Preying to Git Gud

Posted on by Nimgimli

As I mentioned at the tail end of my last post, I’d been stuck in Prey trying to get into Dr Calvino’s Lab. I was determined not to look up a solution to this problem.

Then, in a sign that the universe has a sense of humor, when I fired the game up just to take some screenshots, not really to play it, I found Dr. C’s keycard. I was excited to see what was in the lab but couldn’t REALLY play at that moment because it was during my work day. (Shhhh)

Today I went back, explored his office and honestly, there wasn’t a lot there, other than access to some servers that needed to be rebooted. I did that and was told by the mysterious benefactor who’d been feeding me breadcrumbs that I had to get back to my office to finish watching a video.

OK, easy enough except, nope. During my time in the lab a bunch more scary enemies had spawned. Meanwhile I was at 20% health with no medkits and hardly any ammo, though I had a few EMP Grenades. Those, at least, would work on the berserk robots I had to get past. Hit ’em with an EMP grenade then while they’re stunned bash them apart with my trusty wrench. Except even that didn’t go as planned because once when I was bashing a bad robot, it sparked and caused an explosion that killed me. Fortunately I’ve been obsessively Quick Saving. EVERYTHING in this game can kill me. I’ve died at least half a dozen times from getting too close to a sparking wire!

It took a lot of tries but I snuck past the other enemies by climbing up into the rafters. These creatures haven’t learned to look up yet, I guess. I did have to bust my office window and climb in, but I finally saw the video that was so important for me to watch.

Speaking of videos (this is NOT the video I had to watch):

I snagged a video of Mimics being Mimics, but between the game being pretty dark to begin with, and HDR sticking its fingers in, it came out really dark. This version is brightened as much as ClipChamp will brighten things but my apologies as it is still really dark.

[spoiler territory incoming]

The video was from… me (by which I mean, the character I am playing as). The Neuromods (what I was calling geegaws last post) give you spiffy new skills but when you remove them, it ‘resets’ your memory back to what it was back when the neuromod was installed. That is what had happened to me and I guess I’d had them in for a long time (turns out I work on the station). What I learned was that these enemies, best I can figure, were created by us, presumably by accident. My ‘old self’ told me via the video that they are ‘a part of me now’ and that I had to destroy the space station (Talos it is called) with me in it, because we can’t risk letting “even a single cell” get to earth.

Great, a suicide mission. Then I met the mysterious voice that has been guiding me, and it was basically a 3rd version of me, this one in the brain of a robot. It is going to help me get the two arming keys to blow up the station. Fun stuff. Can’t wait.

While exploring I found a kind of museum that sketched out the timeline of this alternate world. In this world JFK was not assassinated and the US and Russia were working together in the space race, at least initially. This led to an alternate timeline when technology advanced faster than it did in our world where, y’know, we decided science wasn’t very useful. The details are already fuzzy but it is sometime after 2030 in Prey. The station was decommissioned, then bought by a private company who has been using it for scientific research. Oh and the apartment that you wake up in at the start of the game? All a simulation, as was the spaceship ride to the it. We’ve been up here all along, oblivious.

So that’s the story so far. Lots of stuff that can and does kill me. Not many resources or skills. Still kind of lost and confused.

I did find a blueprint for manufacturing Medkits as well as bullets, so that should help, though I clearly need better weapons to fight these ‘Phantoms’, which is what the bigger bipedal baddies are called. They can 1 shot me and seem able to teleport. I can empty a clip into them and it seems to just make them angrier. I mostly run away from them for now.

I got killed (again…I’ve died dozens of times already) trying to get out of my office safely and it was almost dinner time so I stopped for now. Looking forward to my next session!

Prey That I Can Break Into This Lab

Posted on by Nimgimli

Always one to keep my finger on the pulse of gaming, I recently started playing 2017’s Prey [See? Now the ‘typo’ in the title makes sense, right?]. As opposed to 2006’s Prey, which as far as I can tell is completely unrelated to this game. I played a little bit of that one too, back in the day, but I don’t remember much about it other than it made me motion sick.

In THIS Prey you are on a space station overrun with what I assume are aliens or maybe it is some life form that was created in a lab? Too soon to know for sure. But the ‘trash mob’ of the game is the Mimic. This is a little tentacled thing that can disguise itself as anything in the game. You’re walking past a chair and suddenly it turns into a critter that attacks. This has made me SO paranoid that sometimes I go into a room and just do a melee attack on EVERYTHING to be sure nothing is a Mimic.

I’ll admit right away, I’m confused when I’m playing Prey. I’m sort of not sure what I’m supposed to be doing yet. I don’t really know who I am. I have some general goals that game has given me, but no real indication of what I should do first. There are also areas basically locked behind a skill system. You collect these geegaws that let you upgrade your skills. For example you find a broken door and it requires Repair 2 in order to fix it, but you only have Repair 1. So you make a mental note to come back here when you have managed to upgrade that skill.

Let’s just say at this point I have a LOT of these mental notes. I’m assuming Prey is one of those games where you’ll be retracing your steps a lot.

Screenshot showing a "Breach Failsafe" device that is broken
I’ll have to remember to come back here when I have a better Repair skill

One of the first tasks I got was to get into a doctor’s lab. I can’t get into this dude’s lab. I have been all around it, found secrets and passages to other rooms, but thus far I cannot get in. I even found the doctor himself — dead unfortunately for him — but the keycard to his lab door wasn’t on his corpse. I’ve gotten into at least one locked room by crashing through the ceiling but so far haven’t found a way to do the same with this lab, though I haven’t ruled it out yet.

Normally, this is where I’d go online and look up how to get into this lab. But I’m not going to do that, yet. Lately I’ve been on a bit of a kick where I’m trying to play games like in the old pre-Internet days. No instant solutions via search engines. Not yet anyway. There’re other places to go in this space station and maybe if I explore them I’ll find enough geegaws to level up my skills to get past some of the obstacles blocking my way.

A screenshot of a corpse in a white lab coat floating in space
I don’t think Doctor C is going to be of much help…

I learned a little bit of a trick to help me stick to my guns on the ‘no lookups’ thing, and that is to play short sessions. Once I start feeling the frustration of not making progress, I just save the game and go play something else. This might mean it takes me a LONG time to finish Prey, but it’s about the journey, right? I’m having scary fun exploring this world (I’ve met bigger enemies than the Mimic and they KICK MY BEHIND), wishing I could find MedKits, and scavenging everything in sight to break down into components for crafting. Prey is the game that reminded me I have a headset for the Xbox; since we moved I hadn’t dug it out. But the Mimics make a skittering noise and the better directional audio in the headphones helps me figure out where the noise is coming from. Anyway I put those on, turn the lights down low. and creep around this station, freaking out about Mimics, trying to explore, hiding from the big bads. It’s just the right amount of frightening. Like a tingle rather than anxiety and dread. (I don’t normally indulge in horror media, be it games or movies. I’m a big chicken!) I managed to do a spacewalk and that was crazy fun.

Not a surprise that I’m having fun, really. Over on Steam Prey has a “Very Positive” score with over 21,000 reviews (and it’s on sale for $5.99 during the Spring Sale) so it’s not like some dark horse game I just ‘discovered.’

But y’know, sometimes you just want to write a blog post about a game you’re enjoying even though it’s some old-ass game that everyone else has already played.

[BREAKING NEWS!] So while writing this post I fired up the game to take some screenshots, including the one of Dr Corvino’s corpse. And what did I notice floating in space a little ways away from him? Yup, his Lab Keycard! Woohoo! Who needs the Internet!!?

Partial screenshot showing that I found the keycard
The trick, I guess, is to not actually be looking for the thing you’re looking for….

The Weird Relief of Getting Older

Posted on by Nimgimli

My brain has been coming to grips with some odd things lately. For most of my professional life my mindset has been: what’s the next thing I really should learn in order to improve myself, and when I say improve myself I generally mean “make myself more marketable for the job market.” Y’know, I need to learn another programming language, or get good using some tool or something. Lately I’ve started wondering if maybe I don’t actually need to keep doing that.

I make lots of plans but never get around to executing them. By the time my work day is done I just want to chill and relax. Watch TV, play a video game. Have a beer. Nothing the least bit productive in any of that.

For years I’ve carried around low-grade guilt that I’m not working harder to make more money so that I have more security. I’m not talking “buy a new yacht” money. I’m talking “not being one disaster away from being broke”.

Everywhere you go online you’re bombarded (or at least I am) with offers to teach me how to code better, how to learn AI, how to improve this, that and the other thing. Get smarter, get more marketable, make more money, work more!

Recently, though, I’ve started coming to terms with some truths. I am 65 years old. Almost 66. Every day the news is full of people younger than me who have died recently from one disease or another. I could be gone tomorrow and it’s probably like a 50-50 chance I’ll still be here in 10 years. And I very much doubt I’ll still be working in 10 years, at least not in my current job. Maybe I’ll be one of those old folks stocking the shelves at Walmart or something, but I doubt I’ll be a 75 year old web developer.

This is just reality, not trying to sound like I’m throwing a pity party for myself!

But here’s the good news that comes with that. I’m getting close to being done. I don’t NEED to continue to improve my skills all that much. If I WANT to, I certainly can and will. But I can let go of “I should” completely and not feel guilt around that. If I want to spend my free time gaming, or hell, napping, why not? I don’t have kids that I’m ignoring. Don’t even have a pet. PartPurple is always busy doing her stuff and I’m pretty sure she is far from feeling ignored. We both work from home so we’re both in each others business all day most days.

This wasn’t a lightning bolt of a realization. It’s something I’m still orbiting, getting closer and closer to really accepting that when I’m not working I don’t really have to be doing anything I don’t want to do [setting aside, y’know, personal grooming, keeping the apt clean, paying bills… basic adulting].

Let me tell you, it’s a weird feeling and a very ‘light’ feeling. All this self-imposed stress and guilt is slowly, slowly melting away.

So I guess there is a silver lining to getting old, after all.

I’m curious though — has anyone else felt something like this? Either the pressure to improve or better yet, the relief of accepting that you are enough as you are.

[A note on the AI used in this post: the header image was generated at Night Cafe using Seedream 4.0. It’s a representation of how I’d like to spend my final days. Sitting on a beach like a piece of driftwood, drinking rum and taking it easy.]

February 2026

Posted on by Nimgimli

Well, I’ve done it again. I forgot to start a placeholder post for the February recap, so here I am doing the whole thing from memory. HOWEVER, it won’t be so bad since for the most part I played one game all month: My Time At Sandrock, and I just wrote about that yesterday.

I didn’t expect to do this. I had no inkling it would take me so long to finish, but I did WANT to finish so it was by far my main game. I played other things for rewards points and so forth, in particular Ball X Pit which I also finished (which was a suprise.. I didn’t expect it to have an ‘ending’ any more than I expect Tetris to have an ending).

I eased back into social media this month, which led to noticing some buzz around Kevin Brill’s TempusGameit which I’d kind of forgotten about while I was away from PC gaming. But I got back into that and can see that I played a bit of The First Descendant and Eternal Strands. The latter was the game I was going to focus on once I finished Sandrock but… the best laid plans, am I right?

Ball X Pit was really good, by the way. Imagine Breakout only it’s an RPG. Instead of a paddle you control a character who is shooting the balls, and who has stats that contribute to how effective the balls are. There are a bunch of characters all with special abilities, and a bunch of balls and powerups that you gather while playing the Breakout portion of the game. There’s even some city building mixed in. If you enjoy Breakout, give Ball X Pit a try. It’s pretty cheap ($15 at full price) and if you get into it you can play it for a LONG time.

Watching

I don’t have any kind of reminders for this category so I bet I’ll miss something.

Pluribus (Apple TV) — This is such an odd show and we’re still in the thick of it so, if I’m wrong, no spoilers please. The basic premise is, what if the population was taken over by pod people that formed all of humanity into a hive mind? The protagonist is one of a handful of people who escaped this fate. Sounds rote, right? Except the twist is that all the ‘pod people’ seems really happy and genuinely nice. They are aware of the protagonist and just want to help her and make her comfortable, but she is so mean and angry and bitter that she tends to end up looking like ‘the bad guy’. Her intent is sound: she wants to undo what’s been done and give people their individuality back. But she keeps doing awful things along the way. Right now we’re kind of on the side of the pod people, but we’ll see if that changes by the end of the series. I assume it will. Anyway if you like dark, dry humor, you’ll like this.

Man on the Inside S2 (Netflix) — Ted Danson is back as a retired professor who gets a second lease on life via becoming a detective. In season 1 he was undercover in an Elderly Care Facility (is that the polite term? My instinct is to say “Old Folk’s Home”) but in Season 2 he is back on campus as a ‘visiting professor’ who is really undercover. This show is just marvelous. Season 1 was great and Season 2 was, if anything, maybe better. Some of his friends he made in S1 are back, and of course we now know his family and friends. I’ve read a third season has been greenlit and I can’t wait to watch!

Sanctuary (Prime Video or Peacock) — Our lunchtime habit is to re-watch an old show we liked. It’s been working well. We re-watched all the Star Trek shows, we’ve re-watched Stargate SG1. We re-watched Warehouse 13 and Haven and Defiance. All great times. Then we decided to re-watch Sanctuary and…. it is not good. It has not held up well, or maybe (probably) it was never very good. I would NOT suggest watching this show, unfortunately. To jog your memory it’s the one that stars Amanda Tapping as the head of a Sanctuary that protects ‘abnormals’, including one of her staff who is a sasquatch. One of its claims to fame back in the day was that it was almost all CGI with very few physical sets. Like yeah, that was something to brag about once upon a time, I guess. But no… it looks bad. A lot of the acting is bad. Tapping is OK but she can’t carry the whole thing. Avoid this one.

Reading

Still on the old sci-fi magazines, currently working through a small stack of Aboriginal Science Fiction, published in 1991 (the issues I have, I mean). Some of the stories are really good. Others not so much, but it’s still fun reading old sci-fi to see the kinds of future we thought would manifest back then. One thing I almost never see if the basic death of paper. Even on starships moving between solar systems characters are always reading printouts of something.

So that was February. Things are going OK. [knock on wood]. We’ve been basically healthy, we’re settling into the new location, getting driver’s licenses updated, finding new doctors and all that jazz. Work is work, nothing terrible there. It has been delightfully dull, to be honest. After the past few months I can deal with a month or two of quiet routine.

My Time At Sandrock has come to an end.

Posted on by Nimgimli

At long last I have finally finished the main storylines in My Time At Sandrock, a game I started playing in November. That’s a LONG time to be playing one game and my save file sits at something like 140 hours right now. I think the TLDR version of my review is: I can’t wait for My Time At Evershine [the next game in the series] to come out.

Yeah I really enjoyed Sandrock. It’s a life sim/crafting game. You know the drill. You inherit a delapidated old farm/workshop and need to fix it up. In this case you are a Builder which means you’re primarily harvesting/crafting though there is also some farming and animal raising aspects. Plus improving your relationships with the town folk, and in this case, some monster-battling as well. It’s basically the Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley theme only the emphasis is more on crafting than farming.

The chance that anyone reading this HASN’T ever played a game like this is so slim, let’s just move on to the setting and my likes and dislikes.

The “My Time At…” games take place in a post-apocalyptic future where there is constant tension between the Church of the Light which shuns technology since it was what led to the end of the old world, and the folks who want to unearth old relics and bring back the tech that made life better. This was a bigger issue in My Time At Portia but there’s still some tension around that in Sandrock.

The storyline

There are two main plotlines. Sandrock is a desert town that is fading towards ghost town status due to an ever dwindling water supply. The machines in your workshop need water to cool them, as well as wood or some material to burn in order to power them. The latter is easy, but keeping enough water on-hand is a challenge, early on. You can build “dew collectors” that slowly accumulate water, or you can buy it from a vendor. You also collect some while gathering plants and things.

The main character and an NPC strike a pose
My BFF Grace and I mugging for the camera

Anyway, I was talking about plotlines. So the first one is to try to pull Sandrock back from the brink. You’re working with a fellow named Zeke who is trying to develop a way to grow trees in the desert, the idea being that if he can get trees to grow, it’ll help prevent the awful sandstorms that plague the town which in turn might lead to the ground becoming more fertile. Or something. Anyway the other plotline is that the town is being menaced by a group of bandits, the leader of which used to be a well-liked citizen of the town. No one knows why he’s gone bad or what to do about him. At first this is none of your concern since you’re a builder, not local law enforcement. But surprise! The Civil Corp (the constabulary) have taken notice of how well you dispatch monsters and presses you into service in their hunt for the bandits.

The bad stuff

My only real gripe was the pacing. Early on your days are hectic as you try to balance gathering materials, doing “Commissions” to rank up your workshop so that you can unlock access to new blueprints, and keeping those two questlines moving forward. You are ‘gated’ by both time and stamina, though stamina can be replenished eating certain foods. For the first 100 hours this worked well, but then a couple of things happened. One is that the initial plotlines were resolved, but that wasn’t the end of the storyline as it turns out. But after that point it felt like there was less to do and I found myself looking for ways to kill in-game time, or even just going to bed at 10 am to end the day.

But something else happened which I think just broke my brain a little. I was playing on Playstation and I earned the “Platinum” trophy at around the 100 hour mark too. Because of this I assumed I MUST be near the end of the game, so I was in “OK let’s finish this up” mode mentally, but the game ran on for another 30-40 hours. I think without that trophy pop-up everything might have felt more natural.

The main character watches as his dog sleeps on a couch

The ‘meh’ stuff

Next, not really a gripe but a place I would like to see improvement was the relationship stuff. You can take characters out on “dates” and do activities with them to make them happy, but really there weren’t very many of these and every date wound up about the same. I would have liked to see more variety there. The worst was when I’d take Grace out. Grace is a waitress at the only restaurant in town. So I had to take her to her workplace for dinner while we were on our date. I’m amazed she didn’t get angry about that!

There was also a game system where you would go into ‘dungeons’ and fight monsters. Combat isn’t really a strong point for the game. It’s fine but not super compelling. So I did these dungeons as infrequently as possible. The fact that they were timed didn’t help with my personal enjoyment as I hate feeling rushed.

The good stuff!

So what did I like about it? I mean on a basic level I really enjoy these kinds of games, but specifically I liked a few quality of life additions that not all games like this have. First, you can save anywhere, anytime, except in the middle of a fight. Many games in this genre only have an auto-save when you go to bed at night, and don’t have a manual save option. Not sure why that is but I’m glad Sandrock dropped this limitation. Second, you can adjust how fast time goes by. I slowed it down in the early parts of the game and just let Stamina be my main limiter. I didn’t like the feeling that I had to run from task to task if I wanted to fit everything into a day. Later when I had less to do I put the speed back to normal and sometimes up to 3X which I think is as fast as it went.

There is some tie-in to My Time At Portia. Not to the point where you need to have played that one to enjoy this one, but if you HAVE played Portia you’ll probably get a kick out of some of the references, including some references to your character in THAT game (in an abstract way). Evershine is supposed to take place in the same world as well.

The telanovella stuff

Beyond the mechanics, I enjoyed the plotlines and most of the characters. There are romance options and I had fun with these. I started dating one character, but then she saw me giving a hug to another character (hugs being a way to improve your relationship with characters). Both she and the character I hugged got mad at me and my relationship value with both dropped way down. Jeez it was just a friendly, platonic hug!!! Later I romanced another character but she was concerned that a relationship would hurt both our careers, so I got a sidequest where I had to come in 1st place in the monthly workshop ratings list while also finding time to take her on 4 dates. Challenge accepted! [The screenshot at the top of this post is from one of our dates.]

Main character and his wife sleeping in bed together, fully clothed
This is as close to “spicy” as the game gets.

I did it, of course, and we got married. Nothing unseemly here. You do need a 2 person bed and you sleep together but everyone stays safely dressed while in bed. There’s a baby crib you can get but I never explored having a child. I guess it can be done.

This marriage didn’t really take. My wife was lovely but I’d only really married her due to that sidequest. Eventually I divorced her, which was very amicable and aside from a relationship hit, it didn’t really change anything. We went back to the same conversations we’d had before we married.

Eventually I took a second wife. What a lady’s man I am! This one stuck and we were still happily married when the game ended. I think you can put your spouse to work but I never really did.

You can also adopt pets, and those I DID put to work… they’ll go out and harvest materials for you. Mostly I’d send them to collect water.

Anyway, I could go on and on, but bottom line is, I liked My Time at Portia when I played it, and I liked My Time at Sandrock even more. Bring on My Time at Evershine!

The main character kissing his wife during a wedding ceremony
You may now kiss your (first) bride

Daily Logins are the Fun Killers

Posted on by Nimgimli

It’s time for another round of pointless self reflection, and you get to play along at home! First, let’s establish the pattern:

I’ll start playing a new (to me) live service game for some reason. Maybe it’s all the rage, or maybe it’s on Game Pass or something. At first I’m just kind of poking at it. No plan, no optimization, no spreadsheets open on the second monitor, just running around seeing what happens and thinking, “Huh. This is actually pretty good.” I’m having fun. I’m not committed to anything. I’m not trying to be efficient. I’m just playing.

So I play for a day or three, and at some point I get a pop-up telling me I earned a Daily Login Reward or I advanced the Battle Pass.

Now, I didn’t ask for a Battle Pass. I was just over here having fun playing. But fine, free stuff is free stuff. I should at least see what I can earn, right? And next thing I know I’m not just playing the game, I’m studying the reward track like I’m planning retirement contributions. If I do this and that and the other thing I’ll have enough points to unlock the next freebie and keep my streak alive.

How I turn every live service game into a chore

It’s subtle. I don’t even notice it happening. I’m still having fun. But now I have a plan. Dare I say, a schedule. A checklist. I log in every day and first thing I do is finish my dailies, push the Battle Pass forward, collect the daily rewards. This is fine; I’m in that honeymoon period and I was going to play anyway.

The absolute worst version of this, though, is when I’m already logging in every day anyway and I decide that since I’m clearly committed, it makes perfect sense to spend money on the Premium Battle Pass. Or one of those daily login reward subscriptions where they basically give you a little allowance as long as you show up and punch the clock. The latter are so low effort: you literally log in and you get your rewards. You’ve paid for 30 days. The catch is, if you miss a day, you miss that day’s rewards. So you best log in EVERY DAY.

And once I’ve spent actual dollars, that’s it. I’m no longer just playing a game. I HAVE to log in now. I paid for this. I would be irresponsible not to extract maximum value from my purchase.

And that’s when the fun quietly starts packing its bags.

Story? I’ll worry about that later

The thing is, nothing dramatic happens. There isn’t some big moment where I slam the keyboard and declare the game ruined. It’s much quieter than that. I just start noticing that I’m logging in even on nights when I don’t really feel like it. Not because I’m excited to see what happens next, but because there’s a checklist waiting for me.

“Just knock out the dailies real quick.”

That’s the phrase. The phrase of doom.

I tell myself it’ll only take ten minutes. Fifteen, tops. I’ll grab the login reward, clear whatever daily tasks are being repeated today, maybe collect some currency that resets at midnight, and then I can decide if I actually want to play.

Except by the time I’ve done all that, it hasn’t been 15 minutes, it’s been 30-45 because somewhere, something went a little bit amiss. And when the checklist is finished, so am I. I’ve harvested the crops, killed the required number of enemies, cleared the little red exclamation points on various sub-menus and options, and now the idea of “real” play feels like overtime.

Now presumably, since I am a very narrative focused gamer, part of what drew me to this game in the first place is the storyline. But now I’m never touching the storyline. I’m just doing the daily tasks, the time-limited tasks, all the things I ‘should’ do so that I don’t miss out. And the game has become another chore to do every day. Almost a job. I’m logging in to collect virtual currency, NOT to have fun, not to enjoy an interesting story. And as more and more content rolls out I fall farther and farther behind and now I don’t even engage with the community for fear of spoilers since I’m back in the starter zone collecting 10 flowers every day and killing that same boss every night.

Just another obligation

The worst part is that none of what I’m asked to do is hard. It’s not even really unpleasant. It just feels… obligatory. Boring, even. Like taking out the trash. You don’t hate taking out the trash. You just don’t feel a surge of joy about it either. You do it because it needs to be done.

Somewhere in there the game quietly stops being the thing I choose and starts being the thing I maintain.

That’s the beginning of the end. Actually, not true. By this point we’re like mid-way through the end. I’m starting to resent the game more than anything. It’s 10 pm and I want to play the game I WANT to play but instead I’m logging into the live service albatross to check that off my list.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results

Now here’s the part where I pretend I’m surprised by any of this.

Because this is not new behavior. This is a pattern. I have done this before. I will do this again. If there were a Battle Pass for learning from my mistakes, I would absolutely grind it out and still not unlock the lesson.

I always act like this time will be different. This time I’ll just enjoy the game. This time I won’t care about the streak. This time I won’t let the daily reset timer dictate my evening plans like some tiny digital landlord. This time, dammit, I will JUST focus on the story and leave that other stuff for “endgame” once I’ve unlocked all the zones and defeated the big bad at the end of the tale.

And yet.

There’s something in my brain that just hates missing out on stuff. If the game offers me a reward for logging in seven days in a row, well now I have GOT to get that reward because I’m sure it’ll change the game completely for me. [Spoiler: It never does.]

And then there’s the money part. Once I’ve paid for the Premium Battle Pass I’m REALLY committed. I start calculating value per day. If I miss a login, I’ve wasted fifty cents. If I don’t finish the season track, I’ve basically set fire to five dollars. This is how my brain works, and I wish I were exaggerating.

The game didn’t do that to me. I did that to me. I could simply… not. I could skip a day. The sun would still rise. My characters would still be there. The digital crops would not file a complaint. Yes, I’d lose out on 50 cents worth of digital currency but so what? It’s 50 cents. It should’t matter.

And yet I log in.

What I SHOULD be doing

When I think about the games I’ve loved the most, the ones that stuck with me long after I stopped playing them, none of them are tied to a streak. I don’t remember what day I logged in. I don’t remember what tier of the Battle Pass I hit. I remember wandering. I remember the story. I remember the characters. I remember rushing through boring bits and really meandering through parts I loved.

I remember deciding to go left instead of right just because the light looked interesting over there. I remember getting distracted halfway through a quest because something shiny caught my eye. I remember staying up too late not because something was about to expire at midnight, but because I wanted to see what was over the next hill.

That’s my happy place in games. The roaming. The poking around. The completely inefficient use of time. I AM the worlds slowest gamer and for good reason. If HowLongToBeat says it’ll take 50 hours to complete a game, I’m going to take 100 hours. I just HATE rushing.

When I’m wandering, I’m not optimizing. I’m not thinking about value extraction or daily caps or whether I’ve “maximized rewards.” I’m just in the space. If I don’t log in tomorrow, nothing breaks. The world doesn’t reset on me. It just waits. Maybe I take a bite of story. Maybe I don’t. Maybe I go see if I can get over that mountain. Or what happens if I swim too far out to sea. Will I die from slaughterfish or will I just get teleported back to land. Let’s find out!

That’s probably why life sims and slower games have been pulling me in lately. There’s no clock ticking in the background saying, “Better hurry up, this offer ends soon.” I can roam around, talk to whoever I feel like talking to, maybe dazzle someone with fireworks and go in for the hug, and call it a night. [Sorry, day dreaming about my Sandrock wife Amirah… she’s so attentive!]

And maybe that’s the real difference. Wandering is open-ended. It doesn’t demand anything from me. It doesn’t care if I show up every single day. It doesn’t punish me for having other things to do. It just exists, waiting for when I feel like stepping back into it.

Daily logins, on the other hand, always feel like they’re tapping their watch.

And I’m starting to think that as soon as a game starts tapping its watch at me, I should probably take that as a cue to wander off somewhere else.

January 2026

Posted on by Nimgimli

Holy smokes, how is January over already? This month has flown by!

I’m posting this one a day early because we’re about to get hit with a whopper of a storm (they say the area could see more snow than it’s seen in 30 years, but for here that means 8-9 inches, not 3 feet) with high winds and bitter cold, so in case we lose power or Internet, figured I’d hit Publish on the recap.

Playing

I’ve been playing a bunch of stuff a little bit, in a kind of slow-motion cleanup of my hard drive. I made a list of every game I have installed and have been going through them deciding which can be shelved and uninstalled and which to keep around (my SSDs are getting full, mostly thanks to a ton of AI models sucking up space). I won’t list them all, though. Here’re the games I have been playing more seriously:

My Time At Sandrock is still a daily stop in my gaming travels. I’m somewhere around 90 hours in and just based on how much stuff I have upgraded to the highest levels possible, I think I must be getting close to the end of the story, but we’ll see. I certainly am not rushing through it. It tends to be the last thing I play at night which means lots of roaming around exploring and goofing off. I’m also struggling to focus on a spouse. I was dating one character when I said the wrong thing to another character and BOTH of them got mad at me. Now I’ve been putting the moves on Amirah. See the picture at the top of this post. I dazzled her with fireworks then went in for the hug. What a player I am! Anyway I’m having fun and I’ve really been drawn, lately, to this kind of ‘life sim’ game that ISN’T all about combat. I have a couple more waiting in the wings for this one to be finished.

Ball X Pit continues to also be a daily thing. I log in, tweak my village and play a round. They just added more content although one of the new characters they added literally plays the game for you, so that’s dull as dirt. Like for real you can start the level and go have lunch and come back in 15 minutes to see how you did. I guess I’ll call this one done when I’ve unlocked everything; there’s really no story here or any kind of “The End” situation that I can detect.

I spent a little bit of time in Wasteland 3 before deciding the tone wasn’t for me. See more about that here.

And I finished Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and you can read about that here.

Eternal Strands is probably the game to replace Expedition 33 on my “let’s actually finish a game” list. This is an action rpg from Yellow Brick Games that feels like it borrows from several sub-genres in a good way. There’s fighting regular monsters, fighting really big monsters that you can climb on, and crafting weapons and gear from both monster parts as well as plants and minerals you find during your journey. There’s a LOT of destructible stuff in the game. It feels like everything that was “placed” in a level is destructible, which is oddly fun. Finally combat is a mix of melee, bows and magic, with various elemental magics impacting the world. Fires spread, ice freezes baddies in place (and puts out fires) and so on. More when I’ve played more!

Screenshot for Eternal Strands showing protagonist Brynn facing a much larger enemy
Big enemies like this Ark of the Stricken Earth have to be climbed in order to harvest their magical energy.

Watching

Stranger Things S5 — I hadn’t been super excited about another season of Stranger Things after such a long break, and I went into it skeptical. But by the end I was on-board and while the ending seemed really long, it was also pretty interesting. It’s not often you get a glimpse of the life of your shows’ heros after all the excitement is finally over.

Sanctuary: A Witch’s Tale — I did NOT want to watch another witch show, but PartPurple really wanted to watch so we did. And I found myself enjoying it; it’s really more of a mystery with some magic sprinkled in than it is a classic witch tale. It’d been a while since I watched a mystery series so in that way it was a nice change of pace and a very pleasant surprise. I’m glad we watched. That said, I found most of the characters pretty unlikable and just last night we started Season 2 and my immediate reaction was “these characters haven’t learned a thing and are making the same mistakes they made last season” and I’m considering asking Purple to watch this second season on her own. But I guess I should give it a chance so the mystery aspect can kick in.

Fallout — We re-watched S1 (I think that was my 4th time watching, but just the 2nd for PartPurple) and we’re now enjoying S2 with the last ep just a few days out. Love this show to bits!

Defiance — This was our lunchtime re-watch, and we just finished it. Seasons 1 & 2 are on Prime Video but Season 3 is on Peacock, and we were invested enough that we subscribed to Peacock to finish the re-watch. Jamie Murray as Stahma Tarr carries so much of this show. She is so ethereal and sexy and evil and conniving in it. I’d also forgotten what an ass Nolan can be… sheesh dude, take it down a notch. I do think Seasons 1 & 2 are much stronger than S3, but we’ve enjoyed them all. If you don’t want to sign up for Peacock but have Amazon Prime, watching the first 2 seasons still works.

Reading

Still reading old sci fi and fantasy magazines and that’ll probably hold true for a long time to come!

So that’s a wrap on January. It was a pretty good month for me. The trauma of the move is fading into the rear-view mirror, the new apartment is SLOWLY coming together but generally feels comfortable and much nicer than the old place. I’ve been slowly exploring the immediate area, though I still haven’t found my way to the beaches. Gotta fix that. Work has been OK, health has been OK… so yeah, it was a nice month for me despite the wider world slowly (?) falling apart.

 

Finally Finished Expedition 33

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m going to make this pretty short since Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has been talked about so much since release, what with being a hit at launch, then winning awards, then having awards retracted, then news about the studio resisting the pressure to expand so they can get their next game out more quickly… suffice to say that the game is a critical and popular success.

I started playing at launch (April 24, 2025) and finished yesterday, Jamuary 24, 2026. And this wasn’t my typical ‘start over half a dozen times’ playthrough. The Save Game I finished on was the same one I started in April. My playtime was a little under 43 hours. I’d leave the game for weeks at a time before remembering it and circling back.

I liked it enough to finish it (mostly because the story, which somehow never got spoiled for me, had me very curious) but why the long breaks?

Basically I found Expedition 33 hard to get back into after ANY kind of break. When I’d play a good long session I would love the game, but if I left it for even 2 or 3 days getting back into it was difficult for me. It all comes down to the combat. Combat is turn-based with player-reaction coming in the form of dodging or parrying enemy attacks. By tapping a button at just the right time you can dodge or parry an enemy’s attack, mitigating damage and ideally leading to a counter attack. When you’re playing consistently and learn the enemies’ devious patterns (they tend to try to fake you out, but each enemy type has a few varieties of attack that play out the same way every time) and get good at parrying, especially, it is a lot of fun and combat becomes substantially easier.

But for me, at least (remember: I am old as dirt), even a couple days away and I’d have to re-learn all these defense patterns and I would SUCK for the first half hour or so. And, another quirk of mine is I often play games in very short sessions…like 30 minutes or so.

A screenshot showing the combat interface
Combat screen from fairly early in the game

While it took 8 calendar months to finish, I’d guess the bulk of my progress came in 3 or 4 spurts where I really focused on the game for a couple days. I guess this is all a long-winded way of saying that this is a game best enjoyed all at once. My advice is that if you haven’t played yet, when you do pick a time when there aren’t other games plucking at your attention and just focus entirely on this one until you’ve finished. To me this feels like the best way to enjoy Expedition 33. Oh and if you have both an Xbox and a gaming PC, don’t play this on both platforms at the same time. The dodge/parry timing is just different enough between the two platforms that it’ll really throw you off.

My only other issue with is is the lack of a map. That’s a personal peeve. I really like having a map, ideally with ‘fog of war’ so you do have to travel all the pathways to discover them, but after that you have a map. Presumably one of your party members is on cartography duty!

Everything else about the game: the story, the characters, the artwork and the music, was amazing. The characters in particular were some of the most beautiful I’ve seen in a game in a long time.

I have no idea if the devs will be coming back to this IP, but if they do I will surely play the next game in the series. My only request to them is to give us a difficulty slider specifically for the timing of the block/parry. I could have put the game on Story mode which I guess makes the timing more generous, but I didn’t want the enemies to hit less hard or have fewer hit points. I just wanted to be able to effectively dodge and parry even after a break from playing.

A Taste of Wasteland 3

Posted on by Nimgimli

Back in my younger days, before I gravitated to consoles, I was a huge fan of tactical strategy and wargames. Recently I’ve been spending a bit more time on the PC and wanted to see if this genre still scratched the itch for me (yes there are tactical strategy games on consoles but I’ve never found using a controller for these to be very comfortable, nor is reading a bunch of stats from across the room). Wasteland 3 in a CRPG with tactical turn-based combat and it’s on Game Pass so it seemed like an obvious choice.

Actually it was a choice I made a few times, bouncing off very early most times. But this time… THIS time would be different. And it was. I put about 9 hours in. Enough to do ten or so quests and to level up characters and gear, and to engage in a good amount of combat.

I found that I do still enjoy tactical combat. Y’know, figuring out how many things you can do on one turn’s worth of action points. Moving and finding cover. Healing your squaddies. Tossing grenades and accidentally blowing up your own guys. All of that was fun and I enjoyed building the characters as well. This guy will be the doctor and I’ll load him up with health and recovery skills. That one is the spy, give him a sniper rifle AND lock picking skills. Things like that.

So combat and character development, thumbs up.

The RPG aspects though, felt a little dull. Click to move, then scroll the screen, then click to move further, then turn the view so you can see down that side street, then click to move down that street. BORING. There’s a Map screen… why not just let me click on that and have my crew travel back and forth across town on their own? I might need to learn some patience.

The dialog with NPCs and such was pretty good in that there are a lot of choices and apparently these choices have long-term ramifications though honestly I didn’t play long enough to experience that myself.

In the end though, the aspect that convinced me to put this one aside was the tone. Yeah its post-apocalyptic and we know how “edgy” that can get, but this felt like post-apocalypse via the imagination of a 14 year old boy who is caught up in the grip of puberty. It’s really weird by design, and dirtier than it needs to be, and not dirty in a good way if you like your media to be a bit spicy. It just feels crass to me. For example, check out the helmet on this character. At this point I didn’t yet have enough helmets for everyone so I had to use what I could get but c’mon…

A character wearing a helmet that has sex toys as 'horns'
When I was younger I may have found this hilarious.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this, just like I never thought there was anything wrong with the dildo club in Saints Row. I just personally think it’s dumb, and I dunno… I like to find cool armor in games, not armor I’d be embarassed to wear. This is just an example but you get the idea of the tone of the whole game. It can’t decide if it is a soft r-rated slapstick comedy, or a grim-dark story about how after civilization falls, there are no good guys left in the world. It tries to be both, in the way Fallout is both, but for whatever reason, for me personally, it just didn’t work.

I’m NOT saying it’s a bad game; in fact there’s a lot I like about it. It’s just not the game I’m in the mood for right now, so keeping with my new gaming outlook, rather than trying to force myself to keep playing I’m going to set it aside. I MIGHT come back to it some day but there are SO many games out there waiting to be played… life feels too short to play games that you think are “OK”. (At 9 hours in I still have 50+ to go from what I’ve read and that’s a lot of time to dedicate to something you’re not whole-heartedly enjoying!)

For what it’s worth, the Steam community has given this one a “Mostly Positive” rating with over 190K reviews, and it’s currently 70% off ($11.99 USD) and Open Critic gives it a ‘Top Critic Average’ of 86%, but keep in mind those reviews came out in 2021. Point is though, if it sounds fun, don’t let me dissuade you because my issues with it are personal and very subjective.

A Cache of Old Tech

Posted on by Nimgimli

With our move completed I’ve started a second purge/organization sweep. My long term goal is to just reduce the amount of “stuff” I have, and I have a lot of stuff. In earlier years I was fairly comfortable financially and [in retrospect] fairly unhappy in some way, and I’d placate that unhappiness by buying things that seemed cool. The adage back then was: “He who dies with the most toys, wins.” Not something I’m proud of these days.

Anyway the goal is not only to reduce clutter but just to try to streamline life a bit. It’s just been feeling good to send things off to recycling lately.

Anywhoooo…. I’ve found a bunch of old tech I’d sort of forgotten I had. (The image at the top of this post shows most of the current haul.) A lot of it is video game stuff: a Nintendo DS (not the newer 3DS, that one is still theoretically in use), a Sony PSP, and a Sony PS Vita. No surprises there; I love me some gaming devices. I also found two old iPods, including the original 5 GB model that’s about the size of a deck of cards. Lastly some old cellular-but-not-Smart phones, including a Motorola model that has a slide out keyboard (also some unremarkable old flip phones). Most interesting was a little Nokia device that was so old I didn’t remember what it did. Turns out it’s like a tiny, tiny tablet or something. Think of a gadget like the Palm Pilot only more tuned for consumption rather than creation:

A small Nokia 'tablet' of sorts.
This is the item I find most intriguing. Sadly it is frozen in time, stuck in 2006 until I set up an old-timey WiFi network.

None of this stuff is quite working. A lot of these items had proprietary charging ports and (so far) I haven’t found the charging cables.

In other cases, the batteries are so old they no longer hold a charge. The PSP seems to work fine as long as it is plugged in, but as soon as it is disconnected it dies. One of the phones charged fine but in the 20 minutes or so it took me to wipe it prior to recycling, the battery was basically dead again.

And then there is the connectivity issue. The WiFi tech in these old gadgets has no knowledge of modern WiFi security protocols so they can’t connect. I COULD, if I was that ambitious, set up a second 2.4 ghz WEP WiFi network and somehow isolate it, and I MIGHT do that on a super temporary basis but it’s not something I’d feel comfortable leaving up all the time. Mostly it’s this little Nokia thing I’d like to use for a few minutes. It does have a bunch of content on it, cached back in 2006 so I guess that was the last time it had a WiFi connection.

Other devices are just decomposing. The phone with the slide out keyboard has a rubberized back surface that is sticky and gross. At first I thought something had spilled on it, but no, the rubber is just embracing entropy.

A Motorola phone with a slide-out keyboard.
If you think the front looks dirty you should see the back. It literally sticks to the table since the rubber backing is slowly dissolving.

I’m deciding what to do with this stuff. In theory I might someday use the gaming devices but the other items are just curiosities. Maybe I can set up a museum of old tech. Get some Lucite boxes to display it all in. Charge a nickle for admission! More likely I’ll do whatever I can to reset/wipe data and take them all to the e-waste recycling station.

Honestly, it’s been fun finding this stuff and seeing what I can get working. It’s crazy what I used to spend my money on, though.