Category: Gaming

Winter Burrow Early First Look

Posted on by Nimgimli

Earlier this week Winter Burrow hit Game Pass and launched on Steam the same day. I’d seen previews and it was so darned cute I had to try it right away.

So far at least, it’s been a fairly typical survivalbox game, only this time you’re a mouse so everything is on a tiny scale. You’ve returned to your childhood home to find it in a state of disrepair; first order of business is to fix things up! You need to go collect twigs and pebbles to make tools and effect repairs. Then you need to use the tools to harvest better materials to make better tools in order to fix more things. It’s a familiar loop that we’ve all done many times and by now you probably know whether or not you enjoy this kind of game.

Aside from the cuteness, it’s the winter setting that makes the game a little different from most survivalboxes. In addition to gauges for health, hunger and stamina, you have a cold meter that is always dropping when you’re outside. You can knit (SO ADORABLE, your little mouse self sitting there knitting) warmer clothes to mitigate this, and there’s a day/night cycle as well. Colder at night of course.

A tiny mouse in his burrow knitting warm clothes
Knitting some warmer clothes by the fire

It’s billed as a cozy game but the cold mechanic kind of invalidates that designation to me, because you do frequently have to run home to warm up or you’ll start taking damage, and as far as I can tell there’s no map, so you can get lost and freeze. In the name of epic journalism I stayed outside in the cold until my health hit zero. When that happens you ‘pass out’ and somehow ‘stumble home’ to the burrow [aka you respawn at home], but you drop any items other than tools that you were carrying. You can go back to the spot of your misfortune and re-collect what you’ve dropped, though, so it isn’t a harsh penalty.

A tiny mouse outside the door to his burrow. The screen is feezing up!
The colder you get, the more the frost encroaches on your window into the game world. Better get inside!

In addition to gathering/crafting there’s some farming elements as well.

There’s also combat and hunting. So far I’ve attacked passive beetles to get meat that I can roast, and once been attacked by a different kind of beetle that was aggro. There’s also a setting in the options to toggle spiders on or off for folks with arachnophobia so expect some 8-legged enemies at some point.

I’ve only played for a couple of hours but wanted to share my very early thoughts, particularly for Aywren who was curious about the game.

So far I’m really enjoying it but have to stress the cuteness is the real hook here. Being a little mouse wearing snowshows and a yak beanie is just so adorable and did I mention the knitting?!

I’ll circle back once I get further in, but the initial TLDR is, not super original in the gameplay, but the aesthetics are keeping me engaged for now.

Two tiny mice having a chat
You’re not completely alone in the world!

Ball X Pit – Weird and Addicting

Posted on by Nimgimli

I was really late to the Vampire Survivors party. By the time I discovered it, it was old news. If you haven’t played it, it’s a top down APRG where your character auto-shoots. All you do is steer around. You level up quickly and as you do you get a choice of power-ups to choose from and in so doing put together a build for that run. When you die, you hit a store to buy upgrades to make you stronger, then you try again. It doesn’t sound like much, but the sheer number of enemies on screen, each of which drops a bit of exp when they die, make it like a constant dopamine drip.

Anyway, now we have Ball X Pit which is scratching the same kind of itch. This time the gameplay feels like the love-child of Vampire Survivors and Breakout. The main gameplay has you in a tall narrow corridor with enemies marching down the screen from the top while you fire balls at them to destroy them. Both enemies and you have a health pool and generally one hit from a ball isn’t enough to destroy a baddie. If the bad guys reach the bottom of the screen they smack you for a chunk of your health, and some fire arrows or other projectiles at you as them make their way down the screen.

Meanwhile the balls you fire bounce around like they do in Breakout, the major difference being that you can aim them fairly precisely, and if you want you can hold them and then fire. There’s also an “auto-fire” mode that makes it a lot more Vampire Survivor-ish and it is how I usually play. But just like in Breakout if you can sneak a ball to the back of the enemies it will careen around and hit a ton of bad guys, doing a lot of damage.

I feel like a video will be a better explainer than I ever will be:

There are different kinds of Balls. Hero balls, and baby balls. Baby balls are weaker little projectiles that you don’t really control. Hero Balls come in a number of flavors. Fire balls cause enemies to burn for a bit (doing DoT). Earthquake balls cause area damage. Vampire balls heal you when they kill an enemy. And so on. You can hold 4 types of Hero Balls at once, and 4 passive powerups that offer bonuses like faster movement or enhanced damage when you hit an enemy from behind.

As in VS, every enemy leaves a gem which gives you experience. You have a variety of stats (Strength, Intelligence, Dexterity) and when you level up one or more of those get bumped up a point or two, and you get to pick a ball or a passive to add to your quiver or level up. Every so often (haven’t figured out what triggers these) you’ll get a little glowy thing spawning. When you pick one of those up you get some boon. Sometimes it’s random level ups for your existing skills, and sometimes it’s the chance to combine Balls into something new. So maybe you fuse a Fire ball with a Vampire ball and you get, well, a Fire X Vampire ball that both burns and returns health, and when these two fuse you now have an open slot to add something new.

Anyway eventually you die or beat the boss which ends a level. Then you go to your village. Here you can spend your rewards to buy farms and buildings and so on. Farms (wheat, forest, stone) just give more resources to buy more buildings. Houses (which you need to find a blueprint for in the ball-busting part of the game) unlock new characters, and combat buildings (eg Barracks) make your characters start the next run stronger.

But even in your village the ball motif continues. Once you place your farms and buildings and such, you have to aim and fire your characters at them in order to collect, and these characters bounce off things like your balls do. To build a building you have to hit it x times (5 maybe? I never counted). To harvest a farm  you have to fire a worker over it. And so on. Once you’ve built and harvested, it’s back to the pit for another run.

Here is what that looks like:

>/div>

Runs take about 15 minutes once you get a little ways into the game and have leveled up a bit (very early you might die much more quickly). This makes it a great game to drop into when you don’t have a lot of time but just want a gaming fix.

Anyway, I’m finding this one really addictive.  It’s available on Steam (Steamdeck Verified), Xbox and Playstation and it’s $15 everywhere. There’s a demo on Steam as well, and it has an overwhelmingly positive rating on Steam with over 6,000 reviews.

October 2025

Posted on by Nimgimli

Happy Halloween, Hapy Samhain, Happy Too Much Candy Day. Whatever your denomination, happy end of October. Now we can say summer is truly gone and I no longer fear my electric bill (the air conditioner is finally silent). We’re all ready to receive our average of approximately zero trick-or-treaters. But that’s OK, PartPurple did a great job decorating and several neighbors have come by to compliment her display. Our new place has a much smaller entryway so I think going forward any decorations will have to be much more modest. So one last “it should be visible from space” decorating hurrah seemed appropriate.

I messed up this month. I went the whole month without taking any kind of notes on what I’ve been playing or that we’ve been watching. I’m going to have to rely on memory, which is never my strong suit. With the move coming up fast I’ve spent more time chorin’ and less time doing fun stuff anyway, so it might be there’s not that much for me to remember.

Playing

The Outer Worlds — I finished this and… it left so little an impression on me that I can’t really remember how it ended. I do know I got to an ending though. The sequel is out now but I haven’t tried it. At some point I will, just to see if they’ve made any quality of life improvements, because QoL was what really bothered me about the first game. But I talked about all that last month so…

Wuthering Waves — After being well and truly hooked on Wuthering Waves for a good long while, I think I’m ready to take a break from it once my Lunite Subscription (via which you get a daily login reward of premium currency) ends. I still really enjoy the game it’s just that sometimes familiarity breeds contempt and I just need to step away for a bit. I did pull Zani last night though and I really enjoy her so maybe I’ll spend some time building her to see how she plays. Currently my main team is Havoc Rover, Carlotta and Shorekeeper, though none of the three are 100% built yet. Those talent trees take a while to complete.

Little Rocket Lab — THIS has been my obsession lately. I find myself playing it any time I had at least 10-15 minutes free. I talked about it in a mid-month update but as of last night, I finished it. 🙁 I might actually play through it again. Once you finish the game once you unlock “Hard Mode” which could be interesting, or I could just impose some rules on myself to make a 2nd run-through a different sort of challenge.

Answering a few questions I had in my Mid-Month post, you never really are gated by a lack of resources, though one or two are slower to gather than the rest. There doesn’t seem to be any time limits so you can just play around and do whatever you like. There are Seasons but really they’re just cosmetic and they advanced based on you finishing certain tasks rather than being based on the number of days that have passed.

The team is still working on the game, adding QoL improvements and they’ve teased new features in a very vague way. So I’ll probably set it aside for now and revisit after some updates. There WERE, to be fair, parts of the game that felt sort of half-finished. For instance there are stores but I never really felt a need to use them. I did jobs to earn money to unlock some upgrades (there are only 3 of these) but once those were unlocked I had no use for money. There are also plants and shells and things that you can collect but I never found a use for them. I think you might be able to give them to villagers as gifts but I’m not sure what the point of that would be.

But just building conveyor belts and machines to process goods and to constantly tweak things to optimize the delivery of rocket parts and such? That was fun even though my setup was the mechanical equivalent of spaghetti code by the time I was finished!! So yeah, another play-through to be faster, neater, and more efficient is kind of appealing.

Screenshot from Little Rocket Lab showing a chaotic mess of conveyor belts
It just kind of evolved into this…

I was surprised to learn, when the credits rolled, that this was built by a very small team. Two programmers are listed, and one of them is also the game’s designer. There’s considerably more people in QA and localization but I’m guessing that the core game was just the two people.

Watching

Invasion (Apple TV+) — We finished our rewatch and the new season. Liked it all quite a bit. Season 3 put less of an emphasis on the kids, which I appreciated because some of the kids [looking at you, Luke and Sarah] were really annoying. Season 3 ended in such a way that it was a satisfying ending if there isn’t a 4th season, but there’s a few cracks that they could tease a new plotline out of if they did want to come back for Season 4. All in all I find it to be a good, not great, sci-fi show.

Foundation (Apple TV+) — Foundation is dense but really good. You probably don’t want to watch it casually but, if you decide to watch, give it your full attention. I’ve somehow never read the books and I think I might have to do that. I liked this one a lot, but my sense was that PartPurple wasn’t as thrilled with it and I think that’s because she constantly multitasks when we watch shows and I think she just missed stuff.

Interview With the Vampire (Netflix) — This one was for her. She loves sexy vampire stories so… I thought it was OK but she really enjoyed it.

Nobody Wants This (Netflix) — Season 2 of the Kristen Bell romcom hit Netflix earlier this week and we’re in the middle of it. Loved the first season and I might like S2 even more. I feel like the secondary characters are getting a lot more of the spotlight and I’m coming to enjoy them every bit as much as the leads.

Reading

Not much. In the middle of packing I found a copy of Isaac Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories” and I’ve been reading that. It is kind of eerie how many things he got right about AI and robots and future society, given that he was writing these stories in the 60’s and 70’s.

And that’s October in the books. I don’t know if I’ll do a November recap just because our plan is to do a kind of slow-motion move starting right before Thanksgiving and ending in mid-December, so it remains to be seen whether I’ve got my stuff together enough to write a post in the middle of that. We’ll see.

Mid-Month Random Mutterings!

Posted on by Nimgimli

Felt the itch to write a blog post so…. here’s a blog post!

I’m not sure where I’ve said what these days, but we’re getting ready to move from Raleigh, NC, to the suburbs of Wilmington, NC. So after years and years of talking about moving North to get to cooler weather…we’re moving south about 2 hours. So it’ll be even hotter! BUT, we’ll also be about 30 minutes from the beaches and even closer to Wilmington and its boardwalks and fun-seeming things to do. We’ve lived in Raleigh for 13 years, on the outskirts, and have gone into downtown Raleigh about 3 times. It just holds no appeal for me. But Wilmington is a bit tourist-y, and there are rivers and bays and oceans to explore if I don’t mind driving for 20-230 minutes. So I’m hoping I’ll become a bit more active. Since our doggo Lola passed I barely move and it is starting to have a real impact on my health and energy. I watched both my grandmother and mother lose their mobility by doing exactly what I’m doing (ie sitting indoors all day every day) and I don’t want to follow in their footsteps (none of the men in my family lived long enough for this to be an issue).

Anyway, we’re excited, both for the new locale and for going from a 2 bedroom to a 3 bedroom townhouse. This means 1 bedroom to use as a bedroom, then we each get an office/cave. I’ll finally have my own space again!! Right now we share an office and Ms Crafty McCrafterson has it PACKED with crafting tools and supplies to the point it’s hard for me to even get to my PC. But now I’ll have a nice gaming space with star-babe posters on the wall and open space for doing some VR and stuff. Woot!

But the actual process of moving is daunting for us, as we’re old and un-fit and every time we do something we have to take a day to recover from the exertion. I suppose we’ll get in shape during the process (our lease doesn’t start until just before Thanksgiving so we have over a month to prepare). We’ll hire some young strong folks to move the big stuff but hope to move a lot of the boxes and things ourselves, but we’ll see how that works out and if the economics make sense.

But yeah, big exciting changes coming up!

Gaming Updates!

Meanwhile, maybe partly due to having all these moving-related issues in my brain, I’ve been gaming quite a bit once again. Two games in particular have grabbed me.

The first is Little Rocket Lab which I tried on a whim, not expecting to really play it (it was on Game Pass and I needed to play a Game Pass game for MS Rewards Points and this was a small download). I LOVE it. It is basically Stardew Valley only instead of farming you’re manufacturing stuff. Initially you’re banging rocks with a hammer but you very quickly move on to automated drills, conveyor belts, machines that assemble things, machines that move items, and so on. I’m still early days so I don’t know how complex it gets. It’s a game that doesn’t appear to have any time pressure. You get quests and stuff but (so far at least) no deadline for getting them done. Like Stardew Valley it runs on a ‘day’ system where you eventually collapse if you don’t get to bed in time, but there’s no stamina meter or anything like that.

Resources do run out and I wonder if that will be a kind of gating mechanism eventually, but there seem to be ample outcroppings of iron, copper, rock and coal available, which is all I’m working with so far. And we just repaired a port and are importing container ships full of old computers and stuff. We’re going to be recycling the circuit boards from these if I ever figure out how to use a crane to unload the boat. But I wonder if we’ll get other materials from recycling, too.

Anyway I’m finding it a delight. It’s on Game Pass but also on Steam; there’s a demo on Steam and right now it’s on sale for $15. If you like Stardew Valley and are interested in, or curious about, automation games, I think this might be a must-play. Extra bonus points for me: it’s a “Play Anywhere” title on Game Pass so I can play at the PC or from the couch on the Xbox, and work on the same save.

The other game I’m really sucked into is Wuthering Waves. I finally got some characters to level 90, and I’ve been playing through the main story quests in an attempt to catch up. Those quests are long though, and feel like they’re best consumed in a single sitting. This has kept me up much too late for more than one night! And I’m still quite a few updates behind even though I’ve clocked 150 hours or so, I would guess.

I also completed the Pioneer Podcast (their version of a Battle Pass) last time around and I’ve got a good start to doing so again. It’s week one and I’m already to level 20 (of 70) so I feel good there. I start each night working on Daily and Weekly Pioneer Podcast tasks, which includes burning through the day’s stamina (Waveplates, I think Stamina is called) and I use the goodies I get from doing that for improving character and slowly building up some new characters I have in the works, after some lucky pulls.

My current team is Havoc Rover, Carlotta, and Baizhu (spelling?). I’m working on Shorekeeper to replace Baizhu on healing/support duties. I’ve gotten pretty good with Rover in terms of dodging, blocking and using her abilities, to the point where if I’m really in the grove I can beat an early-game boss without ever switching to a different character. I button-spam with Carlotta and every time I fight with her I think “After this I have to go through her tutorial to learn how to play her” then promptly forget to do that. She’s uses a gun and jumps around like Yoda so I’ve been doing OK button-mashing with her. But I should really learn to play her better.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on around here in the middle of October. Exciting changes afoot, exciting games being place.

[Note on the images used in this post:  Images are screenshots from Little Rocket Lab or Wuthering Waves. The image at the top of the post was modified via AI to remove UI components from the shot, which is why it has a Gemini watermark in the bottom corner.]

Microsoft Changes the Game Pass Game

Posted on by Nimgimli

Microsoft just changed the price of Game Pass fairly substantially and as far as I can tell, with no warning. Prices jumped as much as 50%, with Ultimate going to $30/month, which feels pretty darned steep to me.

But that’s not all they’ve done. A lot of us frugal types tend to stack-up game pass subscriptions via Microsoft Rewards points, particularly during sales. Microsoft seems to be making that harder. You can no longer spend Rewards points directly on Game Pass. Instead you have to trade in points for Gift Cards and then spend that money on Game Pass. Why does this matter? Because as far as I can tell (someone please correct me if I’m wrong) you can’t extend your membership using cash, unless of course it has expired or is coming due.

From a pop-up on https://rewards.bing.com/

[Important update] Changes to Rewards Catalog
Starting October 1st, you will no longer be able to directly redeem your Rewards points for Xbox Game Pass subscriptions. To continue enjoying Xbox Game Pass using your Rewards points, you will need to first redeem your Rewards points for an Xbox gift card and then redeem your Xbox gift card for your desired Game Pass subscription, as follows:
Step 1: Visit the Microsoft Rewards catalog.
Step 2: Redeem your Rewards points for an Xbox gift card[TD1] in a denomination that is sufficient to cover the cost of your desired Game Pass subscription. If you do not have enough Rewards points for the desired Xbox gift card denomination, you may use an alternative payment method to cover the rest.
Step 3: Use your Microsoft Account balance from your redeemed Xbox gift card to purchase your desired Game Pass subscription. If your Microsoft Account balance is insufficient to cover your desired Game Pass subscription, you may use an alternative payment method to cover the rest.
When your Game Pass subscription expires, you can buy another Game Pass subscription by either (i) repeating Steps 1-3, above; or (ii) using an alternative payment method to purchase a Game Pass subscription.

As of right now you can stil purchase Game Pass gift cards from retailers like Amazon, so you can spend rewards points on an Amazon gift card, use that money to buy a Game Pass gift card, and then apply that to your Game Pass account, but we’ll see how long that lasts.

Or maybe this is temporary and once the pricing settles they’ll bring back direct redemption for Game Pass.

Another big change I don’t see talked about is that Microsoft is now capping Rewards Points at $100/year. Or at least that’s how I’m reading this:

Ultimate subscribers can now earn up to $100 per year (100k points globally) in the Store just by playing games.

I’ve never stopped to do the math, so before I get out my pitchfork and torch I should do that. I feel like I earn more than $100 worth of points per year, though. But it could be that $100 is the mathematical cap if you do all the quests they offer.

In any case it looks like the golden age of Xbox Game Pass is coming to an end. And PSA: You can still buy 3-Month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate gift card for $60 on Amazon so if you want to stock up, now is the time to do so.

September 2025

Posted on by Nimgimli

September is such a cruel month here in North Carolina. All the advertising and marketing people start their campaigns about “Now that the weather is getting cooler…” and showing folks in sweaters taking comfortable walks in brisk Autumn weather, and here it’s still in the 90s, at least some of the time. The nights are cooler, so that’s something. But damn do I miss a proper Autumn walk!

Anyway I actually played a few games this month!

Playing

The Outer Worlds — A few months ago I decided I should finally play through this, what with the sequel coming soon and all. And I did, finishing it just a few days ago. Honestly, I did not like it very much, but I think that was because I played on console. The combat was fun, and the humor was OK, but Quality of Life issues on console frustrated me. Inventory management was a nightmare between huge pop-ups (needed since we’re reading from across the room) that would obscure most of the inventory, and having no way to sort or filter what you had in order to figure what was worth keeping and what was junk. There was also too much of it, with every location you went to filled with containers holding a few coins, or one of a zillion foods/drinks, many of which did the same thing and most of which I never needed to use. It’s funny how I used to think RPGs with tons of containers to rifle through [looking at you, Elder Scrolls games] were pretty cool, but now it just feels like needless busy work. I’m hoping the sequel is easier to play in terms of console user interface, because the actual GAMEPLAY was pretty good.

Vampire Survivors — Late to the party on this one but now I get it. If you’ve never played this game it’s basically an auto-battler where you control the character. You just steer it around, the character attacks automatically, and when it levels up you pick what skill you want to improve. And that’s it, but the game throws SO many enemies at you once it gets going that it’s like a constant dopamine drip since everything you kill drops an experience gem. Hard to describe, and it’s really slow to start, but once you’ve done some runs and earned some gold to buy perks you’ll start going farther and farther and the gameplay gets more and more insane. Fun stuff when you want something that’s basically casual but still satisfying.

Wuthering Waves — This is where I spent the bulk of my gaming time this month, logging in every day to get my goodies and do dailies. My intent was just to beeline my way through the main story quests but wouldn’t ya know it? I got hooked. Now I’m actually following a guide of sorts (<– link to a google doc made by someone else; I think I found it on reddit) so I can play through the Companion, Exploration and Side Quests in some kind of logical order to maximize story enjoyment. In the meantime I’m making a real go at completing the battle pass thingie. If my math is correct I’m going to make it. Woohoo! At the rate I’m going I’m not sure I’ll catch up on content before I inevitably get distracted, but we’ll see.

Watching

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (Paramount+) — I guess maybe some folks didn’t like this season as much, but I still did. Sad it’s over but on the other hand now I’m not giving CBS any money, so that’s good.

Invasion (Apple TV+) — The end of Season 2 of this series was a gigantic cliff-hanger, then it took 2 years for Season 3 to arrive and it is…. weird. Instead of picking up at the end of S2 it jumps ahead 2 years. A lot of characters are just gone and (so far at least) we don’t even know exactly what happened after the cliff-hanger. It almost feels like a kind of reboot? The season isn’t done yet so maybe they’ll find a way to wrap it all up and have it make sense but I’m not hopeful. Also all the kid actors are growing like weeds of course so look nothing like they did when the show started. Maybe that’s why they did the time skip? We’re going to finish it, but sadly I’m not sure I can really recommend it.

Warehouse 13 (Amazon Prime) — We always watch some older, comfy show during lunch. Something we’ve already seen since often work interupts and we don’t finish an episode. This month we picked Warehouse 13, and it turns out that we never finished the series when it was initially on, so that was a delight. Finding new episodes we hadn’t watched, I mean. I have to say, I REALLY love this show. Maybe more now than when it first came out. Just the chemistry between the characters feels so genuinely warm and family-like. The last season is short and I didn’t realize it was and when the final episode ended and I realized the show was over, I was genuinely sad, and I don’t say that too often. If for some reason you’ve never watched it, it’s currently on Amazon Prime Video in the US. Check it out. It’s a weird, silly concept with a great cast. [After it ended we moved on to Haven so maybe I’ll have something to say about that re-watch next month.]

 

And that’s September. If things work out right, we might be moving in early December, which means we’re going to start packing pretty soon. That might impact October some, but it’ll probably be November before things get chaotic. But if I fall off the face of the earth it’s probably just because I’m too involved in moving headaches to post stuff.

[The Header image is a partial screenshot from Wuthering Waves. I used Flash 2.5, aka “Nano Banana”, to strip some UI elements out of the image. Ergo the Gemini watermark in the bottom right.]

Is Ananta an Anime GTA?

Posted on by Nimgimli

This is going to be really short, but Ananta is one of these upcoming anime titles I’ve been interested in. However I thought it was a social, slice-of-life kind of title with some casual action. Then I saw this long video about it and now I’m seeing all kinds of fun influences: Grant Theft Auto, Yakuza and Watch Dogs, right off the top of my head.

Take a look:

I’m now SUPER excited for this game. I just need a release date, dammit!

That’s all I got. I just wanted to share this video for folks who aren’t aware of this title.

Checking in on My Wuthering Waves Progress

Posted on by Nimgimli

In the last few posts here I’ve talked about being in a gaming-slump where I just wasn’t interested in playing games. I said then that I knew it was going to be a temporary thing, and it was. I’m back to gaming regularly, but I’ve been staying pretty focused on Wuthering Waves. Playstation says I’m at about 90 hours total, and I sometimes play on PC too so I figure I’m around 100 hours all told.

At first my plan was to ‘catch up’ with the story, mostly so I could watch Dusty Monk’s videos talking about it without being spoiled. I pushed hard for that but then realized I was WAY more behind than I thought I was. (I was equating in-game Chapters and Acts with game versions, so when people talked about version 2.4 I thought they meant Chapter 2, Act 4 but noo… not even close.)

Anyway contrary to my usual self-defeating behavior, I decided to give up on that plan and just play the game however I wanted. Crazy idea, right? I’ve been pushing the “Pioneer Podcast” (think battle pass) pretty hard, being sure to spend my Waveplates, do Daily Quests, and things of that nature. I have 4 characters at my current cap (80) but they all need more work in various areas. My Union Level isn’t high enough to push them to 90 yet but we’re getting there.

What keeps me coming back, besides the aesthetics which I just adore, is actually getting better. I don’t mean just progressing characters, though that is part of it. Having to farm materials for these characters means going up against the same bosses over and over, and as I do this I’m getting more skilled at playing. Again, this isn’t radical stuff, except it kind of is for me. I’m usually a button masher but now I’m learning timing and combos. When I go against a boss that I used to barely scrape by on, and now can almost take down without switching out characters due to being better at parries, dodges and pulling off combos, it feels really good.

Which I guess is what folks love those Souls-like games, eh? A boss that smushes you flat the first time eventually becomes trivial as you get better. I can finally see the appeal.

But this got me thinking about why I love Gacha games and this is what I came up with: they’re not that hard. They can BE hard if you want because there are always a variety of ‘tiers’ of enemies to take on. But the developers definitely don’t want you getting frustrated and quitting; it’s in their best interest to keep you logging in all the time. So they always seem to offer some path forward, whether it be leveling up characters to get stronger, choosing an easier world tier, or just getting more skilled as a player. And I love that. Again, no world-shaking revelations. Just me taking a moment to think about why I like the things I like.

Anyway, that’s about it for today, but before I go I wanted to share some un-related news.

I have had a 2nd blog since 2017 and it has mostly been collecting virtual dust. I’ve now starting using it to “learn in public” in order to keep myself motivated. It’s probably not going to be very interesting to 99.9% of the people who stumble on it, but here is the link to the first post in my new Learning Journey, in case anyone wants to keep me honest.

I might start posting my AI stuff over there too, since I know that’s kind of niche.

August 2025

Posted on by Nimgimli

The end of the month really snuck up on me this time around. It’s been a pretty good month for us. Unusually cool, which for here just means I don’t think it hit 100F at all in August, or if it did it was early in the month. Today we have the doors and windows open, at least for the morning. Fresh air… what a treat.

I don’t have much to report this month but for the sake of completeness, here we go.

Playing

Wuthering Waves is the only game I’ve been playing regularly, and even that not very much. I’ve been so fascinated with various AI related projects that gaming just wasn’t very interesting to me, though in the last week or so that itch is coming back (and I welcome that itch). I was pretty sure it would and I’m glad I didn’t try to ‘force it.’ Anyway that isn’t relevant to Wuthering Waves, so back to that. I still don’t have any characters to level cap and I just arrived in the second big area, the name of which I completely forgot. It’s a religious place where they treat their sentinel as a god.

I really have to do some research on team building, but I’d really prefer to learn how to put together a good team vs just looking one up. So that entails a bit of work and concentration on my part.

Right now I’m rocking Havoc Rover, Senhuan (???) (the character you get early for logging in for 5 days or something). She’s some kind of guard and is ice-based. And Baizhi (?? these names trip me up so bad) as my healer. So all very early game characters. I’ve been working on getting their skills and weapons up to par before leveling any of them more since the game seems to ramp up difficulty whenever you level someone up. I have done a decent amount of pulling and have better (presumably) 5-star characters but I haven’t gotten far enough in the story to farm their mats and I refuse to skip ahead! So we’ll see where I end up by the end of September.

AI Gaming is another thing I’ve been looking into, and first I guess I have to explain what I mean by that. Basically my attention has drifted from AI generated art to AI generated words, riffing off the various chat bots to see if there is something a bit more robust out there. I mentioned Silly Tavern in a previous post and I’m still messing around with that, but I keep tinkering with it rather than using it, trying different engines and stuff. In the interim I’ve found another option called AI Dungeon which has apparently been around since 2019! It’s a tool for something that falls somewhere in between collaborative writing and text-based roleplaying. I was really impressed when I used the Quick Start option and then picked “Fantasy” as genre and “Thief” as character type. I assumed I would start in a pub with my friends the elf mage, the dwarf fighter and a human cleric or something. Instead this is the plot summary/starter I got:

You’re Trae, a skilled thief, master of disguise and con artist of the Field of Miracles crime syndicate in the Triflumina Republic, a city-state in the Fioran League within the world of Larion. The trouble all started when you pulled off what you thought was the heist of a lifetime, stealing a precious magical seed intended for the enchanted gardens of Donna Veronica. Then someone stole the seed from you, and it all went downhill from there. It doesn’t help that your guappa (kingpin), Donna Bianca, was already on poor terms with rival guappa and deadly alchemist Donna Veronica, still fuming over how Donna Bianca stole Capitan Rinaldo’s… “heart” from her.
The Fioran League is a collection of city-states known for their merchant princes, mercenary armies, alchemical innovations, and cut-throat politics. Triflumina, city on the Sea of Serpents famed for its Water Arena battles, masquerades and corruption, is caught in a power struggle between various factions, including the criminal syndicates of the various guappi, alchemists’ covens, and the blind Doge Crepido, who doesn’t need eyes to know everything that anyone says or does.
Your fellow thieves – Spinetta, Taddeo, and Sanno – are both potential allies and rivals. In a city as corrupt as Triflumina, friendship is sacred and betrayal is paid for in blood.

I’ve never played real D&D or any other table top RPG, but that seemed pretty intriguing to me and I jumped in. It took a few minutes to get the hang of things but before I knew it I was caught in a web of intrigue. Now out of the box it isn’t really a game.. there are no stats or anything. But apparently you can add scripts to make things more game like. I really JUST discovered this yesterday so I am still learning, but I think it has potential.

Things I like:
1) There’s a MATURE toggle so you can filter out all the sext-bot stuff that is so prevalent in this space. In fact that stuff is off by default.
2) If you decide to turn on the MATURE stuff, it seems a little bit… classier?? than other stuff I’ve seen. More bodice-ripper and less Penthouse Letters, if that means anything to anyone.
3) The writing feels pretty good for what it is, and if the AI takes a turn you just don’t want to follow it down, you can easily re-write what it suggested and guide the story in another direction.

Things I don’t like:
1) The free version gives you a really dumb model that loses track of details really quickly. I wouldn’t waste too much time on the free version, but you can get 100 free “actions” on their low-tier paid model each day. Using those free moves gives you a much better experience, but that means if you want to get into this heavily you’ll need to pay.
2) Their paid plan is tiered, from $10/month up to $50(!)/month. 4 paid tiers in all. Better tiers get you better models and more tokens, but as a noob it’s really hard to decide what’s right for you. The more tokens you have the more of the story your AI partner can keep tabs on, but how much is enough? I have no clue.

I’m still up in the air on whether I want to try a $10 or $15/month sub just to see the difference. I think I’ll worry about that if I ever run out of the free tokens.

But overall I’m kind of impressed by this service. And I LOVE that it has me quasi-writing fiction and storytelling again. Feels good. I’d still like to see how close I can get to it in Silly Tavern, though if I need a $2000 video card with 24 GB of VRAM to get there…maybe paying isn’t so bad!!!

Watching

No real surprises here:

Star Trek Strange New Worlds (Paramount+): SNW has taken the #1 spot in my Star Trek heart. I just love this show so much. And I love how well they can swing between the silly episodes and the serious ones. If I could change one thing about SNW… I don’t think I’d change anything. Except maybe the cancelation date.

Wednesday (Netflix): Season 2 isn’t grabbing me quite the same way season 1 did. Part of it is that so many of the actors have changed so much; the danger of using young actors and letting several years pass between seasons, I guess. And bringing in the whole Addams family makes it feel like an Addams Family reboot rather than a “Wednesday and her Frenemies” show. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate it or anything, I just don’t love it as much as I loved season 1.

Invasion (Apple TV): We needed something to fill the gaps between eps of SNW and waiting for the 2nd half of Wednesday and a new season of this show dropped. We decided to do a complete re-watch which maybe wasn’t the best idea. The show is good but maybe not THAT good.

Reading

Bearers of the Black Staff: Legends of Shannara — I’m still working through my complete Shannara read-through. We’ve jumped forward another 400-500 years and the characters from the last book have become the stuff of legends. But there are still parts of the old world (aka our world) kicking about. I’m only about 1/4 through so not real thoughts yet. I’m not reading too much these days.

And that’s August come and gone. We’re trying to find a new place to live, targeting December as our move date, and now that it’s a bit cooler we’re going to need to get busy, so the next few months are going to get pretty hectic. We’ll see what impact that has on my various projects, but I’m looking forward to living somewhere new without quite so many reminders of Lola everywhere. Yes, months later we’re still grieving over that silly little dog. 🙁

ChatGPT as Gaming Buddy

Posted on by Nimgimli

This weekend I discovered yet another fun use of AI chatbots: as gaming buddy/helper/mentor.

The setup: For reasons I don’t understand, my brain decided it was time to catch up on Genshin Impact. A couple years back I was HEAVY into Genshin (for me at least) and dumped something like 300 hours into it. Then I drifted away. I’ve tried to go back a few times but each time immediately got lost. I even created new accounts to try to re-familiarize myself with the game, but Genishin 3 hours in isn’t much like Genshin 300 hours in, so that didn’t help much.

On a whim I asked ChatGPT if it knew anything about Genshin and it (of course) said it did. It started by giving me decent but predictable advice like follow the Archon Quests and such. When I told it exactly what quest I’d left off on, it gave me some more specific advice, and was good about asking if I wanted info that contained spoilers, and when I said no it didn’t spoil anything.

It did get some things wrong. But this is video games, not brain surgery, so when it got something wrong I just went back to the old fashioned way of using search to fill out my info. And in at least some cases it might have been as much my fault in my description of things:

Me: There’s a blue circle with a star in it next to one of my character’s profiles (Barabara, if it matters). Any idea what that is telling me?

GPT:
Not basic at all—it’s one of those tiny UI doodads that the game explains once and then buries under ten layers of new systems.
That blue circle with the star inside means that character (Barbara in your case) has a Constellation available to unlock.

The marker I was referring to was actually telling me that Barbara’s ultimate was ready. But maybe there’s another blue circle somewhere, not sure.

Another issue of coming back to a game like this is not knowing where the meta has drifted to. I decided to give ChatGPT a list of the 29 characters I have on my account and ask for some team suggestions. I got a few, from casual running-around exploring teams to more focused teams. I decided to pick one and start working on those characters. I need to level some of them up, find artifacts and weapons for them, and just learn how they work together. Is GPT’s advice solid? No idea since I’m just starting. If any Genshin experts want to take a look, I stuffed the 1st team plan on a page here. If I were to make a prediction, I’d predict it probably gave me a team that was solid like 3 or 4 updates ago, but we’ll see. [Maybe I should do the same for Wandering Waves as it’s more likely one of you reading this post will know a lot about WW than about Genshin.]

But at the very least it gave me some goals to work towards while I get re-acclimated to Genshin Impact, and it was actually quite enjoyable to have a ‘friend’ to talk to about Genshin, even if that friend isn’t real. 🙂

Tangent: Microsoft is continuing to roll out CoPilot for Game Bar, and I actually used IT today too, when I went back to Clair Obscur after a 6-week absence. It took was somewhat helpful and it was kind of interesting I could access it without leaving the game. Not I think of it, THIS is why I thought to ask GTP about Genshin.