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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.

Mid-Year Freakout Book Tag

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I was tagged for this by JD Weber of alligators and aneurysms!. Thanks JD!

These sorts of round up posts are fun to write because they make me think back on everything I’ve read this past year. Though, I tend to forget what books are about about a day or two after I read them, so that makes things more difficult….I really had to wrack my brain for some of these.

How Many Books Have I Read So Far?

I’ve read 24 books this year. My goal for the year is 30 so I’m well on my way to meeting that. Unlike last year, the majority of books I’ve read so far have not been novella’s. In fact, I only read 3 books under 200 pages this year. Quite a change from last year, where 25% of the books I read were short. This year, I wanted to focus less on the number of books read and read some longer books. I appears I’ve done a good job of that. I’ve read 5 books this year over 500 pages as opposed to 1 last year.

Best Book You’ve Read So Far in 2025?

Lost Man’s Lane by Scott Carson.

Technically, I started reading this one at the end of 2024 but I finished it in January. So it counts! It’s one of those books I couldn’t put down when I started it and still think about occasionally. It’s such a perfect mix of childhood nostalgia and weird, supernatural horror. Also, it had some oddly satisfying rock climbing scenes and a ghost snake. Can’t forget about the ghost snake.

Best Sequel You’ve Read so Far in 2025?

Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros.

Can I call the third book in a series a sequel? I guess it’s a sequel to the second book, so I’m going with it. I thought Iron Flame was kind of a drag, which I’ll get to later, but the ending intrigued me enough to solider on to Onyx Storm and I’m glad I did. It breathed some much needed new life into the series for me and felt likemuch more of an epic adventure than the previous books.

New Release You Haven’t Read Yet But Want To?

Immaculate Conception by Lin Lin Huang.

I read Natural Beauties last year and loved it. I’m excited to reading more from this author. It just so happens to be the next book my book club is reading. So I’ll definitely get to it this year!

Most Anticipated Release for the Second Half of the Year?

I don’t typically keep up with new releases but the one I am looking forward to is King Sorrow by Joe Hill. My wife and I are both Joe Hill fans and typically read his books together. I usually enjoy his short story collections more than the novels but I’m excited to read this one along with her.

Biggest Surprise?

Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros.

My wife wanted to read this one after everyone in our book club highly recommended it. It’s not a book I would have read on my own, but I thought it would be fun to read together. I didn’t know much about the series outside of the fact that it was a romance book with dragons. My wife loves romance books and I do not, so it was fun talking about the book with her.

I ended up enjoying it much more than I expected. Since I’m not a huge fan of romance, I skimmed over most of the spicier scenes (one was a whole chapter…come on!). I am, however, easily entertained, give me a magic school where people fight each other to the death and ride dragons and I’m perfectly content.

According to my notes, I thought the world was a bit one dimensional. Dragon riding people vs Griffon riding people but, considering how thing play out, I suppose it’s meant to be like that. I also really liked the supporting characters enough that I wanted to find out what happened in the next book.

Biggest Disappointment?

Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros.

It was hard to come up with a book for this one. If I’m disappointed by a book I’m not going to read it. Life’s too short to read bad books. I also don’t keep track of them, so I have no idea what I’ve started and never finished.

Considering how much I liked Fourth Wing, I felt Iron Flame was a weak follow up. It was longer than it needed to be and dragged on quite a bit. It could have been two different books,really, and would have been perfectly fine that way. I got really tired of Violet and Xaden arguing about the same things over, and over, and over again. I did read this right after finishing Fourth Wing, so perhaps, I needed a longer break from those two. The rest of the characters remained great though!

Favorite New Author?

For this one, I’m going with a new to me author because finding out if I’ve read a book by a new-new author is more work than I’m ready to put in right now. So I’ll go with Matt Dinniman. I’ve been ripping through the Dungeon Crawler Carl series over the last few weeks, reading three in a row. I’ll probably take a little break and read something else, but I fully intend on finishing the series.

Newest Fictional Crush?

Princess Donut from Dungeon Crawler Carl.

A fluffy, Persian cat who knows what she wants and shoots lasers out of her eyes. What’s not to love?!?

New Favorite Character?

Carl from Dungeon Crawler Carl.

Ever since finishing the Dresden Files, I’ve been looking for a new fantasy/sci-fi male protagonist written in first person. Last year, Mennik Thorn, from Shadow of a Dead God, filled that void for me last year. This year it’s Carl. I have another 4 books in the series, so he’ll be my Dresden stand in for a while.

Underrated Gems you Discovered Recently?

Luminous by Silva Park.

This was my second choice for my favorite book of the year so far. Ithas such a unique setting where humans and robots are almost indistinguishable. It explores what it means to be human in such a world. Or robot for that matter. It’s a beautiful story and another one I’ve kept thinking about long after finishing.

Book That Made You Cry?

Beta Vulgaris by Margie Sarsfield. I found this one as a recommendation for new horror from Bookbub. From the blurb, I thought this was going to be a campy horror story about killer beets. Instead it was a book about a woman who was not happy with her life, could not deal with her depression or her anxiety, and her anxiety would not let her reach out to her support system. That’s the scary part, there just happened to be beets.

This book reflected my own anxieties and thought patterns back at me. It made me incredibly sad, but it was an excellent book.

Book That Made You Happy?

Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree. This book is just pure happy vibes. Like, when I think about it, not a lot happened in 300 pages but it was a delightful read all the same. It also made me really crave coffee….

Favorite Book-to-Movie Adaptation You’ve Seen This Year?

I don’t watch many movies to begin with and the ones I’ve watched recently have been Disney movies with my three year old daughter. So, unless we’re counting Cinderella and Tangled as a book-to-movie adaptation of Grimm’s Fairy tales, I don’t think I’ve seen any.

Most Beautiful Book You’ve Bought This Year?

I don’t buy many physical books these days. I usually get them from the library. But I really like the covers of the hardcover editions of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I think they capture the essence of the wacky, over the top, campiness of the books and they look cool too!

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.

Wrapping up January 2025

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This Month:

Top 5 Games of January 2025

GamePlaytime
Conan Chop Chop13.5 hours
Wytchwood12 hours
Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap11.5 hours
Jusant7.5 hours
Forever Skies7 hours

Conan Chop Chop takes the top spot this month, in no small part because it is easy to play on the Steam Deck. While I’ve fallen off my daily runs, I think I still might revisit this one and unlock a few more items before shelving it completely. Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap just came out last week and my playtime thus far is a testament to how much I’m enjoying it (a lot!).

December 2024 Goals in Review:

Explore the Road to the Black Sea DLC in ETS2: Missing from my most played games in January is Eurotruck Simulator 2 so this one was a bust. I was playing this almost exclusively in December but hardly touched it in January. Mostly because I got tired of moving the whole setup around when I wanted to drive virtual trucks and then moving it again when I wanted to use my computer for anything else. It’s not exactly hard, it involves moving the wheelstand and chair around and moving my monitor mount. But it’s inconvenient enough that it started to be a barrier to playing. I did drive around Romania for a few hours this month, ticking off cities as I went. Romania is full of windy roads up mountains and through dense forests. It’s a pretty area for sure. Maybe I’ll be a little less lazy in February and clock some more time behind the wheel.

Play games I bought during the Winter Sale: I played almost everything I bought from the Winter sale at least once this month. The only title I didn’t play was Vermintide 2 and that’s because I missed the night the squad was playing it. Otherwise, I’ve tried them all, which may be a first for any sort of Steam Sale I’ve participated in!

Post 8 times this month: Hey I did that! I got exactly 8 posts out in January and it felt like a very good cadence for me. Think I’ll try it again in February.

Books Read this Month:

Lost Man’s Lane by Scott Carson was my favorite book I read this month. Part supernatural mystery, part slice of life story about a kid in highschool in 1999. I couldn’t put it down and there’s just something about the writing style that I found compelling.

I listened to Darth Plagues by James Luceno on audio. I read Drew Karpyshyn’s Darth Bane trilogy last year and this was recommended as a good follow up to that series. The audiobook is fantasctic, with sound effects, music, and the narrator does an awesome job with all the voices. It’s more of a collection of stories about Darth Plagueis and Palpatine that spans decades. It ties right in to the Phantom Menance so if you ever wanted to learn more abut the Trade Federation here’s the book for you…It’s slow, doesn’t have a lot of action, and is mostly Star Wars politics but it held my interest enough to see it to the end.

Hammers on Bone was a short detective noir story except the dectective is an eldritch horror who eats other eldritch horrors. I’m not super in the Lovecraftian mythos but I’ve liked everything I’ve ready by Cassandra Khaw and this one is no exception. I’m definitely going to read it’s sequel, A Song for Quiet in February.

The Goals of 2025

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Rolling in to the new year with the Squad

We’re almost 2 weeks into the new year! Are you having a good year so far? Seems kind of the same as last year to me…Anyways, I’ve been marinating on my goals for 2025. You might call it procrastination, but I was thinking really hard about them (ok probably not). Looking back, I’ve never actually done a year long goal post. Or at least not one that I remember or can be brought up in a quick search through old posts. I set a reading goal every year, but that’s about as far as my long term goals go. So after seeing a bunch of these types of posts, I thought, that’s a great idea. I should do that. Then I can come back at the end of the year an see how I did.

Like I said, I make a reading goal every year. Historically, that’s been a set number of books I would like to finish. It usually ranges from 20-30 depending on how ambitious I’m feeling when I click the button in whatever reading app I’m using. Storygraph has a pages read yearly challenge that I started last year and will continue this year. It also has a minutes read goal, but that seems like a pain to track and would most likely drive me crazy. Best to stay away from that one. But I thought, how can I make my reading goals more interesting? I’ve been doing this whole “count the books” thing for a while, let’s spice it up. So this year, I’m not only focusing on how much I read but what I read:

Read 10% of my To Be Read List

Surprised I could find a screenshot with a book in it. A talking book, no less.

That’s right, I’m tackling that never ending TBR list that haunts me every time I go to the library. Mine is currently home to 201 books. Some of them have lived there long enough to be in middle school now. I loosely tried this out last year and read a number of books from my TBR. The “problem” (not an actual problem) was that I kept adding to it. So I started 2024 with 200 books and ended 2024 with 201 despite reading 10 or so from the list. Regardless, it’s something I’ll be trying this year with a little more focus.

I read, on average, around 30 books a year. 10% of my TBR is 20 books which leaves some room to read books that catch my eye during the year. I’m also giving my self some leeway here. I’m going to count any books I didn’t finish as part of this 10%. Last year, while test driving this out, I found books I was interested in years ago just didn’t spark the same level of interest by the time I got around to reading them.

Within this goal, I have a couple mini goals. One is to finish the Expanse series and all of it’s related short stories/novellas. I read four of them in 2023 and didn’t return to Jim Holden and his intrepid crew in 2024. I’d like to see how things play out before I forget what happened in the first 4 books. This would also get me 50% of the way to meeting this goal. The other is to read the oldest books on the list. They’ve been there forever, it’s a read them now or take them off kind of situation.

Then I thought, what if I applied the same kind of goal to gaming….

Play 10%of my Unplayed Games on Steam

Me, buried in my backlog.

I would like to note, mostly to myself, that I said play not complete 10% of my unplayed games. I’m defining unplayed as less than 2 hours in a game, which happens to be the majority of my Steam library. I feel like 2 hours is a fair amount of time to determine if I like a game and, if I don’t, it’s enough time to see if it get better.I f it does, great I’ll keep playing it, if not it’s being banished to the Hidden Games category, never to be seen again.

After sorting through everything via How Long To Beat, I’ve arrived at the magic number of 44. It’s a mix of unplayed games, games with less than 2 hours of playtime, and games that I’m still interested in playing more of.

Is it ambitious? Yes. Do I have that kind of time? Probably not. But it could be a fun way to focus some gaming choices. Or, it will be needlessly oppressive and I will abandon it. Only time will tell! The next goal will probably help with this one:

Play More Games on the Steam Deck

I’ve had a Steam Deck for 2 years now. When I bought it, I thought I’d use it like crazy. I have always loved the idea of handheld gaming, probably due to all the interations of gameboys and sony handhelds I had growing g up. In reality, it sits on my desk most of the time.

The problem is, I have a hard time starting games on it. I tend to feel a little cramped when going through tutorials on a smaller screen. Even those green check marked “Verified” games sometimes have font that’s just a little too small for me to read comfortably. I’m much more likely to use it to continue a game I have a few hours on PC first.

With that said, I’m going to try to make it a point to use it more. It’s a niffy little machine, and it deserves some love. I just need to find the right games for it.

Write 100 Posts this Year

Actual footage of this goal creeping up on me throughout the year.

The most ambitious goal yet! I’ve never written 100 posts in year and I’ve been out here for 9 years. Wait – 9 years? Really? Time flies….The closest I’ve gotten was back in 2020 with 81 posts. I want to challenge myself this year purely to see if I can do it. Doing the math it’s like 2 posts a week which sounds achievable to at the moment. Especially if I’m going to be playing all these games. Get ready for a bunch of impressions posts! Factor in Blaugust, which could count anywhere between 10%-31% it just might be achievable. Or you’ll never hear from me again, 50-50 on which way it goes. But in all seriousness, I am trying to carve out a writing habit, something I’ve been meaning to do for 9 years. Why not let 2025 be that year?

Just a Few this Time

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Even though I wasn’t playing all that much last year, I was still buying games. Which in retrospect, seems a bit silly as they’re still sitting, unplayed, staring back at mean mournfully from my library. But those games are old now, and the Winter Sale had new games to buy, so I set out to only buy a handful of that either looked interesting in the moment or had been on my wishlist for a while. I know Steam sales aren’t what they used to be and that better deals are often found on other sites during them but the seasonal sales are still when I do most of my shopping. I did show some restraint this time around.

My “strategy” for these sales is to go to my wishlist, sort it by discount, and start adding games to my cart that appeal to me in the moment. Then I wait a few days, review the cart, remove some games, review the wishlist again, maybe add some more things, repeat until right at the end of the sale when I finalize my purchase. I find it helps cut down on impulse purchases which I’m prone to. This is the period when I trim games from my wishlist as well. My “now or never” price point for a game is under $5. If it hits that, and I’m still passing it over, off it goes back into the ethereal mists of the Steam store.

My budget for this year’s Winter Sale was lower than usual on account of trying to buy games that I wanted to play over the next month rather than hoarding them until an unspecified date in the future. After 10 years on the platform and a backlog hundreds deep, it’s safe to say I’ve got plenty of options for when that unspecified date finally comes. But buying new games is fun and relatively cheap so what’s a little retail therapy right?

So, what did I actually buy? I know you’re just dying to know! I settled on four games by the end of the sale. One of which i ultimately ended up refunding because I could not get it to run.

Wytchwood: I added this to my wishlist earlier this year when I was looking for cozy games with quests. In my searches, Wytchwood kept coming up, though it’s debatable on how “cozy” it really is. The main objective is tricking people into situations so you can capture their souls for an angry demon-goat…but there’s no combat so lots of materials to collect, recipes to unlock, and a whole lot of quests. I also thought it would be a nice game for the Steam Deck which it’s turned out to be. I’ve already sunk some very enjoyable hours into it.

ATLYSS: This one’s a singleplayer/online action rpg that has the aesthetic of a 2000s era free to play MMO and some of the gameplay loops to boot. I tend to avoid early access, but it looked right up my alley and has an Overwhelmingly Positive score so I took the chance. I’ve played maybe 30 minutes, much of it spent grinding monsters for items to complete quests…it’s definitely my kind of game. All it’s missing to fit that F2P vibe is some fake micro transactions.

The Forest: Right before the Winter Sale started, I was in the market for a survival crafting game. The Forest, is one of those games I’ve seen around the Steam store for years but was always one I scrolled past when I saw it on the front page. I’m not typically one for survival crafting, but I wanted one that wasn’t in early access and The Forest was only $2! It was on the right sale at the right time.

Ghost of a Tale: This is one of those games that’s been on my wish list for years. It always caught my eye with it’s mouse characters and pretty screenshots on the store page. This year, it was $3 and I was determined to finally play it. Unfortunately, I could not get the game to start. It would go through the initial cut scenes but once it got to a point where I would could move the character the whole screen froze up. I went through all the basic troubleshooting: uninstall/reinstall, comparability mode, messing with resolutions and windowed mode, but I could not get it running. In the end, I refunded this one.

I was happy with these, and they came out to a grand total of $15 (after the refund). I was under budget!

Then the Squad got together and decided to go on a shopping spree…it’s hard to get four people to agree on games to play. So sometimes we go through a Steam Sale together and see if there’s anything that appeals to all of us. There’s a lot of lobbying back and forth as each of us try to convince the others why we think we should all get this or that. We typically settle on a few after much debate and it’s enough for us to play until the next big sale.

These are the four additional games we picked up for the group:

Nuclear Nightmare: To be perfectly honest, I have no idea what this game is. None of us had heard of it before but it was $2, has guns, and looks spooky so I’m sure we’ll enjoy it.

Ranch Simulator: A bit suprised by this one. The Squad tends to play action games and this one is definately not an action game. I think it will be a nice change of pace though for our group gaming sessions.

Warhammer: Vermintide 2: We played through the first Vermintide years ago and enjoyed it. We weren’t particularly good at it. We’ve been eyeing the sequel for a while but, up until this year, it hadn’t been cheap enough for us all to buy it.

Forever Skies: Another survival crafting game. This one looks like a mix between Raft (but in space!) and Subnautica.

I’m definitely set on games for a while. I’m not planning on buying anything new until Monster Hunter Wilds comes out at the end of February. Can’t wait for that one!

Returning to Winterland

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The Return to Winterland event in Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator kicked off last week. Like the Cruising Greece event, Return to Winterland has both a personal goal and a community goal to work towards. The personal goal is to deliver to each of the five depots in Winterland: The Christmas Market in town square, Marigold’s chocolate factory, The Northstar Post Office, Rudolph’ Crafts, and the Snowy Peaks mountain resort. In addition, you need to make 15 deliveries to or from Winterland. Completing the personal goal earns you a Winterland themed paint job, 6 festive exterior lights compatible with the top tier trucks, and a World of Trucks Achievement.

The community event challenges players to deliver Winterland goods to and from every city on both games maps to earn snowflakes. Each city earns a snowflake after 1000 deliveries between it and Winterland with each city able to earn up to 5 snowflakes. Every 200 snowflakes unlocks a new tier and a new Winterland themed cabin accessory. You have to complete personal goal to be eligible for the community goal rewards.

I like that you can participate in this event from either ETS2 or ATS and your contributions to either goal carrier over to both games. I have been participating from ETS2 mostly because I was already playing there to complete the Greece event. Also, SuperToast has been completing deliveries from ETS2 so sticking to one game makes it easier to meet up when we play together.

Winterland cargo jobs are picked up from the external market. Most are short distance trips so they don’t pay very well or give much experience but you can chain them together pretty quickly. One the cargo is picked up, it’s time to head to a Winterland portal which seem to be located at rest stops not too far from each city. Once you’re stopped at a portal, you can travel to Winterland. This also seems to reset the fatigue meter so I don’t have to stop to sleep while completing these deliveries. Must be some of that holiday magic at work.

Winterland looks great! It’s a bigger map than I was initially expecting and it’s charming. All the roads are covered in a blanket of snow which makes driving slightly more challenging. I don’t really notice too much of a difference unless I’m flooring it through turns. I tend to do this frequently since there isn’t any traffic on the roads. I haven’t flipped a truck yet but I’ve had plenty of close calls…The sound effect of tires on snow is so crunchy and satisfying!

Ok, so I did flip one truck…but that was on a switchback in Greece and not in Winterland!

Winterland also sports some cozy holiday vibes complete with ice rinks, Christmas music, and decorated trees galore. Each depot has a place to stop to watch a short cut scene that shows off the surroundings. My favorite depot, Northstar, has a giant frozen lake that you can drive around on. Snowy Peaks also offers some great views of Winterland from above.

Town Square in Winterland

I have four more deliveries to complete before the event ends on January 12th so I have plenty of time. Now that it’s after Christmas though, I’m not sure if I’ll be using any of the rewards from the event. Plus, I don’t have a top tier truck yet anyways.

I have enjoyed both of the ETS2 events I’ve participated in thus far. The structure reminds me of Elite: Dangerous‘s Community Goals where everyone pitches in to accomplish something big. I have been trying to take jobs to and from cities that don’t yet have their first snowflakes. There are still plenty left, but it is fun to see a city with very few deliveries hit 1000 and get their first snowflake seemingly overnight.

My 2024 Steam Replay

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I had forgotten that Steam does a year end summary until I saw some other bloggers posting theirs. I must have missed the giant splash page on the home page of Steam when it was up right before the Winter Sale kicked off. Luckily, I was still able to find the link from this Steam news post.

I am a sucker for end of the year wrap ups and stats. There’s just something about seeing an activity laid out in a nice graph that makes my brain happy. Usually I’m pretty good at guessing what the stats will show but sometimes they can reveal a surprise or two.

As a side note, my Replay from 2023 was missing from the bottom of the 2024 Replay page and I only had a button for 2022. I fixed this by changing the end of the URL from https://store.steampowered.com/replay/yoursteamIDnumber/2024 to 2023 to get to last years Replay. Once I did that, the button for 2023 appeared at the bottom of this year’s Replay page.

If you asked me to sum up my gaming in 2024 before I looked at my Steam Replay I would have said I played less games than last year and spent less time gaming over all. Unfortunately, Steam Replay only breaks down game play time in percentages rather than hours so there isn’t a good way to determine if I spent more or less time gaming this year. However, it does track games played and, as it turns out, I played more games than last year. A grand total of 69, which is 11 games more than 2023. Now whether this means I actually played 11 more games than last year is debatable. Since there is a stat for number of sessions on played games, I am assuming that Steam counts a game as played if it was booted up during the year. So maybe I opened up more games this year than last year in a few fits of indecision when deciding what to play.

My most played game this year was Trove, making up 15% of my playtime over 34 sessions. The Gear Update released in March of this year which added a new tier of Crystal gear to chase after and a crafting system which makes gearing up way easier. I popped back in after learning about the update in April and spent most of May in Trove. This tracks with how I typically engage with the game these days, activating a Patron pass, playing for a month, and then falling off when the Patron pass ends. I’m sure I’ll be back in Trove sometime in 2025, I always come back….

The spider graph…well it’s there. Some of it makes sense, NGU Idle was my second most played game this year so the strong trend towards Idler makes sense. Racing and Driving makes sense too.I got into sim racing at the beginning of the year, playing a lot of Asseto Corsa and Automobilista 2. I finished up the year playing mostly Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator in December. I’m still trying to puzzle out why Tower Defense, Collectathon, and Action Rouglike are on there.

Below are my top played games, which is what I’m guessing these categories are taken from:

The only game here that I screams Action Rougelike to me is Lethal Company which made up 3% of my playtime this year.

Esports Godfather ( a terrible name I know, but a fun game) is a MOBA Esport team manager game/ deckbuilder. MOBAs do have towers that need defending so maybe that’s how this category go in there? With the addition of Game Dev Tycoon I would change this category to Management.

That leaves Collectathon, which I tend to relate to 3D platformers in the vein of Mario 64, which I certainly didn’t play any of this year. But if I apply the term with a more literal interpretation, I could see Disney Dreamlight Valley or Secrets of Grindea filling this category pretty well.

I like this graph, as it summarizes up the entire year nicely. The solid colors are a single game where the grey is everything else. tend to play one game intensly and then ditch it for something new which appears to be at a rate of once per month this year. It also confirms my suspicion that I spend a lot of time playing games in the winter until the weather starts to get nice. Then even less gaming time as the holidays roll around. This graph doesn’t show the time I spent playing Guild Wars 2 this summer. If it did, you’d see a sizable color bar on July and August.

Hope you had a good year!

Cruising Greece in ETS2

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At the beginning of the moth, the Greece DLC released for Euro Truck Simulator 2. Along with it comes the “Cruising Greece” event which challenges players to collectively drive 200,000,000km while delivering cargo to any city in the country. There’s also a personal goal to deliver goods to or from all 15 cities on the map. For the jobs to count, they must be distance of 200km or more. and it has to be from the external market which requires your own truck.

This event just so happened to coincide with me starting a new profile in ETS2. I had a bunch of profiles built up over the years of sporadically playing together with the Squad. They all mostly have huge bank loans or unlimited money and I wanted to play the game right and start fresh this time around. I know very little about the game other than drive the truck to the destination which, come to find out, is like 90% of the game anyways.

Since I wanted to participate in the event, I had to choose a starting city in Greece. I went with Kalamata, not because its the name of a delicious olive (well maybe a little..) but because it was the southernmost starting city. My thought being that starting further south would mean more cities would be 200km or more from me.

The next thing I needed was my own truck. Trucks are expensive and I didn’t want to spend time using other people’s trucks via Quick Jobs. So I did what any sensabile person would do, I took out a €100,000 loan from the bank to finance a used truck! Even 100k doesn’t get you much truck but I took what I could get, a Volvo FH3 Sleeper with 420hp and 9,000km already on it. It gets the jobs done, though sometimes when I take a heavy cargo mission I get a message that my truck isn’t optimized for it. I haven’t run into anything I couldn’t haul yet.

The tricky parts of completing the event are the six cities located on the islands of Greece. Argostoli, Chania, Chios, Heraklion, Mitilini, and Rhodes can only be accessed by taking a ferry from one of the ports. However, The minimum 200km distance only counts for land travel. It took traveling to two or three cities before I figured out why they weren’t being counted. I was traveling 300km+ but only 30km or so of that distance was over land. The rest was spent lounging on a ferry.

The island cities are fun but challenging to drive a truck through. There are some very narrow streets and some very tight corners that I was not ready for. I learned pretty quickly how close I could get to objects on either side of the truck and how to not get the trailer stuck on turns.

The Greece map has some stunning views for a game that’s 12 years old. I find myself constantly going to photo mode to look around and take pictures. I have more pictures of a “truck in front of things” in my screenshot folder than I ever thought I would.

I currently have 3 cities left to visit to complete the event: Athens, Mitilini, and Patras. All three cities, are fairly close to each other so I’ll most likely be taking a job from each city to somewhere else that meets the minimum distance requirements and then driving to the next city before taking another job. I’m kind of surprised it’s taken me this long to deliver or take a job from Athens. I’ve through Athens plenty of times and I’ve been in and out of the port there actually stopped in the city itself.

My plan is to finish the Greece event this week so I can start working on the winter event that started earlier this week. I really need some Christmas lights for my truck!

I Guess I’m Playing Euro Truck Simulator 2 Now?

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Now if you would have told me, even a month ago, that I would be writing about Euro Truck Simulator 2 I wouldn’t have believed you. ETS2 was one of the first games I bought on Steam almost exactly 10 years ago, according to my purchase history. I picked it up because it was on sale (of course) and because it was one of those “must own” games with Overwhelmingly Positive reviews. The year prior I had been in a bad car accident and had a lot of anxiety related to driving. In a way, playing ETS2, even with a controller on a laptop, was a cathartic experience. I don’t think I played it all that long, probably pulled away by all the other shiny things on Steam. I bought Hero Siege the same week, and that’s still one of my most played games.

After meeting the Squad 3 years later, I dipped back into ETS2 once or twice a year. It’s SuperToast’s main game and he’s been streaming it on our twitch channel almost every Thursday since 2017. Every once and a while we’ll join him for some shenanigans. Usually involving a lot of crashes.

Last Christmas, I was home for the holidays and visited Blades. We took out his old racing wheel setup, hooked it up to a PS3, and played a bunch of Gran Turismo 3. It was the first time I had ever played a racing game with a racing wheel and I was hooked! When we got back home, I immediately ordered a wheel and a wheel stand and got very into Assetto Corsa and Automobilista for the next few months. As usual, my interest fell off and my wheel has been sitting next to my desk ever since.

Last month, I started contributing to OpenStreetMap after realizing my neighborhood was missing from the map while playing MissionChief. I wrote a little about OpenStreetMap before but you can think of it like Wikipedia for maps. Anyone can contribute to or edit the map with the goal of providing open spatial data to whoever wants to use it. It got me interested in learning more about maps, map making, and geography.

ETS2 sits in the middle of both of these things. It’s way more fun and immersive to play with a wheel over a controller. Though, when I bought my wheel, I didn’t buy a gear shifter, so I’ve been driving my trucks around using paddle shifters like a race car…

I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that I’m so into this game right now. The last few Decembers have been the time I typically get back into Elite: Dangerous. You don’t have to look hard to find Elite described as Space trucking. I Flying spaceships is cool, driving a truck doesn’t seem like it would be quite as exciting. But! It’s super relaxing and it’s the perfect podcast game!