Matthew Supert

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.