With only a day (mostly) of Pokemon GO under my belt, I have some thoughts, presented in bullet point form… or Pokeball-point, if you prefer:

• Boy howdy is this a Niantic game or what. This is Ingress with a thick layer of Pokemon slathered on top. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but we should be clear that Pokemon GO is more the former than the latter, at least at this point.
• The in-camera effect is surprisingly effective! (Sorry. Couldn’t resist.) I mean, it’s far from perfect but if you’d shown me video of someone playing this game ten years ago, I’d have considered it nigh-unattainable science fiction. I won’t say it’s convincing, but it achieves the right level of immersion and that’s the key part of it, as far as the game is concerned.
• You have to either find out online how to capture a Pokemon with your Pokeball, or get lucky and figure it out, because nothing in the terse tutorial tells you to swipe to throw the ball.
• This is unlike a modern Pokemon game because so far as I can tell, you can’t trade and there are no battles of the type any Pokemon player has become accustomed to (hence nothing actually being “surprisingly effective”). It remains to be seen if this remains to be the case, and how much of a downside it’ll be.
• This looks very like an iteration of Ingress, where you have to team up to take key points on the map, etc, etc. Which is… what turned me off from Ingress because there was zero incentive for solo play and a huge requirement to form some kind of mid-to-large size team of fellow players. If solo play in Pokemon GO is similarly discouraged, I’m out.
• A “Pokestop” (low-key supply station) near my work is based on a window mural from an aquarium supply store. Too bad that store is gone, and what’s on that window now is the name of the insurance company at that location. There seems no way to report these inaccuracies, unlike in Ingress. Presumably that will be remedied at some point.
• I was a “smurf” in Ingress, I’ll probably be on the blue team in this game as well. Convince me otherwise if you can.

Having wandered away from Guild Wars 2 lately, I dabbled with Diablo III for a while until someone sent me a gift on Steam: Stardew Valley.

You may have heard of it.

It’s really working for me. I can farm crops, I can raise animals, I can craft things, I can arrange my domain how I please, there are goals to meet (both “kill X in the mines for a reward” and “bring one each of all these things for a reward”), and some days it’s nice to just run around the farm cleaning up debris. And sometimes the game surprises you.

When life hands you giant melons, reach for your axe…

In the upper left corner you’ll note that I have a duck and a bunny, named Plucky and Harey respectively. (Chickens are named Henri, Etta, Clucky, and so forth.) I am bad at pet names, let’s be honest.

Now, I’m not min-maxing my gameplay. I’m just… having fun. If you’re a casual gamer, Stardew Valley may in fact be an ideal game for you. Possibly.

Of course, every now and then the game gives you the middle finger.

All that gold, no way to reach it because the only exits from my current square are up and out of the mine, or down to the next level…

If you’re on the fence about trying it out, get in touch. Maybe I could be convinced to send it as a gift. That’s how I got my copy, after all. (I turned around and bought copies for Kyla and my daughter, so paying it forward is accomplished.) It’s only $15, and money well spent.