I unboxed my new Steamdeck over the weekend. It's a very cool device, though it is host to several rough edges.
That's part of the charm, however. It isn't a polished walled-garden console, but a fully functioning Linux PC in a hand-held form factor -- for that I am willing to make many concessions!
With my newfound ability to play shiny AAA super-graphics games on a handheld device I dove into... The Excavation of Hobb's Barrow, an indie pixel-art point-and-click adventure (akin to the Monkey Island games).
The game was good! It's certainly not the deepest game or the best ending, but the whole game is voiced, the puzzles were reasonable, the pacing wasn't horrible, and I was rarely lost for long. It scratched an itch I didn't realize I had!
Back to the deck -- besides playing steam games it has the ability to drop into a full-blown KDE desktop and mess around. I understand that there's some default limitations and a read-only root filesystem but that's not impeding anything I'd want to do on this kind of device, and unlocking it is only a single command.
Besides doing the expected "play the games in my library", I've managed to:
- SSH into my dev box (bluetooth keyboard had zero issues)
- Install Chiaki to use the steamdeck for PS4 remote play (works better than the Vita!)
- Have my brother share his very large steam library with me, allowing access to his games if he's not online
- Install and configure a GBA emulator
All this is stuff I could just do on a Linux laptop, but besides the SSH bit I usually wouldn't since I'm not a fan of laptop / desk gaming. I can certainly say I'm a fan of this device, however!
Beat Live A Live on the weekend and I'm still processing whether
or not I enjoyed it.
On one hand most of the 7 (8) scenarios you play through -- each of which
is essentially an intro chapter or side-mission from a traditional JRPG --
aren't very good. The "near future" was a notable dud with lots of
needless backtracking and awful pacing. Some use fun gimmicks, but
none really lasts long enough or is good enough to stand out from a
gameplay or story perspective.
On the other hand somehow the game pulled through in the final chapter,
wherein (spoilers) you get to pick your favorite protagonist and lead
a party of other protagonists to defeat the final boss.
Where I frequently found myself annoyed or rushing through the individual
character chapters, I thoroughly enjoyed the grinding and character-specific
dungeons and secret bosses of the final chapter. I had a tonne of fun
finding the other characters and trying different ones out as a party member.
Despite none of the characters having much depth, and generally having
at most lukewarm feelings toward any of them, I found myself super
invested in them during this last chapter. There was barely any dialogue
between characters but it was almost as if there was implicit dialogue through
the silly dungeons and stupid bosses and the skills and items unlocked
through the process. They felt like a team, and playing as my
chosen protagonist they began to feel like a real protagonist.
After the credits finished rolling I found myself smiling, having truly
enjoyed the final battle and epilogue sequence. I still can't tell for sure,
however, if that one awesome last chapter was worth trudging through 8
chapters of mostly-bland trope-filled JRPG-ness.
I am curious, however, about the secret sauce. Why did that last
chapter work so well? I feel like there's a valuable nugget in there I've
not yet puzzled out!
I also want to identify a really cool thing the game did which was to tell
stories through the RPG mechanics. In one chapter you gain skills by
letting enemies use them on you. In another chapter you fight your disciples
and they get the experience at the end of the battles. Some battles
were presented more like puzzles than battles! They definitely explored
their battle system thoroughly in this one, which I can appreciate!
Finally got through Picturing the Mind: Consciousness through the Lens of Evolution!
It was a really light and fun read, and is full of interesting facts and opinions and info on past research about things like:
- Consciousness in animals (and plants [and sponges]))
- What separates humans from other animals [and sponges]
- How human symbolic language may have evolved
- Autism and savant-ism
- There's a chapter titled "Blushing Homo-Erectus"
- Robot sentience and cyborgs
I had originally picked it up because I was working on a storyline involving robot sentience after being inspired
by the novel Blindsight (which explores the concept of the "philosophical zombie"). I thought it might
be good to do at least a little research on the philosophies and sciences of consciousness before starting, but didn't really
know where to begin as consciousness a bit of a broad field. I happened to see this book listed on hacknernews with zero comments and
knee-jerk purchased it.
This was an excellent place to begin! It's extremely accessible, with each topic taking only a single page, ending with open-ended
questions about the things we might not know yet, and being accompanied by a wacky abstract illustration and/or poem. It was like a picture book
for grown-ups.
Having each topic only a page long means you only get high-level overviews of each topic with a couple of "this person said X" or "it is believed that Y",
but they're all accompanied by references in the appendix, allowing the reader to quickly get through less interesting topics while deep diving
the things they're interested in. Everything moved at a quick and jolly pace kept up-beat by the accompanying artwork.
I don't think I could honestly say I know terribly much more about consciousness than when I started the book, but I'm now much more
confident in what I'm looking for and where to look, and I thank the authors for that.
I wish there were more beginner books for complex topics designed in this format. The ability to read a light-hearted high-level
overview of something before diving into technical details or papers, or just decide "this topic isn't interesting to me" and move
on to a different topic would be great for self-learners exploring complex math, science, or philosophical topics.
I've realized over the last year that I've had a significant decline in mental sharpness compared to my highschool/university days.
My job provides me with ample challenging problems to solve, but often these problems are in similar domains and solvable
using what I want to intuitively call "linear problem solving". (I've not looked this up yet, there's likely a proper term for it.)
As an example, imagine knowing numbers and learning for the first time how to add 1+1 and 1+2. Thinking linearly, you could expand that to
figure out chains of addition, the commutative properties of addition, adding large numbers, etc.
What I feel I've lost is the ability to go beyond linear thinking and understanding the rules and implications of addition enough to
intuitively make the leap to subtraction or multiplication.
This was a power I definitely had in undergrad when I was frequently learning and working with mathematical concepts.
I was by no means a mathematical genius (or even terribly proficient at my studies) but there were frequent "aha" moments
where concepts would just "click" and the bigger picture would reveal itself.
Now, even when I try to pick up mathematical (or other highly technical) concepts my brain just doesn't spin up fast
enough to keep up.
The best way I can think to describe it is switching gears on a bike -- I know what second gear feels like, but when
I try to shift up the chain just won't catch and simply rattles around stuck in first gear.
As I'm moving through the previously mentioned 10-minute physics
tutorials this lack of a second gear has been very
noticeable. The content in each video is simple enough, but the logical leaps between videos evade me. After each
video I try (and fail) to complete the next video's goal without the next tutorial. I can easily extend the lessons in each video within
the framework that video provides, but fail to escape the bounds of basic understanding until I watch the next tutorial
and slap my forehead at how obvious the next step I missed was.
A specific case was trying to move from "ball on a hoop (05)" to "triple pendulum (06)". After learning the ball on a hoop constraint "hack"
the tutorials implement, I simply tried building a pendulum by coding 3 balls constricted to hoops, with each hoop being centered
around the previous ball. Linear thinking.
The actual way to extend the concepts was to change the constraint method from "constrain ball to hoop" to "constrain length of string" which properly
accounts for velocities of sub-pendulums acting on parents, which my solution stupidly did not cover.
What's worse is when the author gets into equations. These aren't terribly hard equations, this is stuff I know how to do,
yet my eyes glaze over as soon as they land on anything typeset in LaTeX and it all stays undigested.
As I very much want to make games and shaders and digital art, I believe it is imperative that I regain my ability to
"shift up", fully understand concepts, and solve problems non-linearly once again. I just need to solve the problem of "how"...
Finished a campaign of King's Dilemma, and what a great legacy board game it was!
The game is fairly basic on the surface: your group plays a council of nobles advising the King, and each round
you deliberate over an event and vote. Each outcome will move some resources up or down on a track (with each
player aiming to finish the game with resources in specific locations), and may add short-term or permanent
changes to the gameplay mechanics.
What started innocently enough -- free the chained lady, investigate some clues, join forces with another nation --
quickly devolved into making horribly corrupt and morally reprehensible decisions to further our houses.
The council has voted AYE to sacrificing several prisoners to be melted alive in experiments to alchemically create gold.
It was remarkable how truly awful we became to move a couple resources up or down while vying for
first place each game.
There's definitely weak points, but they're not big enough to ruin the experience:
- some entire games had nothing interesting happen in the story
- some players didn't always pay enough attention to the story to know what was going on (it's very wordy!)
- setup got a little complicated / annoying by the end with so many things to remember to do. A checklist would have been useful in hindsignt
- I wasn't a fan of the ending sequence process. It was novel, but didn't have as much punch as it could have
I really enjoyed playing it through to the end. While I don't think I'd ever play a second campaign, the game will definitely sit in my top boardgames list for a long time.
My whole life I've loved the first day back to school. The slightly cool September breeze, the electric energy of excitement and nervousness,
the fresh school supplies and just an overall feeling of high potential.
I've long since passed my epiphanic "I never have to go to school again" moment, but working at a university I still get to experience the nervous
anticipation vicariously through students during their "frosh days" as they galavant around a campus that still seems a labyrinth on scavanger hunts
and nerf-gun wars.
In two weeks' time they'll be struggling through workloads and drama and life in general, but today the world is new.
I work mostly remote these days, but I'd never miss the first day of the fall term just to soak in the excitement.
I've just finished with Digimon Survive after completing the Moral and True endings.
Despite a lackluster battle system and some points where the story got too repetitive or awkward or slow, I really
enjoyed my time with the first playthrough -- Enough to watch 2 more endings online (in ultra-fast-forward) and play
through the true ending myself.
The true ending featured some additional party members I ended up really liking, but dragged on far too long.
While I'm glad I played the extra ending for closure and for the warm fuzzies in the final scene, the true route
really lacked any additional character development in chapters 10-13 -- in a story about the characters developing.
Since the whole visual-novel half of the game is built around talking to people and raising affinities, this results in
several additional hours of repeatedly telling Kaito he's a good brother and telling Aoi she "has really grown" while being force-fed
a bunch of not-really-canon digimon lore.
The 3 non-true endings are definitely the more interesting routes, though they have a lot of overlap (and don't feature my
favorite character!).
But enough about the story, I came here for the Digimon!
There's quite a few Digimon to collect via recruitment in random battles and via your party 'mons evolving.
Those attached to humans evolve with the story or once your affinity with that human is high enough, while
recruited digimon are evolved with items
The recruiting mechanic is absolutely stupid, but once I started using a guide it was fun collecting
and evolving lots of 'mons. I used another guide to minimize overlap, as many of your party's
fixed final forms can be obtained through random recruits.
I did find it odd that many party and story digimon could be obtained through random encounters (+ evolving).
It's a bit awkward when the story has a powerful digimon appear and threaten the fabric of reality... and
you've already got the same 'mon in your party.
Likewise, it's a bit weird to have WarGreymon show up in a random battle and be recruitable by responding
correctly to a query about nap preferences... There's lots of questionable decisions on the recruit mechanic.
Complaining aside, if you grew up loving digimon and enjoy the occasional visual novel, this is one of the best-looking
visual novels I've played. While the story is about as deep as a kids-show about digital monsters, it's worth
at least one playthough for nostalgia's sake.
I've just returned from a brief 4-day vacation to find my mind in shambles. This always tends to happen -- I keep so many small
threads of ideas and plans and micro-projects going on a regular basis that brief inattention turns the whole thing into a useless knot.
When in this state I find my mind begins to wander and reach out like hundreds of tentacles, grasping for any interesting
avenue to do something. Should I take a university course? Build a DIY virtual pet with a Raspberry Pi?
Work on designing that board game I always meant to build? So many new threads to begin! Of course, those old ones are hopelessly
entagled and must be abandoned.
And so the cycle of the chronically occupied continues.
On my list of interesting roads I'd like to stroll down is the video series from 10 Minute Physics, by one Matthias Müller. According to the HackerNews thread I found the link on he's a very smart guy who developed some useful computer physics concepts which I'm very interested to learn about.
The tutorials are each done in a single HTML file which is handy. The first few videos are fairly basic implementations of bouncing balls, but it looks like it gets pretty meaty 6-7 videos in!
Browsing the internet recently I saw an artistic rendition of the silhouette of Spike from Cowboy Bebop.
Suddenly a realization came crashing home -- the most memorable game / comic characters I can think of are all
recognizable by their outline alone!
Feeling like I had stumbled across a secret, I shared my observation with my wife who informed me this is very
common knowledge amongst designers. I likely could have picked it up by reading any guide on character design...
That said, the things you discover yourself always stick the longest -- I'll be keeping this in mind from now on
while doodling characters for my ideas!
My brother recently expressed interest in remotely watching me play some of my older games (after a weekend
of PS2 gaming together).
I grabbed an HDMI-capture dongle for the dual purpose of recording gameplay (for personal use) and enabling
him to watch.
Now the dilemma: what platform do I use for streaming? I'm not entirely keen on Twitch/Youtube because I'm
hippie trash,
so I've been looking at open source alternatives like Owncast instead.
It is taking all my willpower to restrain myself from using this an excuse to learn Elixir and build my own
shitty streaming platform...
