Blog: Video Games of May 2016

Quick note: As you may have noticed I'm rather behind in posting these. The retrospective for April was written in early May (and it just took me forever to get it up), but the rest will be written and posted now. As a result, they will probably have some gloss from the passing of time.

May was the first month where I was teaching a course and that ended up eating a lot of my time. So I played with a little less mindfulness than I'd been playing earlier in the year. Most of the stuff I did play was to give me some stress relief and to stop thinking for a little while.
My top five games (by play time) for May were:

1. XCOM 2 - Having played a non-ironman "really easy" run through the first time I played, I thought it would be good to try the game at a little harder. I tried for an ironman run at a harder difficultly level. After a lot of restarts I managed to get a little traction, although honestly this game is *really hard*, or I'm just *really bad at it*.
   
   
   
   
   
2. Stardew Valley - I really love this game. I especially like the 20 minute flow of a day, and I like starting my day with a day or two of Stardew Valley along with coffee and breakfast. It's also nice to be able to drop in for a while in the evenings and play a little extra.
   
   
   


3. Chrono Trigger - It's nice jumping back into old favourites and where I had the time to sit down and focus on a game Chrono Trigger was a nice game to have on hand to jump back into. It's also surprising just how short the game actually is. 
   
   
   


4. Middle-Earth:Shadows of Mordor - I picked this up because I wanted a game I could play without thinking too much. It took a little while to get the flow, but then the stealth to combat mechanic took over and it was a game I could play a lot and let my mind wander while I played it.
   
   
   


5. Super Mario Maker - It's a little disappointing how hard it is to get your levels played, and that's cut down quite a bit on how much I've played. Still there are a lot of good levels out there to play and there's nothing quite so easy to play as 2D Mario.
   
   
   

Project 14 - Sketch Fiction - Home

This is the fourth of six sketch stories. It's unrelated to the others.

You can expect the next sketch story when I damn well post it. (Which is to say I've kinda given up on deadlines here, but I'm still trying to stick with creating cool things.)

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Home

The spar was warm from the sun and there wasn't much that needed done, so she sat and sang idly. The sea was light and the ship surged, pulling for home, same as the crew.

As she sang, a song of harbour and home, the crew calmed.  Hauling wasn't a bad life, better than some courses you could sail, but still, nobody wanted to sail the last stretch, everyone wanted to be home.

The was a fuss down on deck, those two sailors they'd picked up at Stoneille. She made to go down, but Jerin was there and knocked the two of them clean out. She shook her head, first job back home would be to make sure this was the last they saw of the sorry louts.

The crew on deck cleared the two trouble makers out of the way, dumping them on one of the coils of rope. Jerin trussed them up, then stalked among the crew. 

They rounded the headland and the light changed, suddenly brighter, warmer. The city surged down from the hill, a riot of colour, blue and green, down into the plain, yellow and red and crashing white up onto the mountain. The roofs blended together as they poured down to the sea from there, mixing together and meeting at the docs.

"Ahoy," she shouted down, "It's home again."

Blog: Favourite YouTube Videos (Volume (144)

In this volume of my Favourite YouTube Videos,  we get a little superstitious about song writing.

• First, Pomplamoose rebuilds a song to create the Stevie Wonder Herbie Hancock Mashup.
• Next we take a deep dive with Dave Bulmer and Brent Black where they talk about their collaborations to date and the new (then) Ocarina of Time with Lyrics Video. (It's two parts and total, about an hour and a half, just a heads up).

Blog: Video Games of April 2016

April worked out to be a pretty stressful month for me, between being offered my first chance at teaching a Spring Semester course and moving. So, my game play fell into a couple of weird patterns mostly determined by how stressed I felt. For a while Pocket Planes was in my top five, and that's really a game I only play when I'm stressed.

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

1. Stardew Valley - Stardew Valley is really comforting, and it's nice to have a game you can turn to without having to worry too much about what's going to happen. So it was nice to have as an anti-stress game. It also has enough depth that if you're slow playing it (which I mostly am, with a few exceptions) it feels like it will last quite well. My only complaint remains, as I said in March, is that you have to play it in 20(ish) minute chunks since it doesn't save other than over night.
   
   
   
2. Super Mario Maker - I'm still playing more Super Mario Maker than I expected. I think, to some extent, this is due to it being the game with the disk in my WiiU, so it's easier to play than bothering to put something else in. It's also quite flexible, in that you can play for just a couple of minutes, or you can have a longer play session. 
   
   
   
   
   
   Nintendo has also done a good job in keeping new material coming and I've found it worth playing each of their new example courses since you get a new amibo sprite for finishing them. I'm still a little frustrated that there's not that many people playing new levels, but it's not enough to make me feel like putting the game down.
3. Hearthstone - I'm not winning quite as much as I was in the first few days of the Old Gods expansion, and I'm slipping behind on cards and the meta again. Still I have a lot of fun for a game I'm not good at (and I get a lot of joy out of the games I do win).
4. Chrono Trigger - I'm still touring my SNES collection and after Final Fantasy VI (3) this is the natural next place to go. I think my replay has convinced me that this is my favourite game of all time. 
   
   

   

   GameFAQs user MK8

   It feels beautifully choreographed, every fight and every conversation is placed in just the right place, and it feels like people worked very carefully on how players experience the game. Compared to how drawn out and unfocused Final Fantasy VI felt it's a real breath of fresh air.
5. Mario Golf: World Tour - Wanna play nine holes over lunch? Over the years I've played hours and hours of Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour and while I've never been an expert at it, it's up there on my list of favourite games (and probably the number one reason I turn the game cube). Even though it's been around for a while I didn't get Mario Golf: World Tour (on the 3DS) until last summer and didn't really play it that much until this month.
   
   

   

   GameFAQs user ollist

   
   Since I've been quite busy and trying to stay focused on work, I thought taking a good break at lunch and pulling out the 3DS was a good way to have focused fun. I think I'm even actually learning to be better at the game.

Other than that I haven't played too much worth talking about in April. I've definitely tried to focus a little better on the games that are important to me and play less of the games I have a harder time stopping (hi Mini-metro, although that may just be a natural fade).

Here's my total play time table for April 2016:

And here's my total number of times played:

And here's a chart of what I've played over the month: