Month: August 2024

A Return to No Man’s Sky

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Over the weekend, the Squad made its triumphant return to No Man’s Sky. Everyone was eager to see what the new graphical update – well, looked like. I thought it might be cool to check out the new expedition too for something different.

In 2022, we started a save probably after the game was on some sort of Steam sale. We didn’t get very far evidenced by the fact that 3 out of the 4 of us hadn’t completed enough of the tutorial to get to the Anomaly, a kind of nomadic player/ upgrade hub fo the galaxy. It’s also, more or less, the end of the tutorial.

Apparently CC was using an old save since he had access to a freighter with an ungodly amount of raw resources. Which he judiciously doled out to the rest of us as needed.

I vaugely remember out last time through. We were making good progress I. the main questline when we landed on a planet with ancient bones all over the place. We stopped to check out what those were, then proceeded to strip mine the planet of its fossils to sell to the nearby space station for buckets and buckets of credits. As a result, loading in this weekend we all were rich and were greeted by some very stylish ships.

None of us could remember how to actually do anything. A good start.

Water planets are pretty now.

We puttered around for an hour, calling out key bindings when one of us stumbled upon them. Who wants to read through the keybindings in the settings right? The core mechanics of shoot things to gain resources paired with don’t let your bars deplete to zero came back fairly quick. I had some close calls while getting distracted and not replenishing my life support. But there are enough alarms and screen flashing to get your attention.

Toast and I didn’t have any launch fuel to get our ships off the planet so we set off to figure out how to do that first. Once we got that squared away, it was off to space to join up with CC and Blades on the freighter.

From there, we decided to check out the expedition. Now, you can start a new save file to go directly to the Expedition mode, but the Squad lies to do things the hard way. There’s another option to start the expedition from your current save via the Anomaly. We didn’t know this at the time, but this gives a slight advantage because you get to bring along some resources and technology from your current save along to pick up at a later time. The problem was, most of us didn’t have access to the Anomaly. We tried having CC call it in for all of us but it just doesn’t work like that.

Off we went to complete the main quest so we could all get access.

Waiting for Blades to get to the Anomaly

We weren’t far off. We had to build the warp drive to jump to another star system. Then do some exploring from planet to planet to get an event to trigger so we could meet up with the Anomaly. Once we had access, we had to run around and talk to everyone to fully unlock all the stations and vendors there. Then, and only then, could we start the Expedition. We didn’t have enough stuff to bring in to it so we all chose to start fresh.

The Liquidators Expedition focuses on combat which isn’t something I associate with No Man’s Sky. The only combat I’ve done is shooting at some Sentinels when they don’t like what I’m mining and attack. The expedition, on the other hand, comes with mutant bug creatures to shoot! Fun fact, the Sentinels still don’t like it when you shoot the bugs even in self defense. So my first encounter included running from bugs and the space police! They started it!

Not the most comforting sight when you wake up from a shipwreck

What was nice is that this game mode seems to assume you’ve played before. There’s a shortened version of the tutorial where you have to get your ship operational by collecting materials but you don’t have to go through much else to get going. This was a bit of a challenge because the planet we started on didn’t have much in the way of Oxygen plants which we needed to fix our ships. It took us all a good 20 minutes of running around to get enough of it.

With ships fixed, we went to space to find another planet to collect enough things to sell to buy Microprocessors for the warp drive. Along the way, we found a derelict freighter which turned out to be one giant box of loot. We spent the rest of the night running through the frieghter opening all the boxes and selling all the loot to the station. Now we all have warp drives and we’re ready really dig in to the expedition this week!

My Blaugust State of Mind: Week 2

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Hello out there! I don’t usually post on the weekends but during Blaugust I find that having some sort of re-occuring feature helps cover those days. So that’s what this is.

We are now at the end of week two, our first full week of Blaugust. Traditionally. “Lessons Learned” is the theme of the last week. However, I find that most years I’m wracking my brain to figure out just what I’ve learned. Often times, I seem to learn the same lessons year over . Maybe that’s because I always read my old Lesson Learned posts before I write a new one. Maybe I’m just prone to forgetting….Yeah, it’s probably that’s.

So this year I thought I would jot down some of my thoughts around the event each in the hopes that I might find some new wisdom at the end of all this.

  • Every year, I feel like I start to think about blogging differently around day 3 of the event. I find myself thinking about writing more often, brainstorming ideas in my downtime, and reading other blogs way more than I typically would the rest of the year. Nothing has changed here, I’m still doing all of these this year.
  • By the time this post goes live, I will have increased my post count for the year by 11 and exceed my post count for last year. That’s not bad, considering before Blaugust I hit publish on a grand total of 2 posts! It’s been fun getting back in to a routine this week. It’s a nice feeling to be creating something again rather than just consuming.
  • I’m definitely starting to feel that tug to write every day. Slowly but surely building that habit. Even if it is just for this month.
  • I ran out of scheduled posts halfway through the week. Kind of feel like I’ve been treading water ever since. 31 posts in 31 days is an aspiration for sure but, given that I’m still in the running, I might as well go for it if life permits. I’m taking this weekend to build up another set of posts to get back to that comfy buffer.
  • There are more blogs this year that are out of my typical reading scope. I’ve made a Blaugust feed separate from my Gaming feed to make sure I don’t skip out on these. Since I spend most of my time hanging around the gaming blog corner of the internet, it’s nice to see tons of personal blogs out there covering a wide variety of topics. Through some of these, I’ve been introduced to the concept of the IndieWeb which I’m finding really interesting the more I dig in to it.
  • As I suspected, getting back to writing has gotten me back to gaming.

This Week In Screenshots: On My Way To Heart of Thorns

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I find myself in that precarious Blaugust situation where the scheduled posts have run out, it’s late, and I haven’t written a word yet. While I’m not explicitly going for 31 posts (it’s more of a low-key thing), I didn’t want the streak to end so early. So, as is the long standing tradition here at Many Welps, it’s time to pull out the ol’ Saturday screenshots post!

I spent this week back in Guild Wars 2 finishing up the Living Story Season 2. Over the winter, the game had finally clicked for me after starting a new Sylvari Gaurdian. I ran him through the core story, up through the Living World Season 1 content, and about half way through Season 2 before quietly drifting away.

Finishing season 2 is the farthest I’ve gotten a character over the years. Despite that, I’ve owned Heart of Thrones and Path of Fire for what feels like forever. I played enough Path of Fire to get the Raptor mount when it first came out but I’ve never stepped foot in Heart of Thorn’s I’m excited to see what lies ahead!

Time Slips

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You ever go to boot up a game that you could have sworn you played a few months ago, only to see its, in fact, been several months? I find this happening to me constantly. It’s like, I have such a strong memory of playing it that it must have been just last week. Or, at the very most, last month. It always leaves me with a funny feeling. Like time has suddenly rearranged itself around me. It’s quite jarring.

I found myself in this situation, once again, this week. Never quite to this extent though.

Blades suggested playing Sanctum 2 this week. If you’re unfamiliar, its’s a first person shooter,tower defense game from the people who brought us Goat Simulator. It features shooting bugs with guns and setting up bigger guns to shoot more bugs.

It was our main game for quite a while. We finished up the base game and purchased the DLC. We even beat most of that too. So I was down to revisit an old favorite.

I could have sworn we last played it over the winter but, lo and behold, Steam had it listed as last played in 2020. 4 years ago? I couldn’t believe it! Then I went digging through posts to see if I’d ever written about it. I was shocked (SHOCKED!!!)to find I wrote one in August 2019. I guess Sanctum left quite an impression on me.

Stepping away from a game for 4 weeks let alone 4 years is tough. Trying to pick up where I left off never ends well. The controls came back easy enough but trying to figure out what my load out was and why I had chosen it way back when was borderline impenetrable. I went with it anyway, past me knew what he was doing right?

We tried starting on the map we assumed was the one we left off on. That ended quickly. I think are some mechanics we forgot about over the years because we lost our core very quickly. Defeated, we went back to one of the easier levels on endless mode to get acquainted again.

I wish I could say it was exciting to revisit. I had really liked it before, after all.

But, as it all started coming back to me, so did the feeling of having done this all before. I’ve fought these enemies, built these towers, and ran around with these character for 40 hours already. There wasn’t anything new here. It was too familiar, and not in a good way.

Some games are just played out and are better left back in the “Recent Activity” graveyard.

In the Dark

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Photo by David Monje on Unsplash

I had planned to play something Tuesday night to have something to write abut. But it wasn’t meant to be We lost power around 4pm due to severe thunderstorms in our area. Tree branches all over the road, power lines down, it’s a whole mess. A few towns over there was a Tornado watch in effect which, thankfully, didn’t come anywhere near us. We got power back yesterday morning around 8am.

Long term power outages can be a little stressful. They really makes you think about how much you depend on electricity, you know, just working. Lights? Yeah, lights are cool. Candle light gives off a nice vibe, but unless you have a bunch of them, it’s hard to do stuff by. Our stove is electric so we made a dinner of PB&J and an assortment of things we didn’t have to cook but would also go bad in our fridge overnight. My toddler loved that!

Unfortunately, my Uninterruptible Power Source seems to have either died recently or was fried in the outage. I was wondering why my PC completely lost power. I figured, maybe the battery might have finally gone bad. I turned on the UPS this morning to screaming, constant beep, and a fault that indicated a problem with the charging circuit. Everything I read online pointed to a complete replacement. It’s lasted me 7 years so I can’t really complain. While a replacement isn’t inexpensive, I’d rather replace the UPS than my PC. At the moment it’s acting as a glorified power strip.

I did get some gaming time in Tuesday morning. I woke up earlier than normal and sat down to play No Man’s Sky. I booted it up, started the new expedition mode, and quickly realized I didn’t know what the key-binds were anymore. The expedition mode seems to assume that I already know that which- fair. It didn’t interest me one bit to start the tutorial for the sixth or seventh time. So that was out. The Squad is planning to play it this weekend so I’ll fumble around and learn the controls then. I’m sure they’ll love that!

Long Books from the Library

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As I was attempting to catch up with my Blaugust feed this week, I came across Axxuy’s post on checking out big books from the library. I’ve been doing a lot of reading this year and, subsequently, have done some thinking on my own reading habits.

Auxxy says:

I’ve checked out many books of short stories or poems and some of the breezier nonfiction. But I stay away from the big books, even the ones I would like to read. The trouble of course is that you do have to bring the books back, and sooner than later. I feel cramped by the due dates.

I find myself frequently avoiding checking out big books. Even those I’ve had on my to-read list for years.

I am lucky enough to live in an area with three large library systems. I rarely buy books and can almost always find what I’m looking digitally unless a title is very popular and/or very new. There are usually enough copies (or lack of interest from other patrons) that my loans auto-renew. Still, due dates do add some extra stress to finishing a book. Even more so with digital loans. I have been guilt tripped many times by Libby informing me there are multiple people waiting for a book that I haven’t opened in a week.

I am a life long reader but I am a slow reader. I’m constantly below the “Typical time to read” on Kindle books by at least a few hours for fiction books. Who know’s how accurate that stat is though. I finish one or two average sized books a month. Sometimes three if I’m really pushing it. This used to bother me, but it doesn’t so much any more. I found forcing myself to try to read faster just wasn’t enjoyable. It’s not a competition after all.

The time required for me to finish a book makes me hesitate to grab long books of the digital and physical shelf. I really need to be in the right head space for it. If the book is more than 400ish pages it’s probably the only book I’m reading until for the next 3 weeks. But when the mood strikes, and I go to check out something big, I know most of my free time will be spent reading. I recently read Kelly Link’s The Book of Love which is just over 600 pages. It’s, by far, the longest book I’ve read this year. While I did enjoy it, I had to spend an average of 2 hours a day reading to finish it before the 3 week loan ran out. Leaving me with little time to do anything else.

If it’s non-fiction, then forget it, I’m buying the ebook and I will absolutely spread it out over several months no matter how long it is.

Tavern Keeper Demo Impressions

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I got an email the other day from Greenheart Games that the demo for their new game, Tavern Keeper, was available. Admittedly, I didn’t actually read the email, just skimmed the subject and kept a mental note to check it out some time. Had I read the email, I would have known this was a limited time demo ending on July 29th. Lucky for me, because of the recent changes to Demos on Steam, the demo was extended for a few days. I couldn’t track down the new end date of the demo, though I didn’t try harder than clicking on the latest game news in Steam. If it’s a game you want to take a look at, you should probably check it out sooner rather than later.

You might know Greenheart Games for their last successful venture, Game Dev Tycoon circa 2013. That’s one of those games that’s always recommended when I’m trawling Reddit for “recent” tycoon games. I played it, it’s holds up to the hype, it’s on mobile, PC, Switch, and Netflix – wait Netflix has games now?

I digress, I’m here to talk about the demo for Tavern Keeper!

Do you like cozy, fantasy vibes? I like cozy fantasy, vibes and Tavern Keeper’s got ’em. The graphic’s are of the inoffensive, cartoony variety. Though, the people don’t seem to have arms connecting their wrists to their shoulders which is, well, a little unnerving. And the music! The music is lush and warm and makes me want to curl up with a book in front of a large fire place. If there’s a soundtrack I will buy it, without question, on release.

You’ve probably already guessed the premise of the game. You run a Tavern. Surprise! But not a serious tavern, no this is a rather silly place. Full of parody’s of fantasy characters and staff who were fired from their last job for impersonating the elderly. The writing is full of quipy, quips made even better when narrated by our Narrator, Steven Pacey. I didn’t know who that was but when I got around to reading the demo announcement email it says:

You might know Steven’s work from the many audio-books he narrates, for example from Joe Abercrombie’s fantasy works, and several books of the Doctor Who bibliography, to name just a few. Recently, he’s also been featured on House of the Dragon, World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth, and Love, Death & Robots.

Well I don’t know Steven’s work, but I would sure like to. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a moment, I have a bunch of audio books to put on hold.

There are some patron’s who you can interact with via a book above their head. There are two of these in the demo and they are read and voiced by the Narrator. You have two choices at the end of every page that seem like they are the “Nice Response” and the “Mean Response”. Depending on your choices different events can happen. With the narration as good as it is, I’m definitely looking forward to going through more of these on release.

I can see this style of writing and parody wearing thin for some after a while. Personally, I think it’s great and want more of it/ It’s like a family friendly version of Hello from the Magic Tavern.

Along with managing your staff and ordering ale from the traveling merchant, you are tasked with decorating the place. Now I’m not a huge fan of free form building systems, and especially not ones where every piece can be move around on an x,y,z axis. I’m just not that creative. But if you do like that, Tavern Keeper seems to do it pretty well.

Look I made this owl with a top hat and placed a rug underneath the table and it wasn’t horrible:

You can also do some wonky things, like create the tavern’s new Teapot overlord:

The UI can get cluttered at times. It didn’t get in my way of doing things but with a bunch of menus up things can get a little claustrophobic. I also found it slightly confusing when I unlocked some furniture but couldn’t use it in the demo.

Overall, the demo did it’s job. My interest in Tavern Keeper has been peeked and I have not removed the game from my wishlist all in under an hour of game time. You can tell they’re holding some systems and menus back from the demo. There are still some menus that are boarded up and haven’t been unlocked during the demo. Furniture and items seem to have a durability meter so maybe they can break. It also looks like things can be set on fire so I’m interested to see how that all plays out. It looks like Tavern Keeper will have some added complexity over Game Dev Tycoon with more resources to manage. But it looks like it will maintain the cozy, chill vibe, that Game Dev Tycoon has as well. With that said, it’s not an immediate buy for me right now when it releases in Early Access at the end of this year. I’m not in the market for a tycoon game at the moment but in a few months I might be.

Lord of the Rings: Return of the King Live in Concert

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Every year, the Cleveland Orchestra puts on a movie score concert series. In the summer, they play at Blossom Music Center, a huge outdoor music venue that usually hosts popular artist. It’s got a pavilion with assigned seats and a massive lawn for first come, first serve general admission. If you’ve never been to this kind of show, the movie is stripped of it’s score and the orchestra provides the music live in time with the film. If you have a local orchestra who does this, I highly recommend going, it’s a unique experience.

Last year, my wife and I saw Jurassic Park and had a blast sitting out on the lawn, watching the movie, and listening to a John William’s score. For the last couple of years, they’ve been playing the Lord of the Rings movies in the summer, one each year. This weekend was The Return of the King.

When we saw Jurassic Park, the place was pretty empty. We’ve been there plenty of times to see popular bands so it was nice to be able to park close to the venue and have space around us on the lawn to spread out. Expecting a similar experience this year, we planned to arrive about an hour before show time to get some snacks and settle in before things started. When we got there we were shocked to see the sea of cars ahead of us. The closest parking options were in the back grass lots which are like a mile out.

Our parking spot for the evening waaaaay out there.

Thinking about it now, it makes sense. While Jurassic Park is a classic it probably doesn’t have the mass appeal and/or fandom of something like Lord of the Rings. The Cleveland Orchestra has played Harry Potter movies as part of this series before and I’m sure that draws a similar amount of people. Blossom holds upward of 23,000 people and the place was packed an hour before the show. Fortunately, there were only two of us so we were able to slot in to a decent spot where we could see the orchestra and the screen.

I’m a fan of the Lord of the Rings as much as anyone who was a kid when the movies were coming out. It was all the rage in middle school. I saw all of them in the theater with my family and probably watched The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers dozens of times on DVD. Even still, I hadn’t seen either of them in at least 15 years. I only remember seeing Return of the King once.

With that in mind, my wife and I had a Lord of the Rings marathon last week so we could get caught up. We split the first two movies up over 4 days because neither of us are good at sitting through long movies these days. I’m glad we did, because I missed so much as a kid. I remembered the general plot lines and how cool all the battle scenes were but didn’t follow many of the side stories going on. There’s so much going on that’s not Frodo going to Mordor that blew past me all those years ago.

Like I said, I’ve only seen Return of the King once but, as I was watching the movie this weekend, I was surprised to find I remembered much of it. Not because I have a good memory, mind you but because I played the A TON of The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King on the Gamecube.

Ahhh, so much nostalgia packed in to one image.

Shelob’s Lair, The Black Gate, the Battle of Helm’s Deep (technically the Two Towers), the Southern Gate, and the King of the Dead were all my favorite levels from the game. They all happen to be major plot points in the movie too. My wife also has fond memories of this game from playing with her brother back in the day. We kept turning to each other and saying things like “This level was hard” and “I remember fighting that guy so many times”.

Side note: this was the first “T” rated game I ever owned. I went with my dad to buy it and remember being nervous my mom would make me return it when she saw the rating!

Anyways, back to the show. If there’s one thing I took from this weekend, it’s just how much music is in the movie. There is a very small amount of overall time where there isn’t music of some sort accompanying the on screen action. I find it amazing that the orchestra play so precisely for so long. Of course, they are professional musicians but it’s still a feat to play for over three hours.

Not only do you need a full orchestra for this score you also need a full choir. The orchestra was great, don’t get me wrong, but hearing the choral scores from this movie live gave me goose bumps. The woman who did the vocal solos had an incredible range. I found that while the movie was going, I sometimes forgot there was a live orchestra but something about a live choir just sounds different enough that I noticed it every time.

Seeing a movie with thousands of people also brings with it a lot of audience interaction. We cheered for the musicians when they played our favorite themes or big, musical moments. We also cheered for the characters and storylines we saw on the screen.

The highlight of the night was during Theoden’s speech before the Riders of Rohan charge into the battle of Mines Tirith. The whole crowd yelled “Death!” in time with the movie at the end of his speech. It just added to the epicness of the scene and music.

If anyone’s interested in learning more about the music of The Lord of the Rings, Irecommend The SoundTrack Show’s three part series on the music of The Fellowship of the Ring (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3). David W. Collin’s does a terrific job of explaining film scores and music theory even if you don’t have any background in music.

I’m not sure what will be there next summer with the Lord of the Rings Trilogy finished up. Whatever it is, I’m definitely going back. I would like to get pavilion seats next year to see the orchestra better. We’re considering going to see the Cleveland Orchestra play the Muppet’s Christmas Carol for the holidays later this year.

What I’ve Played in 2024: Part 2

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Here’s a Blaugust tip: If you have a very long post, split it up and slap a Part 1 and Part 2 in the title. Now you have two posts!

This is a continuation of yesterday’s post where I continue to expand on the games I’ve played this year.

May

Secrets of Grindea

This is the game that was on my Steam wishlist the longest. After years, it finally released in Febuary of this year and I immediately bought it. At it’s core, it’s action JRPG but it has a gimmick where you can “grind” monsters to drop cards which are permanent passive buffs for your character. Each monster has their own card to drop and I found it very satisfying to collect as many as I could. I was close to the end when I stopped playing, I may have to go back at some point to finish it up.

Disney Dreamlight Valley

My wife bought this game for the Switch on a sale. She loved Animal Crossing but was bored after a while without any direction. Disney Dreamligt Valley fixes that with a never ending stream of quests and unlocks. I started playing because she was playing (she doesn’t play many games) and it was fun to compare where we were at or who we had just unlocked. The Switch version of the game, however, doesn’t run very well. It runs worse the more characters and object you add to the valley and sometimes just crashes the entire game. I fell off playing because of the technical issues but bought the game on Steam when it was on sale. It’s probably the game I’ve played the most consistently this year.

Garden Paws

While I couldn’t deal with the issues of DDLV on the switch I was looking for other “cozy” games to play that had the same vibe. Garden Paws was in my library and recommended across the board as a similar game. It’s got this off kilter charm and also has a never ending series of quests. I found it a great game to turn the sound off and listen to podcasts while I played. It definitely added to the weirdness of the game, in a good way, to listen to the No Sleep Podcast while playing

Littlewood

This is another “cozy” game that I found with a nice grind to it. The premise is you’ve just saved the world from a great evil and now you’re settling down to help rebuild a town. There’s no combat, but there are a set of skills that you can level up to help out the town. This was a great game to play on the Steam Deck in short chuncks or long play sessions.

June

Trove

Trove remains my most played game of all time. It’s not that it’s a fantastic game, it has many faults, but it perfectly tailors to that mindless grind part of my brain. In March, there was a gear update that introduced a new tier of gear and made the old top tier gear easier to get. I spent the month of June getting the Gearcrafting skill maxed, getting Crystal 4 gear sets compete, and hunting for Crystal 5 gear. There was another update in June wich even added a new difficultly tier. I still can’t believe this game, which is 10 years old at this point, is still getting updates.

Battlefield 2024

The squad picked this up cheap on sale for $7. I know this game had issues at launch but was extremely playable for us now that it’s late in it’s life cycle. I played 20 hours and I know the rest of the squad spent much more time with it.

Crusader Kings III

I cannot remember what compelled me to play this game. There was something that made me go search for it in my library. It might have been an idea that I would like to play a complex game or something. I played through the tutorial and liked it enough to buy a bunch of DLC that was on sale. Then I started up a game and played it for quite some time. I remember thinking, this would be a great game to write a bunch of posts about. Then I just never went back to it. Might be a good one to return to.

Dark and Darker

I played this one co-op with Blades for 3 hours. That’s all I can really tell you about it. I have never had such “meh” feelings about a game. I didn’t like it enough to play it again and I didn’t hate it enough to never want to play it again. It’s still installed on my machine more out of laziness than a desire to return.

July

Lethal Company

While not exclusively played in July, per se, it was the most played game in July. Our group has been playing this off and on since release. I swear, this game seems to has comedic timing coded in to it. It’s never not a good time, and with mods, there’s always something new. We’ve been enjoying the TooManyEmotes mod immensely. The mod adds 200 emotes, many of which add music. You get separate funds to buy emotes in a run from the computer. There’s always a new one we haven’t seen every run. We’ve probably spent more time trying out different emotes and laughing uncontrollably than actually playing the game.

What I’ve Played in 2024: Part 1

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While this year has seen a decrease in overall game time, it’s hasn’t been without gaming entirely. While I haven’t played many games on my own this year, I still get together with the squad every weekend to play something.

I was curious to see what games I logged playtime for this year. Steam makes this easy by sorting the library by recent. Still, I wish I would have re-installed ActivityWatch when I set up my new PC to have some more stats to dig in to. Unfortunately, Steam only records the last time you launched a game and doesn’t provide much more info than that but we’ll work with what we’ve got.

January

Space Engine

Not really a game, more of an interactive planetarium. I picked this up coming off of playing Elite Dangerous at the end of 2023. In Elite, I was mostly exploring system to system, so I thought this might be a good way to do the same thing without all the down time. I spent an hour with it, mostly going through the tutorial, but it was as advertised. It didn’t quite scratch that itch of Elite but that’s to be expected. It also works in VR, which I have not tried but I’m sure would be fantastic. Sadly, I didn’t take any screenshots for this one.

Orc Must Die 3

Every time I look back in my Steam library like this I’m always asking “Did I really play this that long ago?”. Orcs Must Die is a series I’ve been playing with my friend Blades for years now. We get absorbed in it for a month or two a year and then move on to something else. Looks like January was this year’s month of Orcs. I’m looking forward to the new Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap coming out next year with 4 player co-op. We’ve always wanted to get our other friends involved in the series but the games have only been 2 player co-op thus far.

February

Automobilista 2

In the beginning of the year I got very in to Sim Racing. I went home for Christmas to visit family and friends and ended up playing Gran Turismo 3 with Blades. He had the whole wheel and pedal set up and I was hooked. When I got home, I ordered my own wheel and pedals and was heavily playing this game and Asseto Corsa every chance I got. It’s weird because I’ve never been a car guy or even like driving all that much. I found learning tracks and getting better times had me hooked!

Game Dev Tycoon

In tandem with Sim Racing I was also very into Tycoon games earlier this year. Game Dev Tycoon is a simple tycoon game where you start out as a one man shop in your garage and work your way up to becoming a best selling studio. The game has relatively simple mechanics but they work very well to form a story in your head while your playing. I actually kept notes of my play through thinking I’d write about it here sometime. So those might make their way to the blog at some point.

March

Surviving Mars

Another tycoon game, this one I was playing together with Blades via Parsec. You start out with a few unmanned drones on Mars and attempt to create a long lasting colony. Over the course of a few play sessions we were able to go from a barren wasteland to a thriving colony with hundreds of colonsits. It was a lot of fun to plan, design, and execute building a colony. It was a lot less interesting once we got the people there and every thing was established.

Timberborne

Another colony builder except with beavers! I only played 2 hours of this, not because it wasn’t enjoyable but because I was at the end of my management game phase. Unlike Surviving Mars I lost many, many beavers to famine and drought. I don’t think I got to the point with a successful and sustainable colony.

Jedi Fallen Order/ Lego Star Wars

We went on a family trip/ reunion in southern California in February. One of the things we did was go to Disneyland/ Galaxies Edge. I’ve always liked Star Wars but have never been in to Star Wars. So after coming back from the trip, I went through a bit of a Star Wars phase. Lucky for me, both of these games were super cheap thanks to whatever Steam sale was going.

April

Assetto Corsa

Apparently April is when I stopped playing racing sims. Assetto Corsa is the racing sim. It’s usually cheap in sale, it has thousands of mods, it runs really well on modern hardware, and it’s easy to set up a server to race with friends. There’s an awesome third party tool called Content Manager that greatly improves navigating the game menus and adding mods. The paid version,, which is as cheap as $2 makes setting up servers a breeze. I spent the driving time on this one and had many hours of fun racing with the squad.