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 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 Gold had a lot going for it back then. Honestly, if it wasn’t for the negelect 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.

Let’s start silly. I described my @bmo account (update: I no longer use it) as a rubber duck. You should explain the problem you have to it. But I put solutions there. And I can justify it. Well, sort of: I don’t want to complain, 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.

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 have no opinion about “disabled person” vs. “person with a disability”. You can call me both.

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.

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.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land goes places. Well, ok, maybe a few places, nothing out of the ordinary, but still. A post-apocalyptic Kirby game? Ok, the story has moments that justify that choice. Also, the final boss is… awesome! Other than that, it’s just a very good game.

Choo-Choo Charles is more silly than scary, really. But pretty fun.

I also watched more of the new Star Trek shows.

Question: What if something that checks most of the boxes but still doesn’t feel right? To me, that’s Discovery. The representation alone should be praised, loudly, but the overall feeling is kind of meh. It doesn’t help that basically everything good has a pretty noticeable stain on it. The show talks about mental health all the time, but uses ableist language. Representation is done in a very bizarre and awkward way, with a lot of obvious missteps. There are good characters, almost all of them, but again, I just don’t like the story.

Question: What if your expectations are pretty low? That’s The Orville. I can’t say I never liked MacFarlane, but I don’t like him now. But I can’t deny that first, the show doesn’t really feel like his show most of the time (when it does, it’s very jarring), and second, it’s not bad, not at all. If you add those low expectations, it’s a strong sci-fi series. It doesn’t do anything groundbreaking, but it doesn’t hide behind the humor (it’s barely there) and isn’t afraid to go for heavier subjects.

Discovery stumbled so  Strange New Worlds can chill. Saying it’s low stakes is a little weird, but it kind of is. It’s not the first Star Trek show out of this new bunch, it’s doing safe, mostly episodic storytelling, its comfortable in bringing in a lot of characters from the original series. It’s, well, chill.

Planet of Lana is lovely. A relatively straightforward puzzle platformer, with a simple story told without actual words (in Simlish, if you will). Calling it Nausicaä-like is a stretch, but I will do so anyway.

While I admit that Signs of the Sojourner is not really my thing – I don’t like card games – I think the way it depicts conversations is very clever. You have to make a path out of cards, simple as that. Well, they are called cards, but they behave more like dominoes, where a one pip side of a piece can be connected to a one pip side of another piece, but not two pips, three pips, etc. I don’t want to spoil how that mechanic evolves, but if I mention that it’s a conversation, there are people who are not on your wavelength, you can get tired, etc., you can probably guess.

The story of  The Invincible, as they never tire of reminding you, is based on a novel by Stanisław Lem, so it is pretty straightforward: it is the era of science fiction that was more about ideas than plot twists. As far as I can tell, the game takes some liberties – it invents another spaceship where the player character comes from – but the core is there.

I would not call Dolphin Spirit: Ocean Mission an educational game, it is a fantasy. Literally, because there are some magical elements, and figuratively, because you can oh so easily clean and fix the environment. I don’t want to criticize it too much, it’s still a pretty good game, but don’t expect a serious depiction of problems that the world is actually facing.

Suzume is pretty great. My only gripe is that it’s kinda a love story between a high school girl and a college student, which is yikes, but only kinda, as it doesn’t go anywhere near “there”, so it’s a little yikes. Other than that, it is funny and sad, beautiful and great sounding.

I can’t really recommend Star Trek: Picard. If you liked The Next Generation, yes, there is a lot there (and bits from other shows and movies). But it is not a good Star Trek. And if you didn’t like it, well, depending on why, you can enjoy some of it, but it’s still not a good show. In the end, I didn’t hate it or anything, but, yeah, I would have stopped very early if I hadn’t been like “Hey, it’s TNG!”