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.

Move Finally Completed

Posted on by Nimgimli

As of midnight last night, we’re only renting one apartment. Yes at long last our endless, very very badly organized move has come to an end. At least the moving part has.

Yesterday we went back to Raleigh, with a truck full of stuff we’d paid to have moved south but now wanted to dispose of (good use of money there, eh?). Our old place has dumpsters everywhere and dedicated recycling dumpsters and to be fair MOST of the trash was cardboard from the packing boxes, but not all. For example I think I tossed 7 or 8 keyboards in the recycling. (Leaving us with, I dunno, 6 spares, still?)

Our new place we have one large trash can that gets emptied once a week, so using the old place’s dumpsters felt like a handy cheat-code since we’d be up there anyway. Now I’ll have to figure out where I can take big loads of cardboard down here. Wherever that is, I’m sure it’ll cost me.

We did a final bittersweet walk-through of the old place. I won’t miss the actual apartment one bit but I will miss the little backyard where I fed the birds, squirrels and even the deer and foxes who wandered by. (The image at the top of the post shows a deer and a squirrel grazing in the back yard.) The new place has a ‘back deck’ which is a small slab of concrete that faces the neighbor’s back deck and is a pretty busy place. No critters out there!

We hugged a couple of neighbors, pet some doggos, said our goodbyes, turned in the keys and were gone. It all took less time than expected. We’d figured on spending the night up there but got done so quickly we drove back down. I’d taken today off thinking we’d be on the road but instead I had a good long sleep-in. Back to work for the day tomorrow and then on Monday we’re back to the old grind, and honestly I’m not too sad about that. Remind me I said that when I get tired of it by mid-February.

The new place is still utter chaos with boxes everywhere. PartPurple has been sick this week so she hasn’t gotten much done and a LOT of the unpacking is down to her since she is, shall we say particular, about where things go. Anything I unpack she comes along behind me and moves stuff so I’ll just let her orchestrate and be the muscle when needed.

The exception is my office which was so packed full of stuff I could barely move. I’m making progress…I can see the floor here and there now. I’ll work on that some more this afternoon.

Everyone has been doing 2025 recaps, as we tend to do at this time of year. 2025 was pretty awful, eh? For us personally, we lost our beloved dog, and we lost all our money. At the start of the year I had about $16,000 in a “Rainy Day Fund”. My goal was $20K at which point I hoped to start shopping for a house. Then Lola got sick, to the tune of $13K in vet bills. I actually took out a personal loan to pay for some of that since I didn’t want to drain the rainy day fund completely. But then this move has wound up costing us almost $10K because we are stupid. (Moving company was $2500 each trip [2 trips which was the REAL dumb part], a junk collector was $500, cleaners were $500, and then there was the old 1st month, last month, and 1 month’s security downpayment on the new place.) Now the rainy day fund has $25 AND I have a credit card balance for the first time in years. Quite a setback. Goal now is to have the credit card balance paid off by June, then we can start building again.

So yeah, if 2026 can just be dull and boring and not cost me a bunch of money, that’d be great. We’re still rocking a semi-busted TV, PartPurple wants a new couch, and I’d LOVE to get a proper corner desk for my office but… all in good time I guess.

So now we start to find the new apartment groove. Now that my gaming PC is back in my office, I’ve been spending more time on PC gaming since PartPurple has been spending a lot of time in the living room watching YouTube on the TV I generally do my console gaming on. I thought about moving the consoles into my office but she says she doesn’t think this new habit of hers will last and that once HER office is set up and not a room full of stacked moving boxes, she’ll be back to working on projects up there. So we’ll see.

I do kind of LOVE having my own office, though. Or I think I will once I have it organized and have purged more stuff. So much junk! For example I have SIX PC towers in the closet (plus two actually running, one work, one gaming) and a stack of 7 or 8 old laptops (aside from the ones we actually use). I have a box of old hard drives I need to wipe before I get rid of them… just so much crap. A few 50′ ethernet cables, tons of coax cables. Switches and hubs that are so old that aren’t gigabit. Stuff like that.

The long term goal is to keep purging stuff and get to where I have room for a project table where I can do thinks other than tap away on a keyboard.

Anyway, we’re so very, VERY happy to be done with this move. I’m hoping this isn’t one of those places that gets you in at a good price then jacks the rent up the first time you need to renew your lease, because I don’t want to move again for at LEAST 5 years!!!

December 2025

Posted on by Nimgimli

OMG I just realized tomorrow is the end of the month and I haven’t even create the ‘stub’ of a recap post (I’m writing this on Tuesday). My usual system is to create a recap post early in the month and just jot down notes in it because I WILL forget what I’ve done. I didn’t do that this month and indeed, I have forgotten what I’ve done.

The truth really is that I haven’t done much ‘fun’ stuff due to the move I’ve been talking about. We are STILL in the midst of this and painful, expensive lessons were learned about how much work it is, and how much time it takes, to move. Particularly if you’re a senior citizen and work a desk job so your stamina is shit. We spent money on movers to move the big furniture and planned to move the smaller stuff ourselves, but after many wasted days (and wasted gas) we threw in the towel and hired the movers to come AGAIN. And still there was more to do, like take down things we’d mounted on the walls, take down curtains… stuff like that. Then the cleaning started and eventually we threw in that towel, too, and hired a cleaning crew (this is gross and embarassing to admit but we’d had furniture that hadn’t been moved in a decade and it appears mice had been living under/behind said furniture, and what a mess they made). On New Year’s Day I’m making 1 last ‘haul’ trip. Friday PartPurple goes up to basically let the cleaning crew in. And next week we go back to turn in the keys and do a walk-through and then, finally….FINALLY…. we’ll be done. And I’ll be broke.

Anyway between shuttling back and forth between apartments, packing, unpacking, recycling runs, and organizing, not a lot of fun stuff got done this month. But here is what did:

Playing

My Time At Sandrock has been my ‘main game’ and I’ve been slowly chipping away at it. Realizing that — unlike in many titles in this genre — Sandrock lets you save pretty much any time has been a blessing and a curse. Blessing because, duh, it’s convenient, but a curse because now it can sometimes take me 2-3 play sessions to get through a single day. I keep forgetting what I was working on and so forth. Because of this I think I’m way over-level for the part of the main story I’m in, though I’m not sure I mind that all that much. Still really enjoying this one and looking forward to the next game in the series, Evershine, where the character models are a big more adult. It feels a little creepy running around looking like a 14 year old boy and trying to woo the (based on appearances) older women in the town!

My yard, with the stable to the right, my garden in center and a row of machines in the background

Winter Burrow was finally finished. Here’s the post on that.

I still play a session of Ball X Pit every day to keep the Microsoft Rewards streak going on console. To earn the points you have to play a game on console and a run takes just about exactly 15 minutes (assuming you don’t fail) so this works out perfectly and it’s the kind of game where you can really easily jump in, play and jump out without having to remember what you are supposed to be doing, or anything along those lines. Plus, it’s fun as heck!

Last is Relic Hunters Legend, which I just spoke about the other day.

Watching

The Mayfair Witches, S2 — This was a ‘her’ pick. She loves Anne Rice and that whole milieu. We’ve recently watched Interview With The Vampire, Talamasca, and now this. I like them, but not enough that I’d probably watch them if PartPurple wasn’t really into them. It’s all urban fantasy about witches and vamps and stuff.

Stranger Things, S5 — We just started season 5 and are only a couple of episodes in. I loved this show when it was new but honestly I like it less with every season. I think. It’s been SO long between seasons I can’t be certain.

Defiance — We always do re-watches for lunchtime TV viewing since we, and particularly me, can’t focus as much as we usually do. I’m always listening for pings from work while we watch. Anyway Defiance recently hit Amazon Prime so we’re doing a re-watch and loving it.

Reading

A Christmas Carol — For the most part, we just skipped Christmas this year. We did put up a tree, and I read A Christmas Carol, as I do every year. It’s a tradition!

Old sci-fi/fantasy magazines. In the back of a closet I found a stack of old magazines. Sci-Fi Age, Realms of Fantasy, the Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy, etc etc. They have dates from the 1990s on them! I’ve been having quite a good time reading this old stuff, particularly sci-fi that takes place in the near future (as of 1995 or whatever) which is often the VERY near future as of 2025. It’s fun to see what the authors got right, and what they got wrong. Also ‘interesting’ is the artwork that comes with many of the fantasy stories. There’s almost always an attractive woman in an alluring outfit. The era of the chainmail bikini, amiright?

So that’s December, and that’s 2025 done and dusted. 2026 is gonna suck (in world scale) but I’m hoping it’ll be less bad in personal terms. Losing our dog Lola was really painful, and frankly really expensive, and this move is driving us deeper into debt. Hoping in ’26 I can climb most of the way out of that hole. And we’re starting the year in a new apartment, and in a new area full of places to explore and things to do. So while the world burns, I’m hoping that we in our specific household have a better year.

And I hope that you in your specific household have a better year, too!

Early Thoughts on Relic Hunters Legends

Posted on by Nimgimli

Here’s another of those games I never would’ve tried if it hadn’t been on Game Pass. But it was and I needed one more Game Pass game to collect my Microsoft Rewards for having played eight different Game Pass titles in a given month, so I gave it a shot.

This isn’t a review since I didn’t play it enough, but the beauty of being a blogger rather than a professional reviewer is that you can just throw in the towel whenever you want. And after 5 hours of Relic Hunters Legends, I think I’ve had enough. It isn’t a bad game, but it isn’t a great game either, and there are plenty of great games out there waiting to be played.

RHL is a looter-shooter that seems like it was maybe made for kids? Your character is a kid, the art-style makes me think of Nickolodeon or The Cartoon Network (if either of those are still around) and the combat is pretty basic. It’s essentially a twin stick shooter played from an overhead perspective. Enemies are anthropomorphic animals, primarly ducks and turtles in the early game.

Big dude on the left is an NPC, white haired little guy on the right is me

At the start of the game you answer some questions like it is 1985 and you’re playing Ultima IV. At the end of this you get assigned a Planet, which I guess is a class. Eventually you can unlock the other classes but until you do, you have the joy of getting lots of loot your class can’t use. That’s always fun. At least you can break useless gear down for components, which are then used to upgrade gear you CAN use. Upgrading gear (whether through drops of new stuff or improving what you have) is the main way of getting stronger. There’s a level system but it just seems to be there to gate gear and not to make you inherently more powerfull.

My assumption is that they really want you to play this with friends, and I played it solo, so keep that in mind. What’s odd is that in the tutorial mission you are joined with some NPC companions, but once you get into the main game you don’t have access to them. I think adding bots to play along side of would’ve made the game more interesting. But anyway as is typical for this kind of game, it’s probably more entertaining when you’re on comms with your friends and you’re laughing at how that one guy keeps running off the edge of the world or whatever. The tutorial mission with NPC pals was frenetic and kind of fun.

Playing solo I tended to charge ahead, then fall back to let my skill cooldowns expire, which was effective but dull. The two mission types I experienced were skirmish (kill your way through a couple of short levels, then take on a boss) and ‘escort the payload’ (where you have to hang out near a vehicle and it moves forward, unless enemies are near it). The skirmish mission was easy until I got to the boss, and it wiped the floor with me. I thought I was going to have to grind the mission over and over until I realized I could respawn and the damage to the boss wouldn’t reset. So I just chewed away at him, dying probably a dozen times before he finally went down. On a second run, after having gotten some better loot from finishing the mission once, I had to respawn three times.

The Escort mission was arguably more interesting but since the payload only moves when you’re near it, you could still fall back and wait for things like your heal skill to cooldown so you could fix yourself up. It didn’t appear that the payload took any damage so I’m not sure if you can even fail these missions. I beat that one the first try.

The Ducans (duck-mans?) are messing with my payload!

The art style and the lack of fail-states is what makes me think the game was intended for kids.

When you’re not doing missions there a hub-world to run around in. This felt like another situation where it might be more interesting if you were running around in it with friends but as a solo player I just found running back and forth to be a little tedious.

I don’t have much BAD to say about Relic Hunters Legends; it’s fine. It just doesn’t really sparkle in any way. It’s currently on sale on Steam for $7.00 USD and might be worth a purchase at that price (there’s also a demo) but at the regular price of $20 it just needs more of a hook to be worth it.