2014 Play Log - April 12 to April 18

4/12 -  Finally got back to Titanfall tonight. First, I decided to give the gamepad controls a try and found them easier to deal with. True, it's harder to aim precisely, but it looks like there is a subtle lock-on and I'd rather have easier to navigate button prompts than key designations. After doing the tutorial again, I jumped into a live campaign - and, no big surprise, got killed a lot. Match-making in the game is questionable considering it put me (a level 1, obviously) in a game with up to level 40's! I was getting killed in one-shot with jump-kicks. Not fun. It's pretty easy to figure out who are the bot's and who are the real players - the real players are the ones double-jumping around like monkeys. They recently added a beta for single-player games and I think I'll try those next time. It's an interesting on-foot/mech  FPS game and I don't (totally) regret getting it, but I'm just too inexperienced with the standard "run around like a jackass making quick kills" to get much out of the multi-player environment. At least for now.

4/13 -  I only had a little time to play tonight, so I decided to play a bit of Monument Valley on my iPad Mini. This was a little $4 puzzle game with an amazing art style - sort of like The Room (in that you manipulate the objects of the puzzle) with a dash of M.C. Escher perspective bending drawings. Games like this make me happy to own an Apple device, something I never thought I'd say.

4/14 -  No gaming tonight because of a total lunar eclipse. These things are rare enough on their own, but living in San Diego, it's particularly rare for them to occur on a night when the sky isn't cloudy. Lacking a telescope or decent binoculars, I decided to try taking pictures of the moon with my Fujifilm digital SLR. Out of 50 or 60 frames I took, two were decent - and I'm REALLY happy with that ratio! Considering I was shooting at the extreme telephoto range (40X) with no tripod, and don't really know much about custom settings on the camera, I had no reasonable chance to get anything more than blurs trying to take pictures of an object 239,000 miles away! So, here are links (or will be when I upload them to Imgur) to my two best images. Blood Moon and Blood Moon with Star. An event like this always makes me wonder how a primitive culture would have reacted. To have something as reliable and unalterable by mortals as the moon appear to be eaten or maybe burnt away with no concept of astronomy must have caused many to think the end of the world was upon them. Personally, I thought the coolest moment was when the moon was totally eclipsed and there was just this grey orb floating in a sea of stars.

4/15 -  I just got this gifted to me by my good friend, Plum (Twitter: @UndeadPlum), and wanted to play it as soon as I could. It's an interesting blend of old school point-and-click adventure games with the sudden (and gruesome) deaths of Limbo. I only got about 20 minutes to play it last night, as I was feeling the afterburn of being up til 1:30am the night before (darn lunar eclipse). Interestingly, I'm enjoying it more than I was Broken Age, proving that a game doesn't have to have a huge budget and an industry luminary behind it to be fun.

4/16 -  So, Raven, how do you like your new house? (Honestly, it looked like a dump when I first got it, but then I spent some gold on it and it's really great now!) Big enough for you? (Are you kidding?!?! This place is huge! All kinds of crafting tables, a central fireplace, a bar, even a guest room with two extra beds. And I even have a giant stone gnome in my living room. Sounds creepier than it is. He's cute.) Well, I'm glad you got a new place. That other one was quite a distance from where you're exploring these days. (Tell me about it! I'd rather walk than teleport any day - always makes me nauseous - but I'd run out of shoes if I didn't.)

4/17 - Wasn't in the mood to game.