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IMO Iron City, a crappy local brewery, should have a beer called Fe Brew Ary (feel free to improve this pun in comments)
(28 Feb 2021 at 23:23) |
Hello! It is February, the shortest month. Nothing interesting is happening, except biding my time until I can get some Norton Antivirus in me and get out into the world again. Probably I should not write these things right before bed on the last night of the month, since I'm generally pretty much out of energy when I do??
I did check several things off my to-do list wrt in-progress projects, especially this newest silly project, which is fully over the top now, but wrapping up. (I've been having that experience where I broke down a large problem into sub-problems, then chipped away at those, and then the experience, which is where I'm like oh... just "return Rec();" and it's done? The moment of completion sneaking up on you is a curious thing I don't encounter much in other kinds of projects, excepting perhaps math.) I plan to do a sigbovik paper and video about that one (I just wish the "results" were a little better, but that's machine learnin' for ya). Even just to cleanse the system, you know? And though the early part of the month was unacceptably cold, the last week has been unseasonably nice, and I've been doing some long adventure runs; also good to cleanse the system.
In V.G. news, I didn't play that much this month, but I did start and finish Ghostrunner. It wasn't quite what I expected (or even was looking for?) but it's a good game. It's kind of like a super-hard version of Mirror's Edge, or perhaps a cross between that and N+, or when you have that one unlucky checkpoint in Call Of Duty where you have 1 HP and six bullets left and you have to keep practicing some route in a mostly-deterministic fire fight to somehow squeak out survival. The maps were good looking and I appreciated how you could just wall-run your way around pretty much anywhere, way off the intended path, and then basically always die because there's nothing over there. No invisible clipping walls to ruin your day, only the abyss. The story is quite silly and all the male voice actors sound like college kids doing a neck-tendon straining audition for the role of Optimus Prime in a live-action Transformers movie. Now it's on to Super Mario 3D World (this one is what I expected and was looking for) and Noita. Noita is a weird one. I've been looking forward to it since seeing a demo/teaser some years (?) ago... it's like a Roguelike built inside one of those "falling sand pixel" automata engines that went around in the early 2000s. The engine is technically very impressive, with these particle systems and rigid body physics inside a huge destructible world. And it does create some cool moments. I'm still trying to figure out whether I really like it, though, as the main route through the game seems pretty slow-paced (aside from the sudden deaths) and not well balanced (there are so many items that seem completely useless, for example). On the other hand, it is very compelling when you deliberately go off the garden path and there seems to be a lot of (extremely difficult) mystery around...? It seems that they are releasing new beta versions every day, so maybe I just need to wait for a bit more iteration.
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| Happy Pi Day Tom7! From your late night sidewalk chalker partner |
| Dan B! Happy Pi day! I was just looking at those old photos (: |
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