Found this over on Reddit. It was a fun little exervicse, so let me share why I chose each of these games. 

Favorite Game - Overwatch: I had quite difficult time selecting this actually as there have been so many games that have really captured me. I picked Overwatch simply because it is the game I have the most hours into and I am still playing it to this day. 

Best Story - Bioshock: The game played out like a novel for me in the best way possible. It was dark, mysterious and so self contained in an interesting way. The world that the game was set it was one of a kind and the twist at the end of the game broke the fourth wall for me and literally made me drop my controller. 

Favorite Art Style - Wind Waker: This wasn't my first Zelda game, but it was the first one that truly captured my attention and the unique cel shading was a huge part of what made this game look amazing when it came out and why it still looks amazing today. 

Biggest Personal Impact - Spiritfarer: Very few  video games have brought me to tears like Spiritfarer. This is just the sweetest of games telling the story of unimaginable personal loss while celebrating all of the people and moments in one's life. It was a magical experience to have played this game. 

Best Combat - Bayonetta: I could've gone a lot of different ways on this one, and almost settled on a fighting game like Street Fighter 2, but Bayonetta jumped out to me for its combo system and flashy animations. Easy to button mash but hard to perfect. 

Overhated - Sonic the Hedgehog: The Sonic games get a lot of hate for for just their roller coaster side scrolling and not really being games. I can't say I've played much 3D sonic, but the 2D games always make for a good time.

Underrated - Fantasy Life: Fantasy Life on the 3DS. took me by complete surprise. It's an open world adventure RPG where you have maybe a dozen different jobs you can switch between. Never expected to love it as much as I did, but it is so charming.

Overrated - Fornite: I'll be honest I have maybe less than a dozen hours here, but I honestly think other Battle Royales almost always do it better and I just never could get the hang of the building mechanic.

Needs a Remake - Prince of Persia Sands of Time: I played this on the GameCube and it totally captured me. Amazing story. Funny writing and fantastic gameplay. 

Criminally Overlooked - Sunset Overrdrive: Nearly a launch title on the One X this game should've become a series. It was bright and flashy, had fun music and great controls. It was goofy in that mall punk sort of way. I wish we got a sequel.

Favorite Protagonist - Assassin's Creed 2: Ezio Auditore. 

Favorite Antagonist - Portal 2: Wheatley and GLADOS.

Best Sound Track - Skyrim: Simply amazing and I play it on a regular basis. 

Best Multiplayer - Overwatch: I had to give it to Overwatch simply because of how much I play it. It still hold up. 

Not Usually My Thing But... - Pikmin 3: This game took me by surprise. It was charming, cute, and funny and actually fairly slow paced, and I held on to the end to finish it, 

Turn My Brain Off - Meteos: I'll admit that I haven't played this game in years, but I felt I needed to put a good puzzle game in here somewhere and I spent hours and hours playing Meteos in college to turn off my brain. 

Best with Friends - Rock Band 2: This one is pretty self explanatory. Having the full setup and then jamming out in your living room is and experience like nothing else and unfortunately, not one I think we are ever going to see again. 

Best Retro Game - Super Mario World: It's rated as one of the best games of all time for a reason and the game is just perfection.

Nostalgic Childhood Game - Uniracers: This game just enraptured me on the SNES. It looked amazing and it was so fast. No other racer was like it and I remember just spending hours playing it. 

Game Everyone Should Play: I have to give this one again to Spiritfarer. There is just a deep emotional hit with this one that I think everyone should experience. 

I've been on a bit of a cyberpunk kick as of late. I've been slowly working my way through the video game Cyberpunk 2077, but at the same time I have been delving deep int some literature as well. I finished reading Count Zero a little over a month ago and I have been really drawn into this genre as a whole as of late. I think this is in part due to the current state of the world in general. The general disfunction of the world right now has too many parallels to what we see in some of these books. I'll have to give credit to both CD Projekt Red and William Gibson here as they seem to all have nailed the dystopia. Unfortunately, we don't seem to get to wear the cool cyberpunk clothes. 

The corporate greed, persistent cost of living and now AI just run deep threads through all of these stories. I can't say that reading any of these will make you feel better, but if you want to draw some surprising coincidences from these stories into the real world, take a shot. 

I am wrapping up my full read right now with Mona Lisa Overdrive as the last book in the Sprawl Trilogy. 

It has just occurred to me that I never blogged about our experience with Hynafol and our first time LARPing last fall. So, let's do that but also let's go ahead and talk a little bit more about the rabbit hold that LARPing has become for both Megan and myself. 

Last fall, for our 15th wedding anniversary Megan and I decided to try LARPing for the first time and we went all in for a week long experience down in Texas at an event called Hynafol. I can't really type out how amazing and incredible this event was, but let me just say that we experienced everything rom a nighttime monster hunt, a mysterious conversation with a druid high priest, a masquerade ball,  a burlesque show, questing, battle, and most of all camaraderie. 

Something magical happened when new went to Hynafol. We didn't just goto an event and have a good time. We instantly made new friends with the people in our house. Our post Hynafol participation has been even more incredible than the event itself. We regularly hang out with our house members now, almost on a weekly basis. We're involved in the larger discussions of the game and things that are occurring in the world on a regular basis. I'm basically on Discord daily now, chatting with our friends and checking in on what the latest is for our house. On top of all of this, I don't know anyone's real world name. We all know each outer only has our characters in the game, almost as how we perhaps one to me. 

This month's SBCGaming GOTM is Sonic the Hedgehog 2 for the Genesis. This was a pretty fun game, especially for a handheld. The music and the graphics really hold up. The game is so fast and crazy at times with only minor slow downs happening. It really works well as a handheld game. I was never exposed to many Genesis games growing up, so this was a nice demonstration of what the system was doing. We were a Nintendo household, but this one really holds up pretty well.

The level design here is really fantastic. Just a ton of moving parts and colors in all of the levels and it looks like there are so many different routes to take. My only gripe with the game is that there are some really cheap shot enemy placement locations (those damn crabs) and the last three bosses are damn near impossible without save states found on modern handhelds. I can only image the level of repetition that needs to be done to memorize all of the locations. 

Overall, a great handheld play, especially on a modern emulation system where you can have save states. 

I had the opportunity to run my game a a Con a couple of weeks ago and I would like to share my thoughts on how that went. 

TLDR

• It’s still super hard to find people who will play and playtest. The RPG Design community really needs to figure something out as the Board game community seems to have a better culture of testing and playing others games. 

• If you can setup a table, that’s great, but it kinda sucks to sit there for hours. 

  • Try and get passive content to have out there. At a minimum a QR code 

  • Free stuff like stickers or a pamphlet work well

  • Board gamers or perhaps “regular” people want to goto a website. Not Itch or Drivethru RPG. 

• Try and Network if you can. I had some good conversations with other game designers.

  • Would love in the future to setup a panel or something.

I had an opportunity to get my table and setup some demo/playtests at a local con this past weekend. It was a super interesting experience and I thought I would share some of my experience that I’ll take away from this and perhaps others will find this useful. 

The Con I was at was in the Chicago suburbs. Not a huge event, but also not small. I would say a few hundred people overall so a “medium” con based on ones I’ve attended in the past. The con has a fairly even presence of TTRPG vs. Board games I think. A lot of scheduled events for both. On the TTRPG side it looked like it was predominately PF2e, Mork Borg (and variants), DCC, and just a little bit of 5e. 

Playtesting

Unexpectedly finding people interested in play testing my game was difficult. I had two demo/playtest sessions on the calendar. One had 6 people sign up (only 3 showed up) and the second had no sign ups. This is understandable I suppose. The event though did have quite a bit of (board) game designers at it. I wish there was perhaps a better way to interface with them before or during the event. I ran into a couple and struck up a conversation. One board game designer was cool enough to come back to my table and even chat with me for about an hour, giving some input on the character sheet. 

There were designers play testing at this event for board games and they definitely seemed to have a better awareness of play testing and supporting each other. Granted, it some cases it is easier to walk up to a table and get a 30 minute board game demo, but it just seemed to me that the designers in the board game realm here seemed to be more active about getting out, testing and then also giving feedback on other people's games.

Running the Game at a Con

If you've never been to a con before just playing a game is gonna be different. The most notable thing will be the noise. You will be in a room with probably 8-10 other games going on at the same time. It will be really loud and hard to hear at times.

The table will most likely be a round table too, in case that matters for your game.

Now, unfortunately for my game, a Con is not necessarily the best playtest setup. My game specifically is designed around a West Marches game, with town creation, etc. That sort of thing can't really be tested so I had to opt for a more traditional "dungeon crawl" sort of adventure, that added some overland travel (to test those mechanics) on the front end. Even those I had to sort of jump ahead through as I could tell the players wanted to just jump into the dungeon crawl to really "start playing".

I feel like in the con setting the only thing I really can test in a meaningful way is combat and some other adventuring related mechanics like skill checks for individual characters. "Macro" systems just won't be able to get tested due to the noise, time limit and interest of the players.

Con Table

I was able to get a con table for free being a designer. The table worked out well, but man did it suck to just sit there. Most people aren’t gonna walk up and just chat with you about your game. If I do this again, I think I will still get a table, but try and just have some more “passive content” at it such as stickers or a free pamphlet people can take. I don’t intent to sit at the table for hours on end. 

My table had a demo setup where I could walk people through character creation and run a quick round or two of combat. I did not get a lot of bites on that. 

Table and Web Content

Get a QR and preferably a business card or bookmark with your info on it. I’ll go one step further and say get an actual website. I do have one, but just from conversations most of the non-ttrpg world didn’t want to sign up or goto itch or DTRPG for a .PDF. When people asked me where they could check out my stuff every single one asked for my website. Now, this could be slightly demographic. It appeared to me that the vast majority of the TTRPG players were 40+. The younger crowed at the event were there predominately for a Catan tournament and for Star Wars Sparks (which I believe is a CCG?)

Had maybe 6-10 people scan my QR code in front of me. 

Seems like handing out and using bookmarks (like for a book) are the new hot thing over business cards. I saw lots of vendors doing bookmarks. 

So that's it. This is just one person's experience at one con, but certainly was educational and gave me some things to think about if I bring my game back to another con in the future.

I was driving home from work the other day and I was thinking about various things I wanted to accomplish this weekend for hobbies. I have a gaming con coming up in February for the TTRPG I am designing. I want to make some time to play my lute dulcimer. I have a miniature that I am trying to paint, a website that I am trying to build, and several RPG sessions to plan. While all of this was occurring in my head I happened upon a really cool song Night Friends by Switch Angel. I've run into them on TikTok a couple of times and I instantly thought the song was fantastic. They're coding tracks on a platform call Strudel.cc. I thought, yeah I want to get back to making some electronic music. Problem is, I am hitting such a wall to do that. The more that I thought about it, I am also hitting a really wall with just creative writing as well and it go me thinking, why is that?

I had a bit of a lightbulb moment when it occurred to me that the hobbies that I am currently engaged with all have communities around them that I am able to feed off of. Larping, TTRPG, learning my lute dulcimer. Those are all either sort of supported by an active community or they have a specific end goal in mind. The lute dulcimer for example as the goal of learning to play by next year's Hynafol Grand Gathering. My TTRPG has an end date of my convention. My electronic music and writing though? Those have no communities to support me. 

I've been most successful with writing when I was actively participating in Nanowrimo or when I was posting to Scribophile. Unfortunately, Nano is dead (at least for 2025) and I haven't been on Scribophile in a couple of years, if simply because I was focusing on other writing endeavors. My electronic music also has been lacking since online communities died. I used to be an active member in several online forums including Serious-Sounds.net, IDMForums, EM411, and others. Forums have largely died with the rise of Reddit and Discord. I'm not quite sure what it is with Reddit, but I have never found the same sense of community there. Perhaps those communities are just too large and anonymous, but the level of active feedback just doesn't seem to be present. In many cases those genre or hobby specific subs don't want people to post their works for review and critique. I dunno, but I feel like for me that is the genesis of some of my inability to engage in some of the hobbies I used to prior to COVID. 

Discord itself seems to be an interesting beast in all of this. Generally, I find Discord gets too unwieldily once you hit a certain threshold of users and the posts are coming too fast. I don't want to login at the end of the day and see that I have 200+ unread posts. All that being said, our LARP group has really engaged me and perhaps that is because the size is rather manageable to a few dozen active people. 

Had a really good year of reading this year. Let's keep it going for 2026. I have tried to pare back my to read list quite a bit this past year to make it more manageable. I've also resolved to focus on finishing some series that I have enjoyed the first book of. 

Last night we had a raccoon show up at our door step. Literally at our front door, laying on our door mat. We discovered him only because we had a food delivery driver bringing food to us. When we first found him he was curled up and looked like he was sleeping on our mat. 

As the evening progressed on, I found him curled up in some dried leaves just next to the front door near some mulch. From an outward glance he looked like he was healthy enough but his movements seem a bit labored. All evening I felt very stressed out. My shoulders ached, my hear rate was elevated, and I couldn't fall asleep. Perhaps this was in part just because of my stress and worry of having a wild animal literally on my doorstep, but I've also always felt I've had a bit of an empathic connection with animals. Perhaps I was feeling some of his pain and discomfort? 

This morning when I woke up to go check the front door, I work up groggy, tired, and with a sense of dread. I think I knew what I was going to find, but silently in my mind wanted to tell myself there would be nothing there. Unfortunately, I found the raccoon still on our door mat by the front door. I believe he passed away in the night, although I am not 100% certain he is gone. I don't want to get too close at this point and I have a wildlife control company coming later this morning. The raccoon though appears to be unresponsive and as far as I can tell not breathing. 

Thankfully he looks like he is at peace though and I am honored that's he found our home for his last moments. I hope that he at least had a dry and comfortable passing under the eve of our front door and that perhaps our home is in some way a welcoming place for spirits. 

I think I would like to hold some sort of passing ritual this evening. 

A couple of weeks ago our Sunday afternoon play group played Ten Candles. Ten Candles is a narrative focused RPG where the characters in the game will all die. If you have played "Alice is Missing" before there is a very similar game setup and mechanic between these two games. Your players will create some players, establish a handful of relationships between each other and then setup some sort of personal goal. In Alice is Missing this is facilitated through the cards with the locations in the game and through the inherent relationships defined, such as someone being Alice's brother. Ten Candles handles this approach a little bit differently where players have notecards and have to write down some adjectives for their character. One is positive, one is negative and one sort of serves as a trigger that would make them lose hope in the world. The thing is, those aren't your character's motivations. You end up passing those to the players to your left and right. It was a cool mechanic and took everyone by surprise, while also establishing some "knowns" about the character next to you. 

Conceptually Ten Candles is storytelling game where the players at the table need to setup scenes, and everyone needs to collaboratively play the scene out. Ten Candles uses a candle mechanic where after each scene or each failure in the narrative a candle is put out. These candles work as a sort of countdown to the end of the game where everyone has to eventually narrate their death. Our game centered around an unknown horror (known as "Them") that had been unleashed from a mountain by a railroad company that was drilling a tunnel through the mountain. That was the premise we started with and that is it. The game specifically instructs the GM and players not to prep the game in any way. From there I facilitated several scenes where our players were trying to escape the town. 

The game played wonderfully at our table and there was a constant tension as our players had to make difficult decisions through each scene. There are a couple of caveats though to this game that I think need to be spelled out for players looking to play this game. First, I think there needs to be an understanding and level of comfort with everyone at the table about the emotional weight of this game. This isn't something you will be playing with people in a FLGS. Players can be hit with some pretty heavy stuff and there is emotion at play. I was on the brink of tears while playing Alice is Missing and we had several who had similar emotional reactions here as well. Second, everyone needs to be on the same page with playing the game. The game rules are incredibly loose; some people need to understand the assignment and come to the table to play cooperatively. 

Comparing this game to Alice is Missing, I like it more, but I think it is a bit hard to facilitate the game. There are some good prompts in the back of the book, but there were a couple of times where I was struggling to make sure, I queued up enough scenes to go through all of the candles. I would highly recommend just straight up asking your players to suggest or craft a scene with you. Specifically asking also helps to make sure the players can try and hit the narrative points on their notecards. 

As the game progresses you will burn off your notecards with your traits and also put out candles. The end of the game is narrated in the dark and is very impactful. If possible, I would highly recommend that you setup your game session where everyone gets up and quietly leaves without saying anything. 

Overall a wonderful a experience that shared a lot of similarities to Alice is Missing. 

The world is weird sometimes. I feel like this across the board are kinda shitty right now, but I had a nice extra does of shininess this past couple of weeks. Those of us in the northern Illinois region have been hit with some pretty heavy storms. I think we had 3-5 storm events that dropped +2" of rain in less than an hour over the course of about ten days. I experienced seepage in my basement for the first time from these storm events. Thankfully the actual amount of water was minor and just amounts to mostly wetness under the flooring. 

I do have pull all of the flooring up however. The benefit and bane of waterproof vinyl floors is that the water has probably spread to a larger area than where it actually seeped in, so there is going to have to be some investigation as to where the water is coming from. I have my first meeting with a company next week to take a look at the foundation. 

Megan thankfully has talked me off my panic attack this past week, and I am slowly coming to realize that while the basement might be impacted for the next couple of months, we thankfully have not had any real damage. 

Just when I was getting a handle on the situation though, I saw a mouse today in the basement while pulling up some floorboards. The cats are on high alert, but my anxiety immediately spiked back up after this incident. An exterminator is I guess also now on our list of things to do in the next week or so. 

I've been playing Citizen Sleeper for a little over a year now, popping on to play it in 20 minute bursts. This game was so delightful and hit the same sort of melancholy vibe for me that Spiritfarer did. This is a narrative game with a delightfully dreamy ambient soundtrack, that is perfect to play in the dark late at night. The stories told here through your experience as sleeper are very heartfelt and personal and are designed to showcase each of your direct impacts upon the people and places that are around the Eye, which is the space station you inhabit. 

Play this game and go ahead and IV drip it in slow increments as it is just pure bliss with some fantastic storytelling. 

I have not had an opportunity to play a lot of games over the past couple of months. I recently wrapped up Indiana Jones and the Great Circle a few weeks ago, and that game took me almost 3 months of on and off play to finish. There is a lot of good stuff coming out this summer, so I didn't want to get into another super long game. South of Midnight came out on Gamepass a few weeks ago and had a bit of hype going around it online. I decided to give it a go, not knowing exactly what I was getting into. 

I was pleasantly surprised by South of Midnight as it turned out to be a really nice adventure game. It really harkens back to an older style of gameplay that I felt was very refreshing. It's a simple, run/jump/fight/explore game that is fairly linear in process. It took me about 12 hours to complete, and I really enjoyed my time with it. 

The game has a beautiful graphical style, an almost quasi-stop motion design that gives me Fable aesthetics. If Fable ever comes out and looks like this game, I would be more than pleased with the aesthetic. The music in this game was also delightful as well, giving me "Tim Burton" vibes where the songs and lyrics played into the scene and narrative. It really incorporated into the gameplay really well.

The game does have some issues. Notably, the combat. While it is good, it is largely stagnant, and you are doing the same thing from the start of the game all the way to the very end. I never felt like the combat was that big of a deal and most instances were quick, so it never really got in the way of the gameplay. 

There was one story element that also really didn't feel cohesive and was sort a sloppily wrapped up at the end of the game. Again, not a big deal, but it just felt a bit weird. 

Overall, totally worth playing. Great vibes with some very touching moments and some fun character design. Worth checking out for a quick game. 

I've been slowly making my way through Indiana Jones and the Great Circle over the past couple of months. I started it back around January while over holiday break and I just wrapped it up this past weekend, taking a small break for the past month or so. This has been a really fantastic game that captured the feel and of the original Indiana Jones movies really well. Everything from the music, to the writing, to the score all nailed the feel and I honestly would love to see this story made into an Indiana Jones movie. 

I need up taking a break in the game because I was striving to get all of the secret collectables, which I haven;t done yet, but aim to go back and do at some point. My only real critique of the game is that I felt the third act (in Sukothai) felt a bit long for me and was mostly the same gameplay mecahnics being brought forth for a third time. Even while exploring that area, I never really felt like I had a good handle on where things were in relation to each other, even with the use of the boat. I think this in part might be due to the forest generally looking the same, but also the traversal areas are much more limited due to the flooded pass area. 

Such a great game though and just makes me want to see and consume more content in this world. 

I've recently discovered that I probably have an inordinate amount of bags for myself. This all arose a couple of days ago when I was discussing with Megan about getting a new bag for my personal laptop. I picked up a new 13" MacBook Air (which is great btw) and decided I need to get a new bag for it to protect it. 

As I began doing some research on this, it occurred to me that I have maybe half a dozen bags already floating around the house that I use in various capacities? Perhaps it's my personal neurodivergent trait here, but each bag I have serves a sort of independent need. 

• I have an old Jansport backpack that might date all the way back to junior high. It's huge, but in incredibly good shape and was definitely from the "Made in the USA" era of Jansport. It is too big for most of my needs these days, but I know as soon as I get rid of it, I will need that space for something. 
• I have a slightly smaller backpack that is from LL Bean that is a day hike pack. I've brought it with me on multiple national park trips and it goes with me on pretty much every vacation trip. That is about the only time I use it though because I don't really need a backpack for most daily uses. It's a great bag, but doesn't have any laptop storage unfortunately. 
• My daily driver is a Chrome Industries messenger bag that I got back in undergrad at college I think? Maybe grad school. It's a pretty big laptop bag that has been my goto bagger work and school for almost 20 years now. It is showing some wear and tear on the edges, but is still in incredible shape and holds just about all of my daily work gear. 
• I have an older canvas Lands End bag that I used for undergrad school that my parents got me years ago. It is floating around somewhere and I really should dig it out. It is another fantastic bag made out of a really durable canvas, but it again doesn't have any laptop storage. For a while it was my goto D&D bag, and I think I might wan to revive it for my TTRPG runs that don't require any digital tools. There was one point when I was using it as my work bag that a banana got smashed in it and it was a paint to get cleaned. 
• Finally I have a Chrome Industries Kadet Mini Sling bag. I picked this up a few years ago for music festivals. I like this bag quite a bit and I should probably use it more for weekend stuff. 
• Bonus Bag: Ahh, I just remembered when discussing the Kadet that I also have a Lunchbox hydro pack, which is a backpack specifically designed for music festivals with a water bladder in it. This I use pretty much exclusively for music festivals, so while it is incredibly utilitarian, it is sort of the perfect tool for a very specific job. 

So, for my next bag I am sort of looking at some options for my small laptop. Again, I want some space to throw just a couple of bags and an additional tablet for RPG sessions, etc. Right now, my front runners are a bit of a surprise as I am looking at a tote bag options. Why a tote bag? Well, I don't really need the long term support that a backpack will bring me. More often than not, I am mainly just carrying my bag from the house, to the car and then back out of the car. Another messenger bag was definitely on the table as an option, but the tote bag with the top opening really caught my eye. The catch is that I don't want something super large. 

Right now it looks like my top options are the Alpaka Bravo Tote and the Bellroy Tokyo Wonder Tote (12L). Both look really nice and I think it will ultimately just come down to which style calls to me the most. 

I've been a Goodreads user for years, almost since the beginning of its inception, and before it was purchased by Amazon. As of late I have wanted to see what else is out there for social apps around reading. As good as Goodreads is, it really hasn't seen any sort of updates to it. The rise of "Booktok" has brought a whole new social aspect to reading that I sort of miss. I used to be part of several bookclubs on Goodreads and at work, but those have largely fallen by the wayside and died. 

I've dipped my toes into a couple of new apps over the past months to see what they are all about. Fable and Tome have seen heavy discussion on my internet circles. I've had Fable for about six months now and Tome for maybe two (it is quite new). 

My initial impressions are kinda lukewarm on both of them so far. They both feature a very modern interface compared to Goodreads, almost like Instagram or BlueSky/Mastodon for the endless scrolling. There is something though rather clean about Goodreads compared to the other two. There is a level of information density that I prefer. Now, part of that might be because I have 10+ years of friends on Goodreads and they are largely still active, but I look at the feeds on these apps and my Goodreads feed is mostly people's book updates. What they have read and what they are reading, whereas my feeds in Fable and Tome are around books, but are not really updates on the books themselves. I see less reviews, less thoughts on specific chapters, and more posts that are people's cozy pictures of them in their living room reading. That's fine I guess, but I kinda wanna have some discussions around a book itself. 

I'm gonna check out Storygraph, but at this point I think Goodreads is still the best game in town. The interface is clean, even with the ads it offers up and it still has the best density of friends and interesting people posting book information. If I'm being honest, I also think the ads are rather good and introduce me to some new books and authors. 

The January Game of the Month over at r/SBCGaming was Metroid Prime Fusion. I have never played this game before and I was rather excited to give it a go. I have not really played any Metroid 2D games with the exception of Samus Returns for the 3DS. I've found that these games share a lot of DNA and I suppose that is just how 2D Metroid games are? If it is I unfortunately have to admit that perhaps 2D Metroid games aren't for me. 

I rather enjoyed the exploration aspects of the game quite a bit, but I found two of the core gameplay mechanics incredibly frustrating. First, while the exploration was rather fun, the investigation for the various hidden areas is a complete chore. Some areas had visual cues to indicate that there was something there, but most of them had no indication they were there. It ended up in me just shooting and bombing the walls for every room that I entered. Even after I found some the the hidden routes, I sometimes still had trouble figuring out what I was supposed to be doing.  It bogged the game down and I had to lookup a walkthrough on more than one occasion.

Second, the boss battles were infuriating most of the time and I often had to go back to the same walkthrough to read about how to game the combat. I finally had to give up on the game just near the section that is in the screenshot of this post when I came face to face with my nemesis in the game and had to figure out how to out run them with little queue on how to actually solve the encounter. 

Perhaps this game is just a product of its time, but I have to admit that it just isn't for me. 

I've really been feeling some nostalgia the past few months for some retro video games. I picked up Master Blaster Zero for my 3DS a few months ago and the aesthetic and gameplay felt really refreshing to me. That led me down the path of looking into getting a retro handheld gaming device. After a long research process I settled on the TrimUI Brick. It is a fairly new device, released this past fall, but has some good reviews. Megan picked it up for me for Christmas and I have been getting some of my retro game time on to some delight. 

Some of the games I have played so far are Super Mario World (of course) and Super Baseball 2020. Over on the r/SBCGaming subreddit they are doing a "Game of the Month", which is a really fund idea to get people to explore games. January's game is Metroid Fusion, which I'll talk about bit more about in another post. 

I'm having a really fun time with this little device so far though. It's rough around the edges though and the software is not very polished. This is definitely a "tinkerer's" hobby with messing with settings. On more than one occasion I've had to hard reboot the device and clear out settings that I've messed up. 

I've made an effort this past year to get back into wearing watches besides just my Apple Watch. My most recent pickup is a Casio-Oak 2100. I'll be honest, I didn't quite like this when I originally got it. The dark color is a bit hard to see at times, but it has grown on my significantly over the past several weeks. It's incredibly comfortable and not nearly as big on the wrist as it maybe initially looks. My only real complaint with it at this point is the Casio App, the is used to sync the timezone. It is simply terrible, so I am not going to be using that moving forward. 

A few months ago I began thinking about picking up a tablet that I could use at the game table to help speed up my GM'ing and gaming process. I hate having to use a full laptop. It's just too big most of the time and I honestly don't want my TTRPG gaming to be so digitally focused. An iPad is the obvious choice here, but I'm staring at computer screens all day at work and want to give my eyes a bit of a break at the table. So I bought a E-Ink tablet. I spent a few months researching the process and I ended up with a Boox Note Air C3, which is an Android based tablet. Since it is using Android, it allows me other install apps, which many of the other tablets like Remarkable don't allow.

So how has it worked out so far?  

The TLDR summary is It's good and I am using it for most of my gaming sessions, but it isn't perfect. It works better as a player notebook than a GM tool and your satisfaction will be largely dependent upon whether the app you are using is well optimized for the E-Ink screen. Super graphic heavy apps don't look great.

I also purchased the color, Air C3, version and in general I am "meh" on the color. I don't feel It really adds much to the experience and I find I have to have the front light on basically all the time. Battery life is decent but I will regularly go from 100% to 70% battery in a single 3-4 hour gaming session.

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If you have been following the gaming news as of late, everyone has been talking about Space Marine 2. I picked it up about two weeks ago, since I am a big fan of the world building. I beat the game last week so, let's talk a little bit about my thoughts. 

Overall, I had a decent time with this game, but I am not quite sure it lived up to the hype that I am seeing online about it "harkening back to an older time in gaming". The campaign was probably 15 hours or so for me to beat. It was fine and a decent linear romp, but if I am being honest, it felt very much like a less rushed Warhammer Vermintide, with just a little bit more ammo. 

The waves of enemies that are thrown on screen at you are cool the first couple of times they happen, and the opening chapter sets a nice tone for the game. By the 30th time it happens though, I just sort of got bored with it. I guess that sorta goes for the combat in general for me as well. Executing a well timed counter results in a cool cinematic, but when you see it for the 60th time, it doesn't continue to impress. I also found the combat a bit frustrating at times because the armor/health management and recovery is not satisfying as it should be. Too often I found myself overwhelmed with crowd control, while simultaneously getting rocked by a ranged attack somewhere offscreen that I couldn't see. 

Bigger enemies just took way too much to whittle down before you could get the "execute" option and the returned armor/health almost never made up for the damage you took to get in close enough to melee them. 

I also found the game surpassingly devoid of combat puzzles through the campaign. There were a couple of instances of holding some zones to open a gate, and one fun instance in the PvE multiplayer where you had to enter some glyphs to attack a drake, but that was kinda it. And also, if this was such a throw back feeling game, where was the obligatory vehicular run and gun sequence?

Overall I felt everything just kinda felt boring and samey at the end and even when the Chaos Marines finally showed up, their tactics and enemy types were almost exactly the same as the Tyranid. I'll leave my final single player thoughts with the fact that I also kinda hated the main character you played as. He is a terrible commander, and that would be fine if not for the fact that they try to redeem him with this camaraderie ideal right at the end of the game. I hated Titus and there were multiple times in the game where he chewed his squad out for making poor choices, but then he deliberately would not divulge mission critical information to them. 

Multiplayer also leaves me really wanting. The PvE chapters are fun, and the concept of having you play as the "B Team" in parallel to the main story mission is a brilliant idea. However, they still have that Vermintide feel to them for me, and out of the maybe dozen sessions I've played I have yet to matchmake with a full party. PvP also is just middling. While it does bring back a Gears of War sort of feel, I don't think I'm fully grasping the combat translation from single player to the multi-player. For example, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to be effective with melee combat in PvP and similarly, does the counter/parry system work at all? I haven't seen it trigger at any point. I believe there are only three or four maps too. On top of all of that the load out customization appears to be different between multiplayer environments? Why? 

Overall, fun game, but I don't think I got a fully $70 worth out of it.