MeghanIsMe

I decided to try out Diablo IV since this is their open beta weekend. I played for about ten minutes, during which time I decided that this is a hell (no pun intended) of a lot like Diablo 3, except my computer doesn't have the graphics power to run it well. I got bored/discouraged fairly quickly and watched Miriam play instead.

I've been wondering if my onboard graphics will run Satisfactory, but haven't tried yet. Maybe I'll see today. Sometimes the repetitive building in that games gets overwhelming, but the combination of making chains of machines and building monolithic/brutalist buildings to put them in is sometimes pretty fun for me.

Danae are playing a game called AI: the Somnium Files together. It's a murder-mystery plot set in modern Japan. It has its funny moments, but tonight was the best one yet.

An 18 year-old girl who's something of a Youtube (except it's not called that!) idol is involved in the goings-on, as are some Yakuza. The Yakuza boss, Moma, has some info that we want, but in order to get it he wants the chance to meet the idol (Iris, or her performing name A-Set). So we bring Iris to see him and the tough mob boss turns into a complete fanboy. We ask for the information because we held up our end, but he pulls us aside where Iris can't hear and says that before he tells us, he wants us to ask Iris if Moma can shake her hand. We say sure, no problem.

The two of us go back to where Iris is and our character, Kaname, says to Iris "Moma was just asking if you could show him your boobs."

Moma explodes "The FUCK dude?! I didn't say that!!"

Kaname then says "Actually, he just wants to shake your hand. Is that ok?"

Danae and I can't decide if Kaname is doing that thing where you ask for something ridiculous first to make your real request seem more reasonable, or if he just wanted to fuck with Moma, but we both had to take a break from the game until we could stop laughing.

On a different note, another thing I love about this game is Mama, a fairly obviously flamboyant genderqueer person (her in-game character file says she's gender neutral and prefers female pronouns) who owns and runs a bar. We end up talking to her semi-regularly and for a while, her gender and/or sexuality are, like, not even a thing to anybody. That's really cool. Here's her page on the game's wiki: https://somniumfiles.fandom.com/wiki/Mama

Hey folks I know: I am terrified of meeting strangers online to play games with. Would anyone I know like to play Factorio or Satisfactory with me semi-regularly? It would be so much fun to work on a big project with friends over Discord or something. Let me know if you're interested! No worries at all if you have not played them. If they look interesting, I'd love to show you the ropes.

Links to games:

Factorio: https://factorio.com/

https://www.satisfactorygame.com/

I really don't know why, but I've started playing a bunch of the Commodore 64 games I grew up with. Brief reviews?

The current version of VICE (the emulator) is nifty. You can even emulate the sound of the 5¼" floppy drives. They sound basically like I remember. I wonder if someone sampled the actual sounds? The sound seems to be the same between the 1541 and 1571 though, so maybe not.

Christ on a cracker, did these things *really* take this long to load? Why aren't we veterans of '80s computers more patient? Gah! Which key maps to Run/Stop? Why do some games use a different joystick port? But on to the games!

Telengard is still awesome. My dad had a character with so much experience the game expressed it in scientific notation. I died five or six times before making it to level two, but it's awesome regardless. "The dragon likes your body!" Ummm, uh-oh...

Lords of Conquest: pretty cool little Risk-like game (but based on another board game called Borderlands). I used to be good at this. I lost my stockpile in the first two turns twice in a row today.
Expedition Amazon: I remember this being *so* awesome as a kid. After monkeys stole my map *twice* though, I gave up this time.

Impossible Mission: DESTROY HIM MY ROBOTS! *zzzzap-craaackle* Good stuff.

Ultima IV: My first real RPG. The Ultima games truly make my heart ache for a simpler time. The Ultima series will always be very close to my heart.

Way of the Exploding Fist. Fun fighting game at the time. Kind of goofy now. The noises they make are hilarious!

Spyhunter: The best thing about this game may be the Peter Gunn theme. Hearing that on a SID kicks ass. The game itself is decent too though.

Spy's Demise; not bad. The music is forever burned into my brain.

Sammy Lightfoot: this game is kind of crap.

Jumpman. Jumpman is 8-bit love! Yes! Thank you Randy Glover. Still one of the best platform action games because of the unique elements to the different levels.

Master of the Lamps: This was a *weird* game. I think acid was involved.

Seven Cities of Gold: Such colonize. Much slaughter. Wow. Also, "creation will take about 20 minutes." It's easy to forget how long things took on a machine with a ~1mhz processor and 64k of memory. But it's amazing how *much* it could do too.

Sword of Kadash: Ooh, interesting dungeon crawler. The gameplay isn't quite like anything I can think of. Not as mysterious-feeling as when I was a kid though! I used to get so anxious when I could hear ghost noises but couldn't see them. Where are you?! Careful with that ax, Eugene: it's cursed. I might come back to this one.

Also, I had the following experience trying to start it up. "Why isn't the character creation working? It just makes me keep swapping disks forever. *reset* Nope, same thing. *keeps swapping disks approximately forever* Ok, it works. You just have to swap disks a stupid number of times... "Your adventure begins..." *waits 5 minutes for the disk to be read* Good thing you can turn off speed limiters on emulators!"

Boulder Dash: Wow, that music! I remember that! This is a fun little game; I may come back to this one too.

Space Shuttle - a Journal Into Space: I never had clue 1 what I was doing, but I still thought flying a space shuttle was awesome! The title screen has a trademark symbol after the text, and for some reason I always kind of sang it to myself "Space Shuttle, a journey into space tee-emm." Through my whole life, that weird little musical phrase still comes randomly to mind for no reason at all. Brains are weird.
Just tried to play it. Still have no clue.

Satan's Hollow: Doood! I remember this! I knew the title, but couldn't remember the game. It's kind of like Galaga, but with Satan. C'mere Satan, I'll fuck you up!

Save Me Brave Knight: Why is this lock spitting hummingbirds at me? This is weird. Level two may have the most annoying sound track of any game ever.

Ok, maybe more later. I might go back to Jumpman right now.

Danae finally got paid!! Yes!! Now I just need a working debit card and we'll both be free of immediate financial worries.

I really really want all the expansions for Heart of Crown and Tanto Cuore. Someday...

Humble Bundle is targeting me. There's a dating game bundle.

https://www.humblebundle.com/

Awesome reviews for the various games like:

"fought floating rubiks cube to impress girl 10/10"

and

"I played this game and got to try to seduce an inexplicably Irish cat. 10/10. Would recommend."

I started playing this furry dating game that's free on Steam. I met a few interesting people in the intro where you're out at a social space. I followed up with this very cute writer/poet boy and went to a bookstore with him to listen to an author speak, then surprised him with a signed copy of the author's newest book. His response was so adorable!

So then my character was back home and I got the feeling that I was supposed to do more stuff before the end of the day. I could call another of the people I met, but it made me anxious. Am I supposed to be pursuing someone else when I just started dating writer boy? Does this game expect you to have multiple ongoing relationships? Will the writer boy be upset? He's so sweet and geeky and excitable and hopeful and I don't want to make him sad.

I got anxious enough already just picking through dialog options on our date, and now I need to make decisions without knowing whether they're going to hurt the person I already connected with and really like? (Yes, I know these are all fictional constructs. But I don't want to hurt them!)

I really enjoyed working on that flowchart. It looks so pretty that I want to make another, bigger, prettier one. I'm going to try to do a comprehensive flowchart of the entire vanilla version of Factorio. Individual charts for particular processes would be more useful than a giant spaghetti tangle with everything. But the giant spaghetti tangle could be so cool to look at! I see it as a piece of art, kind of like topological transit maps. I'd print it and frame it.

I have vague memories of turning myself around like a rotisserie while trying to sleep at four in the morning today.

I'm back to playing with Factorio, in my game named "Special Kind of Hell" after someone's description of trying to play the game with all the mods I have.

In the base game, you mine iron ore and smelt it into iron plate. Two steps. In the modded version, one of multiple ways to do it is to mine a composite ore, crush it, flotation filter it with pure water, process the chunks with sulfuric acid in a leaching plant, refine it into a purified form, sort the purified form of the composite ore into it's component refined ores (including iron, nickel, cobalt, gold, etc.), turn the purified ores into ingots (which have their own processes, involving, for instance, putting nickel ore into a blast furnace with carbon monoxide to get nickel ingots - Wikipedia says this is the Mond Process; I love how close to real processes the mod author has tried to be), then, for the most efficient production, smelt multiple kinds of ingots (one combination that works is cobalt, nickel, and iron) together in an induction furnace to make molten iron, which is cast into iron plates in a casting machine.
Sometimes I get a little overwhelmed by the complexity of trying to do something that's so very simple in the base game and I take a break for a while. But I keep coming back to it. This is one of the best toys I've ever played with.

I'm also playing with a new way to arrange train lines that looks more factory-like. I'm having some signaling issues and trains getting stuck, but I'm working through the bugs.
I'm something like a hundred hours into this map and I have yet to get anywhere close to launching a rocket, the ostensible 'end' of the game.

I finished Factorio for the first time last night, after just short of 30 hours into constructing the factory. I thought I'd finished earlier than that, but once I had a rocket silo built and got the rocket done, I realized I had to then build a satellite to put into the rocket!

It was a lot of fun, and I'm going to play through again after making some notes. I'm going to chart out my first factory topologically and pre-plan where to put things on the second one to hopefully end up with something pretty and efficient instead of the conveyor belt hell my first factory was.

I also got to play with my brother last night. Adding a second person changes the game a lot, and introduced the challenge of effectively communicating non-visually about visual things like layout. I want to do some more of that.

(I'll write about the New Jersey trip sooner or later. It was generally really good.)