Blog: Games of July 2020

I took a "vacation" and played video games in the last half of July. I'm not sure that was the perfect way to spend my time, but it was pretty good. I think I'd have liked something incredibly deep like a Final Fantasy to sink into, but since I didn't really have that I did the best I could with what I had.

My top five games (by play time) for July 2019 were:

1. Animal Crossing: New Horizons - Always a lovely game. It's not quite everything I could have hoped for in a "next-gen" animal crossing, but it certainly charming and I think compared to New Leaf, it does a good job of hiding the wires that make the world turn.
   
   

   

   Skye always brings a touch of joy.



2. Octopath Traveller - Knowing I'd need to get back to getting stuff done, I really pushed myself to play Octopath as much as I could. I ended up playing a bit more than I really enjoyed, since the game tends to push to long sessions. Overall however I think the game is pretty good. I'm planning a "Thought's on" post for Octopath, but that will be a little bit in coming.
   
   

   

   You know that thing where the ball gets really big when you're playing tennis...



3. Paper Mario: The Origami King - I liked Paper Mario: Colour Splash, and I think that The Origami King improves on it in every way. I've been enjoying playing through and I really like the pacing and the length. It's been easy to play and I appreciate that I'll be able to finish it in a relatively contained time.
   
   

   

   Come for the jumping and hammering, stay for the chill coffee philosophy. 
   



4. Wargroove - I was getting my butt kicked by Wargroove (I have a terrible condition of loving tactics games but also being really bad at them). I adjusted the difficulty down a bit and found it really fun and playable. I appreciated being able to play how I wanted to play without having to "be at the game's level". It's possible I may have to go back and play at a harder difficulty later on, but hopefully I'll have learned the systems better by then.
   
   

   

   Caeser wins hearts, minds and combat encouters.



5. Xenonauts - I do really love the original X-COM style of gameplay and Xenonauts definitely does a good job of recreating the organization and careful combat. It does stick very closely to the original format, so I find myself thinking about elements I'd want in a new X-COM style game, especially when it comes to base building and organization.
   
   

Here's my total play time chart for July:

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

Blog: Books Read in 2020

Happiness. Understanding. Thunder.

I'm on Good Reads

Blog: Books Read in 2020

Loyalty. Morality. Leadership. Expectations. Strategy.

I'm on Good Reads

Project 1: 10Blog - Update

Well, happy Blog End and Start Day again.

I've returned to my garden (actually I've been doing a thing called "vacation" for a few weeks so I've been here a lot of the time) and it's time for that annual end of the blog post. And as I usually do it's also time to start another year of blogging.

The garden does not look nearly as good as it did last year, but it's a learning activity.

I generally prefer things with a defined start and end date (much as I'm bad at hitting them a lot of the time), so I find breaking the blog up by yearly volumes (sessions, editions?) helps keep it from feeling like it goes on forever. This is also traditionally the time where I reenforce my distinction between the blog as blog and the blog as project tracker. Effectively, I created this to keep track of projects I'm working on, but one of those projects is to practice writing and getting this out.

The last volume(?) of the blog covered an odd period of my life (I mean it included spring of 2020, so it's been an odd period in everyone's lives). I was fairly stressed in the fall and winter semesters with my day job, and trying to figure out how to live life when not doing a PhD. I'm slowly making progress on that front but honestly it's been a rough year in general.

For the most part the blog itself has been ticking quietly along on series of posts about the games I've played and the books I've read. I've been enjoying tracking those, so I'm happy enough with that. Aside for that I've written a few project posts and I feel like for the first time in a while I'm getting much better traction on the projects I'm working on. (Look for a project update shortly).

I am interested that the only thoughts on post I wrote was for Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival.

Overall a quiet year for the blog, but as I wrote in my update last year I wanted to focus my energy elsewhere, so I guess I've done alright.

My total posts per year, highlighted by month. You can see more on my Blorgress Page

Over the last few months I've wanted to improve my writing and I think my project focus for the last half of 2020 will be on writing the novel I've been thinking about and on writing a manual of interesting coding. That could also include more writing here, but that depends a bit on what I want to write about. I definitely have thoughts in mind on Ocotopath Traveller and on Paper Mario: The Origami King.

I'm also considering moving the blog itself off of Blogger/Blogspot. I've been generally unhappy with outsourcing hosting to Google as a provider for a few years now, as we've seen power on the Internet being consolidated and algorithmic filtering affecting how people are able to access information. I'm also exceptionally unhappy with the recent interface update which has really increased the length of time it takes me to make a post. The tag system has always been bad as well and finding a solution that makes me happier is becoming more important.

I haven't made a decision about what I'm exactly I'm going to do yet, but things muttered on the internet sometimes come true. I am planning to look at Hugo for Code Click and if that goes well there might be a change.

In the mean time, generally, you can expect to see a continued series of updates on books and games, with an occasional update on other things or thoughts I feel like I want to share.

With that, I hope you have a good August, a better end of 2020 and a much, much better 2021.