Blog: Games of April 2019

I'll write more soon, but April marked the end of my PhD. Not of course the end of work, but definitely a change in my levels of stress and business.


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

1. Fire Emblem: Awakening - This game. I'm not sure I like it, but I like lots of parts of it. The thing I like the most is the support conversations, where in if two units work together during a mission, they might have a chat together afterwards. I find this somewhat warps the balance of the missions themselves (and somewhat pushes the game off of the style I love in Path of Radiance). They're also biased significantly towards your units falling in love and having kids, which ... is not what I want in the game? Still it gets its hooks into me and I do enjoy it.
   
   

   

   Teaching the team to talk.

   
   


2. Breath of Fire II - I want to finish. I would like to be finished, and I am at least getting closer to the end. Sadly, not the finest Breath of Fire entry.
   
   

   

   Oh sure!

   
   


3. Xenonauts - I've bounced off this game so many times, but for some reason this time it's really sticking. It stays very true to the XCOM original, with many nice quality of life improvements and, somehow, quite a bit of fun.
   
   

   

   Starting to feel organized when we land.

   
   


4. Cursed Treasure 2 - I think this is the best tower defense game. I lament that 3 has never happened and I really would just like people to turn out a ton of interesting levels to follow up with.
   
   

   

   It warms my heart every time.

   
   


5. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - I ground myself to a halt in my Master Mode Quest, I wanted to finish everything in Master Mode and I cannot kill those two damned Silver Lizalfos. So I started a new game. Regular mode, and no fast travel (so far anyway). And I'm having a blast, this game is so, so good.
   
   

   

   Running back again.

   
   

Here's my total play time chart for April:

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

Blog: Books Read in 2019

So. Good.

I'm on Good Reads

Blog: Games of March 2019

I was pretty steadily busy in March and still holding out on getting to invested in playing anything while I had work to do. I didn't play anything particularly of note, although I probably did get deeper into Xenonauts than I'd planned. I also very briefly started trying to play a version of Simon's Cat branded Snood on the phone, but that has the standard addictive gameplay and pay-to-keep-playing model so I ditched that pretty quickly.

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

1. Breath of Fire II - I'm struggling to get through this a bit. Some of this game is really well done and some of it isn't. The translation is obviously awful, and it has a very SNES RPG habit of sending you to do something ... somewhere, so I've had to resort to a guide (well, several guides) to find a decent way to play. On the other hand, something does keep me playing and I enjoy the overall feel of the game.
   
   
   
   via GIPHY


2. Xenonauts - I got listening to a Podcast where they were talking about XCOM (the real one from '94). So I figured I'd fire up Xenonauts until I got frustrated and quit. So far that hasn't happened and I've been enjoying Xenonauts quite a bit.
   
   

   

   Nothing to worry about.

   
   


3. Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival - As (pretty much) always.
   
   

   

   Brother and Sister

   
   


4. Pokémon Go  - Also as (pretty much) always.
   
   

   

   I take it back. I'm slightly worried.

   
   


5. Mario Kart 8 - I needed something more tactile to play and this was really up my alley.
   
   
   
   via GIPHY

Here's my total play time chart for March:

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

Project 1 & Project 11: Write More

With my PhD winding down, I've been thinking about how I want to organize my time for the next while. I'll write about my thoughts in general in a bit, but at this point I think where ever I go I want to improve my communication, especially in writing.

via GIPHY

So to address that I'm (re)setting up to projects for myself, both to write more.

Project 1 is my already existing project for the blog, but I would like to increase my blog-as-blog output to at least 4000 words a month. I'm still working out exactly how I want to use those 4000 words, but the idea is to think about, write, edit and revise some non-fiction writing each month.

Project 11 is my already existing project to write a fantasy novel. At the moment I think I would like to try to put 4000 words a month there too. The core concept has been floating around in my head forever, and it seems like time to at least produce a trunk novel out of it. I also reserve the right to divert these words into some other fiction project, possibly some more short stories, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Job one is to actually write stuff consistently.

I'll put out a monthly update at least until August 1, 2019 and we'll see how it goes.