This week is just more Rimworld.
Not much has happened, except that I forgot to kill a bug hive, and every time I tried to get rid of it I would get raided or sieged. By the time I had a chance to kill it, it had grown to a total of 172 bugs, and 30 hives. My framerate was terrible if I had the game speed up, and I had to get allies help and save scum just to not lose everything.
What’s everyone else doing this week?
Sable has been on my Steam Wishlist for quite a while. Long enough that I had actually *removed* it for several months to a year, because it was never on sale for enough of a discount to make it a “must get” option. Well, this weekend I was notified that Sable was 65% off, which put it under $10. I figured that was worth it. Sable is arguably my favorite type of game: platforming/exploration/puzzle-solving with minimum (or no) combat. There are games that include combat that I still really enjoy, like Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy and the first remake of Prince of Persia. Or the first and second generation of Tomb Raider games. Likewise, the exploration component can be more expansive or even effectively non-existent. In Prince of Persia and Tomb Raider for example, the exploration content extended to places you could go to that you didn’t actually have to explore and “secret” items. This feature is occasionally called “open-world,” although this is a nebulous concept that only really works with a proper level of interaction, and depending on the primary gameplay. In Sable, for instance; exploration and secret-finding seems to be the entirety of the open world. I’ve read there are several optional side-quests, but in the introduction/tutorial the gameplay was *mostly* linear. Today I’ll go through that first area.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “New Game: Sable”
This week has just been Rimworld.
I finally got around to trying some of the DLC content, and the Biotech DLC is just, good. Having xenotypes and being able to collect genes from the different xenotypes, is really cool. I’ve also just gotten a Mechanitor so now I can get little helper robots. Sure, I can also get combat robots. But, I really need the Roomba to clean my base/ There’s dirt and blood in every room and nobody has had time to clean it. Mostly because either someone is bleeding everywhere, or they are recovering from bleeding everywhere.
The other DLC I finally played was Anomaly. It’s fine. Unlike all of the other DLCs it doesn’t seem to add anything that fundamentally changes how I play. It mainly adds some useful but niche items, and some new enemies that all seem to have their own gimmick. It’s fun, but not adding to the game as a whole.
Anyway, what’s up with everyone else this week?
I spent a lot of time last summer talking about how everything was breaking. The last few days I’ve spent on car repairs. Nothing serious, but time consuming. In fact the days I set aside to plan and write this particular post have been spent on blow-outs and blinkers. I’m about to go get one more thing working and then take a shower and maybe even go to bed after. I don’t normally drink what are most-commonly-known as soft drinks or carbonated beverages, but it was hot enough today to take a Coke Zero break, and then have another later.
So, my apologies for not having anything substantive ready for this week. The ease with which I replaced the Manjaro installation on my desktop with Mint has me itching to try other distributions again, using what I know now. I was planning on trying a Bazzite install (without the nVidia drivers) until the child that is running Bazzite mentioned that since an update early this week Bazzite started asking them to log in to the wifi network every now and then. They aren’t *disconnected* from the network…everything is still working. The system has just started asking them to log in again. They finally clicked on the prompt and it opened a webpage having to do with Fedora. But we have no idea what is prompting this behavior. It did NOT start out doing this; it happened as part of an update.
Troubling.
Anyway, that’s it for now; see you next week!
This week I’ve played more Rimworld.
Instead of trying the new content with the DLC, I had started a new colony because I wanted to start in a different biome and I didn’t like what I had built so far. So I’m about where I was last week but with a better colony.
I also got to play Zombicide for the first time in roughly 10 years. It was fun, even though I got confused because of a card saying something about AP, when there are both actions and A mechanic called adrenaline, and I wrongly assumed that AP meant action points. Me getting confused didn’t really matter in the end because everyone playing was also learning the game.
So anyway what’s everyone doing this week?
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we designed them to.
A big chunk of the internet went down in October of 2016. What happened? Was it a hack?
This mess of dross, confusion, and terrible UI design is the storefront the big publishers couldn't beat? Amazing.
Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.
Here is how I'd conquer the game-publishing business. (Hint: NOT by copying EA, 2K, Activision, Take-Two, or Ubisoft.)
An ongoing series where I work on making a 2D action game from scratch.
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
T w e n t y S i d e d
