Gaming Posts

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Last time, I setup Pico and Grav on a Linux server. Now that I have a working installation of both Pico and Grav, it occurs to me: Now what? I haven’t tested their capabilities extensively, but of the two platforms, I would say that Grav probably has more features and more support. It’s closer to what a WordPress user might expect to see in a blog. It has plugins and themes and an administration panel.

Yesterday for the 15th day of the Steam Backlog Bonanza I played a game called Apotheon, which I got in 2016 for $3.74. Hard to believe I’m into a third week of this. Anyway, I had been looking forward to this one because I knew it was a visually unusual game. I don’t normally like side-scrollers. The last one I remember enjoying was Pitfall on an Atari 2600. Actually I can’t think of any other side-scrollers I’ve played on any platform since then.

Previously, I mentioned that I planned to investigate the Pico and Grav blogging platforms first, since they are both PHP-based, database-less platforms that operate on Markdown flat files, which sounds like the perfect place to start for my mission goals. Incidentally this is exactly the kind of post I wouldn't normally put on this blog. First I’d like to mention that it’s really hard to find alternate blogging platforms. Any sort of Googling will get you information on: WordPress, Blogger, possibly SquareSpace, and maybe a mention about Medium.

Game Of Thrones, the game from 2012, not to be confused with all of the other Game Of Thrones games, was next on my Steam Backlog Bonanza. I bought it in 2013 in a $10 bundle with … I don’t even know what else. I played it for the first time yesterday. This is not a Nazgul, but in fact the character that you play at the beginning. It’s actually surprising that this game has been sitting here for almost six years.

Blaugust has inspired me to write a lot more, and to think about my blog, so I thought I would start writing an open-ended series of posts about a very long-term, often-neglected project of mine: Migrating to a new blogging platform. The generic "this is a post about blogging" image. Over the years, I’ve made a bunch of web sites. I’ve been with a bunch of different web hosts. I currently have four different web sites that I “maintain” (with varying degrees of updates, from none to frequent): A real-name site, a writing site, a music site, and a gaming site.

Back in 2013 I bought Shadow Warrior for $10, and it came with a free “mini-game” called Viscera Cleanup Detail: Shadow Warrior. That’s what came up on the schedule for yesterday’s stream, so I finally tried it out. I had heard about Viscera Cleanup Detail before but I don’t own it. It’s a physics game where you take on the role of a janitor who “cleans up” after the heroic gamer has gone through and slaughtered all the bad guys, exploding them into gibs or whatever.

Yesterday I played a game called Kholat for the 12th day of the Steam Backlog Bonanza, which I got in 2016 for about $9. For some reason, most of the literature puts it in all caps so it’s KHOLAT! Not just Kholat. KHOLAT!!! One of the main attractions is Sean Bean voicing some of the narration. It’s a really interesting game, in a certain kind of way. It’s basically a walking simulator at its heart, but it’s a very intense walking simulator.

Yesterday on the Steam Backlog Bonanza, I tried out a survival game from 2016 called Vortex: The Gateway which I got for $9 in a sale. (I think it’s probably a universal constant that all of the games in everyone’s backlog are games from a sale.) Surviving on an alien planet that looks like a nice camping trip. I only played for about 40 minutes because of a looming thunderstorm, but I tried the two different game modes.

Lurking over in the Blaugust Discord today, I noticed a conversation about the details of precise formatting in blog posts. Someone was having some trouble trying to get the WordPress editor to format their post exactly the way they wanted it to be seen. It inspired me to throw out a bit of unsolicited blogging advice related to this topic. First of all, I think we can all agree that the newest WordPress editor is terrible.