I Know What I Did Last Weekend

First up, I get so many spam comments in Russian on my blog. Do they think I speak Russian? If I let those comments through, would they only be read by other Russian scammers?

The other kind of spam comment is one where they found my blog, and now their life has meaning once more. They love my layout, they love my content, share it around with their equally enthusiastic family, want to make a blog just like mine. I don’t let those through, either, but… what if they really do love this blog, more than I do?

This is how people keep playing the lotto, I guess. Sure, not gonna win… but maybe?

Speaking of gambling, I was trying to figure out if there was a surefire way to make money in roulette. I’d heard that one possible winning strategy was just to keep doubling your bet on each loss until you won your money back. Problem with that strategy is that the most you can possibly win is the amount of your initial bet, and you could be in the hole for hundreds of dollars on a string of bad luck. Then there was the opposite strategy — double when you win, and a variation — double when you win, up to a streak of three wins.

Every single simulation I ran ended in losing all money, none ended in infinite money.

Anyway, Kasul and I are playing Monster Hunter Wilds, but both of us have been working on other things lately and so we haven’t had much time to progress the story. While looking around at other PS5 games that come with my subscription, I hit on Arcade Paradise and got a little bit addicted.

The story of the game: your dad thinks you’re a lazy, good for nothing business school student, and has decided that you shalt run his skeezy laundromat. Lucky for you, you took a look at the calendar and realized you were in the 1980s, when arcades ruled. Even better, when your sister ran the laundromat before you, she’d bought a few video games and put them in the back room so that customers could play while they wait for their laundry.

Your dad is on a yacht in the Mediterranean somewhere, so he just thinks you’re managing the laundromat. What you’re secretly doing is fixing up the place, buying up the empty rooms in the laundromat building, and creating a wicked arcade with all the most tubular, not to mention gnarly, cabinets in the entire metro area.

It’s a time management sim, is what it is. The customers don’t do their own laundry — YOU do — they just stand around shedding trash. Some do head into the arcade and shed trash there. Machines break down. Annoying customers pester you to beat their high scores. Machines only get truly popular when you play them a lot, so you have to build your skills on a couple dozen actual arcade games in order to get them to earn back their cost. And everything is timed, so… you have to do laundry, play arcade games, empty the coin hoppers, deposit the money, clean, fix broken machines, plunge the toilet, arrange cabinets so that the most popular ones are in good spots, finish your daily TO DO list, which gives you Pounds Sterling in order to buy upgrades so you can do even more…

It’s a “just one more day” kind of game. Addictive.

We finally start Frosthaven tonight. I printed up some wolves, because there will be wolves. I also painted the minis for the characters we’re starting out with. I have the banner maid, Drew has the blinkblade, Kasul has the necromancer and Ally has the healer. Behind the painted minis are the enemies for the next couple scenarios, so I have a lot of painting left to do.

Speaking of games with minis, looks like I have my third league matchup for the Malifaux league. Probably happening next week.

Sword for Hire

I finished my “remove LLM” pass from the game, so now only the town map has LLM elements. Which is really too bad. (Usual caveat that AI is bad and I am bad for using it). The whole reason I started this project was to have a DM who knew the adventure and knew details about my character run the adventure for me. And it works — as long as I am the only person to ever play the game. But I’d like it to be more, and so LLM has to go.

The flow for the game is now going to be in two parts. The first part is the main game portion, which is built on the Textual terminal UI package. It works broadly similarly to HTML/CSS, so any web design experience is directly useful, which is good for me, as I am a web designer. The startup page will load the character select screen, and this can optionally flow into the character creation screen, the first page of which is above. Either flow leads into the town map, which is going to be modeled after an old Rogue-like called “Angband”. I always liked their town map. And that will lead into the actual adventure.

Pokemon TCG Pocket

Pokemon TCG Pocket came out with a new expansion, “Shining Revelry”, which adds shinies to the game. Most free; one of which (Shiny Mewtwo) costs $25. The shinies mean a lot less in Pocket, since by and large nobody can see your flair or shinies or whatever, the games are typically short and once you understand which deck your opponent is using, you know all you need to know.

Since Pokemon TCG Pocket decks are so small — 20 cards — there’s not a lot of room for creativity; typically from the very first card your opponent flips, you know everything about the deck they are playing.

Shining Revelry introduced, besides shinies, a bunch of new EX cards, chief among them, Giratina EX. Giratina conjures psychic energy out of thin air. Darkrai EX damages the opponent whenever it takes dark energy from the energy pool (the only kind of energy). Druddigon is there to stand in the active spot and just exist. We don’t have fire or water energy, so it will never attack. It just punishes attackers, and if you have the Rocky Helmet upgrade, it will return 40 damage with each hit, and Shaymin (we have no leaf power either) can passively heal every damaged Pokemon for a small amount.

The deck just powers up Giratina EX and Darkrai EX on the bench while Druddigon buys time. It’s a very technical deck and I love it.

A Dark Room

You’re going to want to play this game.

“A Dark Room” is hard to describe. Much like a painting, perhaps, with a stroke here and a stroke there and from a simple start — you find yourself alone, in the middle of a forest, in a hut, and you start a fire to save yourself from dying in the cold. As you play, more locations open up; a Silent Forest where you can find firewood. A stranger stumbles in and is a builder, and now you can build huts and more people come. Suddenly the game is a survival crafting game, and still you’re just seeing the calm text interface. And then it’s a worker placement game. And then the game opens up even more, and now it’s a roguelike. And now it’s Fallout and the plot is really opening up and it’s still all just text.

That’s a new game up in the picture. A screenshot of my current game would be full of too many spoilers. I need you to go play this.