Category: Games

Quick End-Of-Month Check-In
Let’s see… here are a few things I don’t yet have time + energy to flesh out, though some will get further attention at some point:
- The GameBall trackball is holding up pretty well so far. At least, it hasn’t infuriated me and does its job reliably. So far. The third in the ongoing “in search of” post series will bubble up here probably in early February.
- There’s a new Mono Inc record out, I have it, I’ve heard it. I need to sit with it and give it another solid listen-through before I feel like I’ll be ready to give it a proper review. It’s coming, though.
- Fire Emblem Engage has taken over a lot of my free time, and that’s a good thing. If you have any interest in the game series at all and have read some reviews and seen first-impressions videos, my opinion probably won’t surprise you by diverging from a lot of those… but I want to get a bit further into the main storyline before putting my own complete thoughts in order here. I’ll absolutely be ranting and raving about it before much longer, don’t you worry.
- I don’t think I’m writing an entire post about how angry I am about the state of housing. Nobody needs to read that, and I don’t need to be writing it. Suffice to say that I feel intensely frustrated by the fact that at almost exactly the time that I paid off the big big loan and started stashing money away for a potential move, the costs of everything jumped skyward and now I just… can’t. I’ve nearly been priced out of existing.
- Another brief grumble unworthy of an entire post? The folks who make the good version of my primary diabetes-treatment medicine could resolve their supply-chain issues any day now, please and thank you. Taking the other folks’ version is a fuss and a bother and I hate it. (A pill-crusher is involved. Feh.)
- And to end on a positive note, I need to write up my experiences with trains in Satisfactory now that they’ve been the central concept of my latest solo savegame and an integral part of the co-op game I’m playing with the kids. It’s been fun! But… there are definitely drawbacks to going All Trains All The Time. I’ll get into that at some point in the next few weeks.
That’s all for now, folks. I hope you’re staying healthy and safe.
30 January, 2023
Fire Emblem Transitions

In the beginning, there was Fire Emblem: Three Houses and it was good.

Well, wait. That’s not entirely accurate. Let’s try this again.
(more…)

16 January, 2023
Satisfactory: 2022 Co-op Year End Tour Video

The video I mentioned in the previous post? Here it is:

Arrak-ish. Dune… desert biome. Look, I’m bad at naming things sometimes, okay?

I hope that we all get to have more fun, less stress, more health, less catastrophe, more prosperity, less misery in the year to come.

31 December, 2022
Silly Things To Do With Video Editing

I’m working on a tour video for our three-person co-op Satisfactory game. I recorded the footage Tuesday night. (We took the week off for various reasons, so I used that time to let the Space Elevator shipment production accumulate a bit.) For lack of anything better to do and not wanting to actually Do Game Stuff without the others, I started a video project.

Last night I completed the editing-down. Tonight I started the text overlay process, and decided I’d take this chance to learn something new (to me) in DaVinci Resolve: How to pin text to an object on the screen. Tracking, in other words.

It’s a learning process, but for the sake of this one joke I feel like it was worth it:

Yes, I used that garish color combination on purpose. I mean, why not?

Mind you, I could have used a fancier method and achieved smoother, better-looking results. But for a quick throw-away joke? It’s fine.

Hopefully I’ll have the full tour video up by the weekend.

29 December, 2022
Satisfactory: Turbopower Factory Tour

Fifteen minutes to record, four hours to edit and add a slew of text cards, and half an hour to convince YouTube to post it and let me select a thumbnail of my own choosing instead of picking one of the three automated options.

My ongoing “save game” wherein I play with design elements and such is called “eSthetics” because I’m an absolute dork. I know, you’re all shocked & amazed.

I didn’t want the trouble of recording, cleaning up, and editing a voiceover track so the audio is just what’s in the game footage itself. Also, I thought the idea of going all “silent movie text gags” with title cards would be fun (and I was right). I’m not sure which method I’ll settle on if I do more of these, but I’m glad to get some practice under my belt with this particular style.

25 November, 2022
Satisfactory: Rocky Start, 2.5 Updates Later

I got this done, start to finish, in the span of about a week. This included taking yesterday off from work (as an ostensible mental health day, which I definitely needed) to hunker down & finish adding clips, editing footage down to a somewhat-reasonable 39 minutes, and recording my voice-over.

This meant listening to my recorded voice bits repeatedly until everything was trimmed down and slotted into place. It was every bit as cringe-inducing as you suspect.

At any rate, here you go:

All things being equal? I’m actually proud of this one. I took the fact that the game loaded in with a reset/default player avatar and used that to create a kind of narrative path for the video to follow. During the edit, I discovered a couple of other fun things to do along the way.

It could be better, but I could’ve done much worse, too. Go, me.

28 October, 2022