Gaming 2019

The year started off a bit slow for me gaming wise. I think I was a bit burned out by it and mainly watched Netflix series, I rewatched Friends if I remember well. Then in Febuary the Civ VI expansion Gathering Storm came out. After watching a few marbozir videos, I decided to get it and it made me finally ejoy Civ VI. I had tried a few runs before, but never really grabbed me, it didn’t seem like a complete game. In my opinion Gathering Storm made it complete.

YouTube player

In may Total War: Three Kingdoms came out, it was nice, but I found the campaigns / games dragging on a little too long. Also sometimes you got into a stallmate of some kind and the game didn’t really go anywhere. It was cool to see a strategy game in the top 10 most played games for a few days or weeks though. And it is a very good game regardless of my gripes.

Anno 1800

Around the same time, by the end of April, one of my favourites for this year came out, the citybuilder / logistics game Anno 1800 by Ubisoft. I had a lot of fun with this game. The campaign was relatively short, though the story was decent. The sandbox mode is where it’s at. I usually disable the pirates too, since I don’t think the combat aspect is very good. It was more annoying than anything else to find your ships in ruins, because you overlooked a pirate attack.

Screenshot of a town in Anno 1800

The DLCs that came after the release, were nice as well, especially the first one Sunken Treasures. It gives you a very large new island in a new region to build on, and a vessel with a diving bell you can use to search for treasure. The second dlc, Botanica was a little underwhelming, bit short of content. The third one, the passage, was pretty big with a new region and a new story. Though I have to admit I haven’t played it much since I have the feeling I have pretty much seen and done most that the game has to offer. I have about 70hrs into it now. The first part of the game is the most fun part to me. Once you have eletricity and people that need it, you need to redesign your cities in order to be able to use the trains and move the oil to your power plant, which is pretty much a pain. All in all a great game and one of the best of the year for me.

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SQUAD: To the mun and back

A very interesting article appeared on polygon.com about Kerbal Space Program. It’s not your regular article about the game, but more about how it came to be, and a history of Squad, the company that has created this masterpiece. And how one man’s dream came to be. Originally it wasn’t even supposed to make any money, it started as just a side project. I didn’t even know Squad is originally a marketing company (and apparently still is !).

You can find it at http://www.polygon.com/features/2014/1/27/5338438/kerbal-space-program

Lost 5×08 – LaFleur

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This week’s episode of Lost was very enjoyable. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing mind numbing, just a nice story ! As Ryan of the transmission put it:

Tonight we get an episode that not only spans three years, but jumps back and forth relentlessly. It played games with our expectations, and it gave us even more new characters. But somehow it worked. It had heart. It had velocity.

To be honest I don’t have much to add to that, there aren’t that many questions or answers in this one. We just got to see how our islanders became a member of Dharma around 1974, and then spend 3 years waiting for Jack and the others to come back. I wonder how and when they will get back to ‘our time’ or Locke’s time again though, I assume we will learn in the latter parts of this season ? We get a two week break now, but no major cliffhanger this time. Definately looking forward to the rest of the season !

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Links:

The Transmission

TV Squad

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WordPress 2.5

WordPress 2.5 has been released ! I upgraded my blogs to 2.5 and it seems to work fine. The admin part of wordpress has been overhauled, and the dashboard is now actually more useful. Although it takes some getting used to. The 4 most important functions (write, manage, design, comments) are more prominent and are displayed on the left, settings and plugings, users are on the right in a smaller font on the right. Only thing I dont like is the new write post page, the category selection is now below the write area, don’t really see why that was changed, though it’s not a big deal. At least it looks better.

I also think that wordpress 2.5 feels somewhat snappier, when loading pages etc. and on one blog (my warcraft one) a php out of memory that sometimes occured, has disappeared, so that’s good ;).

All in all a very nice upgrade I think. If you haven’t done so you might want to consider upgrading your wordpress installation as well !

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/03/wordpress-25-brecker/

Comparison between 2.3 and 2.5

9-11

A sad day indeed. I was staying with a friend in NJ at the time, and I was shaving in the bathroom listening to Imus on the radio when a report came at 8:45, that a plane has crashed into one of the towers. The thought at the time was that it was an accident and a smaller plane. But then at 9:00 the second one hit, and my friend came out yelling ‘planes have crashed into the WTC !!!’. We watched CNN for the entire day almost, got out to get Dylan’s new cd, that was released at that exact day, just to get away for a bit.

Twin Towers