January 2026

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Holy smokes, how is January over already? This month has flown by!

I’m posting this one a day early because we’re about to get hit with a whopper of a storm (they say the area could see more snow than it’s seen in 30 years, but for here that means 8-9 inches, not 3 feet) with high winds and bitter cold, so in case we lose power or Internet, figured I’d hit Publish on the recap.

Playing

I’ve been playing a bunch of stuff a little bit, in a kind of slow-motion cleanup of my hard drive. I made a list of every game I have installed and have been going through them deciding which can be shelved and uninstalled and which to keep around (my SSDs are getting full, mostly thanks to a ton of AI models sucking up space). I won’t list them all, though. Here’re the games I have been playing more seriously:

My Time At Sandrock is still a daily stop in my gaming travels. I’m somewhere around 90 hours in and just based on how much stuff I have upgraded to the highest levels possible, I think I must be getting close to the end of the story, but we’ll see. I certainly am not rushing through it. It tends to be the last thing I play at night which means lots of roaming around exploring and goofing off. I’m also struggling to focus on a spouse. I was dating one character when I said the wrong thing to another character and BOTH of them got mad at me. Now I’ve been putting the moves on Amirah. See the picture at the top of this post. I dazzled her with fireworks then went in for the hug. What a player I am! Anyway I’m having fun and I’ve really been drawn, lately, to this kind of ‘life sim’ game that ISN’T all about combat. I have a couple more waiting in the wings for this one to be finished.

Ball X Pit continues to also be a daily thing. I log in, tweak my village and play a round. They just added more content although one of the new characters they added literally plays the game for you, so that’s dull as dirt. Like for real you can start the level and go have lunch and come back in 15 minutes to see how you did. I guess I’ll call this one done when I’ve unlocked everything; there’s really no story here or any kind of “The End” situation that I can detect.

I spent a little bit of time in Wasteland 3 before deciding the tone wasn’t for me. See more about that here.

And I finished Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and you can read about that here.

Eternal Strands is probably the game to replace Expedition 33 on my “let’s actually finish a game” list. This is an action rpg from Yellow Brick Games that feels like it borrows from several sub-genres in a good way. There’s fighting regular monsters, fighting really big monsters that you can climb on, and crafting weapons and gear from both monster parts as well as plants and minerals you find during your journey. There’s a LOT of destructible stuff in the game. It feels like everything that was “placed” in a level is destructible, which is oddly fun. Finally combat is a mix of melee, bows and magic, with various elemental magics impacting the world. Fires spread, ice freezes baddies in place (and puts out fires) and so on. More when I’ve played more!

Screenshot for Eternal Strands showing protagonist Brynn facing a much larger enemy
Big enemies like this Ark of the Stricken Earth have to be climbed in order to harvest their magical energy.

Watching

Stranger Things S5 — I hadn’t been super excited about another season of Stranger Things after such a long break, and I went into it skeptical. But by the end I was on-board and while the ending seemed really long, it was also pretty interesting. It’s not often you get a glimpse of the life of your shows’ heros after all the excitement is finally over.

Sanctuary: A Witch’s Tale — I did NOT want to watch another witch show, but PartPurple really wanted to watch so we did. And I found myself enjoying it; it’s really more of a mystery with some magic sprinkled in than it is a classic witch tale. It’d been a while since I watched a mystery series so in that way it was a nice change of pace and a very pleasant surprise. I’m glad we watched. That said, I found most of the characters pretty unlikable and just last night we started Season 2 and my immediate reaction was “these characters haven’t learned a thing and are making the same mistakes they made last season” and I’m considering asking Purple to watch this second season on her own. But I guess I should give it a chance so the mystery aspect can kick in.

Fallout — We re-watched S1 (I think that was my 4th time watching, but just the 2nd for PartPurple) and we’re now enjoying S2 with the last ep just a few days out. Love this show to bits!

Defiance — This was our lunchtime re-watch, and we just finished it. Seasons 1 & 2 are on Prime Video but Season 3 is on Peacock, and we were invested enough that we subscribed to Peacock to finish the re-watch. Jamie Murray as Stahma Tarr carries so much of this show. She is so ethereal and sexy and evil and conniving in it. I’d also forgotten what an ass Nolan can be… sheesh dude, take it down a notch. I do think Seasons 1 & 2 are much stronger than S3, but we’ve enjoyed them all. If you don’t want to sign up for Peacock but have Amazon Prime, watching the first 2 seasons still works.

Reading

Still reading old sci fi and fantasy magazines and that’ll probably hold true for a long time to come!

So that’s a wrap on January. It was a pretty good month for me. The trauma of the move is fading into the rear-view mirror, the new apartment is SLOWLY coming together but generally feels comfortable and much nicer than the old place. I’ve been slowly exploring the immediate area, though I still haven’t found my way to the beaches. Gotta fix that. Work has been OK, health has been OK… so yeah, it was a nice month for me despite the wider world slowly (?) falling apart.

 

Finally Finished Expedition 33

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I’m going to make this pretty short since Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has been talked about so much since release, what with being a hit at launch, then winning awards, then having awards retracted, then news about the studio resisting the pressure to expand so they can get their next game out more quickly… suffice to say that the game is a critical and popular success.

I started playing at launch (April 24, 2025) and finished yesterday, Jamuary 24, 2026. And this wasn’t my typical ‘start over half a dozen times’ playthrough. The Save Game I finished on was the same one I started in April. My playtime was a little under 43 hours. I’d leave the game for weeks at a time before remembering it and circling back.

I liked it enough to finish it (mostly because the story, which somehow never got spoiled for me, had me very curious) but why the long breaks?

Basically I found Expedition 33 hard to get back into after ANY kind of break. When I’d play a good long session I would love the game, but if I left it for even 2 or 3 days getting back into it was difficult for me. It all comes down to the combat. Combat is turn-based with player-reaction coming in the form of dodging or parrying enemy attacks. By tapping a button at just the right time you can dodge or parry an enemy’s attack, mitigating damage and ideally leading to a counter attack. When you’re playing consistently and learn the enemies’ devious patterns (they tend to try to fake you out, but each enemy type has a few varieties of attack that play out the same way every time) and get good at parrying, especially, it is a lot of fun and combat becomes substantially easier.

But for me, at least (remember: I am old as dirt), even a couple days away and I’d have to re-learn all these defense patterns and I would SUCK for the first half hour or so. And, another quirk of mine is I often play games in very short sessions…like 30 minutes or so.

A screenshot showing the combat interface
Combat screen from fairly early in the game

While it took 8 calendar months to finish, I’d guess the bulk of my progress came in 3 or 4 spurts where I really focused on the game for a couple days. I guess this is all a long-winded way of saying that this is a game best enjoyed all at once. My advice is that if you haven’t played yet, when you do pick a time when there aren’t other games plucking at your attention and just focus entirely on this one until you’ve finished. To me this feels like the best way to enjoy Expedition 33. Oh and if you have both an Xbox and a gaming PC, don’t play this on both platforms at the same time. The dodge/parry timing is just different enough between the two platforms that it’ll really throw you off.

My only other issue with is is the lack of a map. That’s a personal peeve. I really like having a map, ideally with ‘fog of war’ so you do have to travel all the pathways to discover them, but after that you have a map. Presumably one of your party members is on cartography duty!

Everything else about the game: the story, the characters, the artwork and the music, was amazing. The characters in particular were some of the most beautiful I’ve seen in a game in a long time.

I have no idea if the devs will be coming back to this IP, but if they do I will surely play the next game in the series. My only request to them is to give us a difficulty slider specifically for the timing of the block/parry. I could have put the game on Story mode which I guess makes the timing more generous, but I didn’t want the enemies to hit less hard or have fewer hit points. I just wanted to be able to effectively dodge and parry even after a break from playing.

A Taste of Wasteland 3

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Back in my younger days, before I gravitated to consoles, I was a huge fan of tactical strategy and wargames. Recently I’ve been spending a bit more time on the PC and wanted to see if this genre still scratched the itch for me (yes there are tactical strategy games on consoles but I’ve never found using a controller for these to be very comfortable, nor is reading a bunch of stats from across the room). Wasteland 3 in a CRPG with tactical turn-based combat and it’s on Game Pass so it seemed like an obvious choice.

Actually it was a choice I made a few times, bouncing off very early most times. But this time… THIS time would be different. And it was. I put about 9 hours in. Enough to do ten or so quests and to level up characters and gear, and to engage in a good amount of combat.

I found that I do still enjoy tactical combat. Y’know, figuring out how many things you can do on one turn’s worth of action points. Moving and finding cover. Healing your squaddies. Tossing grenades and accidentally blowing up your own guys. All of that was fun and I enjoyed building the characters as well. This guy will be the doctor and I’ll load him up with health and recovery skills. That one is the spy, give him a sniper rifle AND lock picking skills. Things like that.

So combat and character development, thumbs up.

The RPG aspects though, felt a little dull. Click to move, then scroll the screen, then click to move further, then turn the view so you can see down that side street, then click to move down that street. BORING. There’s a Map screen… why not just let me click on that and have my crew travel back and forth across town on their own? I might need to learn some patience.

The dialog with NPCs and such was pretty good in that there are a lot of choices and apparently these choices have long-term ramifications though honestly I didn’t play long enough to experience that myself.

In the end though, the aspect that convinced me to put this one aside was the tone. Yeah its post-apocalyptic and we know how “edgy” that can get, but this felt like post-apocalypse via the imagination of a 14 year old boy who is caught up in the grip of puberty. It’s really weird by design, and dirtier than it needs to be, and not dirty in a good way if you like your media to be a bit spicy. It just feels crass to me. For example, check out the helmet on this character. At this point I didn’t yet have enough helmets for everyone so I had to use what I could get but c’mon…

A character wearing a helmet that has sex toys as 'horns'
When I was younger I may have found this hilarious.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this, just like I never thought there was anything wrong with the dildo club in Saints Row. I just personally think it’s dumb, and I dunno… I like to find cool armor in games, not armor I’d be embarassed to wear. This is just an example but you get the idea of the tone of the whole game. It can’t decide if it is a soft r-rated slapstick comedy, or a grim-dark story about how after civilization falls, there are no good guys left in the world. It tries to be both, in the way Fallout is both, but for whatever reason, for me personally, it just didn’t work.

I’m NOT saying it’s a bad game; in fact there’s a lot I like about it. It’s just not the game I’m in the mood for right now, so keeping with my new gaming outlook, rather than trying to force myself to keep playing I’m going to set it aside. I MIGHT come back to it some day but there are SO many games out there waiting to be played… life feels too short to play games that you think are “OK”. (At 9 hours in I still have 50+ to go from what I’ve read and that’s a lot of time to dedicate to something you’re not whole-heartedly enjoying!)

For what it’s worth, the Steam community has given this one a “Mostly Positive” rating with over 190K reviews, and it’s currently 70% off ($11.99 USD) and Open Critic gives it a ‘Top Critic Average’ of 86%, but keep in mind those reviews came out in 2021. Point is though, if it sounds fun, don’t let me dissuade you because my issues with it are personal and very subjective.

A Cache of Old Tech

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With our move completed I’ve started a second purge/organization sweep. My long term goal is to just reduce the amount of “stuff” I have, and I have a lot of stuff. In earlier years I was fairly comfortable financially and [in retrospect] fairly unhappy in some way, and I’d placate that unhappiness by buying things that seemed cool. The adage back then was: “He who dies with the most toys, wins.” Not something I’m proud of these days.

Anyway the goal is not only to reduce clutter but just to try to streamline life a bit. It’s just been feeling good to send things off to recycling lately.

Anywhoooo…. I’ve found a bunch of old tech I’d sort of forgotten I had. (The image at the top of this post shows most of the current haul.) A lot of it is video game stuff: a Nintendo DS (not the newer 3DS, that one is still theoretically in use), a Sony PSP, and a Sony PS Vita. No surprises there; I love me some gaming devices. I also found two old iPods, including the original 5 GB model that’s about the size of a deck of cards. Lastly some old cellular-but-not-Smart phones, including a Motorola model that has a slide out keyboard (also some unremarkable old flip phones). Most interesting was a little Nokia device that was so old I didn’t remember what it did. Turns out it’s like a tiny, tiny tablet or something. Think of a gadget like the Palm Pilot only more tuned for consumption rather than creation:

A small Nokia 'tablet' of sorts.
This is the item I find most intriguing. Sadly it is frozen in time, stuck in 2006 until I set up an old-timey WiFi network.

None of this stuff is quite working. A lot of these items had proprietary charging ports and (so far) I haven’t found the charging cables.

In other cases, the batteries are so old they no longer hold a charge. The PSP seems to work fine as long as it is plugged in, but as soon as it is disconnected it dies. One of the phones charged fine but in the 20 minutes or so it took me to wipe it prior to recycling, the battery was basically dead again.

And then there is the connectivity issue. The WiFi tech in these old gadgets has no knowledge of modern WiFi security protocols so they can’t connect. I COULD, if I was that ambitious, set up a second 2.4 ghz WEP WiFi network and somehow isolate it, and I MIGHT do that on a super temporary basis but it’s not something I’d feel comfortable leaving up all the time. Mostly it’s this little Nokia thing I’d like to use for a few minutes. It does have a bunch of content on it, cached back in 2006 so I guess that was the last time it had a WiFi connection.

Other devices are just decomposing. The phone with the slide out keyboard has a rubberized back surface that is sticky and gross. At first I thought something had spilled on it, but no, the rubber is just embracing entropy.

A Motorola phone with a slide-out keyboard.
If you think the front looks dirty you should see the back. It literally sticks to the table since the rubber backing is slowly dissolving.

I’m deciding what to do with this stuff. In theory I might someday use the gaming devices but the other items are just curiosities. Maybe I can set up a museum of old tech. Get some Lucite boxes to display it all in. Charge a nickle for admission! More likely I’ll do whatever I can to reset/wipe data and take them all to the e-waste recycling station.

Honestly, it’s been fun finding this stuff and seeing what I can get working. It’s crazy what I used to spend my money on, though.

Move Finally Completed

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As of midnight last night, we’re only renting one apartment. Yes at long last our endless, very very badly organized move has come to an end. At least the moving part has.

Yesterday we went back to Raleigh, with a truck full of stuff we’d paid to have moved south but now wanted to dispose of (good use of money there, eh?). Our old place has dumpsters everywhere and dedicated recycling dumpsters and to be fair MOST of the trash was cardboard from the packing boxes, but not all. For example I think I tossed 7 or 8 keyboards in the recycling. (Leaving us with, I dunno, 6 spares, still?)

Our new place we have one large trash can that gets emptied once a week, so using the old place’s dumpsters felt like a handy cheat-code since we’d be up there anyway. Now I’ll have to figure out where I can take big loads of cardboard down here. Wherever that is, I’m sure it’ll cost me.

We did a final bittersweet walk-through of the old place. I won’t miss the actual apartment one bit but I will miss the little backyard where I fed the birds, squirrels and even the deer and foxes who wandered by. (The image at the top of the post shows a deer and a squirrel grazing in the back yard.) The new place has a ‘back deck’ which is a small slab of concrete that faces the neighbor’s back deck and is a pretty busy place. No critters out there!

We hugged a couple of neighbors, pet some doggos, said our goodbyes, turned in the keys and were gone. It all took less time than expected. We’d figured on spending the night up there but got done so quickly we drove back down. I’d taken today off thinking we’d be on the road but instead I had a good long sleep-in. Back to work for the day tomorrow and then on Monday we’re back to the old grind, and honestly I’m not too sad about that. Remind me I said that when I get tired of it by mid-February.

The new place is still utter chaos with boxes everywhere. PartPurple has been sick this week so she hasn’t gotten much done and a LOT of the unpacking is down to her since she is, shall we say particular, about where things go. Anything I unpack she comes along behind me and moves stuff so I’ll just let her orchestrate and be the muscle when needed.

The exception is my office which was so packed full of stuff I could barely move. I’m making progress…I can see the floor here and there now. I’ll work on that some more this afternoon.

Everyone has been doing 2025 recaps, as we tend to do at this time of year. 2025 was pretty awful, eh? For us personally, we lost our beloved dog, and we lost all our money. At the start of the year I had about $16,000 in a “Rainy Day Fund”. My goal was $20K at which point I hoped to start shopping for a house. Then Lola got sick, to the tune of $13K in vet bills. I actually took out a personal loan to pay for some of that since I didn’t want to drain the rainy day fund completely. But then this move has wound up costing us almost $10K because we are stupid. (Moving company was $2500 each trip [2 trips which was the REAL dumb part], a junk collector was $500, cleaners were $500, and then there was the old 1st month, last month, and 1 month’s security downpayment on the new place.) Now the rainy day fund has $25 AND I have a credit card balance for the first time in years. Quite a setback. Goal now is to have the credit card balance paid off by June, then we can start building again.

So yeah, if 2026 can just be dull and boring and not cost me a bunch of money, that’d be great. We’re still rocking a semi-busted TV, PartPurple wants a new couch, and I’d LOVE to get a proper corner desk for my office but… all in good time I guess.

So now we start to find the new apartment groove. Now that my gaming PC is back in my office, I’ve been spending more time on PC gaming since PartPurple has been spending a lot of time in the living room watching YouTube on the TV I generally do my console gaming on. I thought about moving the consoles into my office but she says she doesn’t think this new habit of hers will last and that once HER office is set up and not a room full of stacked moving boxes, she’ll be back to working on projects up there. So we’ll see.

I do kind of LOVE having my own office, though. Or I think I will once I have it organized and have purged more stuff. So much junk! For example I have SIX PC towers in the closet (plus two actually running, one work, one gaming) and a stack of 7 or 8 old laptops (aside from the ones we actually use). I have a box of old hard drives I need to wipe before I get rid of them… just so much crap. A few 50′ ethernet cables, tons of coax cables. Switches and hubs that are so old that aren’t gigabit. Stuff like that.

The long term goal is to keep purging stuff and get to where I have room for a project table where I can do thinks other than tap away on a keyboard.

Anyway, we’re so very, VERY happy to be done with this move. I’m hoping this isn’t one of those places that gets you in at a good price then jacks the rent up the first time you need to renew your lease, because I don’t want to move again for at LEAST 5 years!!!

December 2025

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OMG I just realized tomorrow is the end of the month and I haven’t even create the ‘stub’ of a recap post (I’m writing this on Tuesday). My usual system is to create a recap post early in the month and just jot down notes in it because I WILL forget what I’ve done. I didn’t do that this month and indeed, I have forgotten what I’ve done.

The truth really is that I haven’t done much ‘fun’ stuff due to the move I’ve been talking about. We are STILL in the midst of this and painful, expensive lessons were learned about how much work it is, and how much time it takes, to move. Particularly if you’re a senior citizen and work a desk job so your stamina is shit. We spent money on movers to move the big furniture and planned to move the smaller stuff ourselves, but after many wasted days (and wasted gas) we threw in the towel and hired the movers to come AGAIN. And still there was more to do, like take down things we’d mounted on the walls, take down curtains… stuff like that. Then the cleaning started and eventually we threw in that towel, too, and hired a cleaning crew (this is gross and embarassing to admit but we’d had furniture that hadn’t been moved in a decade and it appears mice had been living under/behind said furniture, and what a mess they made). On New Year’s Day I’m making 1 last ‘haul’ trip. Friday PartPurple goes up to basically let the cleaning crew in. And next week we go back to turn in the keys and do a walk-through and then, finally….FINALLY…. we’ll be done. And I’ll be broke.

Anyway between shuttling back and forth between apartments, packing, unpacking, recycling runs, and organizing, not a lot of fun stuff got done this month. But here is what did:

Playing

My Time At Sandrock has been my ‘main game’ and I’ve been slowly chipping away at it. Realizing that — unlike in many titles in this genre — Sandrock lets you save pretty much any time has been a blessing and a curse. Blessing because, duh, it’s convenient, but a curse because now it can sometimes take me 2-3 play sessions to get through a single day. I keep forgetting what I was working on and so forth. Because of this I think I’m way over-level for the part of the main story I’m in, though I’m not sure I mind that all that much. Still really enjoying this one and looking forward to the next game in the series, Evershine, where the character models are a big more adult. It feels a little creepy running around looking like a 14 year old boy and trying to woo the (based on appearances) older women in the town!

Image
My yard, with the stable to the right, my garden in center and a row of machines in the background

Winter Burrow was finally finished. Here’s the post on that.

I still play a session of Ball X Pit every day to keep the Microsoft Rewards streak going on console. To earn the points you have to play a game on console and a run takes just about exactly 15 minutes (assuming you don’t fail) so this works out perfectly and it’s the kind of game where you can really easily jump in, play and jump out without having to remember what you are supposed to be doing, or anything along those lines. Plus, it’s fun as heck!

Last is Relic Hunters Legend, which I just spoke about the other day.

Watching

The Mayfair Witches, S2 — This was a ‘her’ pick. She loves Anne Rice and that whole milieu. We’ve recently watched Interview With The Vampire, Talamasca, and now this. I like them, but not enough that I’d probably watch them if PartPurple wasn’t really into them. It’s all urban fantasy about witches and vamps and stuff.

Stranger Things, S5 — We just started season 5 and are only a couple of episodes in. I loved this show when it was new but honestly I like it less with every season. I think. It’s been SO long between seasons I can’t be certain.

Defiance — We always do re-watches for lunchtime TV viewing since we, and particularly me, can’t focus as much as we usually do. I’m always listening for pings from work while we watch. Anyway Defiance recently hit Amazon Prime so we’re doing a re-watch and loving it.

Reading

A Christmas Carol — For the most part, we just skipped Christmas this year. We did put up a tree, and I read A Christmas Carol, as I do every year. It’s a tradition!

Old sci-fi/fantasy magazines. In the back of a closet I found a stack of old magazines. Sci-Fi Age, Realms of Fantasy, the Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy, etc etc. They have dates from the 1990s on them! I’ve been having quite a good time reading this old stuff, particularly sci-fi that takes place in the near future (as of 1995 or whatever) which is often the VERY near future as of 2025. It’s fun to see what the authors got right, and what they got wrong. Also ‘interesting’ is the artwork that comes with many of the fantasy stories. There’s almost always an attractive woman in an alluring outfit. The era of the chainmail bikini, amiright?

So that’s December, and that’s 2025 done and dusted. 2026 is gonna suck (in world scale) but I’m hoping it’ll be less bad in personal terms. Losing our dog Lola was really painful, and frankly really expensive, and this move is driving us deeper into debt. Hoping in ’26 I can climb most of the way out of that hole. And we’re starting the year in a new apartment, and in a new area full of places to explore and things to do. So while the world burns, I’m hoping that we in our specific household have a better year.

And I hope that you in your specific household have a better year, too!

Early Thoughts on Relic Hunters Legends

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Here’s another of those games I never would’ve tried if it hadn’t been on Game Pass. But it was and I needed one more Game Pass game to collect my Microsoft Rewards for having played eight different Game Pass titles in a given month, so I gave it a shot.

This isn’t a review since I didn’t play it enough, but the beauty of being a blogger rather than a professional reviewer is that you can just throw in the towel whenever you want. And after 5 hours of Relic Hunters Legends, I think I’ve had enough. It isn’t a bad game, but it isn’t a great game either, and there are plenty of great games out there waiting to be played.

RHL is a looter-shooter that seems like it was maybe made for kids? Your character is a kid, the art-style makes me think of Nickolodeon or The Cartoon Network (if either of those are still around) and the combat is pretty basic. It’s essentially a twin stick shooter played from an overhead perspective. Enemies are anthropomorphic animals, primarly ducks and turtles in the early game.

Image
Big dude on the left is an NPC, white haired little guy on the right is me

At the start of the game you answer some questions like it is 1985 and you’re playing Ultima IV. At the end of this you get assigned a Planet, which I guess is a class. Eventually you can unlock the other classes but until you do, you have the joy of getting lots of loot your class can’t use. That’s always fun. At least you can break useless gear down for components, which are then used to upgrade gear you CAN use. Upgrading gear (whether through drops of new stuff or improving what you have) is the main way of getting stronger. There’s a level system but it just seems to be there to gate gear and not to make you inherently more powerfull.

My assumption is that they really want you to play this with friends, and I played it solo, so keep that in mind. What’s odd is that in the tutorial mission you are joined with some NPC companions, but once you get into the main game you don’t have access to them. I think adding bots to play along side of would’ve made the game more interesting. But anyway as is typical for this kind of game, it’s probably more entertaining when you’re on comms with your friends and you’re laughing at how that one guy keeps running off the edge of the world or whatever. The tutorial mission with NPC pals was frenetic and kind of fun.

Playing solo I tended to charge ahead, then fall back to let my skill cooldowns expire, which was effective but dull. The two mission types I experienced were skirmish (kill your way through a couple of short levels, then take on a boss) and ‘escort the payload’ (where you have to hang out near a vehicle and it moves forward, unless enemies are near it). The skirmish mission was easy until I got to the boss, and it wiped the floor with me. I thought I was going to have to grind the mission over and over until I realized I could respawn and the damage to the boss wouldn’t reset. So I just chewed away at him, dying probably a dozen times before he finally went down. On a second run, after having gotten some better loot from finishing the mission once, I had to respawn three times.

The Escort mission was arguably more interesting but since the payload only moves when you’re near it, you could still fall back and wait for things like your heal skill to cooldown so you could fix yourself up. It didn’t appear that the payload took any damage so I’m not sure if you can even fail these missions. I beat that one the first try.

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The Ducans (duck-mans?) are messing with my payload!

The art style and the lack of fail-states is what makes me think the game was intended for kids.

When you’re not doing missions there a hub-world to run around in. This felt like another situation where it might be more interesting if you were running around in it with friends but as a solo player I just found running back and forth to be a little tedious.

I don’t have much BAD to say about Relic Hunters Legends; it’s fine. It just doesn’t really sparkle in any way. It’s currently on sale on Steam for $7.00 USD and might be worth a purchase at that price (there’s also a demo) but at the regular price of $20 it just needs more of a hook to be worth it.

Winter Burrow Finished

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Winter Burrow is a pretty short game (12 hours for my playthrough) but it still took me something like 6 weeks to finish it, what with everything going on in my life right now.

That’s only relevant because I think stretching things out over such a long time took away from my experience with the game. I really enjoyed it at first, but over time I was less and less enthusiastic about it. The gaps in play sessions had a lot to do with this. At launch there was no map. It’s not a huge game so that wasn’t too much of a problem until I stepped away for a week and came back and had to re-explore everything to remember what was where.

Shortly before the holiday the devs released a patch that adds a map and that’s when I started focusing on the title again. I like maps.

Oh, sort of getting ahead of myself. If you’re unaware, Winter Burrow is a (self-proclaimed) cozy survival game where you play as a mouse. It has a really cute art style and that’s a big part of the burst of fun right out of the gate. If you played it over a few evenings that cute glow-up will probably last the entire experience, but as with anything familiarity breeds apathy and after a while I needed more than cute.

The actual gameplay isn’t far removed from most survival games. You gather, you craft, you fight baddies. You have to eat to stave off starvation, and you have to stay warm. Staying warm is enough of a challenge that I’d argue against the ‘cozy’ label. Cozy aesthetics? Absolutely. Cozy gameplay? Not so much. Being chased by a giant spider while you’re losing health from freezing isn’t my idea of cozy! Not that the game is hard; the cold mechanic just makes things a little tedious as you constantly have to cut short expeditions to return to someplace warm. This gets particularly tedious when, like me, you’ve been away from the game long enough that you can no longer remember where X is, even though you know you’ve been there before.

You have a home that needs repairs and such, but you don’t build any structures from scratch. You can build better tools, warmer clothes, and there are a LOT of recipes for furniture that is used purely as decoration. I’m not big into decorating so that whole aspect was more or less lost on me. If you’re someone that loves to spruce up housing in your games you’ll probably love this aspect.

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Crafting is limited to Woodworking, Knitting, Cooking and some very lite (and generally not needed) farming.

There are a handful of NPCs you’ll meet and run errands for. Most of these quests are pretty simple “go find X” or “go craft Y”. They’re enough to nudge the story along, though. And all the NPCs are different small animals that nontheless appear huge to a tiny mouse.

My overall rating after finishing is that it was fine. I liked it, didn’t love it. But again, part of that is on me for playing so infrequently. The only truly ‘bad’ thing about the game, for me, was the ending which is really abrupt and is basically just “The End, Thanks For Playing” without any kind of summary or epilogue or something to just help you reflect back on your journey.

Other things I didn’t like were much more subjective. The cold mechanic just felt like busy work (you can eventually craft campfire kits and kindling to alleviate this aspect if you’re willing to put in the time to gather materials to craft them), inventory is crazy limited, and I often had trouble differentiating interactive objects with decorations. This rock I can hit with a pick and get resources, but that rock is just part of the scenery. That kind of thing. Not a huge deal, though.

I played on Game Pass, but Winter Burrow is currently 20% off on Steam ($16.99 USD), and there’s a demo available. I’d say this is an OK price but the full price of $20 feels a little high to me, though maybe I’m just cheap. The developers did add some Solstice content in the same patch where they added the map (the image at the top of the post is of the Solstice Tree that you can craft post-game, thanks to this new content). If they keep on adding bits to it (for free) it’ll make the price more palatable.

Alive and Kicking…

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m at work right now but things are pretty quiet since I expect many people are either on PTO or are acting as if they are. I know I am!

I’m in my new office in the new apartment and it is basically functional. Still lots of organizing to do, but I have both work and gaming PCs set up. As long as I don’t turn around it feels pretty good. Image at the top of the post is what I see when I DO turn around and…yeah, still much to do.

Same holds true for the whole apartment. Boxes everywhere waiting to be unpacked. The kitchen is our first focus point since we’re going broke living on Doordash and Grubhub deliveries. Tonight we expect to cook for the first time.

The move has been an unmitigated disaster. The plan was that PartPurple (Subaru Cross-Trek) and I (Toyota Tacoma double cab with a 4′ bed) would move all ‘the little stuff’ and we’d hire a moving company to move the big stuff. And that’s how it started. Mistake #1 was SEVERELY underestimating how much time it would take us to just pack “the little stuff” (by which we meant kind of anything that wasn’t furniture). The day before the movers arrived we were SO not ready; we busted our butts from 8am to 11pm and did not get CLOSE to finished. That was on Dec 10th and that was when endless exhaustion began.

The next day was moving day, and the movers (Two Guys & a Truck) did an awesome job. They were friendly, professional and efficient and didn’t break a single thing. No complaints at all.

But after they were gone we looked around and it dawned on us how much stuff we still had to go. From the 11th to the 20th we went back and forth as often as we could (her more than me because I did have to work) but it just didn’t even feel like we were making a dent in the pile, and we were just miserable. It’s 2 hours between places so it was get up, drive 2 hours up to the old place, spend a couple hours packing and loading, drive 2 hours back, spend an hour unloading, then get up the next day and do it again.

Last Saturday I hit 12,000 steps on the old Fitbit (typically I do like 3,000) and I was so tired and out-of-breath that the edges of my vision were going dark, and we STILL had so much more to do, and time was running out.

We gave up. We knew it would be expensive but we called the moving company AGAIN to ask them to come back and help us pack up the rest of the stuff and cart it to the new apartment. I didn’t care what it cost (thankfully, since it cost a lot) but I just knew that we were pushing our luck and one of us was either going to get hurt carrying stuff, or fall asleep on the drive there or back and have an accident.

The good news is they’re coming again on the 26th of December and then we’ll have EVERYTHING out. Then we have about 2 weeks to get it clean and ready to turn in the keys. The estimate for this second trip is a whopping $2,500 (which was the same as the first trip) which is a HUGE expensive, but just to show you how defeated and demoralized I was, I’m HAPPY to pay that money. I was in such a dark place I started fantasizing about just driving off into the sunset and never looking back.

Also, I am fully aware that all this pain is self-inflicted. I severely underestimated how much time it takes to pack, and how old and out of shape I am in. Five or six trips up and down the stairs carrying boxes is about my comfort limit and every trip past that is misery. And the amount we were spending on gas was stupid, too. About $40 for my truck and maybe $30 for her car.

I did consider renting a big truck but I just didn’t have the physical bandwidth to load one. Every trip, by the time my truck and her car were both loaded, I was DONE and the idea of single-handedly loading a moving truck was just not feasible. With planning we maybe could’ve done it with one of those PODS moving systems but we’re up against a time limit now.

Money is going to be tight for a while, that’s for sure. I’d hoped to buy a nice new computer desk, our TV needs replacing (the display got damaged, not during the move), and we wanted to get a new couch but that’s all on hold for a while.

But all is not doom and gloom. The new apartment is WONDERFUL compared to our old place. I have my own office and Purple has her own as well. The area we’re in reminds both of us of where we grew up (I grew up in NY, she in Mississippi, but despite that we grew up in very similar areas). There are TONS of houses lit up with Christmas decorations and such. A mix of nice and not-as-nice houses that feel, I dunno, organic? And the not-so-nice places remind me of, frankly, the houses my extended family lived in back home. Old cars being worked on in the yard, out-buildings with junk. Maybe an old boat. Sounds weird but this all feels very comfortable to me.

In one direction things feel very small-townish, and a little distance in the other direction are strip-malls filled with big name chains and stuff. And then not much farther is Wilmington, NC. Not that I’ve explored much, but I’m looking forward to doing so.

Anyway, moving lessons learned (we’d been in the old place for 13 years so were definitely out of moving practice) and a huge wad of cash gone, but I’ve been feeling SO much better now that I know the professionals are going to have our backs.

Purple is going back up on Christmas to have dinner with some friends so I’ll be alone for Christmas, but that also means she’ll be there for the movers when they arrive Friday morning (I have to work Friday so had to skip the Christmas gathering). We didn’t bother with presents or anything; the move is our present to each other. And I guess I’ll spend Christmas Day playing video games and eating a TV dinner or something.

Hope your holidays are more festive than mine, but it’ll all be worth it once we’re past this process.

November 2025

Posted on by Nimgimli

Been crazy here this month, and next month will be just as crazy. I really thought that spreading out this move over a couple months would make it easier and in a lot of ways it does, but it means instead of one absolutely crazy moving-week we’re experiencing weeks and weeks of moderate craziness. But things are coming along and we’re pretty excited about the new place. We’ve made two trips there so far. The first was brutal, the second much easier which was interesting because I think my body is actually just growing stronger that quickly. Or more flexible anyway. Whatever the reason, hauling boxes of books up and down stairs didn’t take nearly as much out of me during the second trip.

Somehow I’m still sneaking in a fair amount of gaming, but I’m going to rip through all this pretty quick cuz…. boxes need to be packed!

Playing

Wuthering Waves: Shelved for now. I did a couple of months of the subscription thing (where you get premium currency every day) and the paid version of the battle pass thingie. Made good use of both of those but, as is VERY typical for me, they also made the game feel a bit like a chore. When I started playing a swore to myself I’d just play for the main story line but alas, that was dropped in favor of logging in every day and doing all the things that give you battle pass progress and stuff. I did get in something like 150 hours before burnout hit though so… not a bad run.

My Time At Sandrock: I started this a year or so ago right after finishing My Time At Portia but soon realized I needed a break between two titles that are so similar. Glad I did because I am HOOKED on Sandrock now. If you’ve never played a “My Time At…” game they’re a lot like a Harvest Moon or Stardew valley, except in 3D and they take place in a post-apocalyptic world. But a pretty, mostly friendly, post-apocalyptic world. The tension is between two factions, one that shuns technology since it ruined the old world, and one that wants to rediscover technology to make the current situation better. You kind of straddle that line and mostly spend your time harvesting, building, farming, mining, fighting and trying to befriend the natives. It’s pretty casual and stress-free in site of all that stuff you have to juggle. One setting that I can’t remember if Portia had is the option to slow down time so each day goes by more slowly. I turned that down so I could just putter around without a lot of time management stress.

Ball X Pit: I wrote a post about this… still playing!

Winter Burrow: Wrote a post about this too. Also still playing. This one has turned out to be a bit harder than I thought it was going to be due to the lack of a map and the ‘cold’ mechanic that means you have to be careful of how far you wander from home. Also your inventory is pretty small. It’s cute as heck but that doesn’t mean it’s super easy, as it turns out. Or maybe I’m doing something wrong which is always possible.

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Octopath Traveler: Picked this up on sale and I’m playing it on the Steam Deck in the evenings when we’re at the new place. Very early days and everyone interested in this game is familiar with it, so just sticking a flag in the sand to say I’m playing.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage: This game follows Bassim who was in AC Valhalla and I did NOT like him in that game so I had no plans to play Mirage. But then it hit Game Pass so I figured “What the heck.” I’ve barely gotten started on it, though.

That’s too many games to be juggling, isn’t it? Sandrock is by far the title I spent the most time on this month.

Watching

Nobody Wants This S2: This is the Kristen Bell sitcom about her dating a rabbi and all the trouble that causes because she is not Jewish. Loved S1, loved S2. Can’t wait for a Season 3 which I assume is coming.

Talamasca: This is set in Anne Rice’s vampire mythos. It was a PartPurple pick. The Talamasca is a shadow organization that keeps tabs on supernatural goings-on and in this show a new recruit is sent in to spy on an ancient vampire. It was actually pretty good, but I’ll never admit that to Purple.

The Witcher S4: I didn’t really miss Henry Cavill so much, though PartPurple did. We’re in the part of the story where a lot of the emphasis is on Ciri anyway. I enjoyed it but it is VERY similar to what I remember reading in the books. Almost too much so since I know what was going to happen next every step of the way.

Tales from Woodcreek: This is a D&D Campaign hosted by Deborah Ann Woll on YouTube. This is the 2nd time we’ve watched one of her campaigns (the other being Relics and Rarities, also on YouTube) and we really enjoy them for a few reasons. First, each episode is a manageable length: about an hour. Second, she brings in guest players, often ones who’ve never played D&D before, and generally her guests are actors. It’s fun watching the regulars help the newbies and being actors, the newbies tend to really get into their characters. Third, her campaigns tend to be really interactive with props and such. In this one she actually leads the party to new physical locations to set the scenes and such. Now I do not play D&D so I can’t speak to how authentic this all is, but it’s really fun to watch.

Reading

The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories — A collection of Isaac Asimov’s short stories, mostly written in the 1970s. Lots of robots. Lots of concerns about AI that seem pretty similar to the concerns we have today, for reals.

microserfs (Douglas Coupland) — A novel in the form of a journal. The narrator is a 20-something Microsoft employee and super-nerd, living in the 1990s when working 100 hour weeks was considered slacking. He and his colleagues decided to leave and start a company making a Lego-like videogame called Oop. (Oop, as described, seems a little bit like Roblox, though the game isn’t the focus of the story.) I really enjoyed this though it is hard to quantify why. In the end there isn’t much story there; it’d be like, well, reading the journal of any mostly ordinary person. I lived through this era so there was a lot of nostalgia for me. The team going to visit 3DO HQ, or going to CES and seeing the Ninteno VirtuaBoy. I was at that CES so, y’know, maybe brushed shoulders with these ficticious characters. It came out in 1995 but looks like it was re-issued at some point [Amazon link]. If you enjoy ‘nerd culture’ you might enjoy it. [I found this while purging to move and intead of sending it to the donation bin I held onto it to read.]

Old science fiction and fantasy magazines: I found a cache of these in the back of a closet. Most of them are from the 1990’s which means I’ve lugged them through 3 or 4 moves. Now I’m finally reading them and they’re pretty fun since in a lot of cases their “future” is our present and boy did they get a lot wrong (and some stuff right).

It’s strange to be reading physical magazines again! Remember “Continued on page 104…” WHAT? Why do I have to jump around you crazy editors!

OK, back to moving and by the time the December recap rolls around we should be (more or less) settled in our new dig! Happy Holidays!