T w e n t y S i d e d

I have written before about Lifeless Planet, one of my favorite games. It’s short, not difficult (although I still haven’t tried to get the achievement with no lives lost; I really don’t think I can do it. Likewise the speedrun, although I’m more optimistic about that one) and has a fantastic sci-fi story. A crew of three American astronauts in a post-Apollo pre-end-of-the-Cold-War alternative timeline travel at twice the speed of light for 15 years (i.e. 30 Light Years away) to a newly-discovered green and oxygen-rich planet. This is a one-way mission (as far as you, the main character knows) to verify a habitable planet reachable by Earthlings. However on arrival your capsule crash-lands and you discover a barren, lifeless world. Having been left for dead by your colleagues, you follow their footsteps and soon discover that this world appears to have been *already settled* (barely) by the Soviet Union! You learn as you explore the planet and the Soviet structures present that the U.S.S.R. discovered a “portal” in Siberia in 1974 that transported them instantly to this lush green planet. The Soviets immediately began quietly establishing themselves here before announcing the discovery to the world. They also discovered that the green moss or algae that covered EVERYTHING was actually a power source! They learned to tap into this substance for UNLIMITED POWER! They discovered artifacts from the alien race that created the portals, including the remnants of other portals and many other devices, and a portal that let them return to Earth. Unfortunately soon after switching over to the “green” substance as their power source, all life on the planet began to die. The portal from Earth became unstable, destroying anything sent through it. Yes, including people. The portal that returned the Soviets to Earth suddenly changed to show an alien city full of tall skyscrapers and round portals. Also the Soviet scientists realized that time passed on this planet much more quickly than on Earth. Minutes on this new planet equaled months on Earth. As the Soviets died off, one scientists expounds that the alien city visible through the “return” portal isn’t an alien city at all; it *is* the Earth…the Earth as it would appear hundreds if not thousands of years in the future. You, the American astronaut, having been guided through all this by a Soviet woman who somehow hybridized with the native life energy and sacrificed herself to bring life back to this world, knowing the final portal is the only way forward to save his life, steps through the portal to a lush world and an unfamiliar city. The End. (there’s also a sub-plot about letting go and living your life to the fullest, but honestly it’s not that important)

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Lifeless Moon: A Worthy Sequel?”

Paige Francis He/him

More on that in a minute. I decided to try using Opera on Linux instead of Firefox. My motivation is the influence Google has been exerting on Firefox coupled with suspiciously-rapid “updates” over the last couple of months or so. Of course, I want to be clear: choosing Opera over Firefox because of problems with Google’s influence is a bit like saying “I don’t like how General Motors controls Opel so I’ll buy a Chevy instead.” Firefox is still based on the Gecko engine; Opera is built on Chromium. As in, Chrome. I have, however; accomplished some of the things I needed to do in order to move on to maybe a more secure and less-Google influenced browser, like maybe LibreWolf. Most importantly I broke my dependence on Firefox’s sync settings, and the Linux version of Opera (in my experience so far) WILL NOT import ANYTHING from any external browser. Or rather, at least; the EASY way. It won’t detect that I have Firefox installed. I had to manually export bookmarks to a file then import it. And since I’ve been meaning to move all my Firefox-stored passwords to Bitwarden for a while, I finally went through that process. After some setup Opera works…fine. I have noticed that it slows down after a while doing playlist management in YouTube, but some things work better on Opera than on Firefox, like video redirects on some sites. Certain ones don’t work on Firefox; they do on Opera. Bit of a surprise honestly, because I thought they were just broken. I will likely try LibreWolf sooner rather than later. Firefox works *well* for me, I just want to get further away from Google.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “I Grew Up With Two Songs Called “Forever Young””

Paige Francis He/him

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”

Paige Francis He/him