Skip to main content

Pretty Good Hat

Tag: games

A flaming capsule hurtles toward earth in. Helldivers 2 screenshot. The tip at the bottom of the screen reads ‘when in doubt, simply shout FOR DEMOCRACY and charge into your problems.’

Really having a good time playing Helldivers 2 the past couple of weeks. It’s a good mix of goofy, difficult and utterly chaotic.

An image of an email containing several thumbnails of Destiny 2 game videos.

My personal OneDrive account is connected to my Xbox, and for years and years the only thing in it was game clips and screenshots. So once in a while I get an “on this date last year” sort of email from Microsoft, and it’s always full of nothing but Destiny 2 clips, mostly PVP and mostly Iron Banner. (Some of them are bangers! Every once in a while I’m good at this game.)

Screenshot from Against the Storm, showing a crowded village center. There is a cozy hearth surrounded by shelter buildings and a large red warehouse building tucked tightly within a forest.

There’s a whole meta campaign layer to Against the Storm, but I’m pretty perfectly content to just make little villages where my lizards can bake pies and cozy up by the fire.

I played the demo of Lamplighters League yesterday. It’s a fun mix of real-time stealth and turn-based tactics that looks like a great adventure in the full game. The demo is available for another couple of days, so consider checking it out, gamers!

I chanced across this old post about how my kid played Breath of the Wild, recently. Well, they’re keeping up that style: they started playing Elden Ring last week, and beat the game today. One week! I’m months into that game and nowhere near finishing it. All this, after starting Tears of the Kingdom weeks after I did, totally bogarting my Switch and beating the game after profoundly breaking all its mechanics to their will.

I’m so deeply disheartened at Vice’s shutting down of Waypoint. It has been such a source of insight and joy. If its strong patron-supported model of critique and community can’t survive – and let’s be clear, it’s not that it didn’t make money; it didn’t make enough money for some small group of assholes to care enough to keep it on the books – then… well, fuck capitalism, go home.

The next few weeks of podcasts are going to sad bangers.

Screenshot of a pixel-style game showing a party of player characters on the right side and a giant floating monster with rays of light emanating from it, on the left.

I’m really having a good time with Chained Echoes. This was the first pretty hard boss and I had to think about how to handle it, revising my tactics and leveling up my party a bit more before I successfully finished it off. This is a great Steam Deck game for kicking back on the sofa.

An animated gif showing a set of growing bars measuring Destiny 2 weapon usage

I’ve had a really nice hobby R coding weekend, learning to use {gganimate} to make plots like this. I’ve been re-tooling all my old piles of fish scripts that I’ve used to gather my Destiny data from the game’s API. Now I have a useful pair of quarto notebooks that retrieve data using parallel processing and produce this kind of output. I’m super enthused by what I’ve learned!

Screenshot of a web application showing two items selected from a form field. They are circled in bright purple marker with an arrow pointing to them to draw the eye.

I finished a big update to Armorer this week, to enable inclusion of subclass fragments in stat calculations. I learned a ton with this release and laid good groundwork for additional mod management. I’m pretty pleased!