Games on fournm

2023 - A way late year in review post!

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Alright! Let’s just get these all out of the way in one big post, shall we? No need to create a bunch of backdated entries for a few years ago, and by setting that precedent now I won’t feel the need to for the OTHER years I want to backdate as well.

books

I am ashamed to say I don’t have anything recorded? I know I was reading my usual webcomics, but most other series I had been following all ended and I hadn’t picked up new ones yet. I don’t think that it’s actually possible I went through the year without reading anything of note, even if it was only one or two books, but… I guess maybe?

More ...

2025 - Year in Review, Games

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Alright! First post of the year in review, and it’s one of the easiest ones. I’ve also made a change to how I track things this year, which is that I broke it down by month. I like how it let me see a better idea of how my play habits changed over the year, but, well…

I didn’t play that much?

Don’t get me wrong, I had a lot of fun with what I did play! I did a post about Necese, I did a post about Silksong, and I really should have done one about Monster Hunter Wilds. Short version? I legitimately think it might be the best game in the series. Is it a little easy? Sure, but at this point I’ve been playing games in the series for two decades and this isn’t the G-rank release yet. It has some of the best monster variety at launch that we’ve ever seen, some of the smoothest controls, and its gimmicks (unlike with Rise) don’t hurt the fundamentals of the series. Bringing back Little Miss Forge and Gore Magala? Fantastic. The story is a bit cheesy, but the experience of playing through it in multiplayer was incredibly smooth. Maybe the squad lobby system could be a bit more intuitive, but overall the connection and ability to drop in-and-out of hunts with friends has never been better.

More ...

Thoughts on Necese

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m not sure why I feel the need to give Necese its own shoutout, since it isn’t like I’ve been a particularly prolific blogger this year. On the other hand, I’ve meant to be. I have a bunch of these that I want to write now that the year is winding down, because there’s a lot of stuff I’ve enjoyed this year that I want to give a bit more of a blurb than I feel like I should put into just my end of the year wrap-up posts.

More ...

Thoughts on Hollow Knight: Silksong

Sat, 25 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Well. I’m a bit late to commenting on the game, because … well, life has sure been life this year.

For context: I have not completely finished True Ending, but I have done a lot of everything else. I’m not going to try to spoil too much but if the notion that there is a true ending immediately makes you cringe to find out, well, that’s your sign to probably not read the rest of this.

More ...

2024 review: part 1, games

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I still do these! I’ve actually been keeping the records still, more or less, so I do intend to backdate the posts for the missing gap years. What missing gap years, future reader? Exactly. Concern yourself not. These are the games I played in 2024, ordered roughly by date of first play, except for when my notes sucked.

2024! Well, you sure weren’t a 2023 in terms of gaming. That’s not a slight against you–Armored Core 6 was rough competition. That’s probably one of my favorite games of all time now, and for something to reach that list these days is pretty imp-no, no, Fields of Mistria, wait your turn, I’m writing over here-ahem, difficult. Now for some brief thoughts!

More ...

Thoughts on Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon

Fri, 15 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been playing a wide variety of games this year and, after a number of high profile releases, thinking critically about games has been on my mind more than it has in years. I saw someone talk about how one of the interesting things in gaming is that sometimes you can see the designer’s vision, sometimes it doesn’t seem like there was a cohesive one, sometimes it lines up with yours for what the game is, sometimes it doesn’t. Reviewing ~~games~~ media is hard, but the interactivity of games adds layers to art critique and “accessibility” that aren’t there in other formats, and, well, one of the things that’s come with having (minorly) injured myself this year is wanting to write about those games and their experiences more.

More ...

Video games... good actually?

Sat, 26 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Well then.

So we picked up Diablo 4 to play with a friend, and… I’ve got a post about that I need to clean up, because the frustration there got me back into playing Diablo 2 and also Diablo 3.

You know what? Give Diablo 3 another shot, if you last played it at launch. Preferably on console. It’s dramatically better – inventory makes more sense, button limitations make more sense, and they’ve cleaned up a lot. The story’s still… what it is, but at least it doesn’t feel like corporate-design-by-committee slop that’s designed to be as palatable to as many regions as possible. The areas are vibrant and pretty. It’s ended up as a pretty solid game, really. Couch co-op definitely improves it.

More ...

Links roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

Sat, 29 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Not a lot that I’ve really seen that caught my eye this week, but here’s a bit.

llms

https://nebula.tv/videos/patrickhwillems-ai-filmmaking-is-not-the-future-its-a-grift

Does anyone other than me always remember that old “What if Wes Anderson made X-Men” video? Well, the guy who did it put down his thoughts on the generative AI trend of “Wes Anderson” videos, which are… bland.

games

https://cohost.org/matthewseiji/post/2183727-thinking-about-game

Interesting thoughts on game difficulty, indirectly via Zachtronics.

https://cohost.org/lizbushouse/post/2269622-yet-another-example

Context is important in localization, and Final Fantasy XIV is doing a great job at it.

More ...

2019 games

Tue, 23 Jun 2020 10:43:22 -0800

Like most years, gaming kind of was one of the main things I went through this year. In particular, though, I got on a great kick for visual novels that I found through Itch and that was a blast. Angela He’s work in particular stood out over and over, but I have to give credit for Heaven Will Be Mine starting the trend in the first place.

I do not honestly know why I was playing Pac Land. I must have lost a dare while setting up MAME. I can think of no other explanation.

More ...

Update to the Dwarf Fortress mods...

Wed, 06 May 2020 17:25:53 -0800

Thanks to the wonderful Kat, I feel like playing Dwarf Fortress again and I noticed that version 47.x has released. Because of this, well, all of my mods needed to be updated. I’ve gone through and updated them all, along with finally creating a post for “clay dirt” which I’ll absolutely admit is a bit on the cheating side.

I also edited my hugo theme a bit to provide better support for my mods, in both giving them a better summary view and giving me a way to link bitbucket repositories instead of direct downloads only. See, look at me, making it up to my poor neglected website. Two whole posts in one day.

More ...

Mass Token Gen

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 14:01:53 -0800

My favorite format of Magic the Gathering is Commander, formally known as EDH. For a quick rundown, in normal Magic the Gathering, you can typically play up to four of any card (outside of some specific restrictions) and your deck is typically 60 cards. In Commander, you have a 100 card deck that may only have one of each individual card. In addition, it has one (again, specific exceptions) special card known as your commander, and you can only play cards that share a color identity with your commander.

More ...

2018 games

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 14:01:03 -0800

Next up, we have games. Whew, there were some really good releases in this year in addition to all the older games I finally made it around to playing (and sometimes even finishing!).

Disgaea 5 is hands down my favorite entry in the series now, at least from a mechanical standpoint. The story and characters.. well, they’ve grown on me. I did complete basically all of it other than the Baal fight, so I’m counting it as complete.

More ...

mid-2018 update

Thu, 28 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Just a quick update on things since I’ve been a bit sparse on the posts. Work and other life things have been eating up most of my time (in ways that I can’t really publicly write about), but there’s been a few things worth an update.

I’ve (as of this week) got a 500 day streak on Duolingo. I’m feeling more and more comfortable with Esperanto, I do need to get back to working on my Spanish, and I would also like to get back into the process of picking up Japanese and Swedish. I suppose a “better” fourth language to pick up would be German, though my understanding is that wouldn’t be that difficult coming from English and Esperanto.

More ...

2017 games

Tue, 09 Jan 2018 15:08:24 -0800

This was.. not a great year for me in terms of games. I started a large number of them, but didn’t finish very many thanks to just not feeling like I had the time or energy to do so. I did complete a few more 100% achievements on Steam, with a few other games getting close to it, and I’ll probably try to keep that going.

An outstanding exception to this, however, was Pyre from Supergiant Games. I’m utterly in love with Supergiant and Pyre was no exception. Darren Korb’s soundtrack with Ashley Barret’s vocals continue to deliver, the plot was fascinating, the mechanics of the game’s plot branching so heavily was incredibly well done, and I have to also give them a shoutout for allowing a non-binary lead character. The game felt good.

More ...

sept 2017 starbound updates

Sun, 10 Sep 2017 21:06:13 -0700

Whew, been rather quiet this year! We moved to a new house, had some job shuffles, gotten engaged, and so on and so forth–that’s made things rather hectic and blogging isn’t exactly something I’m in a regular habit of doing. Anyway, moving on to the actual interesting thing–Starbound!

Starbound has had a lot of changes with 1.3.2, and as such, we’re finally getting back into playing. I’ve updated Printable Storage to v2 because of that, and also added a new mod–Cleanbound! Cleanbound isn’t everything we want in a mod, so we’ll be coming out with Eww! (I’ll write it up when we do!) later, but it’s a quick mod to remove biomes like flesh and bone from Garden planets. Basically, we want them to be reasonable worlds to settle instead of just Barren worlds, since Frackin’ Universe does way too much to justify installing.

More ...

2016 games

Sat, 31 Dec 2016 14:08:50 -0800

Games! After a few years of being out of gaming, I got back into a bit of a groove in 2016 thanks to Rare Replay and an early purchase of an Xbox One. Being able to replay Blast Corps and Jet Force Gemini after more than a decade, running at a full frame rate? Sunset Overdrive was similarly almost everything I wanted out of Dead Rising originally. Ori and the Blind Forest didn’t get beat, so I need to revisit it, but it was also incredibly impressive.

More ...