The self hosted version of the blog, that’s been there for a good fifteen years, was part of when I was an active web developer as my day job. That bit the dust about 8-10 years ago (I really have lost the exact date during recent history). But now I’m more of an stay at home dad and in my spare time I run my little Roleplaying Games Company, D101 Games, publishing books. So the idea of maintaining a self hosted version of WordPress has fallen completely by the wayside and its currently running very sloooow, which is the death of internet engagement.
This blog was originally hosted on livejournal.com in 2000-11. Since then, it’s moved to a self-hosted instance that has changed web hosts and names a couple of times, and sat on a WordPress Multisite that also hosts D101 Games. For the last decade, it’s been patchily updated, as, like most folk, my attention has been grabbed by the likes of Twitter (which I left as soon as Elon bought it), and Farcebook. I’m most active on Blue Sky these days as newtus.bsky.social.
But I still love blogging, its in the blood, and Farcebook (which is on life support as far as I’m concerned), Instagram, and even BlueSky are poor substitutes.
Which is all a big way of saying I’m now hosted on WordPress.com itself, which will hopefully take away any concern regarding performance issues. The plan is to post something every other day, over morning coffee, and bring this twenty year old blog back to life!
Here’s a recent picture of me (age 54, nearly 55), to liven up this wall of test…opps sorry text… post 😀
I wrote a review for a game I played full price on Steam so you don’t have to 😀
It made me so grumpy, I wrote a long ranty review on Steam, which I replicate in full here.
Here we go…
The short of it: This game is very tenuously a Borderlands game. It makes lots of game play changes to broaden its appeal, with hit and miss results, and there’s been a complete dulling down of the narrative this series is famous for.
Long version
The main quest is a slog. Sure it has its moments of fluid exciting battles, but those only helped to get me through the sheer shoot-grind of the experience. Travel across multiple way points in a quest, and in each of which encounter one of the limited enemy types in various configurations. For about 60% of the game its a big big open world, with numerous boring sub-quests, bizarre pop up boss battles in a bubble, and optional capture the point encounters. Then for the last part, suddenly its a very linear,dull, jump, run and shoot-grind to the final boss battle. Final boss is kind of cool and exciting, but then the narrative takes a running jump of a cliff and spoils the end.
Gone are the characters and hand crafted narratives that made the previous games so memorable. Sure there’s returning characters, but they are so briefly in it I wished they hadn’t been. There’s a handful of new characters. I barely remember them. If I do that’s only because they remind me a character from the previous games. As for the main villain? Well I understand they wanted to dial back the “in your ear every five minutes” cringe of Calypso Twins from BL3, but its nowhere near the heights of Handsome Jack (BL2), more the dullsville of Col. Whatshername (because she was so boring) from the first game. Instead of building encounters around memorable characters, its all cookie cutter, fill out a template with hordes of minions, followed by a predictable end of level boss fight.
Mechanically there’s too much complexity now. Except there isn’t. Get the right combo of uninspiring gun, augmentation chip, character skill and you might have a winner that will see you fly through the game. But its the other 80% which will see you junking it upon picking it up. Good job one of the new features is the ability to add a Junk marker when you pick an item up 😀 As I said earlier, some fights are good old run and gun classics of the FPS gen, but the rest are keyboard hammering affairs, full of grenade spamming.
Guns wise, and Borderlands is all about the GUNS, you don’t get anything remotely interesting until the last couple of levels of the game before the ending. I beat the game using a pick double barrelled shot gun that fired rainbows, and bouncy squeaky grenades that spawned more bouncy squeaky grenades. I feel so manly 😀
I’ll stop there. But overall what made the Borderlands games so special, has been gutted in favour of aim to please mechanics, and a dumbed down story, to appeal to a mass audience. I.e. what marketers thinks make a good game, not what actually makes a good game 😉
Oh and all of this was with the game running reasonably well, without all the crashes and optimising issues others are having. I did notice something wasn’t quite right with a bit of stuttering here and there, and a few moments of lag, on what was a good robust medium ranged PC desktop five years ago.
I suppose there’s was enough of a good game to carry through 70+ hours to the end, putting up with the grind and lack of narrative colour. If none of this puts you off, get it in the sales, in a year’s time when they’ve properly optimised it (is that we are calling “squashing the bugs” now?) and responded to customer feedback and added/changed bits to make it less dull.
A strange day. Very focused on things from the analog world.
We have a new internet connection, which required me to empty a junk room.
As we waited for the digital world to return, I spent the afternoon, sifting through the books, photos, old toys, DVDs from 40s-00s, which would now only exist in the Cloud.
In less weird existential news, Cardiacs are finally putting out their lost LP, LSD, seventeen years after the death of their leader Tim Smith. Has the haunting lyric:
“I said I’m sorry, I’m sorry that I’m not here. I had to be somewhere else or something else.”
I dreamt that I was still working in the BIG OFFICE where I was so gainfully trapped in my late 20s. I realised so many of my attitudes were set by that period, so I shed them like old skin. Life is not Doing but BEING.
I am fighting the urge to down tools and go because it’s Christmas soon. It doesn’t help that my eldest insisted I put up the tree about five days ago! We did this last year and went on holiday to Lanzarote the week before Christmas. So my diseased brain thinks we are doing that again this year! 🤣
So after the nth replay, I uninstalled Borderlands 3 and Fallout 4 and decided to take a blind shot and find a worthy AAA successor amongst the current crop of recent releases.
Didn’t take me long to download Atomic Heart, a 1950s Soviet Themed shooter, where a bunch of robots have run amok on a floating Research station/Worker’s paradise. It’s a retro retro-themed sci-fi, with a solid story. Gameplay wise it’s a satisfyingly old-school shooter (it reminds me a lot of Half-life 1 & 2, with action and puzzle stages) with reassuring modern features (graphic novel quality graphics, open world sections, skill trees and worthwhile crafting). Firm recommend.
I finished Atomic Heart, and the various cut scenes and in-game character dialogue told me what was going as I blasted my way through this very lore-rich game. The ending felt rather rushed and a bit Deus-ex-machina, so I felt a bit cheated. But it sets itself up for a sequel or a good string of DLCs. It’s due another playthrough to explore all the skill trees and combat options. I would love to dive back in and play the just-released DLC Annilation Instinct, but seeing I was getting this as free ride via Microsoft Game Pass, I’ll wait until the Winter Steam Sale
So what do I play now? How about a familiar shoot ’em up, low on lore and narrative? What’s this Quake II remastered has just dropped? And it’s free if you’ve already got it on PC. Modernised graphics (lighting, textures, and models – so no more wobbly models) and a ton of new content (extra secret levels, new episodes). I happily played for a good twenty minutes. It was like a wonderful rollercoaster ride that had just been renovated with all the bumps removed.
This video does a good job of explaining the technicalities of what they have done.
I’ve just discovered, after my Quake 2 remastered playthrough, that there is a whole range of old-school FPS games called Boomer Shooters. This revelation mainly came from discovering the Warhammer 40K shooter, Boltgun. A fantastic little game that is up there with the 90s classics, with a few modern comfort-of-life additions (the big one being running on modern PCs flawlessly).
While the rest of you have been frothing over Baldur’s Gate 3, I headed into space via Game Pass on PC, hoping to do the same with Starfield. But omg! I’m glad I didn’t pay full price for this thing. According to Bethesda, Space is Boring. Really dull. Dull, predictable companions. Boring NASA Punk style. The most mediocre McGuffin Main Quest. The only bit I liked was when I headed off to the Wild West in Space, Free Territories, and did a series of sidequests best summed up as Star Marshals. But that’s because I liked the Firefly vibe until I realised it feel far, far short. This game was delayed a year, and I can guess it was all bug fixing, where I had hoped it would have been, putting the shine on the gameplay. Deeply disappointing.
So I returned to an old fave Fallout 4, and decided to go full mod with it. This I’ve successfully done by going to Nexus mods and installing the Storywealth collection.
This is a curated collection of mods that covers the whole range of gameplay, equipment, graphical enhancements and a ridiculous amount of additional quests that round out the game. Want to play Evil (and a well-considered Evil at that), you can because it includes the mod that does that. Want to play through the whole rebuild the Commonwealth adventures of Sim Settlements 2. That’s included, too. Oh, and I think the early release of the Fallout 3 in Fallout 4 mod, that covers the old DLC pack Point Island is in there too. But I’m too busy to explore it (yet) There are similar collections for Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas and, of course, the Elder Scrolls games too, that not only get those even older games working seamlessly on modern machines but add tons of additional content and shine too.
So who needs new cutting-edge AAA games, OLD SCHOOL RULES!!!
In December last year, Elaine’s (who died last August) bungalow had 42 pipe leaks during a cold snap while we were on holiday in Lanzarote. It suffered five days of flood damage. Insurance was fully paid out last week after a long, drawn-out process of drying the property and haggling over the details of the claim. The old boiler was a sticking point that dragged out the process by a month.
Today, our ace builders are fixing and improving it so we can finally sell it! I could barely sleep last night with the excitement.😀
And the best bit?
A skip! A skip! My kingdom for a skip! Now, after three years of skip envy, I have my own skip. All that useless crap that has been clogging up my house for the last five years can GET IN THE SKIP.
Although my Monkey the RPG is based upon the novel Journey to the West, I first came across it via the translated Japanese TV adaptation, which was shown on Thursday at 6 pm on BBC2 in the 80s, simply called Monkey. This YouTube video does a good job of exploring it.
So to celebrate Evie’s GCSE results (which she passed with flying colours), we went off to Blackpool Zoo, which is now my favourite local zoo and much much greener than when we last went there a good five or six years ago!
Maximum Newt 