Gaming Posts

If you just want to see my gaming-related posts, you can find them right here!

My current thinking is that I should be looking into two distinct blogging platforms. One for the “live” blog, the most recent stuff, where people can theoretically interact and leave comments on a daily basis, and consume an RSS feed. The second platform would be for the “archives:” Mainly static pages of older posts for reference, without much of any interactivity. Regardless of how I proceed with the “live” blog, the idea of a “static site generator” for the older archives appeals to me, or one of the Markdown-based platforms I’ve previously mentioned.

Welp it’s happened. Now that Blaugust is over, there’s nothing to write about anymore. :) I stumbled upon an episode of Spotify - Landmark on YouTube and sat down to watch the whole thing. It reminded me of two things: Tears For Fears is one of my favorite 80s bands, and a band from which I’ve never bought any of their music. Songs From The Big Chair is peak “huge 80s sound” which I miss from an audio engineering perspective, and I have a great appreciation for the simplicity and precision of the production in that album.

The Blog Here I present the reason you should never pay attention to statistics when blogging. My views actually went down during Blaugust 2018, and went down even more during Blaugust 2019. Views and Visitors I also offer this chart as evidence that the “you have to blog every day to build an audience” advice is completely obsolete. Blogging every day is strictly for fun and/or personal growth. Building an audience is accomplished by networking, and is largely unrelated to the content you produce.

Writing a blog post every day is not new for me, although the exact process I used this year was new. But livestreaming every day for a month is definitely new to me. I have livestreamed before, but most of my experiments were back in 2015 before Twitch Culture became, ahem, that thing it is now. I also never made any attempt to impose any discipline on myself. I was curious how I would find the process of streaming every day.

Congratulations everyone on the completion of another Blaugust! Belghast put together another fantastic event, and I do not envy him now having to compile the results. :) This is the first of my posts where I evaluate my Blaugust performance as part of the Lessons Learned week. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote last year but I recall I wrote a lot, so this year I’m going to try to avoid that.

For what will probably be the last game in the Steam Backlog Bonanza, the 35th one on the list, I played a shooter called Serious Sam Fusion 2017 (beta). I have no idea how I got this game. I have a bunch of Serious Sam games, but I don’t remember buying any of them, and since Blaugust is over now I don’t particularly feel like doing the work to look it up.

Since my production pipeline is offset by a day, this should be my 31st and last “official” Blaugust post. However I’m still going to play at least one last game today on the 31st as well, which will get a blog post tomorrow. Yesterday for the 34th day of the Steam Backlog Bonanza, I returned to Rapture with BioShock 2 Remastered. This is a game I’ve owned since 2010, but never played until now.

The game of the day was Mount & Blade: Warband for the Steam Backlog Bonanza. I got it in 2010 Winter sale, but I can’t find any record of how much I paid for it. I probably got it in a bundle with both Mount & Blade and Warband. Fighting bandits from horseback. Warband is an “old” game. You can always tell an “old” game because they are stretched out horizontally.

Two great games in a row! Yesterday I played a cyberpunk action game called Remember Me for the Steam Backlog Bonanza. I got it in the 2015 Winter sale for $6. I really enjoyed it. I liked it so much I lost track of time, and played for nearly two hours. It’s an “action movie” kind of a game, by which I mean it has a whole lot of cut scenes and voice acting and storytelling in between the gameplay.

I mentioned this briefly before, but I thought I’d break it out into a separate post. I’ve been livestreaming a bunch of videos to YouTube this month as part of the Steam Backlog Bonanza. It’s unlikely, but it’s possible that someday, YouTube will shut down and everything on their site will disappear, so I also download a copy of each video to a local hard drive. Originally I had planned to record a local copy of the video while streaming at the same time.

I took a screenshot last night in World of Warcraft Classic that really captures my nostalgic feelings for the old days. I never ran down this particular road in Vanilla, but many like it. I’m by myself, running down a long, empty road. That’s pretty much how I played World of Warcraft back in the day, and how I usually play MMORPGs today. I play on my own schedule, I never play the same time two days in a row, I start and stop on a whim, I log out suddenly when I get bored or think of something else I want to do in real life, often right in the middle of a field of mobs.

Yesterday for the Steam Backlog Bonanza, I played a game called Never Alone. It was released in 2014, but I couldn’t find any record of when I bought it or for how much. This is the most interesting game in the list so far. I had been looking forward to this one, and dreading it at the same time. I knew it was a game that involved a story with an animal companion (a fox, in this case).

I stopped writing about my Quest for The One Blog for a very good reason: I gave up on it. What I want to do is essentially impossible unless I develop the blogging platform from scratch myself (or fork one of the open source projects). It’s within my skillset to do that, but I just don’t have the time or motivation or funds for it. (But hey, if anyone is interested in Kickstarting it, let me know!

Okay I’m going to try to be brief here because nobody likes a buzzkill. World of Warcraft Classic launched Monday night here in the U.S. It was extremely smooth and free of major technical issues, as far as I’m concerned, which is an amazing accomplishment. Blizzard has gotten really good at launches. The “narrative” will be that it was a catastrophe, because that’s the only narrative that can be spun to draw a crowd, but it wasn’t.

Yesterday I played the second Tolkien property game in my Steam Backlog Bonanza: Middle-earth: Shadows of Mordor. It came out in 2014, I bought it in 2016 for $7.50, one of the more expensive titles on this list. First the good news: The story of this game starts out fantastic, one of the best I’ve seen. It began with yet another “this is the epic story of the entire history of Middle-earth” prologue and I started to roll my eyes.