Category: Games (Page 1 of 7)

I’ve had zero creative energy this year so most of my spare time is spent watching documentaries (CuriosityStream and Nebula and PBS for the win), listening to music, and playing games. Quite a bit of playing games.

But not a whole lot of games. Just a few.

I wonder if anyone is going to clock that reference. Hmm.

At any rate, I said a few days ago that I intended to come back once I had the process worked out for right-turn bypasses at railway roundabouts in Satisfactory. The idea being that there’s no point in sending the train through 270 degrees of cornering and eating up all pathway vectors if all it needs to do is “hang a right at the junction.” Minimizing the time spent in the roundabout block is good for any train which needs to utilize it.

So here’s how I make that happen, more or less. (Circumstances sometimes require some creative fudging. That’s the game in a nutshell though, isn’t it?)

It’s been a while since my last check-in on my ongoing train-centric Satisfactory save game, so here’s a bullet-point catch-up:

In the co-op Satisfactory game with the kids (look, I get to call them “kids” even though they’ve been full adults for over a decade now, it’s my parental privilege) we’ve finally reached the point where we need to consider actually doing the thing we only really joked about early on: Tackling nuclear power.

“… mountains come out of the sky and they stand there!”

Yes, ha ha, the song “Roundabout” by Yes (ha ha) earworms me every time I think about building roundabouts in Satisfactory. Maybe you, dear reader, are young enough not to have this problem. I envy you your youth and your lack of Jon Anderson’s voice in your head.

Anyway.

Over the weekend I finished off my first playthrough of Fire Emblem Engage, and I’ve been sitting with it for a little bit to percolate my impressions. Overall, in general? It’s a perfectly serviceable tale. There’s nothing groundbreaking in it, nor is there anything absolutely awful.

I don’t want to spoil specific details, but I can’t really talk about my reactions without giving some general things away, so… bail now if you aren’t done with the game and want to avoid anything spoiler-ish. For that matter, I’m also going to talk about some comparisons with Three Houses, so… again: Beyond this point there shall be spoilers-of-sorts.