Matthew Supert

It's taken me over a year, but I finally spent the past few months working my way through Cyberpunk 2077 and completing my first play through. I bounced off the first time I tried playing it, taking a break after completing the first "chapter" of the game, but man it sunk its hooks into me once I sat down and really invested in it. 

This has to be the most detailed game I haver ever played. I enjoyed just walking down the street and looking at all of the people walking by, cutting across through alleys to see what I would stumble across. This was such a fantastic game and I think has certainly risen to the top of my list as my favorite game of all time currently. 

There are so many different character builds and choices I can make, I absolutely seem myself going back into this game in the future to replay and try different story paths. 

I am taking a break though and going to revisit the Witcher 3 with the new remaster that has come out. I never completed that game either and I figured I should give it another chance since it is so well regarded. 

A couple of weeks back I attended my third larp event with the Hynafol organization. This event was a monster hunt that took place over two days and nights on October 12th. 

The event was hosted on Hynafol's new property, which is located just south of Sherwood Forest. Compared to the previous two events that I have attended at Sherwood Forest, this event was really sparse and amenities. There was no bathrooms, showers or even garbage facilities really. It was pretty rough and the temps were around +90 degrees during the day. 

The even consistent of almost entirely combat during the day and then monster hunting at night. I volunteered to be a monster both nights and I had a really fun time doing that. The four hour shifts mostly went by pretty quickly. 

Combat during this event consisted mostly of various factions and houses fighting against the monsters. I fought for the monsters during this event since it resulted in an award of two resources cards for each fight. Combat was super hot, I'll be honest. In fact I ended getting sick as a result of this event. 

Nights were cold during the event and Friday evening I was freezing. Saturday going into Sunday I also felt pretty miserable. At the time I just assumed this was due to the poor sleep, lack of a shower and the heat. When I got home Sunday evening I quickly found that I had a fever of 100.6. Not super high, but enough that I felt pretty crappy. 

I finally dragged myself to immediate care on Tuesday and they had to give me a full workup with blood work, a chest X-ray and an IV. My urine was a very dark amber, so I was clearly dehydrated. The doctor came in and told me that my urine results were "all over the place". 

Thankfully about 24 hours of the antibiotic and I was straightened out. Fever was gone. I think if I were to do. one of these very short events again I would gt an AirBnB to stay in, simply so I could get a shower and some AC at the end of the day. This was a bit too much "roughing it" for me. 

I have recently really gotten into leathercraft as a result of my larp participation in Hynafol. I have cranked out a couple of projects so far including a small belt pouch, a sword frog and even a pair of turn shoes. Leathercraft seems to be incredibly forgiving with the work. 

My first project was a pre-cut pouch that came together in a couple of days. Second project was a sword frog from a pattern I got from Tandy Leather. I lined the inside of the sword frog with some blue suede. My third project was a pair of turn shoes from Foxes and Ravens. I purchased the pattern online and followed their video to make the shoes. It was not a difficult project, but the sewing was really tedious. 

My latest project is some leather armor and is my most ambitious project yet. No sewing thankfully, but it involves a lot of cutting, tooling and dying of lather in multiple colors.

The book is a sci-fi (sci-fantasy really) take on the classic Cinderella storyline. I ran through this audiobook in a little bit over a day and quickly discovered that this is the first in a series of about four books. 

Cinder was a bit of a surprise for me. It is a very lightweight take on the classic Cinderella story that interweaves some adjacent fairytale stories and characters int the narrative. It is a young adult book that has some light romance moments that blossom a bit into some deeper sexual innuendo in the second book Scarlet. 

The second book follows Scarlet (Little Red Riding Hood) and Wolf on an adjacent story arc that brings them together with Cinder towards the end of the book. 

Overall I am really enjoying this series, but there are a few narrative plot holes that aren;t fully answered in the series. Things like "why does the Lunar Queen want to attack Earth?" and "Why does everyone hate Cyborgs" are never addressed, but if you can get past these larger plot issues, the characters are what really carry this story forward and what have kept me going. 

I can see how these books absolutely serve as precursors into the more spicy books young women would read and ultimately get themselves into as they age up. Overall a fund series that is light hearted and worth a quick read. 

Our play group has gotten back into playing D&D 5e after taking a significant hiatus off. As I have gone back into this recent play setup, picking back up our long term campaign of level 14+ characters, it has really become apparent to me that the players at my table have built their characters for a very specific style of play. That style of play is just a "max damage during combat" build and almost nothing else. 

This came to my attention at one of our first sessions back when my players needed to enter into an abandoned dwarven watchtower to find two adult white dragons. I was surprised that the players had almost no abilities or skills to navigate even basic obstacles in the dungeon like locked doors, basic traps, etc. Now, these characters were level 14 at the time of this specific dungeon crawl. Not a single player had any lock picks, no one took a a spell like "misty step" or other similar spells to get past a simple barred portal.

So, I at first felt a bit bad. I had to change some of the dungeon design to accommodate the players, but I was a bit surprised at the lack of basic dungeoneering ability. The issue came up again a few sessions later when the characters were getting into some significant dwarven areas and mines. No one in the group chose dwarven or elven as languages to speak. We have every exotic language in between, but not the next two most common languages next to common. 

I eventually just decided that it's too bad. Those players are going to need to be creative players at the table to come up with solutions to the basic dungeon problems if their characters don't have the tools at their disposal. I felt my players were expecting me to hand them a direct route to thei dragon at the end of the dungeon with their full health and resources available to them to throw their max damage down. 

Don't get me wrong, I am still providing them plenty of combat and other things they can role-play or skill check their way through, but they are going to continue to get the "basic" dungeon tropes such as traps, puzzles, locked doors, etc. that are found in any classic adventure.  

Our recent obsession with LARPing has encouraged me to pull the trigger on a craft I have had my eye on for years. We decided to pull the trigger about a month ago, buying a cheap beginner toolset off of TEMU and then picking up a couple of leather patterns. First, let me say that I am pleasantly surprised by the kit we received from TEMU. Despite the tools coming in a pleather tool roll (ironic) the rest of the stuff in the kit seems solid enough and is more than enough to get me started in the hobby. 

It just so happens that Tandy Leather, one of the largest leather retailers, is in the Chicago area so Megan and I had the opportunity to head up to their warehouse to buy some stuff. The staff there were absolutely fantastic at helping us with all of our questions and to get us started with some leather purchases. 

I picked up two projects to start myself off with. The first was a leather pouch kit that had all of the leather pre-cut. I basically just had to stamp, stain and stitch it all together. This was a great first project as I got to play around with almost all of the tools and techniques except the cutting. 

The second project was a pattern for a sword frog. This one I did have to do some cutting and that proved to be a very good learning experience. I also found that the tool that makes the holes for the stitches is a lot more difficult to use than you would initially expect, so I have to work on some stitching. 

I'm pretty happy with how my first two projects turned out though. 

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.