Retro

Games

Not too many reviews since this was very much the month of Clair Obscur, which I've technically finished but not 100%-ed as I write this. Will hold off until then to write the review because man it certainly has a postgame.

Black Mesa gave me some insight into why Valve was such a big deal as a developer before Steam became a money printer, delivered noticeably more graphically palatably than the original.

Of the Devil's first episode was much slower paced than the demo but paid it off with a deeper storyline & mystery, while Gorogoa...

Games

After yet another fitful FromSoft playthrough my journey finally came to an end with Dark Souls 3. Maybe not the best game in the series (that might still be the original for me) but definitely the best possible ending to it. Friede & Gael can stand alongside Malenia/Rellana/Messmer as peers and there's plenty of fanservice (not that kind) to bring on the nostalgia. I'll likely take a nice long break before Bloodborne/Sekiro since there's so much other great stuff to play; but I'm really glad covid forced me back into Elden Ring & then onto my journey through...

Games

Despite intending to 100% it someday I reviewed Axyz this month as I approached the end of the final (A-side) floppy disk; great as either a second screen game or main focus due to its immaculate vibes. It may have missed as a way to get The Wife into gaming through Kula World nostalgia but it hit me head on.

Another nostalgia trigger (even if it's other people's; I never played Zelda before BoTW) was Mina the Hollower, Yacht Club's first non-Shovel Knight game and apparently one the fate of their studio rested on. It turned out...

Projects

Honestly I'm probably just gonna drop this section unless I start working on something consistently again; I haven't felt like working on programming stuff outside work in months. Our current spending tracker is janky but it works fine/costs <1000 yen a month, so no strong motivation to finish the Cloudflare-based replacement.

Games

A pretty huge one this month; I had two weeks off where The Wife was either working or in a different country so I played a LOT. Some absolute bangers as well, both expected and surprising. Since there are so many I'll just list them...

Projects

After much consternation about presentation programs and making edits to my script in two places after copying it into the slide notes I finally got to give my talk, 10s to 100ms; Optimizing a Legacy Endpoint. The reception was definitely positive; I got 3 good questions afterwards when it's pretty rare to get one and a few people came up to say they enjoyed it. Someone even added me on Linkedin to tell me they liked it!

It was not problem free; I took a drink partway through and immediately regretted it, panicked and dropped the cap of...

Projects

Continued writing this blog! Did not make as much progress on my meetup talk as I probably should have (i.e more than 0) but I've always worked best close to the deadline anyway.

Games

Despite being in Italy for 10 days of the month I racked up over 90 hours of Slay the Spire 2 in the 16 remaining days after its March 5th release. That's just over 5.5 hours a day which sounds about right haha, more or less every moment I could be using my laptop. As expected it's the original but better in every way in...

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...

What Went Well

Projects

Finally decided to give a talk at Tokyo Rubyist and mentioned it to enough people that I can't back out now unless legal just tells me I can't do it. I have until sometime in April, so naturally I'll start working on it once I get back from the honeymoon in late March. Any earlier would be wasting valuable panic-energy.

Other than that the only thing keeping my Github graph green continues to be this blog; I'm pretty sure I'm just a date-filtering system & deploy away from the new spending tracker but never seem...

What Went Well

Projects

Plenty of game & books reviews here, not so much progress on any coding projects because of that. Not so much being none, zip, zilch.

Games

SILKSONG IS DONE! What an incredible game, but man it took me a long time to beat. When it came out I wasn't expecting to sink anywhere near as much time into it as Elden Ring, but apparently Team Cherry made a(nother? Didn't finish to original back in the day) 100+ hour metroidvania. Or I'm just terrible at Silksong's combat, which is definitely possible. Either way it's definitely my...

What went well

Projects

• Kept writing this blog
• Some minor progress on the spending tracker, mainly styling the transaction dialog and making it usable for editing as well

Games

Silksong continues to be incredible; now 70 hours in, not even done with Act 2 and still absolutely loving it. I even enjoyed the famously rough Bilewater boss & its accompanying runback (plus pre-boss gauntlet!). Every moment with Silksong feels special, and I'm going to take my time finishing it because once it's gone all that's left is a replay of the original.

In service of taking my...

What went well

Projects

• Month 3 of regularly posting here!
• Actually made some progress on the spending tracker
  • albeit I'm just porting stuff over from Svelte to React so not a lot of thinking involved

Games

Mostly more Silksong & Hades 2; man those are long games. In Hades I finally finished off Typhon, then beat him twice more, while beating Chronos is a given unless I crank the fear way past 10. Two more Typhon kills and I'll have the ingredients for what I assume are the incantations which start the leadup...

What went well

Projects

• Kept writing this blog
• Nothing else this month haha

Games

Well I was right about Silksong being the main focus in last month's retro; didn't anticipate Hades 2 though. Absolutely crazy those two came out in the same month; both live up to their hype which is incredible given Silksong's 7 year development time and all the memes. Hades was a safer bet since it somehow spent its whole early access at Overwhelmingly Positive, but even given that it's an amazing example of how to make a 'more, but better' sequel. Really...

What went well

Projects

• Migrated this blog to 11ty
  • started adding more of my own to it
  • and started producing a lot more content, not just the weekly TWIL
• Added a 'Links' section to TWIL posts and found a lot of great sites for my RSS feed
  • Feels like I have a steady flow of quality articles to read that I'm pretty happy with now
  • Once you get it set up RSS is so much better than trusting the algorithm, and blogs I like linking to blogs they like makes that much easier
...