Hmm…440 hours on Steam…probably another 125 on the Switch…

I love this game. It’s so cozy and comfortable. I found SDV after my divorce just when it had originally released and I was drawn into the cute world and how much character oozes from every corner. Every person you meet has something going on or you can just be a weird hermit building out your farm in peace. There’s enough of a story to propel you forward but never overbearing and it gets out of the way when it’s “done”.

As time has gone on from my first playthrough, I’ll typically dive back in when the itch strikes or a new content update comes along. The last few playthroughs I’ve done a lot to mod the game and introduce new things into the world to discover, some of which just feels indistinguishable from the official content and others that just help reduce barriers that I want to skip over (like fishing).

Stardew Valley is a game I will likely always go back to. I’m sure it will eventually eclipse my current most played game (Team Fortress 2 @ ~800 hours). I’ve tried other games like it and while they’re fun, none seem to have the staying power that Stardew has over me. While I will absolutely check out his next game, I’m hoping Stardew Valley never really stops being updated over the years.

I think original Sims made the biggest impact on me since I probably played that one the most. Our PC couldn’t handle The Sims 2 when it came out, and I only tangentially tried 3 and 4. Mostly enough to build a cool house and spend a few days with the Sims I created. Sims 1 I probably poured a ton of hours into it.

One thing I did discover and never fully completed in the later games was trying to do some sort of haunted house family. As in, have someone move in and intentionally die in a way that created a new color of ghost. Get all of the different ghost colors in one house/lot then move a normal family in. I don’t think it really mattered in any way, I just loved the idea of a regular family cohabitating with a rainbow of ghosts.

There’s something both so unique and also so simple to the Sims that I’m surprised it’s taken this long for folks to try and “go for it” the way Cities:Skylines went for Sim City. Like, you have to craft interesting stories within the game but you don’t need to wholecloth invent a galactic empire/fantasy world/etc…you can broadly look at our world and copy/paste for inspiration. With Paralives and Life By You “coming soon” in some fashion, there’s going to be some interesting competition here.

We just had our second kid so any games have to basically be on the phone right now. Luckily, someone mentioned Wildfrost in the same breath as Slay the Spire and it has been awesome to play while holding the little one.

It’s a card/deck builder rogue like, but you’re deploying units into one of two lanes and positioning them for maximum effect. Each unit counts down until it attacks, but you have a handful of cards to directly attack as well. You run until you fight the final boss, unlock more stuff along the way, etc…it’s been a blast. The art style is cute (how big can Yuki’s snowball get? Try and find out!) and I love the soundtrack.

On iOS at least, the game is free to download and try out before purchasing (think it was $7). If you like Slay the Spire and similar games, well worth looking into!

If you want to pay for audiobooks, Libro.FM is a DRM free alternative that allows you to easily download your books without any issues that Libation solves for. It also supports local bookstores in your community while not giving more to Amazon. Only a handful of books aren’t available on Libro but it’s been a seamless transition for us. It’s only going to be difficult if you’re one of those folks who returns/refunds audible credits regularly as it’s not easy to do with Libro.

Seconding the Secretlab chair. For someone who works from home and would play PC games at the exact same desk when work ended, it made sense to invest in a chair beyond my $30 IKEA one and has held up pretty well over the last several years.

The best part of it too was for Wi-Fi calling, if it was off, couldn’t be turned on since it relied on AT&T’s website/capabilities to approve and authenticate. That was at least my experience as well as my family’s.

So if you hadn’t already enabled it before the outage, you literally couldn’t turn it on.

And if you listen at 1.5x speed, does that just burn your 15h faster or can you fit in more time?

It’s an interesting idea, but I think the only way I’d use it is a “try before you buy” and go out to Libro to make the purchase. At least that’s the only way I could realistically see using 15h/month.

I might have just turned to dust and blown away in the wind reading this!

Seriously though, it’s nice how just simple they are. Even times I’ve fired up my PS3 it’s got just a little bit of friction in ways you don’t expect there to be. The trade off for all that simplicity though is you get what’s on the disc/cartridge and that is it. No patches, no DLC or expansions, and you lose/break/give away that disc you’re out of luck. It’s weird even now feeling like those games could be “lesser versions” because they can’t be updated in any way, but as a kid at the time that wasn’t even an expectation.

Probably the hardest thing at this point is remembering you need that ADC to connect it to a modern TV!

Ahh nuts, you’re right. It was harder to find the right one than I expected and didn’t even realize it was an April Fools joke. Thanks for the correction!

Here’s kind of your easiest parallel thread from Reddit at the time to see if anyone’s interested what overlap might be there.

scrapped

(go use Hot Saucerman’s link instead!)

Not sure if this van_dam might work for you. I found it randomly searching through my Unraid server’s App store and it seems to be built around 3D printing files. As a note, I haven’t worked with this one personally yet since I haven’t had the time to get Postgres and Redis set up, but I have this pinned to come back to it. Could be worth a look!

Yep. I hit a wall with a couple of the final battles in the DLC missions (Morbius and Storm) that I finally ratcheted down my difficulty level back to “normal” just to get through and not sour my experience with the game.

It did mean I annihilated the final boss of the campaign but I didn’t mind. It was still fun :)

(finally) Finished Midnight Suns. About 80h towards it and while I did enjoy it immensely, I’m glad it’s over and time to move on to other things.

I started and finished the first Frog Detective game last night. I figured it would be short but not 1.5h short! Quirky and it got a couple of legit laughs out of me. I’m definitely interested in playing the other two episodes.

And I decided to play Overwatch 2 now that it’s on Steam. I stopped playing OW1 years ago and this seemed a good excuse to try it again. I am starting from the ground up since I apparently deleted my old Battle.net account, which is frustrating to not have all the heroes/skins available but it’s also easing me back in. The monetization at least seems to be an improvement over loot boxes. I’m really just playing with whatever I’ve managed to unlock and not paying for the BP until I know how far a super casual player like myself can get. The core game is luckily still solid and since I don’t have the bad blood of the scrapped PvE mode or anything, I’m just enjoying playing more Overwatch again.

This is interesting to say the least. I tried out Vortex on my last major Stardew Valley playthrough and I found it a bit clunky. I got it to work, but I feel like it had a learning curve to its own vocabulary and how it organized everything. Then when I found a few of the mods recommended skipping Vortex and just doing a direct download, I keyed in to a much simpler workflow I could wrap my head around with updating the mods.

Interested to see what the new app might look like in time. If they can take lessons learned from Vortex and apply them forward, that’s great.

I think I’m nearing the end of Midnight Suns. Story seems to be wrapping up so I’m trying to get the last few friendship levels for folks. This has been such a blast to play and I’m glad I picked up the complete edition for ~$35 in a Steam sale.

Not sure what the next one will be. Really tempted to grab Baldurs Gate but I’ll probably go back to some indie backlog games for a few.

Skimming through my Steam library, here are the games that I’d call memorable/left an imprint for me in the last year.

• Neon White - Score attack/leaderboard chasing is NOT my genre at all, but the game felt so good to get into a flow state and solve the puzzle, chasing that last Ace medal timing. There are more things I could have gone and chased, but getting all Ace medals, gifts and finishing the story was sufficient for me. I’d be curious to figure out if playing again, almost a year later, if I could do any of the later levels!

• Security Booth: Director’s Cut - A very short experience but such a fascinating and creepy one. You’re asked to man a security booth and let in or reject cars based on a list of license plates. Things get weird and that’s all I really want to say. This is also a game that feels like it was originally released on a PS1.

• The Case of the Golden Idol - Both Outer Wilds and Return of the Obra Dinn are some of my favorites of all time , so when I heard that Golden Idol was like both of them together I was extremely curious. It’s more Obra Dinn than Outer Wilds, but the core mystery in each level is so interesting to uncover. Nothing ever really comes out and says “So this is what happened” in a cutscene, but you read a letter in one room, maybe a letter in another, then you’re checking between them for the dates and trying to figure out what happened when. I felt so smart when a puzzle came together and when I saw/solved one of the big mysteries before they basically tell you the answer. So so so much fun and I need to get into the DLC.

• Marvel’s Spider Man and Miles Morales - I played the first Spider Man on Sony’s streaming service a couple years ago, so I knew all the story beats already. That didn’t stop the emotional impact from STILL hitting me from some of the final villain’s speech to Peter. I had also never played Miles Morales, so it was great to put them both back to back. The story can feel very routine/by the numbers but I almost didn’t care because I was having so much fun swinging through New York. Cannot wait for Spider Man 2.

Honestly, my biggest use case is listening on the phone and listening on my PC while at work. The two sync together extremely well and it’s pretty seamless. No idea if Apple Podcasts can do that (or plays that nicely on a Mac) but that’s my biggest use case for their sync capabilities.

Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod - https://techpod.content.town/

Brad Shoemaker of Gamespot/GiantBomb/Nextlander and Will Smith of Tested.com and several other things (but not THAT Will Smith) both dive into tech issues and are more to the left. They also have a separate FOSS Pod.

Oh god, I read that article and thought “Well that’s wrong, I wonder how they could mess that up.” I saw the author was an AI and just laughed.

But they got the click in the end and I have an ad blocker so I have no idea who wins at that point.

If mods are allowed, Stardew Valley. Heck, even if mods aren’t allowed. I’ve probably put nearly 600h into it between PC and Switch, so if I’m playing one game exclusively, I’m going to design the best damn farm I can!