You Must Build a Boat

Holy dang, I've been slackin' on updating this blog. It's not because I haven't been playing things. It's because I haven't been beating things. Overwatch has kind of been monopolizing my gameplay time. However, on a vacation flight to London recently, which afforded me many hours of downtime, I played "You Must Build a Boat" until it was squashed.

“You Must Build a Boat” is a puzzle/matching game. I played it on mobile (iOS), but I believe it is also available on Steam, though gameplay works really well on a mobile device.

You start out with the tiniest of boats and a sparse crew, and you must build a bigger boat to travel further into the depths of the river for reasons. You do this by completing quests during dungeon runs and collecting items and crew and resources to upgrade your abilities. This all sounds a little complicated, but it’s not. It’s a simple but fun game.

To begin a dungeon run, you go up to the top of your boat and talk to a dude. There’ll be an Add Quest button. You can add up to 3 quests in each dungeon run. They start out easy like “Use an item”, defeat some jackoff. The positive of rolling with three quests is that you can complete more quests in one run. Efficient! The downside being that adding more quests also adds more dangerous creatures to fight or harder chests and the like. But that doesn’t scare you, now does it?

During a run, the dungeon is shown at the top of the screen. Your little avatar will run from left to right, encountering beasties, chests, or traps. Below the dungeon view, is the meat of the game. There are tiles in rows and columns that you can slide to match like tiles. Matches must be horizontal or vertical. None of that diagonal bullshit. 3 tiles or more matched gets rid of the matched tiles and performs whatever action those tiles represent. So, if you are fighting a beastie, and you match 3 swords, the beastie will take damage. If you match 4 or 5 swords, it’ll take more damage. Chests require keys to be matched, beasties require swords or magic tiles to be matched. Traps can be disarmed by matching whatever icon they display. Shields give you a shield barrier. I told you this was simple.

It’s a fast paced game. The world is constantly moving forward Super Mario style, so if you take a while getting rid of an obstacle, you’ll get pushed off the edge, which means, try again loser. As you progress, you’ll get resources through these dungeon runs so that you can upgrade your weapon stats, magic stats, shield stats, etc, so you’re not such a pile of mush.

Once you complete all the quests of an area, you’re good to pull up anchor and move on to the next area, with a bigger, swankier boat, and a new crewman. New crewmen generally give you the option to upgrade or buy different things. New areas also mean new, more difficult baddies. Some have caveats like they are invulnerable to physical attack, for example, so you’ll have to focus on magic attack tile matches with them. You get the gist.

The quests get more difficult as time goes on as well. One of the final ones that gave me the most trouble was matching 356 tiles in a dungeon run. That took many a try. Most of the time though, you just put all three quests possible in there, and you complete things without actually specifically trying. You’re just playing the game. With the match a bajillion tiles one though, you throw strategy out the window and just match match match…and hope it’s enough, and then curse when it’s not. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This is a great game to pass the time. I got surprisingly into it, and it made time fly by while I was on that long ass flight. (There might have been a pun in there, and I hate myself for it.) I think I spent almost 12 hours playing “You Must Build a Boat”, and for a mobile game, that’s pretty damn long and well worth the price of admission. Once you beat it, you can restart at a higher difficulty, but why? I have conquered you, game, so get out of my face. Thanks for the lols.

Stardew Valley

Holy time sink, Batman! All my addiction centers were helpless to the likes of Stardew Valley. I sit here having spent 82 hours on this game. And much like when I played Harvest Moon back in the day, it's really hard to describe to people why this is fun to play at all.

Stardew Valley is a game about farming. You inherit your Grandpa's farm, and it's just a plot of land with a bunch of trees and rocks and weeds, and it's your job to plant crops and water the crops and pick the crops and sell the crops. Are you enthralled yet?

So the first little bit you're just trying to clear the land and get things to growing. Everything is on a daily cycle, so you get up at the butt crack of dawn, and you're forced to go the fuck to sleep by 1 AM. If you aren't snuggled nicely in your bed by then, you collapse from exhaustion and some kindly hermit is kind enough to take your dumb ass to the hospital. You get a hefty hospital bill and lose some progress as a result of your poor life choices. I was mining when it happened to me, so the progress lost was I forgot the last several levels of the mine and had to explore them again.

So yes, I jumped ahead. There's farming, but there's also a great big world where you can mine for ore, go fishing, collect artifacts, raise livestock, etc. etc. Are you enthralled yet?

What's the point of all this, you may ask. Well, the thing that kept me playing for ages was there's this old community center that's dilapidated. In each room of the community center, there's a list of items for you to collect to form different bundles. An example of a bundle would be the Spring Crops Bundle, which requires you provide a parsnip, green bean, cauliflower, and a potato. Providing all the items of a bundle gets you a little reward (fertilizer, for example). Completing all 5 bundles in a room will get you a larger reward, like fixing a bridge that opens up a new area. What happens when all the bundles are collected wasn't explicitly stated, but that mission was enough to sell me.

In order to collect all the items necessary, the player needs to toil day after day through spring, summer, fall, and winter, harvesting season specific crops when the opportunity is there. I say toil, but there was something enjoyable about getting up each day and performing a routine of watering the crops and milking the cows. After all my chores of the day were done, I would generally head into town. The general store has a job board where townspeople routinely put requests. These requests are generally to bring them items you can grow, forage, or create. Why do these quests? A. Money. B. There's a heart system where doing things for people in the town, talking to them, and giving them gifts they like will bump up the number of hearts in your friendship meter. The more hearts you gain, the less they treat you like some asshole stranger. "Heart events" will also be triggered when you reach a certain heart threshold and see the person again. These events give you a little more insight to who they are, what they like, what's their life like, and whatnot. They're short little stories, but it was a pleasant surprise each time I triggered one.

There are a number of townsfolk who are marked as single and when you have maxed out your friendship meter with them, you can ask them to be your boyfran or girlfran and eventually do the marriage dance and can have kids and such. I ended up choosing the guy who may have a drinking problem and was a real douchebag in initial whatups. #whatdoesthatsayaboutme lol I got to max heart level with him first because I kept giving him gifts (mostly beer #enabler) to see at what point he would stop being a douchebag. Through the heart events you learn he hates his job and feels stuck, blah blah blah. You can do farm stuff instead. I will save you from your cycle of hating life and then killing your feelings with alcohol. #whatdoesthatsayaboutme

Anyway, so seasons pass. I collect things. I have new buildings built, I get chickens and ducks and sheep and pigs, plant fruit trees, and make wine, and then build a cellar to age the shit out of that wine, give gifts to all of the townspeople and make everyone think I am the best at stuff. I do this for a bajillion hours, until at one point, as I seem to do with all games, I think, "Okay, I'm fucking over this." What is my end goal? I want to collect all those damn bundles, and I only need a rabbit foot and a pomegranate to do it.

I have rabbits, but the rabbits have to reeeeaaaalllly like you to start dropping feet. I kept consulting the internet to see if I had to sell the rabbits or kill the rabbits to get the feet because you know, that makes logical sense. Nah. You just gotta wait the little bastards out, and they'll start dropping them like chickens and their eggs. It made no sense, but was happy because I didn't want to kill Bugs, Buster, or Babs. (Yes, you get to name all your livestock.)

So with the rabbit's foot in hand, I just need a pomegranate. Oh woe is me, the idiot who first thought she planted a pomegranate sapling then realizes she didn't, then proceeds to put torches around the one she does plant, which unbeknownst to her was preventing the tree from growing. (They need 6 clear spaces around them to grow.) Days had passed wasted where this fucker could have been growing. Thinking this was some sort of bug and not realizing that I had stunted the growth, I plant another pomegranate tree. They take 28 days to mature and they produce fruit in the fall. The point at which I was over playing this game was early Spring. Oh bother...

So thus begins the steady decline of my farm. I just needed to get to the 1st of Fall then I could be done. The quickest way to do that is to sleep the days away. I stopped planting new crops or collecting anything that was being created. I would wake up say whatup to the husband, whatup to the kid, check the mail, and go back to bed. 6:30AM: "Good night. Mommy has postpartum depression." Every few days I would go say hey to the cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, ducks, and bunnies, make sure they had enough food, and that their status was "is fine" and go back to my slumber. I didn't even pick up the chicken eggs until they kept me from reaching one of them to check if they were grumpy or not. The only days that ended slightly later were Fridays and Sundays because on those days, there was a traveling cart that shows up with a 1.26% chance of having a pomegranate for sale, and I had to go check.

It never did.

I proceed in this manner for 50+ game days. I feel slightly bad about it but soldier on until glorious fall arrives, with a fresh pomegranate on the tree. I take it to the community center and the building is restored in its entirety. I feel accomplished.

Until I realize that I didn't get my fucking achievement for completing it. No satisfying event is triggered. The last bundle was just like every other fucking bundle. That can't be right, I think. To the internet I go, where they say I need to wait a few more days for an event to trigger.

So I do. It's 2:30AM (in real life) by this point, and I just want to be done.

It took 4 more days of my depression sleep cycle, but there it was...the community center in its former glory, all the townspeople enjoying it. Joja-Mart all pissed off because they wanted to demolish it and make a warehouse. I failed to mention Jojamart before. It's an evil corporation. We hate them. That's all you need to know. Take that, evil corporation. And with that...and one more inconsequential quest, I deem Stardew Valley complete.

Despite my grind at the end, I REALLY liked Stardew Valley. I was obsessed with playing this thing for daaaaaaays. I was embarrassed by how much I was playing that I got in the habit of marking myself as Offline on Steam so people wouldn't see how much time I was sinking into this game.

If you enjoyed Harvest Moon, you'll like this. And just as an interesting note about the game, this game was the work of ONE person, which is amazing! It was a 4 year labor of love BY ONE GUY. That blows my mind and is pretty inspiring. Go buy it. It's $15 bucks. Fucking do it.

Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell

I don't remember what I paid for "Gat Out of Hell", but it was too much... The whole thing felt lazy, even by DLC standards. The story takes place after the events of Saints Row 4. Satan decides he's gonna kidnap the President, your Saints Row character, and marry said character off to Jezebel, his demon daughter.

Johnny Gat and Kenzie Kensington aren't about to let that happen, so they follow Satan down into the depths of Hell. There you reunite with Dane, who tells you that you'll only get The Boss back by getting Satan's attention. You do this by doing a bunch of activities that are reminiscent of activities in previous games. Reminiscent might be a little strong. They are the exact same activities with husks running around instead of human people. There are even cars in Hell, so no creative solutions needed here!

This brings me to my biggest gripe. I enjoyed the activities in Saints Row 3. Very much so. HOWEVER, this was not the main event. Occasionally you'd get a mission that would take you to one of these activities so you would know how they worked, and the rest of them just lived in the world and you could do them if you want, you could ignore them if you want. The meat of the game had a story, A COHERENT STORY, and things generally made sense. This is not the case for Gat Out of Hell. ALL the main story quests in Gat Out of Hell involve going to an activity and doing it.

Each activity starts with Dane explaining what the activity is and telling you how this will really get Satan's attention. Bullshit, Dane. It's a cheap ass way of cobbling together a storyline without actually writing anything interesting, funny, or of the sense making variety.

These missions are given by 5 different Hell-dwellers as Loyalty quests. Why the fuck am I trying to gain loyalty from Shakespeare? I beat the game. I still don't know the answer to this question. It's not like they play into the endgame AT ALL. Their dialogue doesn't add much, and I just kind of wanted them to shut up so I could trudge through the rest of the bullshit quests that awaited me.

I want to mention that in Saints Row 3, I played every single activity available. I did this because I was enjoying the game as a whole, the world, everything about it so damn much, that I was trying to prolong the game. Having a game consist of nothing but these activities makes me instead want to sprint to the finish so I can never play this again.

One more note regarding the "Quests". The quest list is a joke. It says there are 50 quests to do, but if you look at them, it's chock full of nonsense you should find in an achievement list. Example: the quest "Testicular Manslaughter" requires you to kick a certain quantity of demons in the dick. This is not a quest, jackasses.

Next gripe: One of my favorite things about the Saints Row franchise is rolling around with my player character and another Saint. The interaction between you and your buds was always fun, well written, and made you really give a shit about them. There are literally zero missions that involve anyone else. Dane will sometimes chime in with some plot furthering words, but nobody wants to fucking talk to Dane.

On a related note, how the hell was Dane even talking to me? We don't have phones in Hell. I know this because I have no way to play music, which would have helped drown out the voices in my head and their incessant complaining the entire time I was playing.

SPEAKING OF MUSIC though, did you know that this game at one point decided it was a musical? One moment the devil is saying some shit I don't particularly find interesting, the next he bursts into song like it's High School Musical. I pretty much made this face the entire time the singing lasted.

The only good part about that was Jezebel started singing later, and Gat shuts her down, saying we're not doing that anymore. That got a chuckle.

Whenever the sorry excuse for a story would move forward, there would be storybook pages displayed with a voiceover describing what had happened. These coooould have been cool. Nothing really stood out to me in them though. No memorable laughs. It was a neat idea that wasn't really executed all that well.

That could be said about the game as a whole, I guess. I encountered some pretty heinous bugs during my 6 hours with it. Probably the worst one involved the Interaction button (E) suddenly becoming non-functional. This meant I couldn't start missions or activities. This meant I couldn't access the weaponry vending machines to buy ammo. This meant I couldn't open doors! I had to quit the program, and when I started it back up, it triggered the next main storyline point and fixed the issue. Another problem was encountered during the final fight with Satan. Something about Satan suspending me in the air while I was using the Armchair-a-geddon, a chair with Gatling guns and missiles, triggered an issue where I would remain seated but the chair was invisible or I would remain suspended in air as if Satan had ahold of me, but he did not. This was problematic because I couldn't shoot while in this state, but I could take damage and die perfectly fine, which it caused me to do.

On a positive note, the Armchair-a-geddon was a funny weapon. It was as satisfying to use as it was humorous. The cut scene before the big boss fight was also a highlight. There were some funny lines. Kenzie and Gat team up to Wrestlemania some demons. It was aight. And that's where the highlights end. I think the whole game got about 4 chuckles out of me. It was mostly an exercise in willpower to complete it.

I love you Saints Row, but we need an intervention. I'll forgive you for one bullshit cash grab, but my love and my dollars won't follow if the next installment is anything like this.

Banished

Banished, man... Banished sucked me in for a good three days and didn't let go. You start off with a few simple tutorials to get you acclimated to the layout of the game. The mechanics of the game aren't drastically different from similar titles in the genre but what was compelling about this game were the storylines that unfolded as a result of me not being aware of how the subtle differences could royally fuck you over. This is best expressed with a story of three settlements. This isn't my first rodeo with settlement building, so I thought I knew what I was doing. I was so wrong.

It started off well...I thought. People were housed, clothed, warm, had jobs, but I noticed my population wasn't growing. Nobody was homeless, so I had stopped building new houses. In other settlement building games I've played, the houses evolve as they gain access to new amenities and goods. This home evolution also results in expanding the number of people it can house. This is not how this game works. A wood house is a wood house forever. A stone house is a stone house forever, and one family lives there at a time.

It turns out that children don't move out of the house unless there's a house to go to. And grown ass children don't knock boots and make new children while they're living under their parents roof. By the time I figured this out, I had spent a good long while with this settlement in its current state. The next time I booted the game up, I paused it, and looked at all of the houses I had and their inhabitants. I was in trouble. I had a bunch of houses with 70-80 year old parents and their 50 year old children still living with them. Fuuuuuuuuccckkkk!

I needed young people, but they were in short supply. There was one woman who was 21, named Marlotte. I needed her to move out of her parents' house and find a fuck buddy fast for the good of civilization. Luckily I had one man who wasn't knocking on death's door. His name was Beatricki. He was 37. The average age of everyone else was about 76, their boot knockin' days firmly in the rearview. I built a house and Marlotte moved in. Beatricki soon followed, and they ended up having a girl named Bayley. Hope! Young Bayley eventually moved out of the house, but I needed nomads to miraculously show up for her to have a potential baby daddy. Marlotte and Beatricki had another baby, a boy this time, but soonafter Beatricki was killed in a tragic "giant quarry stone falling on his head" accident. Tragic!

With all young couples gone, I needed nomads...and bad. Just when all seemed to be lost, a young nomad named Ramien showed up. He didn't see nothing he liked apparently and moved into a house by himself. Dammit, Ramien! Years passed, and at age 38, he still wasn't picking up what Bayley was puttin' down, and Marlotte was no longer a spring chicken, so that wouldn't have helped anything.

It was about this time that my aging population started dropping like flies. This caused food supply problems because these old folks had been gathering, hunting, and growing the food that was keeping the plates of this society spinning. Everybody was starving. People were dying, but when all hope seemed lost, nomads showed up! A lot of them! I put them all to work in the food providing roles, but the damage had been done. I was now playing from behind and entering winter with no buffer. To make matters worse, the newly arrived fertile nomads had had a bunch of babies which I was now having a very hard time feeding. Marlotte's little boy was one of the first to die of starvation. Once winter came, I threw all my farmers into hunting roles. Hunting and gathering barely sustained us, and the elderly and new nomad babies fell one after the other, all of starvation. When spring came, I tried to switch some jobs around to get more farmers. But farming takes time. Time that I didn't have. It didn't take long for each house to completely run out of their supply. Marlotte then died of starvation, and that was it. I was done with this place.

I started a new civilization. This time, I vowed to build all the houses. Houses on houses on houses would ensure that there were plenty babies, and I wouldn't get stuck the way I had last round. Well...that worked...but too well. I had plenty of babies, but I had not built the food supply quick enough to sustain that growth. I was pretty much in immediate food danger. I was just eeking by. No one was starving, but people weren't exactly thriving either. Everything was balanced on the edge of a knife, and when a house caught on fire, the balancing act came crashing down.

I had built wooden houses because they took less resources to build and could be built quicker. They were placed close to one another to pack as many of them into the space I possibly could. This became problematic when one of them caught fire... Soon, they all had lit up like Christmas, and everyone stopped what they were doing to try and put it out. The problem is when everybody is playing fireman, they're not gathering, hunting, or growing all that food they're already desperately needing. I gave up on that town before the blaze was out. Onward and upward.

Take 3. I was going to go at a more measured pace this time. Keep an eye on how old everybody is getting, but only add housing when you can feed everybody. Only build structures when you need them, when you have the resources to build them, and for the love of God, put a buffer between structures so fire isn't so devastating.

Keep Gatherer's Huts and Hunting Cabins in places you don't intend to chop down all the trees. While in the midst of the previous two trainwreck settlements, my town's insatiable need for lumber led me to clear the forests around my food gathering structures. Wildlife and woodland edibles don't exactly stick around without the woodland. Multiple times, this made my already strained food situation worse. Putting Forester's Lodges in places where I did need to chop things down ensured that it would at least regrow and resupply me in time.

Even taking these steps, I still had trouble getting enough lumber for building purposes AND for firewood. My current map had lots of creeks/rivers separating the different land masses. I built bridges to hard to reach places that had resources, but when your lazy little settlers are too far away from their house, they take about two licks at a tree and go home for lunch. Slackers. That wasn't sustainable, so I strategically cleared nearby what I needed to clear and didn't raze the earth unless absolutely necessary.

All in all, I was smarter this round. I only took in nomads when I had enough food to keep them alive and I had a job need for them. One time I had 11 nomads show up, and I told them to get the fuck gone because I had just barely made it out of a lean winter.

After that, I beefed up farming, adding more fields. I had a shit ton of fisherman and farmers, hunters and gatherers. At one point I was producing too much food to even remove it from the field. As Banished doesn't have any programmed objectives, quests, or levels, your goal is to simply survive as long as possible. I had reached a point where I felt in control of my civilization, they had more food than they knew what to do with, and I felt like if I kept playing, it would essentially be more of the same. I decided my end goal was to get my total population to 100. I was at 61 adults and 20 children at this moment. To give you some context, my first settlement...you know, with all the old people, stagnated at about 20 people. My second trainwreck started going sideways about 10 people deep. Getting to 100 was a significant improvement.

Every time I would get to 99 people, someone would die of old age. That was the biggest difference of this playthrough, most of my deaths were because people were so old, they had turned to dust. There were a couple quarry workers that got crushed to death, and a hunter that was gored by a boar, but those were outliers. No more starving people. No more death by human popsicle.

Soon, I made it over the hump. 100! I felt accomplished. Then I decided to sit and watch it for a little bit longer. Someone immediately died. Then another. "Don't care, I already reached my objective." Then disaster struck. Tornado time in my pristine town. Death. Death. Death. Building destroyed. Forest destroyed. More death. More destruction. It moved across the map leaving a trail of fuck your shit. Once it roped out, I was down 20ish people and many necessary structures.

Don't care. I completed my goal. Goodbye Banished. You were 17 hours of fun. No more, no less.

Deadpool

Deadpool was interesting. Not "interesting" in the way your mom says it, which is just code for bad. It's interesting in that there are parts of it that are super enjoyable and parts of it that drag on until I don't want to play anymore. I feel like the tone is spot on for Deadpool, the gameplay is fun for the most part, but for some reason, I still was in a hurry for it just to be done, which is kind of sad for an 8 hour game.

So the conceit of the game is that Deadpool has been approached to have his very own game, but Deadpool being Deadpool he's not about reading scripts and following a plan. Plans are for people not nearly as awesome as Deadpool. The whole thing is very meta, as you'd expect. He uses a bunch of explosions right out of the gate, which ruin the game's budget, and the studio makes one of the levels uber shitty looking to save money, resulting in Deadpool calling them up and yelling at them to fix it. Things like that abound.

The fighting is fun and kind of reminds me of the current gen Batman titles in that you're surrounded by goons on goons on goons, and you bebop from jerk to jerk, jacking them in the face and countering them as they try to attack you. I say "kind of" though because I don't think it's quite as good as all that.

You can use guns, swords, and explosives. I laughed out loud the first time I ran away from a goon while still shooting, and Deadpool just shot behind his head without looking, yelling "Pew pew pew!"

There were a lot of things that made me laugh. Like I said, the tone is great. There was one point where you were trying to wake up an unconscious Wolverine by pressing X. Each time, Deadpool would slap Wolverine and say something like "That's for never calling just to say hi.", "WHY", "WON'T", "YOU", "WAKE", "UP?", "That's because the player keeps mashing the button.", etc, etc. This went on for like 5 minutes if you kept pressing the button. You could have pressed "B to be a quitter", but I was enjoying it far too much for that.

Speaking of Wolverine, there's quite a few X-Men that show up in this game as well as villains in that universe. Each time one of them shows up, you can press Spacebar, and Deadpool will tell you all about that person in fun little cutaways that show images from the comics to illustrate what he's talking about. These were a really nice add.

Onto what I didn't like as much. The combat was fun to a point. I liked sneaking up behind unsuspecting baddies and watching Deadpool one shot them in creative ways. I liked the special moves that became available when I beat the hell out of enough people to gain the "Momentum" for those moves. I enjoyed the countering finishing moves. I liked that Deadpool mocked me when I did a crappy job. What I didn't like was the fact that ramping up the difficulty was done like you'd see in an arcade game. Just add more bad guys. More and more and more bad guys until at the end, you're fighting off a dozen waves of bad guys, and you're just tired of the whole thing. Every area was very similar looking, and you'd just have to fight through a bunch of guys to get to the next area that looked the same and had more guys. This was fine for a while, but I think there needed to be more variety in the things I was doing.

Back to the comparison with the Batman franchise, I would have probably had the same problem with it if it didn't have the stealth areas mixed in there. That's not really Deadpool's style, so I wouldn't expect something like that, but I would have appreciated some sort of mix up regarding gameplay every once in a while similar to that, just to break up the areas.

All in all, I enjoyed it, but it could have been better. If this game were a chimichanga, it'd be one from Taco Bell. Not everybody's gonna like it, but I did, and there's only a slight chance it'll give you the shits.

Pokemon GO

I am so incredibly amused by this game. Not necessarily the gameplay itself but the fervor in which I see people playing it. It's unlike anything I've really seen. The office is abuzz, the majority of people playing the game and talking about what they caught and things they learned the night before. That type of communication is fostered 1. Just because people are enjoying themselves, and 2. Because this game doesn't have any sort of tutorial system. You're thrown into the world, pointed at 3 starter Pokemon, and once you've caught your first one, you're cast off into the world.

Much like Ingress, Niantic's last app, Pokemon GO is location-based, meaning you gotta get off your ass to go play. As you walk around, recognizable locations around you are designated as Pokestops or Pokemon Gyms. If you're out in the middle of nowhere, you're going to have a harder time finding locations than if you're downtown in a large city, where Pokestops are plentiful. Pokestops are places were you can get random items given to you every 5 minutes. Things like Pokeballs, Potions, Pokemon eggs, etc. are found here free of charge.

My first two days of playing Pokemon was pretty sparse with regard to resources as my neighborhood didn't have but one Pokestop a couple minutes from my house, and downtown where I work was oddly bare considering Ingress is flush with locations downtown, and Pokemon GO uses that data. Downtown was fixed three days after launch, and I went from having to ration about 6 Pokeballs a day to having about 60 at my disposal at any given time.

Anyway, on one of the sad time, drought days, I was out of Pokeballs for most of the day. My only hope was to level up by hatching a Pokemon egg I had incubating. Eggs hatch by walking around. Each egg takes either 2km, 5km, or 10km to hatch, and no, driving doesn't contribute to your walking total (unless you're driving less than 15mph, so hope for traffic. lol). On this Pokeball-less day, my co-worker wanted to take a break and go walk down to the lake to see if he could catch some water Pokemon. We could see the leaves being flicked up, indicating that there were plenty of Pokemon down there. I was all for a walk as it served my egg hatching purposes, so away we went.

This is an interesting thing about this game, it's absolutely making people get up and get active. A lot of these people aren't necessarily people who are excited about such things, BUT they'll do it for Pokemon. I saw so many people walking around my neighborhood. I'm walking the dog more. I work at a very sedentary job where I stare at a computer screen all day. That whole get up and move every hour thing doesn't normally happen, but it has been the last few days.

Yesterday, someone in another department found a Haunter while she was just sitting at her desk. The word spread and everybody started looking by her desk, Design talking to Dev talking to QA talking to Project Management. A lot of times we're very insular in our departments but not so when we're all trying to find Pokemon. It's become a sort of group activity. It's a fun thing that connects us, and I've talked to people at the office that I hadn't really interacted with much prior. One of the rather quiet devs has been talking a whole lot more as we all try to figure out all the mechanics of the game. People have been going with each other to lunch and interacting with each other a lot more as result of this game.

However, some of that daily chatter involves the common question about if the servers took a shit or exclamations that one lost a [insert Pokemon name here] because the app crashed. Pokemon GO has been fraught with trouble from day one. I had to log in dozens of time as the app crashed and kicked me out. I'll lose at least 10 Pokemon a day because the app decides to shit the bed at the exact moment of capture. I'm fairly certain that if it weren't for this being a Pokemon game and everyone being so stoked on the mere idea of it, people wouldn't stand for an app that has this many problems. I'm sure things will improve, and this fervor for it can't last, but while we're in the thick of it, I'm enjoying the hell out of Pokemon GO.

Every time you see a Pokemon nearby that you haven't caught yet is exciting. Every time I get enough resources to evolve one of my Pokemon is exciting. Every time I walk far enough to trigger a Pokemon egg to hatch is exciting. I'm going to keep playing as long as I'm finding joy in playing it. See ya out there.

Day of the Tentacle: Remastered

Day of the Tentacle has long been one of my favorite adventure games, and when the remastered edition came to Steam, I had to have it. Well...I had to have it once it went on sale...

It's odd to review something you've played through dozens and dozens of times. From the opening sequence, I started quoting all the dialogue. Did I mention I've played this a lot? It had been about a decade since I played it last though, so I was kind of surprised by my recollection of everything. It's ingrained.

One of the nice things about the remastered version is that it has a creator commentary track that's available on many of the screens that give you an insight into the creation process. It was really interesting to hear things like the composers were often told their music files were too massive at 32k or the fact that CD-ROMs becoming prevalent right at that time made them decide to do complete voice over for the entire game in the last month of development when the original plan was that all dialogue would appear as text.

I played the new version of this game through twice, once using the Remastered art and without commentary and once with the classic art and creator commentary overtop. I was kind of shocked because as I played the remastered version, in my mind's eye, that's what it looked like all along. That is how I remembered this game. The only kind of weirdness I noticed was when the location required the the camera to truck left or right, it seemed too smooth. It didn't seem as natural.

During my second playthrough, I turned on classic art mode, and I had to pause a moment because it was far more pixelated than I remembered. When I played the remastered Monkey Island, the opposite had happened. I turned on the remastered mode at first, and my brain absolutely rejected it, thinking, "This wasn't what this game looked like at all!" I turned on classic mode and never looked back in that case. I played Day of the Tentacle fully in classic and fully in remastered mode, and both look great, once my brain kind of acclimated to my 1993 eyeballs.

I loved this game then. I love this game now, and if you love adventure games, you should love it too. Go forth and Steam.