I met my goal. By year’s end 2023, I made it all the way through the Phase 4 parts shipment. Look!
This officially puts the “ChooChooingScenery” savegame sequence to bed at 299 hours 45 minutes accumulated play time. Coming up in mid-January: I… haven’t figured out what I’m calling it yet but it’s a new savegame with a very particular focus, and I also want to sort out how I can turn it into more regularly-scheduled material for this here not-a-blog.
Wait for it! It’s coming! It should be fun!
End-of-year retrospectives are as common this time of year as wadded up balls of wrapping paper thrown aside in frustration while trying to wrap presents. I’ll be putting together my thoughts on some of the music released during this calendar year later on, but I was reminded this afternoon that Steam’s fancy “year in review” results are now available, so let’s take a look-see.
Checking out the full document may be entertaining for you, but if you’d rather just get the high points in summary: I played a lot of Satisfactory, I spent a couple months getting back into Skyrim pretty heavily, and I used my PC to play Gems of War & Ascension a few times (usually I play those on the tablet).
The amount of Satisfactory I played will come as no surprise to regular followers of this site. (Hello to both of you!)
Over 170 sessions, nearly 70% of my entire time spent out of all games from my Steam library. Yeah, that tracks.
But that’s not the whole story, is it? I play games which aren’t on Steam, after all. Like Honkai Star Rail (my main mobile game), Fire Emblem: Three Houses (several years on and I’m finally winding down on that one), Fire Emblem Engage (for a few months there, anyway), the beta for Palia (the 3D Stardew we keep hoping starts to gel), the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV (just getting back into that very very recently), and a few other odds & ends besides.
That seems like a lot of games, but again, remember that Satisfactory (and HSR) are getting the bulk of my attention… as do books, TV shows, music, and so on. I’m a “gamer” but only in the mildest, most casual sense of the term.
And that’s fine!
I hope you’ve all had fun this year, and I hope you have increasing amounts and quality of fun in the year ahead.
On Tuesday, the 14th of November, 2023 the 8th major update to Satisfactory arrived in Early Access, after spending months in the Experimental branch to shake out the worst of the bugs… most of them, anyway. We have a few things to talk about with “U8” but today we’re going to focus primarily on the new engine’s support for something called “Lumen” and how that makes an already-pretty game even prettier.
I’m passing a lot of my time playing games lately, a mix of new and really-very-old. Let’s run down the list a bit, shall we?
I needed to get OBS Studio and Davinci Resolve installed on the new computer anyway, and what better way to incentivize myself than the wild hair of an idea which led to…
(more…)Oh, the hours I sunk into this game, a decade or so ago.
Someone on a friend’s Discord brought up “Nolvus,” one of the mod pack manager bundle thingies (technical terms? what’s the fun in using those?) for Skyrim and how it made them want to revisit the game again and I thought… why not? Surely, after the better part of a dozen years, the Skyrim experience has been perfected and polished.
Well.
(more…)