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The Scariest Part of Yuppie Psycho is the Save System

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Lately, I’ve been playing through Yuppie Psycho. A pixely, horror, adventure game released in 2019. It being October and all I thought I should play at least one horror game. This has been on my radar since the No Sleep Podcast was hawking it, so probably 6 years now. Having just completed Hell is Us, I was still in the mood for the puzzling/adventure style game and Yuppie Psycho fit the bill.

I’ve been enjoying it so far. It’s a little more action-stealthy than I thought it would be but there’s still puzzles and a good bit of exploration to do. I like the juxtaposition of it’s bright pixel graphics with it’s horrific scenes filled with blood and monsters. There’s a printer that crawls around on four human giant hands for crying out loud! But it’s pixel art so it’s all kind of cozy. Even so, I have been tempted to call it a day and shelve the game due to it’s save system.

See, you can’t save whenever you want and there are hardly any auto saves. You might be asking, “well what’s so bad about save points, have you never played a game with save points?”. And I would say “Of course I have! This is different.” While there are save points, photocopiers to be exact, you need to find witch paper to be able to be able to photocopy your soul to save. Spooky! And witch paper is a consumable item found in various drawers and filing cabinets throughout the building.

Consumable saves, that’s a new one for me, I saw this and the question “What happens if I run out?” immediately came to mind.

Well, I haven’t run out yet. Nor have I found myself in a situation where I wanted to save and couldn’t. I have been close and it does add a lot of tension to the game. Will I find that next piece of paper before I meet my untimely demise? There isn’t a whole lot that will straight up kill you in the building but when there is they tend to come out of nowhere and lock you in a room together.

I’m not the most up to date on my video game history but I had a feeling that this save system was nod to an older game. It just has that feel of old game design. A few quick searches later, and it turns out I was right! The original Resident Evil, which I haven’t played, uses a similar system with ink ribbons and typewriters.

This kind of item based system does make me think differently about how and when to save. I have been caught plenty of times saving right before a big piece of dialogue and then having to go through it again if I die before the next save point. So I’ve been pressing my luck sometimes to see if I can make it until the next story beat to save. Other times, I don’t want to save while my health is low so I’ll look around for healing items before coming back to save. But if I die during that, I’ll have to find all those items again.

It also dictates how I have to interact with the game. It can’t just be a quick pick up play and save. I need to have the time to complete the section before I shutdown the game. This can be frustrating, but typically, the time between saves have been at most 20 minutes. Still, losing 20 minutes because I died still feels bad.

With this type of save system, the game feels less like an open ended exploration game and more like a level based game. Except, I determine how long the levels are by when I choose to save. Fail the level and die, you have to do it all over again.

I’m torn on this system as a whole. On the one hand, it does a great job of building tension when exploring new areas. Will I be able to find the next save point? If I do, will I have enough paper to save? I’m low on paper should I really save now, or risk another area? It works for a game like this where it’s harder to build a sense of unease with visuals. On the other hand, it’s no fun to have to run through sections again, redo dialogue with multiple NPCs, or find all the items again when you die. Not being able to save when I need to close the game is also inconvenient.

It’s certainly a novel system, but I still prefer being able to save when I want not when the game says I can.

The Great WelpSquadTV Twitch Highlight Migration

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Next month, on May 19th, Twitch is purging highlights from channels with over 100 hours of stored videos. This announcement came out back in Febuary with the original date being April 19th. Since then, I’ve been working on exporting WelpSquadTV’s archived streams over to Youtube. We have been saving our entire broadcasts as highlights since we started streaming in 2017. It has long been a running joke that we must be costing Amazon a ton in video storage.

Turns out, we were right. The reasoning Twitch sent out to channels affected by this, and later added to their FAQ, is that storage is expensive. Which, fair, but it’s got to be less costly if you’re Amazon and you own all the storage right? My favorite bit though, is that less than 0.5% of Twitch channels are effected by this. I’ve never been in the top 0.5% of anything so I’m taking this as a win! I guess accumulating 3353 hours of saved video over the past 8 years will do that.

A few years ago, we did start moving some of our older videos over to Youtube with Twitch’s built in export feature. Back then, I remember it being a gamble whether or not the video actually got exported. Which lead to exporting one or two at a time, waiting 10 minutes to see if they showed up on Youtube and then start the next few videos. It seems that this feature has improved over the years and at least I’m able to “bulk export” videos out. I still have to click the export button on each video but they all make it over to Youtube.

There seems to be an upload limit for Youtube. At some point, the exports just stop working. I haven’t figured out if this is a video limit or a video hours limit but I seem to hit it after uploading about 100 videos (the most Twitch Video Producer will show on a page). And this appears to reset every day. It’s still pretty lenient, these videos are 2+ hours long after all.

So for the last 2 months, I have been dutifully moving everything over to Youtube. I’m going to just get everything uploaded before Saturday (the original April 19th deadline) and I will be glad to have finished this project. Though now that the deadline has been extended I may be a little more lax on hitting those upload numbers.

In case you’re wondering what the analytics of a Youtube channel uploading one hundred, 2 hour long plus videos a day, without tags, descriptions, or thumbnails:

I find it interesting that the average watch time is just about 18 minutes. I’m surprised anyone is clicking on these in the first place, let alone letting it run for 18 minutes. They must be sleeping through an auto play or something….Speaking of clicks, I love that impression click through rate is impressively low, but .4% or 450,000 impressions is still many, many clicks!

Revisiting Devour

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Yet again I find myself in a familiar situation. It goes like this: The Squad is discussing what we should play with this past weekend.I bring up Devour. It’s been a few months since we last played it, there were a few maps added since we last played, and we always have a good time with it, so let’s check that out. Then I head over to Steam to make sure it’s still installed, only to find that it’s been 3 years since we last played.

This happens to me all of the time. I have such vivid memories of playing something that I could have only played it recently it but then find it’s been many months or years since the last boot up. All thanks to sorting my Steam library by recent. It used to suprise me. Now I just laugh at how long it’s been this time, if I even remember to check. It’s definetly an interesting personal phenominon. In general, my memory can be, shall I say, lacking at times, in day to day life but apparently I can recall fine details about a video game I played a year and a half ago. Go figure…

Anyway, back to Devour. It remains to be the best $5 I’ve spent on Steam. It’s a co-op, horror game, where you and up to 3 friends collect 10 of some sort of animal to sacrifice to exorsise a demon. As your sacrifices increase so does the monsters level of aggression. There are six maps, each with its own theme and flavor. The original map, The Farmhouse, has you and your team picking up goats and sacraficing them at an altar to stop the demon who chases you around the whole time. It’s fun to watch your friends get scooped up out of nowhere, less fun when it unexpectedly happens to you! Each map offers it’s own challenges and the two newest maps, The Slaughterhouse and The Manor have a few tricks up their sleeves that made our return visit feel fresh.

I’m sure you can already guess the theme of The Slaugherhouse map – It’s a Slaughterhouse!It’s a big, open square area with two levels. At first, we couldn’t figure out what to do because every single door was locked and we couldn’t find any keys to open them or release the pigs that needed captured. That’s a thing on every map, you typically need to release whatever it is you’re sacraficing from a cage that their already in. Seems coutner intuitive…

I eventually found a big square hole in a wall on a whim after running around in circles for 10 minutes. Turns out, this map has some vents to crawl through instead of going through doors. Once we spotted the vents, things moved much more quickly. We found the ritual room with a giant meat grinder. For science, I jumped in to it to see what would happen. I expected to die when I hit the ominous blades but this wasn’t the case. However, the walls of the grinder were just a little too high and I couldn’t jump out of it. Luckily, or unluckily for my unwitting character, Blades and Toast fueled up the ginder and turned it on which downed me! But that just meant I was crawling around waiting for a revive. Much to my suprise, I was able to climb out of the grinder while downed even though I couldn’t jump, not quite sure how that works. Oh, and we also found the guy who would be chasing us around.

After the whole debacle, the doors actually opened and things really started to get going. We found some keys, let some pigs out but couldn’t find the object needed to lure the pigs so we could pick them up. If you just run at them, they run away even though they aren’t very fast, you can’t pick them up with out putting an item down to distract them. The item in question was a bone, a femur by the looks of it, which seemed to only drop from some crawling lesser demons on the ground. Typically, these items spawn around the map and it’s a matter of finding them but tying them to an enemy that had to be killed wasn’t made this a chore. It was hard to find the enemies and there weren’t enough of them around to find them quick enough to deal with the increasing difficulty after every sacrifice.

One of the cool things about this map was when you got caught by the monster, you spawned under the map in a small area with a bunch of traps and some of the crawling enemies. After a little trial and error, we figured out that you didn’t respawn back into the map with everyone until you killed the crawlers. This means your teammates can’t revive you until your back on the map. Writing it out, it sounds like it would be kind of annoying but it was fun seeing how fast I could kill the things and avoid the traps to get back into the game.

We got to five out of ten pigs before we all died and called it quits on that one. I do wonder if it would have been better with one extra person. We were only running with 3 people. Perhaps another person would have made finding the crawlers easier.

Next up was The Manor, which was a big ol’ house with “grounds” around it. There was going to be a wedding but the groom died and the bride tried to summon a demon to bring him back. That – didn’t go well and she was possesed instead. On this map we were tasked with finding….heads….yeah heads and reattaching them to the corpses in the graves around the house. Fun times.

This one was more interesting than the slaughterhouse and is a bit of a departure from the previous maps in general. The ritual is much more involved. The heads are, uh, well they’re crawling around in a mirror world…and they want…cake. The steps are as follows: find the cake in the real world, go into a mirror and find a head, lure it with some cake, then take it to a basin to drown it in, which then turns it into a normal head, then find the matching body for said head in the graves outside, and finally, burry the body. That’s one sacrifice!

This map definitely made us think and come up with some new new startegies. Our usual strategy is to do mutiple sacrafices in a row to decrease the amount of time we have to deal with the monsters aggro. But that doesn’t work on this map because there is only one shovel to complete the final step of burrying the body. However, you can gather up a bunch of heads before hand. It seems like the max is five before they stop spawning in the mirror world. But there are crows in the real world who will pick up the heads and move them to random places so you can’t put the heads next to the matching grave and chain bury them one after another. We ended up putting all of them in the shed and have one person fend off the crows.

It lead to a much more intense experience as we had to fight off the monster multiple times and it just got worse as we burried more bodies. In the end we made it to six out of ten heads before we were all downed.

Out of the two maps, I think we could complete The Manor if we spent more time on the map learning where things are. Again, I think another person would have made a big difference but it looks doable with three.

For a $5 game, I’m suprised they’ve managed to put out so many maps, what looks to be about one a year. I was even more suprised to see that another map is coming this year with a carnival theme. We will be back from that one for sure.

All the Way to the Top

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I just finished reading Lost Man’s Lane by Scott Carson. That’s not the topic of today’s post but it’s a good book. You should read it. It’s got a ghost-snake. It’s also got some awesome rock climbing scenes. Upon finishing it, I wondered if there were any rock climbing games out there. This is the way my mind works.

I immediately thought of Jusant a game about climbing a tower which was a part of October 2024’s Humble Choice. I also came across the Cairn demo a few weeks back which looked interesting enough to download but not immediately play. Both seemed to be what I was looking for.

I tried the Cairn demo first, because it was shorter and it was already installed. It bills itself as a survival-climber which it is to a tee. You climb, and you have some meters you need to keep full to continue to climb. The demo focuses a lot more attention on the climbing bit which is exactly what I was looking for. You control Aava by taking control of one limb at a time, finding hand and foot holds to climb the cliff side. It’s slow, it’s methodical, and it is way more satisfying than it should be to reach the next flat area to rest. I felt like I had climbed some rocks and needed a breather, which of course, is absurd. I think this effect is achieved by a mix of micro decisions on the best placement of each arm and leg coupled with no background background music and Aava’s heavy breathing. The focus is on climbing so the survival elements are rather simplified. One odd thing I encountered is health and stamina are shared on one bar. I had to go digging around in the Steam discussions to find out why I was losing health while running. Overall, it is exactly the kind of experience I was looking for but it was short. It took me just under 45 minutes to complete my first climb. I am looking forward to the full release, which is slated for sometime this year. I hope sooner rather than later.

The map of my first successful route.

Then there’s Jusant which is another game about climbing but with a focus on storytelling and puzzle solving. You control each of your arms while climbing, which did give me a sense that I was, in fact, climbing something. But not quite in the same way as Cairn The climbing paths are per-defined and while there is some freedom in the ways you can tackle a situation, it’s still mostly a linear game. There are collectibles to find and letters to read. Even some cairns to place a stone on top (see what I did there?). So there are reasons to go off the beaten path, but it doesn’t quite have enough freedom. I am constantly seeing things in the distance that I want to be able to get to and the game won’t let me. Even when it does, there isn’t anything there. The game could do with just a little bit more exploration.

The story revolves around the cliff/tower the main character is climbing and is told through these letters. The ocean has receded leaving only a desert behind. The remaining people who inhabited the tower have gone on an expedition to the top to find water in the clouds. As you explore, you’re going through a ghost town, but one that looks recently abandoned. It’s got a cozy, post-apocalyptic vibe, if you can even have such a thing.

While Jusant has weaker climbing mechanics than Cairn, it’s a full game and I will continue to play it. It’s not very long, 5 hours or so, and I think I’ll see it through to the end.

MissionChief: Extinguishing Fires Near Me

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My gaming interests are fairly cyclical in nature. I can always count on them to come back around. It’s one of the reasons I never regret buying something even if I don’t play it. Eventually I’m going to come back to it.

This turn of the wheel appears to have landed on “games that use OpenStreetMap data”.

OpenStreetMaps is like Wikipedia for maps. At its core, it’s a database that’s updated and maintained by contributors that is also used to render a map of the world. Anyone can contribute to the map and make edits and the data is freely available for anyone to use. Services that use OSM data range from GPS routing apps, to finding hiking trails, data visualization, games, and much more.

I had no idea that OpenStreetMap existed until I stumbled upon Nimby Rails on Steam a few years ago. I spent some time creating virtual train routes all over the world and I was facinated with the idea being able to play anywhere in the world.

It turns out, there’s a more than a handful of games out there that use this data which are helpfully located on theOpenStreetMap wiki. As expected, the list has a number of augmented reality mobile games. The most notable, by far, is Pokemon Go which uses OpenStreetMap data to influence Pokemon spawns.There are quite a few PC games that also use OSM data. The big one there is Microsoft Flight Simulator.

I’ve been keeping an eye out for a good sale for a few games on the list. There’s a couple published by Game Operators that look interesting: Delivery Inc which looks like a delivery company tycoon kind of thing and Infection Free Zone which is a zombie survival game. Of the two, I’m leaning more towards Infection Free Zone but I have yet to see it go on sale for a price I’m ready to pay.

To scratch the current gaming itch I went with a free to play browser game on the list called MissionChief . It’s a game where you manage and dispatch emergency services in an area of your choosing. You start out building fire stations and outfitting them with vehicles to respond to calls. Then from there you can expand into hospitals/EMS, police stations, water rescue, and apparently tow trucks. It’s a little bit of a tycoon game, a little bit of an idle game both of which I’m a fan of, and it’s been keeping me entertained for the last two weeks.

You can place stations anywhere you want but it appears most of the community plays with “realistic” station placements. I thought would be fun and maybe add a little more challenge too.

I started building around my area in Cleveland and it’s been fun to find all the fire stations in the different towns around me and see the vehicles drive around roads I know well. It was slow going at first but I’ve built up 10 fire stations now so there are always calls to respond to.

The gameplay is simple. You earn money from completing calls/mission. Each mission requires a certain number of vehicles to successfully complete. A mailbox fire only requires a fire engine while a garage fire needs two. So you need to decide which vehicle is the best to send where to complete the calls efficiently

As you build more fire stations, more mission types become available which require different vehicles. This means you have to make sure you’re not expanding too quickly or you risk either running out of money for the vehicles required for the new missions or not having the staff to operate the new vehicles.

It’s got a mobile app that I can hop in quick to dispatch some vehicles to missions while I’m doing other things. Then when I feel like spending time expanding my stations or setting map POI’s I can do so from my PC. It’s keeping my interest for now. For how much longer? Who knows!

Minor Technical Difficulties

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So I started a new play through of Dragon Age: Origins this week on PC. It’s only been about 13 years since my last one and that was on the PS3 so it’s basically like my first time through all over again. It’s been a while since I booted up an older game (ya, ya 2010 is old now). It’s amazing how many thing I take for granted that just work with games now.

Borderless Window for one. Dragon Age either runs in Full Screen or a window. I can’t stand playing games in window mode, everything looks so small and seeing my messy desktop breaks that immersion! So that option was out.

Let me tell you, Dragon Age does not take kindly to switching to other applications when in full screen mode. Every time I went to take a note it was a gamble whether or not the game would come back up. Either the game would crash to desktop when the window was opened back up. It was a fifty-fifty shot whether I’d get back in. To get around that, I used the SimpleNote app on my phone to take notes even though I had the desktop version open on my second monitor.

It felt a bit silly but you gotta do what you gotta do, you know. That’s the plight of the game blogger.

Speaking of plights, Dragon Age doesn’t support Steam Screenshots. I found this out when I hit F12 to take one and the game crashed yet again! So I went to my backup option, Greenshot. It’s free, it takes screenshots, it even puts them in a folder for you. I typically only break this guy out when I’m playing games through Epic because that still doesn’t support screenshots. Unfortunately Greenshot, wasn’t really working while Dragon Age was in full screen. When I went to take a screenshot everything would freeze up for a few seconds. I’m noticing a trend here…

I thought maybe I could suck it up and play in windowed mode. Greenshot appeared to be working there. Appeared is the key word here. When I went to look at my screenshots they were not what I was expecting:

I was about to call it a day. But on my next launch of the game I saw the familiar green logo in the corner of my screen for the Geforce Experience overlay. I have only seen this thing in action once and that was last week where it kept saving clips of me being killed in Hunt: Showdown. I had no clue I could also use it to take screenshots and, surprisingly, it worked without an issue in full screen. It does save them to the Videos folder in Windows which I find weird but other than that it works!

Which brings me to my last pain point with this aging title: It. Kept. Crashing! Well most of it was my fault, I’ll admit, trying to swap applications while it was running BUT it also crashed while playing a few times. I managed to get past the starting zone of Orzammar – I’m playing a dwarf rouge by the way – and to the surface to join the Grey Wardens. This about 1.5 hours in to things when the game crashed while I’m running around trying to find my next plot point. It had been a little while since I saved and even longer since the auto save saved so I found myself losing some time.

That’s when I remembered that these older titles usually have some sort of mod or stability patch that makes them run better on newer hardware/ Windows versions. So off to the internet I went to find one. The first Google result lead me to the 4GB LAA Patch for Dragon Age: Origins which let’s the game access more than 2GB of RAM. For the EA and GOG versions of Dragon Age there’s a little program that needs to be run on the Dragon Age .exe.

Since the Steam version is encrypted you need an unencrypted version of the .exe which I found on NexusMods. I found the guy’s video on how to install the patch confusing so I went to try and find a write up somewhere. Lucky for me, there was a 10 year old Steam thread that detailed how to to it, which in all honesty, was very easy. Now that I have it patched, the game hasn’t crashed once in the last few hours.

Hooray!

Reminiscing on Dragon Age

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A few months ago I saw the entire Dragon Age franchise on sale for like $15. At the time, I wasn’t looking for a big fantasy RPG of any sort let alone three. But I know me so I scooped it up for the inevitable day that I would be compelled to play it. That day has come. It was apparently last night.

This 1000% has to do with all of the news I keep seeing about The Veilgaurd coming out this October. Also because I can’t seem to do anything unless I make it into a project. So of course I’m like “Let’s play all of the Dragon Age games! I totally have time for that!” (I probably don’t…)

So there I was, creating a new characters in Dragon Age: Origins and reflecting back on my time with the series as a whole. Well – not really – but I needed a way to somehow segue into this next part! I make no claim that any of the following is actually accurate, I’m just jotting down what I remember, I didn’t bother to fact check anything other than the dates the games came out.

Dragon Age: Origins was one of the first games I played through on the PS3. I must have gotten it over winter break of my freshman year of college because by the time I picked up the physical copy, it was the ultimate edition. Fun fact, I used the remaining balance of my meal plan that semester to buy it.

What I remember most about Dragon Age were the commercials leading up to the games release. I distinctly remember seeing one at the movies is somewhere in between those Maria Menounos Noovie things they played before the trailers. Grey Wardens looked awesome! A fantasy game that wasn’t Lord of The Rings!

What I remember from my first playthrough of the game? Not a whole lot. I remember Alaistar, the swamp witch lady, a particularly challenging boss fight with a very large boss, and speccing my character out to be a sword and board warrior. That last part was my favorite, I liked that I could be an actual tank for my party taunting enemies and knocking them down. It wasn’t a role I played a lot of in other RPGs, preffering characters who used a bow over melee. I also remember the combat feeling like a tab targetting MMO complete with a big hot bar with lots of skills that somehow was manageable on a controller. I thought that was pretty cool too!

Other than that, I couldn’t tell you much about the story. Something about the templars hunting down mages maybe? But then, that might have been a bigger plot point in Dragon Age 2 which I also played, though never finished. I did finish Dragon Age: Origins. Spent plenty of nights that winter break sitting in front of the living room TV plodding my way through. I did start the DLC, but I think around that time, classes had started back up. I never got back to it and just played Dragon Age 2 the next summer.

Dragon Age 2 I remember being more of an action game. Less create your own character and more you’re going to play our character but you can change their looks and pick their class. I don’t know how true that is, it’s been ten plus years since I played it. I think the main character actually had voice lines which I always preffered over the Silent Protagonist type.

For that game, I switched it up and played a mage. Again, I think a big plot point of that game was outlawing mages or something so I thought it was an interesting background to try out. I distinctly remember being a gravity mage that pulled enemies together and flung them all over the place while my party wailed on them. Good times.

Dragon Age: Inquisition dropped the fall of 2014, the year I graduated from college and had just started living with my then girlfriend/now wife. It wasn’t a game that was on my radar anymore, I had fallen off of gaming in general during college, well except for League of Legends. We played a lot of that.

I think my mom gifted it to me for Christmas that year. I distincly remember creating a character in the likeness of my now-father inlaw which my now-wife did not find it the least bit funny. I, on the other hand, found it very amusing…I remember some cutscenes, an interegation of sorts, then being thrown out into the world and not getting very far.

You know what also released in the fall of 2014? Destiny. That had a hold on me for at least a year and there wasn’t’ much time for anything else.

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!

What a Year

Kluwes1 Comment

Hello out there! It’s been a while hasn’t it? Well, more than a while, actually. More like several months of radio silence. But the thing I’ve come to learn over the years is that this blog is always waiting for me when I’m ready to write again. No matter how long those gaps are in between posts.

2023 was a year and am I glad to have it behind me. In April, the company I work for laid off 20% of their employees. I kept my job, thankfully, but I watched a lot of my friends lose theirs. It was a bit of a wake up call to start studying for some certifications I’d been putting off and focusing on more professional development in case I end up out of a job.

I also too a break from gaming in general this year. I spent more time reading and chasing a toddler around than I did at my PC. Less gaming, of course, means less to write about. I always come back though…and what really brought me back was a much needed upgrade to my PC. Or, in this case, a whole replacement of my PC. My 1060 was really starting to show it’s age, especially after I upgraded to 2K monitors earlier this year. I manged to snag some good deals on parts and upgraded to a 4080, with a Ryzen 7 processor, and 32 gb or RAM, and 4Tb of storage. It’s really renewed my interest in gaming, especially VR,.It should last me a good long time too before I need to upgrade anything again..

Much like last year, I spent most of my time in December in the cockpit of my Diamondback Explorer out in the middle of nowhere looking for cool things to take pictures of. But this time in VR, which looks so much better than it did before! I’m sure I’ll have more space ship pictures to show soon…

Oh look, here’s one now.

I would like to make more of an effort to write here this year. At least, more than I did last year which turns out to be the least I’ve written for the blog since I started 6 years agao. We’ll see how that pans out going forward but I’m hoping for a less chaotic year ahead.