gamerdad With barely a couple days warning the good folks who make No Man’s Sky released another big #featureupdate earlier today. Of course, it took a solid half hour to download and update my game, and so I bumbled around watching an episode of the Simpsons while the download meter crept ever closer to zero. After I got into the post-update game I thought I would poke around and see if I could find any of this supposed new on-world content. Some of it might be pretty subtle, which is nice because no one wants all their hard base-crafting work to get swamped up in some major overhaul. After noticing a few subtle upgrades in my base systems, I hopped from my established solar system over to a brand new discovery to see what difference that made. I’m in no way critical when I say I’m not sure my old gamer guy brain picked up on much of the changes, which is fine. The game is still a great way to kill a few hours.

gamerdad These night flights ate scenic in their own way while I’m actually playing, but the subtlety in the view is much less impressive as a screenshot. It’s too bad, I guess, that I’m not taking and making videos on this trip which tonight took me deeper into the states and part way across North dakota from Minot to Devils Lake just as the sun had set. I’ve been enjoying the zen of these hour long flights with little to do between takeoff and landing besides point the joystick control on a level course, so I spend a good chunk of my flight listening to an audiobook or a podcast, whatever is handy. That’s the joy of #flightsimulator I suppose—you can just settle in and zone out while logging some time. On a side note, as I closed down the plane and checked my log book a Steam trophy appeared in my notifications letting me know that after tonight’s night flight I had tallied 100 hours of flight time on my profile. So that’s a thing.

gamerdad I left Canada and as I approached the giant cliffs at the border (or maybe it was just a data rendering glitch?!) I crossed into North Dakota where I have never been to in real life but which from the air seems very similar to Saskatchewan except maybe for the abundance of airports south of the 49th. This leg of the journey took me from Estevan to Minot which I presume means a lot to people other than me but which to me means as much as two other random cities on a map and once again arbitrarily chosen because of their relative distance and the shortness of my attention span for #flightsimulator flights longer than an hour.

gamerdad With the return of the real world hot weather on Monday morning, I was back in the basement continuing my #flightsimulator adventure and taking one last Canadian leg as I flew my little orange plane from Moose Jaw to Estevan which is just a few steps away from the Saskatchewan/North Dakota border. I’ve sort of got it in my mind to take a trip down in the direction of Chicago where I actually visited and ran last fall, and yeah again, I could just load up O’Hare airport and zoom around the city, but there is something about earning the view by flying all the way there that just feels right. So, instead I just toddle along at about 100 NMPH and see how many legs it will take me to fly to the windy city. I will say tho that the game was acting a bit wonky today, setting the time to late in the day (which I didn’t notice until I was about mid flight) and then landmarking the airport in the middle of the forest to the west of the runway (while the buildings were to the east) which resulted in me parking the plane under a tree and hoping the log book records my flight as valid even though the luggage guys were going to have a heckuva time unloading my suitcase.

gamerdad I’ve had my eye on a way to continue my adventures through the early 90s comedic adventures of the folks from Cicely Alaska, and Amazon provided this week as the DVD box set of all the seasons went on sale briefly and I happened to be in the right place at the right time to nab myself a copy. Yeah, I did write DVD—that wasn’t a typo. I don’t think I’ve purposefully bought a new-in-the-wrapper DVD in at least a decade, at least since we upgraded to Blu-ray and then have pretty much fallen into the streaming era and turned most of our physical media into interior decorations. And here i went and bought a box with 26 of them inside. But I gotta admit that there is something both nostalgic and appropriate in settling into this classic from my youth as I begin (well, continue) my full-series binge (still in season one) and feel those retro vibes from the old school way of watching this terrific show. One part character study, one part fish out of water, one part magical realism and a whole lot of wholesome classic television for these crazy dark days. Let’s roll.

gamerdad Having flown four previous legs across the Canadian prairies bound for who knows where, my fifth wasn’t really shaping up to be much more exciting. In fact, the sooner that I can get somewhere a bit more interesting (geography wise at least) than a big expanse of prairie farmland as far as the eye can see, the better this #flightsimulator adventure is likely to be. I picked up from my evening flight yesterday where I landed in Saskatoon and in search of cleverly named airports, headed on down to Moose Jaw, where it was, as predicted, flat and sunny out.

gamerdad What can I say but is been a long hot day and I spent a chunk of it in the basement playing #flightsimulator more than ever. Just one more leg, right? And my timing couldn’t have been better. The other side of this little adventure, a rule I made up to make my trips more interesting when I did my trip (part way) around the world, was that I flew in real time, real conditions. The game simulates weather and clouds and .. sunsets. As it turns out flying from Biggar to Saskatoon at 930 mountain time was just about right to hit a perfect sunset flight across the Saskatchewan prairies. I took off to a gloriously low lens flare of the sun low on the horizon and then landed with just enough of a sliver of the sun still peaking over the western skyline for it not to count as a night landing. Hmm… Almost makes me want to get up early enough to try for a sunrise flight outta dodge. Sadly, I think that might be around 4am, so on second thought…

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.