeper exploration and sussing out a few of the deeper missions of the game rather than just building my little empire. I found two more sets of power armor and started the robotics quest in earnest. I built myself a new companion in the form of a little orange robot with laser arms, named Frodo because I’ve been watching Lord of the Rings again and it’s a bit stuck in my craw. All that said my biggest challenge is finding interesting moments to grab screenshots without getting my arse blown away while I move my attention to the photo button.

gamerdad My adventures thru the wasteland continues this week. My build this time has been less of my usual tank and more focusing on the intellectual pursuits, ramping up my base building perks so that I’ve been able to build supply lines early in the game and really focus on the Minutemen story. That said, I’ve as already built out at least two sets of respectable power armors and have done some serious wandering and cleaning up some of the main thru routes.

gamerdad I’m not sure how much effort goes into rebuilding an eight year old video game’s graphical assets, but the folks at Bethesda thought it was worth doing to bring Fallout 4 onto current generation consoles. The free update for those of us who owned the original version and played hundreds of hours prior to the update emerged this week and I installed it to check out the fuss. Maybe it was lucky that after a playthru a few years ago, I’d started a fresh save less than a year back and only really made it thru the first few intro missions, and so I was able to upgrade that save and keep trucking thru the wasteland with a foundation of about 5 hours under my belt. My lack of a 4K tv probably means most of the value of the upgrade is lost on me, tho. Things do seem a bit crisper I will admit and the play seems smoother too, but to be honest I tend to be fairly old school about graphics having grown up in the 8 bit era and played (and loved) games in my youth that were often just line art or CGA 4 colours. Gameplay! That’s the whole point. I appreciate the free upgrade but there’s so much more to a good game than crispy visuals.

gamerdad My foray back into the Tt LEGO-verse has taken me into the vast and nostalgic Star Wars world. #ps5 As with any game it’s good to find the tools early on that support and multiply your efforts, so that I’ve literally dug into to upgrades like the stud multiplier and the bonus radars within the first chapters of my play is probably not surprising. And with all nine movies to work through, I’ve opted for the boring but gen-x approach of release order. Episodes IV and V are in the bag!

gamerdad

I crossed the 100 hour mark in #fallout4 about 18 months ago just before I quit playing. Quit is the wrong word tho. The game has been squatting in my mind since then, tho rather than jump back into my #oldsave in which I made a few questionable choices in my #characterprogression I opted instead to kick off a new run thru and focus on some of the things first that triggered big gains when I’d discovered them last time, but later on.

For example, three hours in I built my first supply lines between camps and #iykyk why that’s an early game #gamechanger