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!
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.
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 ofHello 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.
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.
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 Valleyfixes 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.
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 tothe 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.
While 31 posts in August is not my goal it’s an aspiration and something I might be able to do one of these days. Looking back, my most “successful” Blaugust was in 2022 where I eked out 26 posts. That’s successful in the sense that it was the year with the most posts, but really more than 0 posts in August is a success in my book. More realistically, I see myself in the 10-15 range this year and would be very happy with that.
I joined Blaugust this year to give me some extra motivation to start writing regularly again. I already feel like that’s working. It may only be day two but I’ve already doubled this year’s post count. I even have two more posts scheduled out this weekend!
You never know though, my future self might find pleasantly surprise me at the end of the month. No pressure on you future self!
To get to that 10-15 post range I will need to spend more time playing games than I have been. I’m not sure if that will come in the form of trying lots of things from my library I haven’t played before or finding a game to sink some time into all month. I’ve been eyeing No Man’s Sky since it just had a graphical update and I haven’t played it in years. I also have a horde of games I, inexplicably, picked up in this years Steam Summer Sale that I really should should play…I’m suspecting it will be a mix of both.Either way, I’m hoping to find something that re-capture my interest and give me some posts to write.
And if not, well, I’ll just have to find something else to write about this month. That could be fun too.
It’s always hard for me to figure out what to say when there’s a large gap in between posts. Do I talk about where I’ve been? It’s been like 6 months after all. Do I start back up like nothing happened?
I was going to do the whole ‘This is why I haven’t written in a while’ thing. More for myself, really, than any one else’s beneift. Then I got to the end of it and it all seemed very familiar. It turns out, I basically wrote the same thing earlier this year. So I scrapped that and started thinking about another angle.
I didn’t actually need to do much thinking after all. In the Blaugust kick off post this year, Bel has suggested using the first post of Blaugust as an introduction post. What better way to end a long hiatus than talk about my blog and participate in a month long event with a great community!
I’m Kluwes, this is my blog Many Welps. I write about video games and sometimes fiction podcasts/audio dramas. What you’ll find here are mostly accounts of play sessions either on my own or with my friends (like this). They’re my favorite blog posts to read and also my favorite to write! You’ll also find summaries of games that I finish in my Backlogged posts which I don’t like to call reviews but kind of end up being them anyways.
I started blogging in 2016 during the Newbie Blogger Initiative event with the idea that I would write mostly about MMOs. I also had this, frankly, naive idea that I would play through all of my games in my backlog at the time and write about that. I had only had a Steam account for 2 years at that point, but still 79 games is a lot to go through.
Over the years the blog has changed quite a bit. I found that forcing myself to play games in my backlog was not fun and abandoned that idea after a while. I did get a nice re-occuring post format out of it though so it wasn’t all bad. Over time I had less time to play MMOs and now mostly write about single player or co-op games. I changed the name of my blog from I’m Not Squishy to Many Welps 4 years ago to better align with what I was writing about at the time. I still play games every weekend with my friend group who we’ve deemed the Welp Squad so the name still fits today.
Over the last few years I’ve been spending less and less time playing games and instead focusing on other things. I may try branching out and trying to write about other things. One of my goals for Blaugust is to see if I can’t rekindle that love of games over the next month. Or I might try writing about some other topics and see if I enjoy it. Either way, I want to write more than I have been.
I’m very excited to get back to blogging this month. Bear with me here as I find my footing again. I am so out of practice.
There have been plenty others, but this one is mine. Can I call it an impression if I’ve already sunk 50 hours in to it before I got around to putting my thoughts down? To answer a question with a question: Sure why not?! It’s certainly left an impression on me and has sucked up almost all of my free time this last week or so. I can’t remember the last time I sat down to play a game and got up with the hours just passing by. Well…I’m sure I could find a post about such a game around here somewhere…
I had grand plans of writing posts as I went to really capture all that excitement and discovery. But I never could never put it down to write when all I wanted to do was play. Ah well, maybe next time…The mix of creature collector and survival game is a more potent combination than I imagined. The two game-play loops of collect more monsters and collect more stuff to collect more monsters feed in to each other so,so, well.
I’ve been keeping an eye on Palworld for, what feels like at least a few years. I remember stumbling across the trailer on Steam late one night and instantly sharing it with the squad in our Discord. We all agreed, we had to play it when it came out. From the trailer, it looked like not much more than a meme game. Shoot (not)Pokemon! Then use your (not) Pokemon to craft you more guns! And take along your (not) Pokemon and your gun to fight more (not) Pokemon! It looked like something we’d play for a weekend, laugh about it, shelve it, and pick up some other game to play the next week. It was quite a shock when it released and broke records as millions of people flocked to play it.
The creature collection and map exploration is more of a draw for me than the base building part. The base is just a necessary step to capturing more pals and seeing more of the world. I have spent almost no time designing anything. For the most part, I plop things down where they fit when I need them. Which has led to an expanding pile of crafting tables, beds, and machines.
What’s nice is that if and when I find I need to move something, there’s no resource penalty. Everything magically comes back to your inventory. Even so, I haven’t moved my first base set up which is located 50 feet from where I started. There are better areas but I can’t be bothered to move *all that stuff!!* The only reason this base has any walls is to a) int erupt the pathing of enemies during raids which makes them take a very long way to get to me (unless they can fly…Then it’s not much help) and b) to stop my Pals from wandering where they get stuck all the time.
I set up a second base next to a nice ore spawn. I tried to optimize this one more to have a steady income of ore, which you need all the time, but never quite got it the way I thought it should work. It’s simply just too slow even with Pals with good mining skills. I could mine the ore manually with a good pick axe faster than any of my current pals.
Which surprised me, really. It seems like Palworld wants to have an automation thing going on. I mean, it’s got assembly lines for crying out loud! But it doesn’t provide good tools to set this up and Pal’s actions really limit how much you can really automate. For example, they’ll only pick up materials on the ground and bring it to a box. They won’t pick up the material and bring it to a crafting bench and craft a thing. They just pile it up into a box until I pick something to craft. Then they’ll help but they won’t bring the crafted materials to a box. So really it’s more like they slapped a Pokemon on a crafting timer and said good enough.
The world is fun to explore though. It’s compelling to set off to an undiscovered part of the map and see what’s out there. You’re always running in to obstacle that you need to craft your way around. Higher level pals need higher level weapons and Pal sphere’s to catch, some areas need heat or cold resistant armor, and some areas just need a better Pal companion to ride on to get there. There’s a very strong feeling of progression which has kept me engaged for quite a long time.
More thoughts to come I’m sure. Maybe even better screenshots, if I can figure out how to hide the UI…
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.
Many Welps 