The warm weeks continue on, but at least the last couple of days was a reprieve. All in all it has been a decent week, but work was more or less just going along to get through it, on my free time it finally felt like something happened again, had a good weekend although the saturday was heavy with rain, had a nice little walk, finished off my book, and the sunday had a comfortable temperature as well, so I was just enjoying the day, so a decent week.

Books

Finished off Exodus by Peter F Hamilton this week, and it was a decent one, the pacing was a bit all over the place, to the point that I felt he could have sliced off 100 pages or so to get it there. But then again, that’s not why you read a Hamilton book, you expect something sprawling and fun, with good writing that is a great journey, the end doesn’t always live up to it, but this book landed it pretty well, with a clever solution, and kind of an open-ish ending, which I guess is needed as this counts as a prequel to a game. I enjoyed it.

I was kind of not quite sure what to go on reading after this one, so I just looked through my library of books for something with a recogniseable name that I haven’t read yet, that I heard good things about, so my next one is Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie. The first few chapters were decent at least, not quite sure quite what’s going on, but it at least seems fun.

Games

Buckle down, because I think this section is going to be rather long this week, I was playing a lot of stuff, and have been thinking a bit about it lately.

Persona 4 is going along, I’m starting to be a bit more enamoured with the characters, they are decent and some of them are good like the Dojimas. It’s very driving foreward which is good, and slowly I’m meeting people that I’m more interested in spending time with. I specifically chose to play on easy to not have to follow a guide, because that’s not really fun to me, and so far I’m having fun with it here too, it’s just still something that is missing from the characters of 3 which I really prefer. It’s a weird game, as in before I sit down to play, I don’t really want to, but then when I do sit down and play a day or two I get sucked back into the story, there are a lot of fun stuff happening, but it all does feel a little bit too plucky and happy go lucky in a way, which is weird, because it’s something that I usually really enjoy.

I played a bit of Rift of the Necrodancer this weekend too, but did pace it better, it tends to become a real black hole of flow to me, but I did get out of it at a good time, the game is still very good, I just need to watch out that I don’t duck into it too hard, because it ends in hours for “nothing” that usually feels not great to me.

I was kind of having an want to play some retro games this week, and every time that I’ve been sitting down with them lately it just haven’t clicked with me, so this weekend I downloaded GZDoom and a pack of the “official” wad files, and I’ve been playing quite a bit of Doom as I thought I would start from the first one of them. And it’s just silly fun, I do like the graphics, and the movement just feels really smooth, that game really manages the trick of making you feel like an absolute certified bad-ass. I’m still getting lost quite a bit looking for the keys now and then, but it’s just dumb silly fun, and I enjoy running up to monsters with a shotgun blasting them in the face from around the corner.

My phone company complained that I hadn’t loaded my prepaid account in a year or so, so I refilled that one, since I don’t really use it for anything else I bought three Android games, it’s a nice little treat to have something around that isn’t filled with ads, and can be played offline, I ended up being pretty happy with what I got.

I got threes, which is the one that started the whole 2048 thing, it’s a fun game, and it does manage to evade what I feel is one of the biggest problems with 2048, that it just gets too much of a mechanical go on until you’re tired of it kind of thing. Playing a round of threes is a bit shorter, and it has more fun thinking to be done to get there. I quite enjoy it for a short break to reset a bit, and it’s a good podcast game.

The second one that I got was Merge Maestro, It’s a fun merging version of a balatro like, and it seems to be still in development, I like the idea, and the whole game being based on emoticons, while having been done before is pretty fun, it’s always a bit of a struggle in the start until you get to build up synergies of a couple of symbols, but when you do it feels pretty good, I have won two runs on the two easiest difficulties, and so far it’s been a decent amount of fun, and it was really cheap for what it is at least, so a promising thing.

And then the last one was Slice & Dice, I’ve heard so much good about this one, and it seems like most of the people that have been playing it really has been enjoying it. So I dived in, and so far it’s really fun. A roguelike version of Yatzee with an honestly mad amount of different modes and stuff to unlock. It opens up a bit basic, but starts to really unfold. I feel like at least so far it has just the right amount of decisions to be fun, but at the same time not be too overwhelming, it’s hard though, in the 4-5 runs that I’ve had so far the farthest I got was to die on the last fight, and that on the easy difficulty, but it’s fun to theorise along the way, and it does have really good feeling dice, which just makes it more fun to play. Very enjoyable.

I did play some more of the Pleague knight part of the Shovel Night big pack, and I still struggle with the movement of the character, I didn’t do that much before going back to Persona, but it’s something I probably will dig into after I finish off my Persona maraton probably, I’m waiting for Persona 5 to go on a sale, while the game looks pretty fun, I don’t really want to shell out 60 € for it, and I have time to wait for it to go down, it does seem like it regularly goes down to 20, and that I will be more than happy to pay when the time comes.

Media

The podcast well is still rather dry, and I’m in danger of going into the same trap that usually happens to me around this time a year, subscribing to a lot of different things to fill up the lull, and then being bogged down when the ones I usually listen to start to flow back in. I’m still using the time to listen to backlogged episodes of Videogame Podtimism and I’m up to episode 60 or so now in their older episodes, which means I still have 100 or so to go before I’m caught up, but at least for the time being that’s what I’m filling up with, I will have to see when things starts to fill up again, I just don’t want to go back into that same problem again as I usually do.

There is a new Stay forever episode about the simpson’s hit and run that I have downloaded that I look foreward to, I had a lot of fun with that game back in the day, and Gunnar and Christopher do manage to make games that I have no connection to and that seems dull at first glance be interesting and fun episodes, so I’m pretty sure this one is going to be fun.

Geowizard released a fun adventure on youtube again, I really enjoy his stuff, this time he’s going through London without following any car road or canal for more than 25 m, the first episode was already fun, and now I’m pretty sure there will be a couple more before he’s gotten all the way through, that guy is just fun, and it’s always a treat when something new comes up in my feed from him.

I also quite enjoyed Olexa and Retromation playing rogue-lite block out bingo, they are both people that I enjoy watching, they are pretty calm and fun dudes to watch, and just having some banter and them doing some challenges in different games was a nice time.