Endgame Viable

I’m writing this on the morning of August 9th, so it’s the ninth day of Blaugust. I’ve streamed and posted a first impressions piece about a game from my Steam backlog every day for 12 days in a row now. It’s been grueling work, but I’ve whittled it down to a fairly streamlined process, so it “only” takes about 2 cumulative hours out of every day, or merely half the time of a part-time job. (1080 words.)

Death knocked at the door yesterday, and I answered with a game called Darksiders II. Get it? Because Death is the protagonist in Darksiders II? Anyway, it was the 20th day in a row of the Steam Backlog Bonanza, and one of the most expensive games in the list so far. I got Darksiders II for $10 in 2013, and it’s taken six years to install and play the game. (614 words.)

Most of the blogging and Twittering MMO world is talking about World of Warcraft Classic, with all the recent hubbub about name reservations. My advanced Googling skills tell me that it launches on August 27th. Not WoW Classic, but probably a quest that will be in WoW Classic. I personally have never been interested in WoW Classic, have never yearned for the “good old days” of World of Warcraft, and have no idea why anyone would want such a thing. The Vanilla game engine was clearly inferior to the modern engine, which leaves nostalgia as the only reason to play. But I never played in a WoW guild, never did any raiding or dungeons, never formed any lifelong Internet friendships or married anyone in-game. WoW came along well *after* my “nostalgia days” of Internet gaming. I’ve been ignoring the whole thing. (979 words.)

The big wheel of life turned and landed on a game from my Steam backlog called A Story About My Uncle*. I got it in a 2016 sale for $2 and tried it for the first time yesterday. (It turns out that 2016 was the final year that I indiscriminately bought games on Steam.) It’s getting really hard to think of a different opening sentence and paragraph for each one of these things. I had high hopes for this game, because I had vague memories of hearing that it was one of those really fantastic story games along the lines of Gone Home. It turned out that my memory must be flawed, because it wasn’t anything like that. (933 words.)

This is a list of Blogging/CMS solutions I’ve looked into so far, which I gleaned from this site. These are just some of the different ways that people (by which I mean programmers) have desperately tried to break free of the WordPress Industrial Complex. Automad. I didn’t care for the documentation, or lack thereof. Baun. Installed, see below. Very promising directory structure of content similar to what I had envisioned. Baun is apparently a newer iteration of Pico. (As if this all wasn’t confusing enough.) (967 words.)

For the halfway point of Blaugust, more-or-less, I played Alan Wake’s American Nightmare from my Steam backlog. I got it, along with Alan Wake, for $4 right before it was removed from Steam. Is it live or is it Memorex? The first game, Alan Wake, did not qualify for my Steam Backlog Bonanza because, according to Steam, I’ve played it for precisely one minute. I do not remember that minute. I’ve read numerous reports that Alan Wake was a great game, a must-buy game, particularly when it was about to be removed, but I haven’t played it, and apparently something about it made me recoil away from it. (822 words.)

Last time I looked at Pico and Grav. I was going to look at Kirby CMS this time, but I encountered two things that stopped me before I even downloaded it. Kirby No-Go First, upon perusing the cookbooks, you have to setup the same kind of one-directory-per-blog-post structure in Kirby that I didn’t like in Grav. Just for the record, contrary to Kirby’s tagline, that is not “adapting to your content,” it is, in fact, “forcing a strict ruleset upon your content.” (1368 words.)

Yesterday’s new game for the Steam Backlog Bonanza was Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions Evolved. I think it’s an extended edition of the “Dimensions” release. It’s a pure arcade action game, of the kind you might find in an old-fashioned upright arcade cabinet. It's very difficult to get any sense of what the game is like from a still image. I don’t know why I bought this game, but it was only $1.35 in the 2016 Winter Sale. I feel like that was the last time I “went crazy” and just bought a lot of stuff because it was cheap. I also bought a huge list of old, 2D RPGs for about $1 each in that sale that I have yet to play. (545 words.)

Last time, I brainstormed about content archives without accomplishing much. This time, however, I am diving straight into the deep end and trying to create content in Pico and Grav. Okay, that’s overselling it a little bit. But I have now tinkered a little bit with Pico and Grav to see what it can do straight out of the box. I imagine my writing workflow is going to look something like this (as it has, more-or-less, for the past month): Write a blog post in a plain text editor on some other computer, possibly my iPad with an Apple wireless keyboard, which is my favorite keyboard to write on. Going forward, let’s say the plain text files will end up on DropBox. Then I would copy the plain text file containing the blog post into the CMS directory structure either through PuTTY or some other upload method. (1896 words.)

The Steam Backlog Bonanza marches on with a look at Penumbra: Requiem (and Black Plague). Penumbra came out in 2009 but I couldn’t find any records of when I bought it, so it must have been a long time ago. I had played Black Plague for about a half hour before, but yesterday was the first time I looked at Requiem. An obelisk puzzle in Penumbra: Requiem. Penumbra: Requiem is actually an “expansion” for Black Plague. It was billed as a puzzle game. (480 words.)