More Steam demos

2025-07-04 2 min read

Still finishing off demos from Steam Next Fest. I may have overestimated my free time. Heck, two of the demos expired before I could play them; I got a “no licenses found” error on Steam, making them unplayable.

Anyway. Let’s get to it.

WIZman’s World Re;try

Sometimes you just need a good old-fashioned JRPG where you shove monster souls into fairies that belonged to your adoptive mom in order to find out why the city you’re in is surrounded by collapsing dungeons. It’s a neat story, if nothing earth shattering, and the pixel art and monster fusion are a treat for me. I’ll probably get it when it’s on sale sometime.

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Blue Prince

2025-06-30 4 min read

my Blue Prince notebook. it’s a lovely reflective blue and silver in person

I mentioned at one point that I had beaten Blue Prince – inasmuch as one can truly believe they have fully plumbed the depths of the bottomless puzzle pool that is Blue Prince, which at this point I fully believe I have done. But did I like the game?

First, an anecdote: a few weeks ago now I was a guest on the Blizzard Watch Podcast, and we asked editor-in-chief Liz if she liked Blue Prince. We then poked fun at it later because she hemmed and hawed about the game, talked about a number of things she did or didn’t like, discussed the weirdness and the puzzles and the worldbuilding and whether or not things like the letter I missing from every keyboard matters, and never got around to actually saying whether or not she liked the game. This is, I am finding, something of a common refrain.

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Steam Next Fest 2025

2025-06-18 11 min read

A short rundown of my opinions on all the demos I played during Steam Next Fest 2025, before I forget them all. This isn’t even all the demos I downloaded, I just haven’t gotten to them all yet - I still haven’t touched Galvatein, Lock & Key, Outrider Mako, Starlight Re;volver, Ninja Gaiden Ragebound, Danchi Days, Tron Catalyst (which is actually released now!), or Wizman’s World Re;Try. (Yes, I downloaded a demo for everything on my wishlist. Yes, my wishlist is an absolute mess.)

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Hypothetically, Hugo

2025-06-16 1 min read

Hypothetically, if I did everything correctly, this site should now be running off Hugo. I was never super happy with the way Quartz required me to maintain my own front page, since it really wants to throw your entire vault onto a website instead of just a subset of it, which required me to do wonky stuff with symlinks and directory junctions and… anyway, after I broke my own Quartz install a few days ago, I decided to just say fuck it, let’s try something else. Now I’ve got an Obsidian vault with a specific subfolder that, thanks to a community plugin, I can spit into a Hugo install whenever I like.

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Clearly not out of my way enough

2025-06-12 2 min read

Clearly a blogging system that got mostly out of my way so I could focus on blogging wasn’t quite good enough. It doesn’t quite help that I broke my setup with Windows for a bit – the newest version of Quartz requires a newer version of Node.js than we were using for work, so I ended up switching back to using Zoner, which has been a trip. That also means actual new posts aren’t getting posted for a bit because I’m not just reinventing the wheel, I’m finding entirely new ways to reinvent the reinventing machine.

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Switch 2 direct quick thoughts

2025-04-02 6 min read

My coworker asked me for my thoughts on the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct. Since he was in a meeting, I took notes. And since I took notes, here they are.

  • Mario Kart World
    • New Mario Kart was the one thing I figured was guaranteed since MK 8 was 11 years old
    • Looks really nice - feels like PS4-era graphics?
    • Like the idea of a circuit as one continuous race
    • Free roam is a cute feature
    • Only saw 1 new racer but I think it was one of the cows from Moo Moo Meadows. lol
  • Hardware features
    • GameChat
      • Did not call the C button being for game chat.
      • Nintendo just straight up lifting Discord’s voice UI is a bold choice
    • GameShare
      • Welcome back, one of the best features of the DS!
      • Online play via GameShare is wild, though
    • Hardware details
      • 1080p up to 120 fps, with 4K docked, makes me more certain this is basically a PS4
      • I’m really hoping magnetic joycons feel less flimsy/fragile when attached and used in handheld mode compared to the rails
      • No mention of the joysticks being Hall Effect; hopefully they’ve fixed the drift issue…
      • Two charging ports is smart. More handhelds should do this.
  • Enhanced games
    • Super Mario Party Jamboree: Neat and all but this is still my least favorite Mario Party in a while…. it’s so sloooooow
    • Switch Zeldas: Very cool to see. Don’t think I necessarily need to play these again, but they look nice. The phone thing is a fun gimmick, but at least Nintendo is thinking about stuff like that.
    • Kirby and the Forgotten Land: This is basically DLC, right? Fun game but man this was WAY too hard at points for a Kirby game
    • Metroid Prime 4: Switch 2 Edition: This is how I’ll probably wait to play this. Kinda wild to see Nintendo offering graphical settings
    • Pokemon Legends Z-A: See, now Nintendo is making problems for me: I want to play this game but I don’t want to buy it once and then buy the upgrade pack too to play it on Switch 2.
  • Mouse Mode games: Give me Mario Paint 2 or give me death
  • Third party games
    • Elden Ring: Well, didn’t see THAT coming. “Tarnished Edition” is right; gameplay looking a little rough.
    • Hades II: Not surprised, and this’ll be great. Hades still probably the most-played game on my original Switch. However, I already have it on Steam….
    • Street Fighter 6: Local wireless and exclusive game modes, but no mention of allowing the Switch into the current online play. Pass
    • Daemon x Machina 2: Day 1 purchase for me, no questions
    • Split Fiction: Already playing this! It’s actually a great couch co-op game, my wife loves it
    • Sports: zzzzz
    • Hogwarts Legacy: didn’t play it before, not gonna play it now either
    • THPS 3+4: Yeah, probably a day 1 purchase for this too
    • Hitman World of Assassination: I haven’t played this Hitman game, but in general modern Hitman games are really fun. A James Bond crossover is interesting. Playing on Goldeneye nostalgia?
    • Bravely Default HD: I have a funny comment about this that is also a story spoiler so if you haven’t played it I’m just gonna say: Bravely Default is very fun and I’ll probably get this.
    • Yakuza 0: I’m not gonna buy it and play it again but Yakuza 0 is one of the best games I’ve ever played, happy to see it on Switch. Expect the rest of the series to follow.
    • Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment: it might be nice to have a Hyrule Warriors that doesn’t run like garbage (a thing we haven’t had since the Wii U, of all things). I’ll end up picking this up.
    • GameCube library on Switch Online membership: this just continues to be worth the money. F-Zero GX definitely the one I’m most interested to play right off the bat.
    • Deltarune: This another one of those “not surprised to see it on Switch, happy to see it on Switch, but I already have it on Steam” moments
    • Borderlands 4: They’re still making these? Sure, why not. Borderlands is fun.
    • Civilization VII: If they fix the problems the PC version has, I might pick this up, but the PC one launched in really sad shape for a premium AAA title.
    • Survival Kids: Okay, it’s extremely funny to see a Konami franchise last seen on the Game Boy Color in like 1999 come back for the Switch 2. This may or may not be good, I’ll probably hold off on picking it up.
    • Enter the Gungeon 2: This should be extremely good if it runs well.
    • Starseeker: I don’t know what this is, and the animation looks a little rough, but it gives me No Man’s Sky vibes, so might be worth a look.
    • Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition: Is this finally what gets me to play CP2077? Guess we’ll find out.
    • FF7 Remake Intergrade: I had a lot of fun with Remake after adjusting my expectations. This is pretty cool to see on a Nintendo platform again.
    • The lightning round at the end (most of these I had no opinion on other than “that looks cool”):
      • Puyo Puyo Tetris 2S: Glad to see this series finally getting more consistent US localizations. Another good couch game.
      • Star Wars Outlaws: Maybe I’m underselling the Switch 2’s hardware capabilities. 😂
      • Grimdark Pac-man and Raidou Remastered are also on my to-buy list
      • Professor Layton and the New World of Steam: Wait, that’s not a Switch 2 game, that’s coming out THIS year for Switch 1. (And I’ll probably get it.)
    • The Duskbloods: Okay, Nintendo scoring a Fromsoft exclusive is huge. A lot of people who have been begging Sony for a new Bloodborne for years are gonna love this: this feels like it’s trying to evoke Bloodborne without explicitly being set in that universe. But a multiplatyer vampire extraction shooter? No thanks.
      • “Run! It’s Bloodborne!” “It looks like Bloodborne but due to international copyright laws - it’s not.”
  • Kirby Air Riders: I cannot imagine this is the game a lot of people wanted from Masahiro Sakurai, but man, Kirby Air Ride was fun. I’ll play this for sure. (Did he really have to say that the first one came out on the Gamecube over 20 years ago though?? My bones hurt.)
  • Donkey Kong Bananza: I honestly cannot believe it took this long to get Donkey Kong in a 3D platformer? With what looks like completely destructible environments, too. This looks extremely fun.
  • The price: $449.99 might be a little rich for my blood at this point, that’s my only issue. Nintendo very rarely has anything stay exclusive except for first-party games, and $450 is approaching the point of a PC handheld.

A busy March

2025-03-28 3 min read

Boy, I had a pretty good blogging streak going there for a while! Well, at least I’m not gonna let a whole month go by without putting something here. Heh.

I haven’t had a lot going on in March in terms of the usual things that I blog about: no completed video games to wax poetic about, no big projects like the great De-Googling, nothing like that. Bullet point time:

  • I’ve been going back and forth between two different ideas for game development projects, trying to decide which one I’d rather do first; I think I finally settled on one and am doing a good amount of worldbuilding as well as some low-level actual code writing. The other is on the back burner waiting to become more fully baked for the time being.
  • The Traveller 2e game that replaced my (now-wrapped-up) D&D 5e game finally started. I am currently playing former noble and current lawyer Fontaine Infinity, who has no combat skills to speak of but is surprisingly good at giving orders in combat as well as, well, lawyering. (He made it out of character creation with 4 ranks in the Advocate skill and a smattering of other face skills, but – surprisingly – none in Deception.)
  • World of Warcraft’s second major raid of the current expansion dropped, and so my raid team is back to raiding twice a week. We’ve made pretty astounding progress, clearing the entire thing in normal in one week and then trouncing 3 out of 8 heroic bosses very quickly, with a 4th likely to go down on Monday night when we raid again. Here’s a kill shot of us gathered around the most recent to fall, Rik Reverb:
    Screenshot from World of Warcraft of TTGF’s heroic raid team gathered around a defeated Rik Reverb, one of the bosses in The Liberation of Undermine raid
  • The third of three episodes of an actual play I ran for The Tavern Watch Podcast, playing Triangle Agency, is up now. I thought it was a lot of fun, although trying to keep the spotlight going for six people can be a real task. I also thought on reading the adventure as written – it’s a pre-written one from The Vault, a book of premade mysteries that came with the Triangle Agency core book – that it’s not, uh, a very good mystery. As written, Dead Quiet presented a whole list of locations for players to go to, but they were so saturated in clues that led directly to the end of the mystery that there was not really a reason to visit more than one. (Essentially they only even went to two because the second one had an easy way to rack up 10 Commendations from the company.) A lot of the contents of The Vault are like that, so if I run TA again, I’m definitely going to be trying to write something of my own.
  • I have another actual play next month for the same podcast in which I’ll be running Legend in the Mist’s playtest materials. Should be fun; expect that to be out sometime in May, most likely.
  • Also my actual job has just been kind of going at breakneck speed? I’ve been pulled back and forth between two major projects, with a third looming in the wings to occupy any downtime I might have, which – well, look at the timestamps on previous posts, and maybe the explanation for why my post count in March is 1 might make sense. Heh.

Anyway: all that to say I am alive and well and keeping myself busy. Maybe I should do some devlog posts here once that game project starts being interesting to look at? Not sure if it’ll be here or somewhere else, but given how much I’ve enjoyed keeping everything sequested in Obsidian, it might just be here in a subfolder. Something to look forward to.

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