Nothing PersonalNothing Personal

Welcome

Hi! Since this is the home page, a little introduction is in order. I’m Andrew, and this is my blog.

I mostly write about #games and #what I did last month, but other stuff too: check out the Site map for specific things, or the Tags page for broad categories.

See the About page for more details.

No Steam Controller 2 for me, thanks

Out of steam

I changed my mind, I don’t want one.

Black glossy gamepad with two circular touch pads, the left one has a groove resembling a dpad, a joystick and four face buttons.
[Steam Controller]

First of all, this is Valve, a bad company, that is notorious for only caring about profit, so it can easily abandon the project and stop supporting it. I’m not singling them out, commercial companies do that, but that’s my point: I don’t trust any of them. And I don’t trust the open source community to carry the torch, no offense.

And it needs support: it’s software based, which is my personal nightmare. A piece of hardware that is useless on its own? Horrible! That’s why I’ve been looking at mice with on-board memory.

And that’s why I’m more or less satisfied with so-called elite/pro/whatever gamepads, because they work as gamepads by themselves. If I can have a gamepad with four programmable back buttons, I’m 90% there: it’s a sweet spot between simplicity and customization.

Because customization is the greatest feature of a Steam Controller. It’s also its biggest drawback: it needs to be customized. Pads are not sticks, nor are they a mouse. They are, in my opinion, better, but only if you willing to spend time tinkering with them. A lot.

I realize that this falls into the “you want perfection but you only got good enough” category, and for some people a Steam Controller or something like it is more of an accessibility aid than it is for me.

All of this is based on my experience with the Steam Controller, which I got on day one. I liked it right away, I never had any complaints about the shape or anything like that. Steam Input (the software part, basically) was good enough to start with, and it got better over time. But after a couple of years I realized that the drawbacks outweighed the benefits: I tinkered more than I played. And in another couple of years Valve decided to rewrite the software and, at least in my opinion, made it worse.

Black handheld device, with a screen in the middle and gamepad part on both sides: a square touchpad and a joystick on each side, dpad on the left and face buttons on the right.
[Steam Deck]

That’s also why I don’t want a Steam Deck. It’s like those old TV combos that have a VHS or DVD player built in. One thing goes out and bye-bye the whole deal.

I also realize that the reason we are not getting Steam Controller 2 may be much simpler: a lawsuit.

Bottom line, I know myself and I like gamepads. And if there’s an interesting new one, there’s a good chance I’ll get it, even if I clearly don’t need one. But it would have to be really, really interesting, and a true successor to the Steam Controller is at the bottom of that list.

Summary for October 2024

Divine Beasts

Two scelettons, holding spiked clubs from which hang pieces of colethes, face each other in a torch-lit dingeon. There is a dialogue box on the screen where one of the sceletons says “Best not to think about it. I don’t want to fall to bits ‘cos of excess existential thought. Nasty…”.
[Divine Divinity]

Divine Divinity is a game from the era when attitude was a valid substitute for humor, message, or even story. So it is a bit surprising that it is very restrained. Not without its eyebrow raising moments, but nothing worth calling out, I think.

Starting with the good, it makes me more interested in what else Larian has done (I’ve already dipped my toes into some of their games, but no more than that). There’s also the bad: it’s a bit junky and its difficulty is uneven, to say the least: I only finished it by cheating my ass off. Do I regret playing it? No. Can I recommend it? Eh-h-h…

Princess Zelda, blonde elf in a blue shirt, dark pants and shoes, and a Tablet PC-like magical device called the Sheikah Slate on her belt. She uses a power of Magnesis, which looks like a big magnet in her hands, to smash a huge metal crate into a bunch of bokoblins (pig-like humanoids) and lizalfos (bipedal chameleons). There are a lot of them around, waiting for a fight.
[Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity]

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is in its own subgenre, but it’s basically a beat-them-up. It can be repetitive, but on easy is at least not demanding. It tells the alternative history version of the backstory of Breath of the Wild, and manages to tour through it’s world, bringing most of the notable characters (with some very surprising choices@) along the way. Fan service-y? Sure, but still easy-going fun and a good excuse to revisit this world for the third time.

Communication in games

Come, you, nya cat

At this point, I accept that I will never play another tabletop roleplaying game again. Or any video game with similar level of engagement between players. Consider, that to play something like this, you need:

  1. friends,
  2. …who play games,
  3. …who play the same games you do,
  4. …at the same time as you.

Or dealing with strangers online? Nope.

Partially because of this, and partially because it’s a fascinating thing in itself, I’ve been interested in games that approach this problem: games that require some coordination between players (otherwise why talk at all?) but don’t use (or at least don’t require) text or voice chat.

I wonder what was the first multiplayer game where jumping became a form of communication. Probably the first multiplayer game with jumping in it 🙂

Splatoon can be kind of a level zero. The game is simple enough that you can just play cooperatively and it works. Like with any game, there are ways to talk to your friends, and a coordinated team would be better, but it’s not necessary to have fun.

Two characters wearing red ponchos, hoods and scarves with gold trim and white symbols, similar to the clothes worn by characters in the game Journey. They are standing in a glittering, magical-looking desert, looking at a silhouette of a distant castle hidden in the clouds.
[Sky: Children of the Light]

Games like Journey and Sky: Children of the Light go for something simple, like Splatoon, but they also invent their own thing. Calling it a language is a stretch, but there is communication. If you think about it, a lot of human communication is non-verbal anyway, and this is no different. And when it works, it’s very special.

Apex Legend’s ping ability is brilliant. It’s even useful if you use the voice chat that the game has. If you are not familiar with it, you just have a special button that you press while pointing at something and your character would say something appropriate. You can warn about the enemy, you can say that there is an item on the ground, or even that you need ammo for your gun. It is great.

You can throw the entire Dark Souls Extended Cinematic Universe in here as games that have gestures. And I find that the vast majority of people actually roleplay in these games. Sure, there are not a lot of ways to not do that, but I still think it is a design choice and a good one. When someone attacks you or helps you, it feels appropriate to the world of the game.

In a green, lush forest that looks like a paper diorama, two small figures wave to each other across the river.
[Book of Travels]

There are a lot of other games that do something similar or maybe very different that I haven’t played or have forgotten. For example, I am still trying to figure out what the hell Book of Travels even is.

Summary for September 2024

A whole wide witchy world

A very small figure of April Ryan, a short-haired brunette, stands on a country road. There are some small wooded buildings, probably a house and a barn, off to her left, with huge sunflower-like flowers behind a small fence. To her right, there is a small herd of animals that looks like an elephant-bull hybrid. Further out, lush green mountains, stretching far into a bluish haze under fluffy white clouds. There are also two huge statues of humanoids blowing into horns.
[The Longest Journey]

I don’t need a “it’s a game from a quarter of a century ago” qualifier to say that The Longest Journey is a great game. Because there is not much to qualify. Sure, it’s not perfect, nothing is. But the story is good, the puzzles are logical, it’s still pretty and very charming. Quite progressive in places@, too.

Like many fairy tales, Tchia is a bit dark. It’s also a bit junky in that indie way. But overall, a very good game! A sort of Breath of the Wild and The Wind Waker hybrid. Plenty to do, collect, discover and customise.

Girl with short red hair, wearing a white jacket, dark pants and boots, glides on a zip line towards a concrete tower. Below her is a sandy desert, to her right is a large concrete building, and to her left are some white tube-shaped missile debris. On the horizon is an ominous red storm with white clouds swirling around it.
[Caravan SandWitch]

A significant element of both Caravan SandWitch and Mika and the Witch’s Mountain stories is how capitalism is ruining it for all of us. In both games you traverse a decently sized open world. You help the community, collect things and find secrets. There are non-humanoid people around, and they both have witches. The same game?

I’m kidding, but there are surprisingly many similarities, apart from the obvious: in Caravan you drive a van, but in Mika you fly on a broom. By the way, this is more platforming with gliding, less actual flying. I know, I was worried too: the ghost of Superman 64 is always looming.

They did it. They did it again. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is fantastic!

Princess Zelda, a blonde lady with pointed ears, wearing a white dress with blue trim, stands on the edge of a sunlit world. There are mountains in the distance. In front of her is a river with clear water, then a forest with some roads in it. In the middle of it all is a town, surrounded by a moat, with a castle in it. Everything is somewhat blocky and cartoony.
[The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom]

OK, the elephant in the room: developers, and Nintendo is no exception, have a tendency to say shit and then either the game doesn’t even have that as a problem, or it goes beyond that and is actually good, progressive, if you like. This is more or less the case here. Well, I wouldn’t call Echoes of Wisdom woke or anything, but as far as I can tell, it never makes a misstep and delivers a complete The Legend of Zelda game with Zelda as the protagonist.

And it is complete, to the point where I can’t even think of what was in BotW/TotK that isn’t here. From dungeons to shrines, from quests to secrets, from horse riding to imaginative and fun world manipulation (“hey, can I do that?… oh wow, I totally can!”).

Obviously, it has its own thing going on with the echoes mechanic, and there’s been some tweaking to make it work in flat-ish style of the Link’s Awakening remake, but it’s all there! And the game is long, too. There are also a few firsts that I won’t spoil. And cats. So many cats!

I think I mentioned somewhere that the Zelda games from Nintendo are my “problematic faves”, and I stand by that: problems ranging from questionable game elements to the firing of a harassed employee. But I think if they keep going in this direction with games (even with ridiculous claims that there needs to be a justification for these changes) and fix other shit, I won’t have to say it so often.

Typograf for Kate

Fancy typography

At this point, I’ve switched to Kate Editor. It’s much simpler than VS Code/Codium and similar programs, and I like that. There are ways to customize it to your liking that I’m still exploring, but one I’ve already done is add Typograf.

The description is in Russian, so the gist of it is this: Typograf (which can be a CLI application, an extension to your browser, etc.) formats the selected text, changing quotes, dashes, elipses, and stuff like that to it’s fancier form. So "Huh..." would become “Huh…”. It also puts non-breaking spaces where they belong. Pretty useful.

To be fair, Hugo already does the fancy thing with every Markdown file, but I prefer to have more control over it.

And we can use it in Kate! First, let’s install typograf-cli with npm (which is a package manager for things written in JavaScript):

npm install typograf-cli -g
[Installing typograf-cli]

With -g installation flag, it should be in our $PATH for easy of use.

In Kate, we go Tools → External Tools → Configure → Add → Add Tool. Then fill in the text boxes as follows:

Text BoxInput
NameTypograf
Executabletypograf
Arguments--stdin -c /path/­to/config
Input%{Document:Selection:Text}
OutputReplace selected text

-c is for a settings file if we want to change the default behavior. It really wants a full path for some reason, so no ~/. Mine is -c /home/­andrew/­.config/­typograf/­typograf.json

At the end, it should look like this:

Screenshot of the Edit Tool window in Kate. Its contents are described in the table above.
[Edit Tool — Kate]

We can customize these to process the entire document, for example. But I just add a keyboard shortcut (Settings → Configure Keyboard Shortcuts…), and it does the magic on a selected text.


Bonus, in Micro we can add

"Alt-y": "command:textfilter typograf --stdin -c /path/­to/config"
[typograf-cli for Micro editor]

to .config/micro/bindings.json for the same result. Alt-y is a keyboard shortcut that we can pick.