Blog: Favourite YouTube Videos (Volume 155)

In this volume of my Favourite YouTube Videos, we lament the passing of small local video game zoos and celebrate just how cool modern engineering can be.

• First. Dave Bulmer, sings a song that makes him very happy. About Donkey Kong. And how he doesn't have a zoo any more. And it's a real song even!
• Next, Destin from Smarter Every Day discovers that the cupola shutters on the International Space Station work by turning a rod stuck through the side of the space station. You might think this would let all the air out, but, because engineering is cool, it doesn't.
• Finally, The Engineer Guy breaks down the way aluminum cans are manufactured, which is a very complex process for something that happens within a second or so.

Blog: Video Games of February 2017

February was a pretty unfocused month for games for me. I played a bunch of stuff, but definitely didn't have a dominant theme and I think that shows in that a lot of the easy, short play time games are at the top of the list again.

My top five games (by play time) for February 2017 were:

1. Marvel Puzzle Quest - Again a little bit each day put MPQ up at the top of my list. As always it's lots of fun, it's easy to play and it makes playing for 5-15 minutes a day pretty rewarding or playing for a couple of hours too.
   
2. Kerbal Space Program - I think I largely got back into KSP, because I keep some screen shots from the last time I played in my PC wall paper. There's just something about looking at some of the cool space ships of my past and thinking, I should play more. I played quite a bit back in 2012, but never really got to landing on other planets or building crazy interplanetary-ships and it all just kinda built up.
   
   
   It's a bit interesting since it's been a long time since I played, a lot of things have changed. It's taken a little bit to pick up again, but generally I've had a lot of fun with it.


3. Hearthstone - As with MPQ, I've been playing a little bit of Hearthstone at a time, but it's built up. (It also took over "lunchtime game" for me this month.) I'm feeling at a pretty good spot, I didn't get that many cards from the Mean Streets of Gadgetzan expansion, but it seems that they aren't too critical to (my part of) the current meta. Also I still love my Paladin Murloc deck and overwhelming people with Murlocs just makes me happy some days.
   
   


4. Earthbound - I'm still enjoying Earthbound, but it's a touch tough to get started playing some times. It's a little bit slow (ala all SNES RPGs) and it can be kinda hard sometimes. Still, every time I play, I feel rewarded. And Mato's Earthbound book is still really great (so I have to keep playing).
   
   


5. Rimworld - Rimworld is ok. It's even getting a little better than it was last year. It's also still in pre-release, so the fact that it's any fun at all (which it is) is fine. The problem with Dwarf Fortress-likes is that they tend to suffer from a lack of depth. With Dwarf Fortress it might take you two or three months to learn how to farm but once you do and you can reliably not kill all your dwarves (by starvation) then there's plenty of other things to turn your mind to (and an incredibly deep (literally) world to explore).
   
   
   Rimworld has a number of complex interacting systems, but it doesn't seem to really take them anywhere. I think the different types of "game narrator" AI will help with that, but the world still feel constricted to me and I'm not sure why I want to build a settlement.
   
   
   
   

Here's my total play time chart for February:

And here's my play chart for the month: