Well another week is over, and I went from feeling restless to anxious, well like everything with me, things move in cycles, so I will get through this as well, it will just take a bit of time. Someone dragged a cold with them that I finally caught, so that and some cold and snow made me not take that long walks over the weekend, I was not really feeling that great, so it ended up with being 8-10 km on each day, not much, but at least it’s something.

I hope my mood will come up a bit, I did feel a bit better towards the end of the weekend, so uncharacteristically for me, I felt better on sunday than what I did on saturday, that’s how it rolls, hoping for better times, and I’m pretty sure they will come. As they tend to do.

Books

I finished off Darkspace Warrior pretty early in the week, it was decent and fun, not fantastic, but it was some nice cotton candy happy reading that doesn’t hurt to get through. It’s enjoyable, but forgettable, at least I didn’t find anything bad enough to write much about it.

As the second one for the week was Planet Biter which was one that really hooked me, this series has the tendency of doing that for some of the books, and it was really a lot of fun, it’s one that I would never read if I would judge from the cover. At the same time the premise of them are starting to grow a bit thin, so I am pretty happy that there is as far as I know just a couple of books left in the series.

For the last one that I started this week Prince of Dreams it is the last one that I have in the messenger chronicles, and I don’t think that this is one that I will continue on with, it’s one where the last books has kind of dragged my reading tempo and frequency down, they are pretty good books, but they just aren’t that interesting to me, I think they are leaning too much into the whole urban fantasy thing, and just aren’t for me I think, I’m already 100 pages into this one though, so I will at least finish this one.

Games

I finished a game this week! It’s not something that I do very often but I got through Ori and the will of the wisps mostly in this week, it’s a good game, but I feel like the focus that they put onto fighting in this one didn’t really do it any favours, I finished the first game years ago, and that’s still one that I liked more, that one had almost no fighting, and focused more on platforming, I was happy that there was still some chase sequences in this one, but it seems like they took away quite a bit of them to focus on battling, and boss battles. The thing is that enemies often are the same colour and size as ori, so it was pretty easy to lose track of where I was, and for the bosses it was difficult to see what was the spots they weren’t invulnerable, which led to at times frustrating times, also since the fighting implementation felt rather sloppy, I didn’t really feel much of a difference between the times that I died to the boss, and the time that I succeded.

I also played a couple of runs of Hades but progress here has been dying down as well, it seems like I’ve picked most of the low hanging fruit, and now the bigger things are there. There is only the hidden aspect of the rail left to gather. Things are expensive enough now that there are multiple runs to get anything. And the nectar is coming in on it’s normal slow pace, it’s kind of funny that that is always a bottle neck while I still never have gotten under 5 ambrosia. I do really like getting the different visual upgrades in this game though, I’m usually not a person for that kind of stuff, but I actually like making the hall of hades more and more gaudy and fun. I’ll probably keep on playing this one a bit here and there in between I think, as I still quite enjoy it, it’s just getting too slow to be my main focus I think.

For the next game after Ori, I still kind of felt like a metroidvania so I started up Ender Lillies which I got a while ago, and started a new save. It does feel very stiff coming from endgame ori, but that is kind of an unfair comparison as ori is one of the most fluid games I’ve played, and it’s the beginning of a metroidvania with next to none of the upgrades. But I’ve been quite enjoying the fighting in this one, it’s slower and more deliberate, and the things that the enemies do are well shown so that you have time to react. It’s been quite challenging so far, with hordes of enemies, and getting used to movement that is very different from what I’ve been playing lately, the bosses are tough but fair, I did 3 of them on sunday, and one of them took me half an hour to beat, but it never got frustrating, it was just getting used to the patterns and executing.

Media

It’s been a slow period still with media, youtube in general is not great in january for some reason, and even with podcasters it seems like this month has been rather thin this year with many people being sick or having short breaks. I have been listening to some backlog stuff, and gotten to episode 50 of the Hades II playthrough I’ve been watching, it’s quite fun but it’s mostly background stuff when playing a game or doing something else, as it otherwise would have gotten a bit too samey for me. I’m still kind of hoping for some great episode of something again, something that exites me a bit more, but we’ll see, something is bound to come up at some time or another.

So all in all it’s been kind of a downer of a week, but things are at least looking up a little, I’m just really looking foreward to spring now, which is dangerous as it’s still a couple of months to wait, we’ll have to see, hopefully there will be some happy things happening before then as well :)