gamerdad I haven’t been buying many games but in celebration of some anticipated new income in the coming weeks I spent my first hour’s pay on a title that had been tucked away on my wishlist for a while. I don’t remember where I heard about this, maybe from a podcast? but it looked intriguing enough as a chill out zen game to have on the #steamdeck for bursts of quiet time play.

I didn’t quite make it through the opening act, but I think I’ve got the vibe. It’s like 95% exploration and climbing so far, and before you think it’s just pressing the arrows and moving around on a wall, think again. It’s strategic, and you need to be increasingly more thoughtful about placing ropes and leaping and resting and then of course the multi-button climbing controls where each hand is controlled by a different button. It’s deliciously complex. I think I like it.

gamerdad An odd chain of events led me to playing #flightsimulator on my #steamdeck this morning. Ultimately it kinda started with a power failure that borked an update on the deck and forced me after about four hours of effort to bite the bullet and reimage my device. It was one of those sacrifices that led me to have basically a fresh install and lots of room to install games—particularly when I’d been struggling with the motivation for a digital purge. When I first got the deck, FS2020 wouldn’t even install on it, only stream, and the lag was unbearable. But for some reason it gave me the option and since I had the room I, again, bit the bullet and endured a three hour 129GB download over wifi to get the game on there. Of course I had to crank down all the graphics settings to “medium” at best, and in many cases just off (I mean, you can’t tell on a small screen anyways) and I actually got some respectable performance out of the thing, even flying over a small city like my hometown. Now I just need to tweak the control scheme and maybe I can actually play on this thing, huh?

gamerdad Back at home after our mini vacation we kicked off a second campaign of this little tile game so we could both preserve the campaign we started with our friends and also kick off a new run with just us two now that we got our heads wrapped around the rules a bit better. There had initially been a bit of confusion around the scoring of tasks, particularly around the ability to build compounding tasks that multiplied or efforts per tile played while not breaking the resource count. See, the point of the game is to string together specific landscape resources to chain points.

Our initial read of the rules was quick (because we just wanted to play and we were sitting in a hotel lobby) but on a more thorough comb over the scoring we got our heads around some of the deeper strategy which is simple enough to learn but still has some depth and randomness baked in. Or new campaign got a couple game sessions checked off on the campaign sheet and we made a lot more progress now that we’ve figured it all out.

gamerdad We picked up a copy of this new game at a board game store in Calgary while killing time before a backcountry hiking trip, and our first couple rounds were sat in the lobby of our staging hotel.

As a #cooperativegame board game it was as much a social evening sorting thru the rules and chatting thru strategy as it was a focused games round.

We had a few curious gazes as other guests made their way past over the hour and a half but no one looked too far askew at what four middle aged hosers were doing playing a weird game at a random hotel in Calgary on a Wednesday evening.

gamerdad I watched this back in January and reviewed it here but the post was lost in the great hack of ‘24. So…

I could strive to tell you something smart about a twenty-year old superhero movie other than that it intersected through my life in a string of coincidences over the last month so much so that I opted to open up my Disney account and watch it again all these years later. I could strive to have some kind of intellectual commentary this movie, or ask if it has stood up to the test of time or has competed in a film landscape of a million other more modern takes on the superhero genre. I could even strive to say something about the quality of Pixar animation, especially considering that not three months ago I was standing at the gate of their main campus in Emeryville, California snapping pictures through the fence and longing to be on the other side. I could, but rather I’ll just say that there is always going to be something timeless about a parenting story, a story about a dad in a mid-life crisis, or a story that lurks on the fringes of social commentary about the role of exceptionalism versus inclusivity. I was more drawn into this movie than I thought I would have been, again, even twenty years later (having seen it in the theatre on the big screen nearly two decades ago now.) It’s not perfect, and Moore’s Watchmen comic will always have tackled this plot in a more nuanced, adult way, but for a movie which is now known as much for the rollercoaster themed after it as for the story, it's not a bad rewatch.

gamerdad There is a grim sort of horror to be found in the depths of toxic relationships that is amplified the victimhood of the invisible trauma unwitnessed by friends and family, cutting a sometimes familiar path across ancient memories repressed by time and distance. Not everything, mind. Not even most of it, or even a lot of it, but enough that after four episodes I needed a break for some weeks to process and work up courage to cap off the series. Weird, huh? You don’t even think about these things for goddamn thirty years and then pop you’re all like well, now shut the front door.

gamerdad It took a couple short first seasons, but the writers have now managed to disentangle the two main characters from their pre-show romantic partners. The long distance engagement fell off a cliff at the end of season one, while Maggie’s dude was crushed by falling space trash at the conclusion of season two. I know the will they won’t they trope is pretty common these days, but I suppose it wasn’t anything new in the 90s either and the same writers likely had some plans about making the central couple struggle for a couple seasons (albeit short seasons) with their connection despite existing romances. I may have mentioned this in a previous post, but I don’t recall much of either these early seasons back from when I watched it if I ever did, nor did my early viewing ever have much respect for order or continuity through my re-runs on cable approach to 1990s television. That is to say, this binge through is all pretty new to me.

gamerdad As often happens when I game, I followed a rabbit hole of interest and was soon thereafter installing something new on one of my devices. I’ve played the first chapter of The Witcher twice before and both times I feel of my horse and went on with other adventures. I’m not sure this time will be any different. But just in case, here is a marker in time to note when such adventure begins anew.

gamerdad A cartoon television show based on a card game based on an internet comic named after a breakfast cereal. Mmm Oatmeal.

I was having some blood drawn the other day and the nurse with a needle plunged into my arm asked me about the cartoon on my shirt. The tee was a relic from when I ran the Beat the Blerch virtual half marathon back a decade ago. Try explaining The Oatmeal and his comic sensibilities in race form to a random human. Now I’m here trying to explain a tv show on netflix with the same premise.

I’ve been vying for the centre of the galaxy for a long time. I mean, for starters it’s just a big tease, isn’t it? The centre of the galaxy? It’s just calling out for you isn’t it?

And for seconds, it shows up as a perpetual navigation destination on the galaxy map, your waypoints always kinda nudging you closer and closer. Go towards the core!

Well. I reached it today. I didn’t even realize it was that close. It suddenly was just: there you go. Click to travel. And it turns out it’s kinda a disaster. My ship is crashed and I’m kinda stuck at the moment. I’m gonna need to play me some macguyver to get back to civilization, I think.

Screenshots capture some of the vibe, but I thought I would try posting some video as well.

gamerdad Onward. I seemed to get sucked into this game with some regularity, usually after an update or something inspires me to load it up again and push forward on my save. That’s not a bad thing. [read more...]