Summary for April 2024
Nintendo. Nintendo never changes.
Fallout is a comedy. A dark, violent, crude, bloody comedy. That doesn’t mean it’s funny, the structure is comedy. Ridiculous and awful things happen to ridiculous and awful people. But yeah, sometimes it is funny. And very good!
Princess Peach Showtime! has an inherent problem: rarity. Mario seems to appear in a dozen games a year, but Peach may appear as a playable character in two, if that. So no matter what happens, the game will be at a higher level of scrutiny. I’m not saying that as an excuse, Nintendo doesn’t deserve it. They should do better!
But if you ignore that for a second, I think the game is pretty good. Not great, but good. Would be a great start to a series! *stares at Nintendo*
Also, it seems that the premise of the game – Peach playing many roles – is the answer to the rarity problem. They want to bridge the gap faster by having 10 games in one. That is probably not the logic the developers had, but it is funny to think that way.
Summary for March 2024
▲ ◄ ► ▲ ◄ ►
I am a “Hey, listen!” liker and Water Temple defender. Can I list a bunch of flaws of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time? Sure! Can I praise it a lot too? Of course! Does anyone not know about this game and I would be wasting my time doing both? Definitely. So, yeah, it’s good, really good.
⚙ Lutris installs Ship of Harkinian. I also installed Malon (Heroine) and Female Pronouns mods.
I updated my profile a bit, added /uses page.
And that’s about it. I started a couple of games and then abandoned them or put them on hold. I tinkered with a few things, but nothing really finished. At least nothing worth sharing. One of those months, I suppose.
Summary for February 2024
20 years ago.
My logic for the month was: if I have a new PC, with a new (-ish) OS, and a new gamepad, it would be logical to test it all with something familiar. Besides, something familiar is comforting, which is nice these days.
I started with Dungeon Keeper. Then I remembered this post and went from there. But not just to replay those four games, I also used them as jumping off points to look at other similar games. Oh, and I narrowed it down to games that are 20 years old or older, in addition to the usual restrictions.
Dungeon Keeper is a very atypical RTS. Something of a god game, something of a management sim, something of a first-person shooter. At this point I do not trust myself to judge it properly, it is undoubtedly one of my favorite games. Except for a couple of levels that are actually evil.
⚙ KeeperFX, by the way, it is a good improvement, and works great in Lutris.
Dungeon Keeper → Project Nomads is also an atypical strategy/action hybrid. You have an island that can go on a predetermined path. You build structures on it in a sort of RTS fashion. But you can also control turrets and planes, and there are even levels where you are mostly on foot. If you try to be careful, you will spend most of your time flying ahead and destroying enemies before they can even get to your island. Also, while it is clearly a huge stretch, I decided to put it in sailing games. Sure, your island is more like an aircraft carrier that you can barely control, but why not!
I have written a lot about Quake II.
Quake II → Unreal had a lot going for it back then. Honestly, if it wasn’t for the negelct we see today from an apple-biting Fortnite maker, it would have been a series on par with id’s Doom and Quake.
We have a story of sorts, told through logs and books. We have interactions with friendly NPCs. Heck, it was even occasionally shown in promotional art that you could play as a woman. And it is a legit choice, not a hack, like in Quake II.
And, of course, it was a pretty impressive technical achievement. Huge maps. It had good gameplay tweaks (alt-fire for example). The multiplayer was not bad, much improved in Unreal Tournament.
Disability
I don’t know how to complain.
Let’s start silly. As I said, I don’t use Backloggery the way it’s supposed to be used. You are supposed to put games you want to finish. But I put already finished games there.
I described my @bmo account as a rubber duck. You should explain the problem you have with it. But I put solutions there.
And I can justify both of those things. Well, sort of: I don’t want to promote, even in this small way, games I don’t know enough about. And I want to be useful.
But it goes way, way beyond that. You see, I’m disabled. I have a pension and everything. But I never talk about it. Why not? Internalized ableism? Patriarchy? Self-esteem issues? All of the above? Probably all of the above.
I have no opinion about “disabled person” vs. “person with a disability”. You can call me both.
It even goes to ridiculous places. I care about ableist language regardless of the fact that I’m disabled. I care about racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, etc. languages without being a member of any of the groups affected by those. But I fear that my contribution would be less if I presented myself as disabled. “Of course you care about yourself!” Ridiculous, as I said.
I even justify writing this not as something about myself, but because it is still very important to raise awareness. Which is true.
At the end of the day, I don’t think I would ever feel comfortable complaining about everything about or around me. I would never call myself a survivor. But at least I would try to pick one or two things and be more open about it.
Summary for January 2024
Hand delivery, fits in one hand, hand-made.
I read, watched, and re-watched Kiki’s Delivery Service. Well, kind of. The cartoon and the book are delightful, and more or less the same story (the book doesn’t have a dramatic finale). But the live-action movie… I couldn’t finish it, it’s cringe-worthy.
I bought a Mini PC. It solves a few problems:
- it uses a lot less electricity;
- it is silent at low load and slightly noisy at high load (I can compare the noise level to Nintendo Switch or Xbox Series S) – I have become more sensitive to mechanical and electrical noise lately, so this is a big plus;
- it gives me a reason to daily drive Linux, since it can’t run “heavy” games (so installing Windows doesn’t make sense);
- but it can run some games, which gives me an opportunity to test games on Linux;
- not a problem, but tinkering is fun!
I’m not here to promote a specific brand, so I’ll say it’s an AMD Ryzen 5 5560U machine. AMD has served me well with my latest PC, since it is better with Linux, so that was one of the reasons I bought it.
So, yes, now it is my main work, media, some gaming machine. The worst thing is that it’s so small that I don’t have room to put a sticker of Chihiro on it. At this point, I name my machines after characters from Miyazaki’s works: I also have a big PC I built last year called Nausicaä, and a small laptop-tablet hybrid called Kiki.
This January marks one year since I started this blog. I have been tinkering with it ever since, but for this occasion I added a light theme and a search. Static sites have one disadvantage, they don’t do search themselves. You can mitigate this in a number of ways, I decided to go with DuckDuckGo. It seems to work well.