Videogaming: Metroid Fusion

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. 

Videogaming: TrimUI Brick and Retro Games

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. 

It's Time to Say Goodbye to META

If you are coming over to this blog because you saw one of my posts over on Instagram, Threads, or Facebook ,welcome. I mentioned on those other platforms that I wasn’t going to get into a soapbox about why I was leaving META platforms, but I figured I would do a brief explanation here. To be honest, it wont be a surprise but the main reason is that I do not agree with the general position Mark Zuckerberg and his ideology these days. His recent changes to moderation on the META platforms don’t give me confidence that we wont see an influx of hate speech and other negative commentary, and unfortunately I have too many people on my social and family circles that I have seen over the past eight years get hooked in by some extreme ideology. With the upcoming Trump presidential term, I fear that it will again only get worse and I am sick of seeing it and dealing with it. I’m exhausted and I don’t want to have to self moderate a constant stream of content that I don’t want to engage with. 

When I first signed up for Facebook back in the early 2000’s I was approaching it for the original intended use of connecting with friends and family. Social media has changed over the past twenty years and these days (like most I think), I am not using social media for connect with friends and family. I’m connecting with my friends and family through basic messaging apps and I am finding that more and more of my photo sharing and life updates are occurring through small, closed door discussion rooms. My social media these days is focused around finding communities and discussions around my hobbies. I am really finding interest in, following topics and not following people. 
I am going to miss Threads if I am being honest. For what it's worth, the algorithm over there did find me great conversations to follow and engage with. I am going to be investing most of my time though into the Fediverse, namely Mastadon and Pixelfed. Bluesky seems alright, but I dont really want to rebuild a social graph around another single company. While the environment over there is positive right now, that could change in a heartbeat with a new CEO or management. 

If you would like to come and join me or follow me on some of those other platforms, I would love to engage with you in those conversations. I’ll have my links shared over on the sidebar of this blog. 

Getting Back into Watches

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. 


Using an E-Ink Tablet (Boox Note Air C3) for TTRPG Gaming

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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Videogaming: Space Marine 2

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.  

Book Review: The Crippled God


The Crippled God by Steven Erikson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's been almost eight years since I first picked up Gardens of the Moon and began my journey with the Malazan Book of the Fallen.

This series has demonstrated to me that it is one of the most dense and complex narratives that perhaps will ever be written in this genre. The Crippled God follows in the general form of the predecessor books. The story is dense, with multiple storylines weaving back and forth. Erikson demonstrates once again his proficiency for writing a war epic and I found myself sobbing at the latter half of the book as the final stories of heroes and brothers and sisters all came together.

This book and this series stand as a testament to such an incredible narrative concept. Yes, the writing at times was long and verbose and the internal monologue of characters extends for pages at times, but the grand story of what is told over the course of ~10,000 pages is truly epic in all sense of the word. The world, the story, the events that occur here are grand beyond scale, while at the same time never losing sight of the personal stories of the soldiers and their comrades standing next to them in the trenches.

It's remarkable to sort of look back both on the series and where I am as a person. It's a chapter that is closed in many ways, finally finishing this series. I don't know if I'll ever go back for a second read, but the writing in this book has influenced me creatively perhaps in more ways than anything else I have ever read. These books have become tent-poles for my concepts on fantasy in much the same way that the Lord of the Rings has for so many others. The world, the races, the gods, the magic are all diverse and creative and it is bittersweet to close this final book out.


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Ridelog: Indiana and the Hoosier National Forest

This past weekend we had a nice extended four day trip down to the Hoosier National Forest area in souther Indiana. I have to say that the trip was a complete surprise for me. I had no idea what to expect for the roads, but man they were great. Most of our riding took place in and around the Hoosier National Forest and our basecamp was in Columbus Indiana. The roads were very narrow and very hilly with blind curves all over the place in and out of the hills. If I am being honest, they were perhaps some of the more technical roads I've ever ridden if only for the small hills that made so many blind entrances. 

On Sunday we rolled into Nashville Indiana for lunch and we were pleasantly surprised to find a very charming artist community. I would 100% love to go back and make a basecamp weekend in this are and rent a cabin or something in the Nashville area. The whole thing is only about 200 mile from Chicago so you can get there and back in about four hours. 

Ridelog: Chigee AIO-5 Play BMW - First Impressions

I've been on the lookout for a new GPS device for 2019 R 1250RT for a little while now. I have the Garmin Navigator VI that came with the bike, and while the GPS device itself is still working very well, the user experience with the trip planner Basecamp is poor. Basecamp  has good features and I rather like its trip planner, but the application runs so poorly on my Mac that I have on multiple occasions screamed into my computer while the mapping interface stutters along, unable find basic addresses, or just outright crashes. 

Earlier this year my entire Basecamp library became corrupted and I lost all of my ride data that I had saved into the software. Worse still, the backups I had somehow also became corrupted. Thankfully, most of my data was saved externally as .kml files, but I did lose about six months of rides and the elevation data that comes along with those .GPX files. 

I really began to look hard at some alternative GPS solutions entirely because Basecamp is terrible to use. I was hoping that BMW themselves would pull through with their recently announced BMW ConnectedRide Navigator. Unfortunately, the dimensions do not fit in the nav prep on the K1600 or R1250RT bikes.

I've given some serious consideration to the Garmin Zumo XT, which is very well regarded and does not utilize the Basecamp. I was just about to pull the trigger on it when a newcomer emerged with a CarPlay/Android Auto device called the AIO from Chigee. 

They just released a BMW focused version that fits in the existing Nav prep cradle. I received my AIO-5 this past Friday and put a little over one hundred miles on it today, so here are my first impressions. 

Chigee AIO-5 for BMW 

First up, I think it is worth clarifying what this device is and what it is not. It is not a stand alone GPS device. It requires a smartphone connection and consequently a GPS or driving app on the phone. There are at least half a dozen motorcycle focused apps for iPhone, but I am going to focus on Apple Maps and Rever.co on my first impressions here. 

The AIO-5 has no internal battery, so it can only be powered on when connected to the bike. I was able to get it to read all of the data like engine temperature, tire pressure, etc. but I was unable to get the AIO-5 to respond to the BMW Wonderwheel. Looking at the Facebook Group it appears that my 2019 model RT may require an additional dongle. That's disappointing, but not a deal breaker. 

The Chigee interface essentially has two main screens. The first one shows basic speeds, RPM and other data and mimics the dashboard of the new LCD model BMWs. The other shows the screen in a more grid view. Both screens are fine, but the biggest issue that jumped out at me is there is no "light" mode for the background. Everything is dark, which honestly can be hard to quickly read on a full sun day. 

I also noticed that the screen brightness on my device was a bit wonky, dimming randomly at times. It is also super responsive to switching to night mode. Driving through an underpass had the interface in the maps switch to dark mode. This may just be a firmware issue that could just get updated in the future. 

The only other thing that really jumped out at me is that there are way to many touches to jump between the Chigee dashboard and back to a map app running in CarPlay. I think there was probably 3-4 button presses, which makes it difficult to switch if you are driving.   

CarPlay Interface

If you are at all familiar with CarPlay, the interface here is just CarPlay. It's good, but if I am being honest, I don't really like it on a motorcycle. There is just too much going on most of the time and you can tell that the interface is not optimized for a screen this small, with the rider ~3' away. On a motorcycle, I just want to be living in the map interface 99% of the time. The Split View with the music, while cool, is just a distraction on a bike. CarPlay also has a persistent menu on the left hand side of the screen that prevents any app from filling 100%. I wish that could be tweaked. 

Also, CarPlay does not allow you to remove the phone or Messages icons. If I could I would prefer to turn both of those off entirely. I do not want those distractions while on the bike. 

My experience with Apple Maps was fine. I know a lot of motorcyclists online say stuff like "why don't you just use Apple or Google Maps" for your routing, and for running errands or going to work, that is 100% fine. Any sort of multi-point route planning or multi-day trip planning though is not ideal for those apps. For that, I am going to explore other apps. 

The other big observation with Apple Maps is that the text on the screen is just not big enough. This is probably because it is built for a car with a larger screen, but it is what it is. 

Rever.co

I also had a chance to test out Rever.co today, thankfully it did pickup a lot of the slack that Apple Maps left behind. I am going with Rever right now in part because I think it most closely matches the features that I liked on my Garmin. Having both weather data and traffic data on the map to re-route is incredibly valuable for long road trip planning. 

The Rever app looks pretty good, but their CarPlay capabilities are kinda weak. It looks like it is more or less a screen mirroring device, and I was not quite sure how to trigger a ride recording on the CarPlay screen vs the iPhone app. It also was a bit unclear how to request a "twisty roads" ride from the CarPlay screen. 

The iconography though was much better and easier to read than Apple Maps. The Pro version also has some nice features like notifying people when you get home safe and you can set a privacy buffer for your home or any other address. 

Rever also is most attractive to me for the sharing features of maps, etc. 

Overall I want to develop some multi-day and multi-point routing in Rever in the coming weeks and really put it through its paces. I'll test out some other routing apps before the end of the year as well.