Souls Like Strings

A bit too much lamp-rubbing in this one

Why

• Bright & colorful vibe is a nice contrast to many metroidvanias
• Has a lot of personality, even if not familiar with the (apparently established) characters
• Mostly chill & breezy gameplay...

Why Not

• ...but towards the end RNG takes a bit too much of a role
• Progression gates can be a little adventure-gamey at times
• The biome where every female character ends up in a Slave Leia costume wasn't strictly necessary

Impressions

I may not have finished it, but the 70%ish I did play of Shantae...

• Working at a bigger company leads to questions like
  • Do we need separate privacy policies for some clients?
  • Do we need separate privacy policies for specific features?
  • How do we track whether a user accepted a client's privacy policy?
  • How do we manage versioning privacy policies, and tracking which version a user accepted?
• head_object from the S3 Ruby SDK lets you check if an object exists in a bucket without actually retrieving the object
• You can't (without some application-side logic) roll back an S3 bucket without enabling S3 versioning
  • But you can use object lifecycles...

John Wick meets James Bond meets Pinocchio

Why

• Nails the frenetic, improvisational combat it's going for
• Also nails the cyberpunk disco vibes
• Never stops introducing new mechanics

Why Not

• Feeling as cool as it makes possible isn't easy
• Maybe a few too many mechanics to keep track of in a ~5 hour game

Impressions

You deflect a bullet with your bag, use your shapeshifting bat to combo down an enemy, pick up their gun so you can unload it into an elite then throw it at them and unleash a giant robotic fist to...

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood.

Everyone(?) is terrible

A fictional retelling of Grace Marks' real story which brings the characters to life without drawing its own conclusions.

It's rare to enjoy a mystery which goes unsolved, but Atwood's Grace and the various side characters are so compelling and colorful I don't really mind knowing if she's guilty or not. Mary Whitney and Jeremiah the peddler are highlights in support of Grace and Dr. Simon Jordan's delusional confidence, as is the sheer unfairness of the historical setting. Despite seemingly constant backsliding in the quality of life people can...

What Went Well

Projects

From time to time I make forays into old Slack threads and Confluence pages looking for stuff I can use in my talk, but that's about it at the moment. The Cloudflare spending tracker seems doomed to forever be about a day of sustained effort away from done.

Games

Roadwarden taught me that maybe I wouldn't like DnD as much as I've always assumed; despite the obvious care with which it was made and quality as a game of its genre it just wasn't for me.

Kena: Bridge of Spirits lived up to its...