Blog Post: Books Read in 2021

Men. Together.

Blog: Games of November 2021

I don't think I've had a month before, where I haven't played five games. I was pretty busy this month, and my PC is borked, so I guess I got to be focused for November. I'm looking forward to playing a bit more over December. I'm just about finished Secret of Mana and I'm trying to decide what to play next. I've been thinking about playing Legend of Mana, but also Final Fantasy 9 and 12, and maybe Eastward, and the Skyward Sword remake. The Axe of the Blood God is also doing a pantheon/game club playthrough of Chrono Cross, which I was thinking of playing sometime soon as well. So I have no idea what I'm going to do next, but at least I have options.

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

1. Secret of Mana (Collection of Mana) - I think I've played Secret of Mana more than any other game. It's certainly one of the two games I first fell in love with as a kid (along with Illusion of Gaia). I played a bit when the Collection of Mana first came out, but decided when I finished Trials of Mana that it would be interesting to go back to where I started and play again. It's been fun, sometimes frusterating (I've tried to do a more-or-less low level run), and a little weird. There are several things I'd forgotten and a few I don't think I'd ever seen before.
   
   
   
   


2. Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past - Continuing to try to "git good". I had a fair bit of fun, although honestly playing ALTTP makes me want to play Illusion of Gaia more often than not. They have very similar game play and IoG is beautiful (and I love it). I started to do a second play through to keep building towards "gitting good" but trailed off as the month got busy.
   
   
   
   


3. Trials of Mana (Collection of Mana) - Playing the original after the remake has been interesting. I've tried and bounced off this game quite a few times in the past. I'm thinking I'll write a combined "things" post about both the original and the remake - and Secret of Mana as well. Overall, I'm glad I played it certainly has a lot of interesting elements. I'm not sure how I would have felt if I played it back when it was originally released, and it does have some flaws by modern game standards, but it's really pretty and fairly fun.
   
   
   
   


4. Super Mario Odyssey - I barely play this, but I finished the "main game" and started on the post game bit and the flow and joy in running around this game has been great.
   
   
   
   


Here's my total play time chart for November:






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

Blog: Books Read in 2021

Loyalty. Meaning. Edge. Relations.

Project 18: Game Tracker Update - 2021

 So it's been a long while since I've sat down and worked on the Game Tracker and it's also been a long while since I've written anything other than vague intentions for working on the project. Fortunately my new focus on creative work has push me back to it.

I was actually pushed by a post I'm writing for the blog that I'll share pretty soon. I've wanted to do a good explanation of Java's Preferences. I managed to thoroughly confuse myself with them and so thought I'd follow the Julia Evan's approach of writing about what confused me. I'd left my project in a thorough mess back in March - the equivalent of the truck sitting in the old bard with the engine out and wires and tubes laid out all over the place - and so in order to show how I was using preferences, I thought it might be a good idea to put the bits back together.

When I abandoned the project, I was in the midst of trying to convert the save system (persistence) to use JSON. That was part of a grander idea to connect to some kind of web interface - Google Sheets and Firebase are the two I've been eying. I ended up struggling to get Java and JSON to play nicely together and after a little bit of cobbling, I discovered that Joda-Time -  which I've used for managing time in Java for *years* - was also making everything complicated. 

I gave up and decided that since I mostly wanted the system up and running so I could finish the blog post - which I've been working on for months. I set up a project - well... took over the one from March - called 2021 refresh and tried to get a minimal set of the Game Tracker up and running. That was more or less fun, I built a CSV version of the data manager and then did all the cleanup I had to do to get up and running.

Game Tracker - Pretty much the same after all these years.

I also realized that I've been keeping the GitHub repository for the project private. I think that's partly based on not feeling like the project was ready for people to see and partly fear about showing off my own programming work. Given what I've been thinking about with creative work and how I want to use my time going forward, hiding isn't going to help me, so I opened the repository to the public and put and MIT Licence on it - not that I think it will be terribly useful for anyone. I found Choose a Licence, which was helpful for comparing licences.

 

I also got to write a readme, which at the end of the day turned out to help me feel better about the whole project and make sure that anyone who stumbles across it will know what on earth is happening. Nothing about the whole project feels at all glossy or cool - like I would like it to - but it's happening and I've moved it a little bit forward. I found Make a README which was a really good resource.

I like that I can return to the idea of small tasks for the project now. For example, for reasons that are beyond me - maybe as a demo for students - I set the game systems to be a Java Enum. This is a terrible idea since for some reason new video game systems have been released in the last few years and I've even purchased some of them. It'll be nice to be able to jump in and work on that for a little bit and then be done.

I also have a lot of other things I'd like to do. I'd like to expand the interfaces to include a desktop GUI, something for my phone and something for the web. I also still want to set up remote data management for the system. I'll get to those at some point, but again my new approaching to getting things done means they'll hopefully trickle out over time.