More Neverness to Everness Musings

Posted on by Nimgimli

I wrote a long screed (lately all I do is screeds…I’ve been blocked from SO many comment sections…probably) on a recent Neverness to Everness post at Inventory Full. I only stopped scribbling because I remembered I was in someone else’s comment section and maybe I shouldn’t post a COMPLETE wall ‘o text.

I stopped but now I’ve been carrying around these residual NTE thoughts and I need to get ’em out. I’m gonna go ultra-cheese and copy/paste my comment then go on from there. Here’s the comment:

Old Comment

* * *
I still struggle! The UI on console was getting a lot better but this week’s patch seemed to bring back some older nuisance bugs. Hopefully they get smoothed out again.

But what is with this mysterious texter that spams you every day? Hate that person!

And Sakiri is a psychopath. I was doing a quest and was forced to take her along and we met this dude, one of a pair of twins, and she tried to get her monster to eat the poor guy. I’d happily throw Sakiri in a volcano.

I DID get Hokori using the dice I’d been hoarding, so that was awesome. Love her. Love the main character, too. Most of the adults I really like (maybe not Adler) but all these kids… they’re all like fingernails on a chalkboard.

I was doing the quest where you’re at an auction trying to buy an anomoly and the kids from the Courier Service were there. I finally get away from one set of kids and now I’m dealing with another (though they’re not as grating as the Eibon kids who’re just awful to everyone, including each other.) Edgar is slowly growing on me a little just because I feel bad for the poor kid; the girls just savage him constantly.

Edgar is the one kid in the game that I don’t find too annoying

I’m trying to figure out how to unlock stuff I keep reading about, like racing, delivering, real estate. I just never get very far. Many days I don’t even get the award for fighting 5 enemies because I spend all my time on txting with this scammer who pings me every day.

I’m not giving up, though! Why? Because like you I LOVE the city. I love seeing a busker in a plaza and folks are watching and dancing and such… driving my little scooter around at 40 kph cause that’s as fast as it goes. I think I can run ALMOST that fast if I sprint.

I’ve completely forgotten how to fight since I do it so rarely; I’ll have to redo the tutorials if I ever start seeing combat frequently again.

I don’t know what kind of feedback Hotta is getting but I hope future content skews away from all the annoying kids. But maybe I’m just a curmudgeon and most people like them.

* * *

Hathor is one of the Sterry crew but I ‘pulled’ her early and I love her aesthetic.. tough gal biker angel or something

New Stuff

Since then I’ve pressed on. I realized I was completely ignoring the “Industry” icon on my in-game phone screen. I opened it up and was told to do a race. Went to do the race and someone politely pointed out that I didn’t own a car. I’d been to this point once before and my gamer brain assumed I would be tutorial-led to where I could obtain a car at some point. This time I just opened the map and found *gasp!* a car dealership. So I went and bought the cheapest car I could and did some races.

It was tough timing for NTE since I was doing this the same day Forza Horizon 6 (or is it 5?) came out, but in spite of that I found racing around the city to be pretty entertaining, and now I had the Industry bug. I’ve now bought a Cafe but am just learning how to run it.

I also started paying attention to Events and stumbled into some that were WAY too difficult for me, which I honestly appreciated because the game has been really easy up until now. I don’t want a Souls-like experience but I guess I at least want a reason to make my characters more powerful.

I’ve completed as much of the main story quest as I can for now; I have to raise my “Hunter Level” (which seems to basically be your account level) before I can continue. I didn’t mind this, though, since it somehow gave me the OK to just putz around and do whatever.

This has improved my enjoyment of the game quite a bit. I stay as far away from the annoying kids as I can while heading to different points of interest. Next up, fishing!

Also the mad texter that I mentioned in the comments has stopped for now, which I appreciated. I really wanted to Block that person.

Not to say there isn’t more work for Hotta to do. There’s still some UI oddities, I still have bugged quests I can’t finish (and as far as I can tell, I can’t abandon/restart them either) and haven’t been able to finish since the first week. Like the one involving Miss Patty:

NTE main character talking to "Miss Patty" at a playground
This quest having to do with Miss Patty has been broken for me since I first attemped it during the first week. I’m supposed to repair a stuffed animal but the game tells me it isn’t in need of repair even though it is clearly shredded, and the Internet has confirmed I’m supposed to fix it.

I guess in a lot of ways NTE just throws too much at me at once, considering often enough my play sessions are like 30 minutes a day. By the time I attend to everything that has the red exclamation point that indicates “something new to check!” I’m out of time. I’m guessing this will ease as I get farther in and I run out of new tutorials and such, plus just get into an efficient routine of all the daily tasks.

Anyway, since I have been warming to the game, and my first post about Neverness to Everness was pretty ‘meh’, I wanted to do an update. I paid for the $5 daily login ‘subscription’ (using $$ I earned by filling out random Google surveys) which has me logging in every day to collect the goodies, and that’s worked well to keep me semi-engaged and get me through.

Mixtape

Posted on by Nimgimli

Mixtape is about 3 kids getting out of high school and facing the fact that life is going to now pull them in different directions. It takes place in the mid-90s. I myself graduated high school in 1979, but Mixtape still hit me hard with the nostalgia feels. I guess high school never really changed, at least not until cell phones were invented. These three were up to the same trouble I was back in the day. Skateboarding around town, getting high, trying to get booze, and hitting up secret parties, the location of which passed by word of mouth.

The comparison I keep coming back to is American Graffitti. Same mix of laughs and melancholy for times lost.

I absolutely ADORED Mixtape. The main character is Stacey Rockford, a girl whose superpower is finding the right song for any occasion. The soundtrack is a big part of Mixtape (probably not a surprise given the name) though I have to confess a lot of the music I’d not heard before even though it was from the 60s, 70s and 80s. Lots of b-sides and such. Stacey announces each song, breaking the 4th wall, as it starts to play. Her two friends are Van Slater, the tall skinny beanie wearing kid who says “cha!” for yes unironically. But he has a weirdly philsophical side. The third member of the party is Cassandra. Her dad is a cop and her parents are super strict, so when she got old enough to rebel, she deliberately sought out Rockford and Slater to hang out with them.

I loved all three of these characters. Y’know when you consume a piece of media and you can kind of ‘map’ the characters onto real life people you’ve known? That was what happened with me and the Mixtape trio.

Stacey on the left, Cas on the right.

Before I go too much farther I should warn you that Mixtape isn’t much of a game. I guess it’s more ‘visual novel’ than anything (I’m not sure I exactly know what a visual novel is). There are interactive sequences that you can zip through or hang out and enjoy, but there are no fail states or branches in the narrative. I finished in in under 4 hours. I didn’t mind because it told the whole story it has set out to tell, and didn’t pad things out.

So what you have is a 4 hour experience with great music, a great story, great voice acting, an interesting art style and honestly I can’t find a single nit to pick. Game of the Year for me, so far. 5 out of 5 stars. A masterpiece. I laughed, I cried, I cringed, I nodded along in agreement. I was completely, totally lost in this world. I have not been so impacted by a game or a movie or a book in a long, long time.

Will you like it? I’m not sure. I wonder how younger kids who grew up with cell phones and play dates will react to it, as it takes place in a very different time where sneaking out of the house was a thing and kids had secret hideouts they’d go to in order to party. We used to break into a local school to skateboard through the halls, just for the hell of it. These kids skateboard through a mall that is being built. We had that one place you could hang out in front of to get someone to buy us beer. These kids have the same kind of place. It all felt wonderfully familiar to me and got me thinking a lot of old friends, some of whom are no longer with us.

Anyway…yeah, I loved Mixtape. I JUST finished it and now I think I need to go sit with my thoughts about it.

There are some fantasy segments that may or may not be alluding to the fact that the kids are high. In this one they’re flying/tumbling instead of running

Mixtape is out on pretty much every platform for around $20. It’s also on Game Pass where it is a ‘Play Anywhere’ title. I played about half of it on PC and half on the Xbox. I recommend wearing headphones, and when you boot the game on PC you’re told it plays best with a controller.

Neverness to Everness is Dissapointing Me

Posted on by Nimgimli

I had REALLY been looking forward to the launch of the new urban fantasy gacha game Neverness to Everness. It had been the game I was waiting for and I’d anticipated falling down, down, down an NTE rabbit hole until summertime or beyond.

I’m sad to report that this hasn’t happened. I really really WANT to love the game the way Bhagpuss is loving it, but some things can’t be forced.

My dissapointment can be sorted into two buckets.

Bucket #1 is a lack of polish, at least on the Playstation 5 version. Mostly we’re talking Quality of Life things. There are a lot of places in the UI where you have to drill down a few levels to get to the task you want to work on, but then backing up takes you all the way out of the UI and you have to drill back down again to pick the next option on a list. Doesn’t sound like much but it just adds a certain amount of friction and frustration to getting things done. Then there are the voiced dialog segments where you can’t skip forward as quickly as I’d like to. For whatever reason when a character starts talking, but I’ve already read the text on the screen, hitting the “next” button doesn’t do anything immediately. Eventually it does, but I like to advance at the speed I’m reading and it is all much slower than this. Sometimes even after the character has finished their line, I STILL can’t proceed unless I wait for 10 seconds or so. More frustration. Lastly I’ve encountered some bugs that make certain quests uncompleteable, but maybe that’s just me being unlucky.

I’m guessing all of the above will get cleared up as updates roll out and rough surfaces get smoothed down.

The second bucket, though, I don’t have as much hope for. This is the content. I expected something like an anime-themed Grand Theft Auto that had my character and their friends going on adventures and getting into trouble. Instead I got what feels like a babysitting simulation. My character is a young adult; let’s say late teens-early 20s, based on appearance. But they’re surrounded by children who behave like annoying shogun anime children. They tend to be tropes. The shy young boy who is really smart, the way over-excited young woman. The mysterious but child-like character that can’t stay awake and talks like she is an infant. Others who fixate on getting desserts constantly. They’re all pretty annoying.

But the worst… the absolute WORST, is this character Taygedo who is an otter with a tv for a head who says one thing over and over again but somehow everyone understands him, and he just… ugh, just thinking about him is irritating me, and he seems to be a main character, at least in the early game. He says something like “Togee-dogee” over and over again while being manic. That’s him at the top of this post. He needs to go away.

Now let me be very very clear… bucket #2 problems are very personal and highly subjective. You might find all these characters to be just delightful. A lot of people, I’m told, actually LIKE kids. Can you believe that? I don’t understand it but let people like the things they like, right? 🙂

It’s not all bad. I love the style of the game, and the music is pretty good. I like the main character just fine; I took the female MC and she is voiced really well and isn’t the least bit annoying. The city itself is fun to wander around in. It feels very ‘alive’ as you overhear conversations going on around you.

I’m not giving up. I’m hoping that as I get deeper into the story I’ll meet more adults and have to spend less time with Taygedo and the children. If you thought Paimon in Genshin Impact was annoying, let’s just say you ain’t seen anything yet!

Backlogs (If You Care)

Posted on by Nimgimli

A LOT of us have medium to huge gaming backlogs. Most of us are unconcerned with this. We like games, we buy games, but we have limited time to play games so the backlog builds. No big deal. I acknowledge that backlogs are a silly thing to stress over.

And yet, at times I do stress over them. If you don’t, just appreciate that your brain is more reasonable than mine is and take it as a win.

Why do I stress? I’m not even sure. There’s a little bit of “I paid for this and it is wasteful not to then consume it” but honestly a lot of my backlog comes from bundles or super sales or even giveaways. The actual cost of most of my backlog is fairly low. I think it is more “What am I missing out on by not experiencing this game?” At the end of the day, WHY I stress about it isn’t the point of this post.

The point is I learned a couple of interesting tips for combatting your backlog yesterday and I wanted to share. These come from a YouTube video that the algorithm fed me, but like most YouTube videos it is way longer than it needs to be. So here are the ideas that resonated with me.

The author of the video first talks about the mental cost of making choices. We make choices all day long, particularly on work days. By the time you’re ready to play a game, your brain is just exhausted from making choices (so the argument goes) which is why you end up staring at your collection but never actually playing anything.

So the first suggestion is to limit your choice. Pick 3 games in a variety of genres and ignore everything else. For digital games that author suggests finding some kind of physical token to represent the three games, and leave these in a basket by your gaming rig. Now when it is time to play, you still have to make a choice but choosing between 3 games is a lot easier than choosing between 300 games.

Now that you’ve picked a game, put your phone away on the other side of the room, to limit distractions. Personally this didn’t really resonate with me as I don’t find my phone all that distracting, but I get the idea. The idea is to agree with yourself that you’re going to focus on this game for a set amount of time. The author suggests 2 hours but that seems like a LOT of time to spend gaming every night. So you’ll have to pick a duration that works for you.

But here was the (in hindsight, obvious) suggestion that really resonated with me. In your basket with the game tokens (or actual games if your a physical media person) you keep a small notebook. When you’re done playing for the night, make a brief note on what you did and what your next planned task is. The idea is that the next time you play, you can refer to your notebook and refresh your memory and not spend the first 15 minutes of your session trying to remember where you were and what you were doing. This is the suggestion that I’m going to really embrace because even if I play the same game every day I can manage to forget what I was doing from one day to the next.

The one gap in this system is that it doesn’t account for “forever” games. The author of the video is a retro player and his games come from before the time of live service games.

I’m still trying to figure out how to decide when I am “done” with a live service game. In theory it might be “when I finish the MSQ” but I play so slowly that I rarely catch up; new content comes out faster than I can consume it. I don’t play competitive games but those would be even more of a challenge to quantify as being “completed.”

So this is still a work in progress, but I liked the idea of a physical representation of a couple of games, and a notebook to get you back into the fun ASAP when you pick the game up next time.

This might help until I manage to convince my brain that there’s not a thing wrong with having a backlog and there’s no reason to stress over it. These are games, brain, let me just have fun with them!

Coral Island Progress Report

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’ve been on quite the journey with my Coral Island playthrough and it has somehow become my main game recently.

Early days was just your typical farming sim loop. You know the one. Clear land, prepare the land, plant the seeds, water the seeds, look up in bewilderment at the fact that evening was drawing near. Those early in-game days are always a little frantic as you race to get everything done before you run out of hours in the day, stamina, or both.

Phase two was when cash started becoming the limiting factor. That’s when I got serious and set up a spreadsheet to try to track which crops and ‘artisan goods’ (aka crafted items) were most profitable. At the end of every in-game day I’d pop open my laptop and transcribe all the figures in. This was kind of fun and interesting…until it wasn’t.

Screenshot of one of my Coral Island Spreadsheet tabs
Sometimes I pretend I’m good at money management

As is typical in these games, you get better at everything. You get new tools to automate chores (sprinklers to do your watering, feeders to keep the livestock fed, improvements to your tools so manual labor goes faster and eats less stamina). That gives you more time to explore, which is about when I learned there’s a second map and it’s all underwater. I spent a LOT of time cleaning the sea floor around Coral Island. This was honestly tedious but in a zen kind of way.

There are also a series of mines that need to be explored. These had monsters in them, though so far the combat has been ridiculously easy. But you have to find a hole to go down to the next level, and that hole is randomly placed under a rock, which has to be busted up via pickaxe. You can only ‘save’ your progress every 5 levels (except for the final stretch which is 10 levels) so you need a lot of time and stamina to make sure you get to the next “elevator stop” in the mines. You might find the next shaft down on the first rock you break, or it might be under the LAST rock in a level, so you never know how long it’ll take. I generally did these on rainy days when I didn’t have to spend time/energy watering.

Eventually the money situation got better and now I’ve got what I think are the biggest sprinklers. Here’s the layout I’m in the process of putting together:

A screenshot from Coral Island showing the character standing in his farm
I have the sprinklers in the middle of these plots, with scarecrows between them, overlapping to provide full coverage. Hopefully this will work well when the next season begins.

My next investment is a dohickey that attaches to the sprinklers and automatically fertilizes, plants seeds and harvests crops. That should more or less automate the farm, though the animals and artisan goods will still require me doing things.

I was thinking I was hitting end game and then I got an invitation to start a second farm…. underwater! What!!!? I was warned not to start this until I had my land farm squared away, so I’ve yet to discover how involved this part of the game is.

In the meantime I’ve finally started socializing with the townsfolks. Generally this isn’t my favorite part of these games, but here it is pretty good. First, there are events where you are basically just an observer and the event happens between NPCs which makes the town feel more ‘real’ to me. I’m an NOT the sole focus of attention for everything that happens here. The “hangouts” are easy. In the “My Time At…” series hangouts required you to drag your friend/date all over the place and play minigames which for me got pretty tedious pretty quick. Here you ask someome to hang out, pick an activity from the map, and then it just happens in a little ‘montage’ of you and the NPC having fun and chatting. So it is simpler in gameplay terms, but more rich in ‘story’. Right in my wheelhouse.

I’m only in the Spring of Year 2 but I’m over 50 hours of playtime (the game starts in Spring). I manage about 2 in-game days per evening of gaming time, so I could be here for a while yet. But it is really hitting that sweet spot of pretty chill gameplay, characters that are reasonably interesting, and progression that so far has felt satisfying. I picked up Coral Island on a whim after finishing My Time At Sandrock just because it was offered via the PS+ subscription, but it’s been one of those very happy gaming accidents. It was a little slow and ‘same-y’ at the start but if you stick with it through the first season or so the unique aspects start to emerge. In my opinion, it was worth the wait (and even the same-y bits were as fun as they always are, to me, when starting these games. I take a weird joy in clearing fields and stuff). I’m liking it enough that I’ve put it on my Steam wishlist to snag on sale so I can replay it at some point on PC.

March 2026

Posted on by Nimgimli

I hate it when the 1st falls in the middle of a busy week. Makes it hard to find time to do a proper recap, though once again I don’t have much to recap.

Playing

A screenshot from Coral Island showing the male main character talking to what appears to be an angler fish
This guy doesn’t look happy, but he did just give me a gift for freeing him from a cage

Coral Island — This is where I spent most of my time this month. After finishing My Time At Sandrock I apparently wasn’t done with (mostly) cozy farming sims and I rolled right into CI. I’m in my first Winter now (which is a little boring to be honest) and at about 35 hours. It is even more “Stardew Valley”-ish than Sandrock was, though again it is ‘3d’ rather than sprite-based. The characters look older too, which I prefer. I mean there are kids, young folk, old folk. Married folk, single folk. There’s a lot of stuff to acquire and upgrade, and of course people to meet and befriend and possibly marry, bed and have kids with. [Personally I keep busy enough petting my chickens, sheep and cows every day… can’t imagine adding a kid into the mix!] Apparently there’s an update coming that lets kids grow up and I hope you can assign them chores once they do. Also, there’s a whole underwater section of the game which is kind of neat. Anyway, good game so far. On console movement can be a little fiddly when it comes time to interact with things; that’s really my only complaint and it’s pretty minor.

A screenshot from Coral Island showing the male main character standing in his mostly barren winter farm
Not a lot to do on the farm in winter. Eventually you can unlock a greenhouse and a few hardy plants that’ll grow outside, but this first winter I don’t have access to any of that.

A Game About Digging a Hole — Novelty game, really. You dig a hole in the backyard of your picturesque cottage, you find ore. You sell the ore (from a terminal in your garage) and upgrade your tools. You dig deeper. Repeat for a couple hours. It’s a $5 game and while it has good reviews on Steam, it’s kind of hard to take them too seriously. That said… I finished it (more or less) so I guess there was SOMETHING there…

Prey — I pledged to not look up how to accomplish things in Prey and so far I’m sticking to that. However there are days when I really want to get in there and search for solutions, and days where I don’t. So progress has been slow, both in terms of the hours I put into the game, and in terms of how far I’ve gotten in it. Work has been a lot and honestly by the time I flounce down on the couch the soothing rhythms of Coral Island calls to me more than problem solving.

Eternal Strands — This is still a back burner game that I pull out now and then. Ever have a game that you always enjoy playing but then forget about for days or weeks at a time? That’s Eternal Strands for me. It’s a great game. Mostly a combat game using melee, bows and magic. The world has a lot of destructibility which is fun, and there are some really huge enemies to fight: enemies so big you have to climb up them to beat them. So what’s the problem? I don’t want to get in trouble for saying this but I feel like they’ve leaned so hard into having the characters be inclusive and understanding of each other that there’re no hard edges to be seen and it all feels a little monotone, if that makes sense. I like to have a little spice in my games. A little tension. A little roughness. But this is just so smooth that it’s like I have nothing to grab onto. [I’m speaking in narrative terms, not the actual gameplay.] Still, I WOULD definitely recommend the game!

Watching

This was a good month for TV!

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms [HBO] was amazing! I’d read the first book (not sure if there are more than one) but PartPurple went in blind, and we both really enjoyed it. The only fault I can find is that it was too short. Just 6 episodes and some of them were only 30 minutes or so. I signed up to HBO Max for $18 just to watch this show and it was SO good that I think it was worth it. It takes place in the world of A Game of Thrones only before all the happenings in that show, and the scale of it is much smaller. It’s about a hedge knight and his squire trying to catch a break in a tough world. Unlike Thrones its a much ‘nicer’ show in a lot of ways.

Pluribus [Apple TV+] was great. Imagine a zombie apocalypse only instead of everyone being turned into zombies they’re turned into a really, really nice hive mind. This happened to all but about 12 people in the world, and the show focuses on one of these people. The “others” just want to make her happy and they are driving her crazy. It’s a hard show to describe but well worth a watch.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters [Apple TV+] is really fun it you’re into kaiju movies and particularly if you’ve enjoyed more recent Godzilla and King Kong films, as this show ties into those. It also stars Kurt and Wyatt Russel as the same character a few generations apart, which is really fun (Wyatt is Kurt’s son and that apple did not fall far from the tree). We bounce back and forth between the 50s and 2015. Before you watch, go watch the 2014 Godzilla movie as this takes place very soon after that one (at least the 2015 parts do).

Shrinking [Apple TV+] stars Jason Segal as a therapist who is really struggling after the death of his wife. In spite of that, it’s a heart warming, kind of raunchy, often funny show. And it has Harrison Ford in it! What more do you need to know? The cast seems to have great chemistry and every pair of characters has its own strange vibe and I just love every character in this show. As long as raunchy language doesn’t bother you, this one is worth watching.

Reading

Still working through 1990 issues of Aboriginal Science Fiction. Fun stuff!

And now I shall go and do my best to avoid all the April Fool’s pranks. Not to be a party pooper but I’m glad those seem to have settled down a bit in the past few years. Maybe the truth we’re living in is so strange that no one has much of a taste for pranks.

Preying to Git Gud

Posted on by Nimgimli

As I mentioned at the tail end of my last post, I’d been stuck in Prey trying to get into Dr Calvino’s Lab. I was determined not to look up a solution to this problem.

Then, in a sign that the universe has a sense of humor, when I fired the game up just to take some screenshots, not really to play it, I found Dr. C’s keycard. I was excited to see what was in the lab but couldn’t REALLY play at that moment because it was during my work day. (Shhhh)

Today I went back, explored his office and honestly, there wasn’t a lot there, other than access to some servers that needed to be rebooted. I did that and was told by the mysterious benefactor who’d been feeding me breadcrumbs that I had to get back to my office to finish watching a video.

OK, easy enough except, nope. During my time in the lab a bunch more scary enemies had spawned. Meanwhile I was at 20% health with no medkits and hardly any ammo, though I had a few EMP Grenades. Those, at least, would work on the berserk robots I had to get past. Hit ’em with an EMP grenade then while they’re stunned bash them apart with my trusty wrench. Except even that didn’t go as planned because once when I was bashing a bad robot, it sparked and caused an explosion that killed me. Fortunately I’ve been obsessively Quick Saving. EVERYTHING in this game can kill me. I’ve died at least half a dozen times from getting too close to a sparking wire!

It took a lot of tries but I snuck past the other enemies by climbing up into the rafters. These creatures haven’t learned to look up yet, I guess. I did have to bust my office window and climb in, but I finally saw the video that was so important for me to watch.

Speaking of videos (this is NOT the video I had to watch):

I snagged a video of Mimics being Mimics, but between the game being pretty dark to begin with, and HDR sticking its fingers in, it came out really dark. This version is brightened as much as ClipChamp will brighten things but my apologies as it is still really dark.

[spoiler territory incoming]

The video was from… me (by which I mean, the character I am playing as). The Neuromods (what I was calling geegaws last post) give you spiffy new skills but when you remove them, it ‘resets’ your memory back to what it was back when the neuromod was installed. That is what had happened to me and I guess I’d had them in for a long time (turns out I work on the station). What I learned was that these enemies, best I can figure, were created by us, presumably by accident. My ‘old self’ told me via the video that they are ‘a part of me now’ and that I had to destroy the space station (Talos it is called) with me in it, because we can’t risk letting “even a single cell” get to earth.

Great, a suicide mission. Then I met the mysterious voice that has been guiding me, and it was basically a 3rd version of me, this one in the brain of a robot. It is going to help me get the two arming keys to blow up the station. Fun stuff. Can’t wait.

While exploring I found a kind of museum that sketched out the timeline of this alternate world. In this world JFK was not assassinated and the US and Russia were working together in the space race, at least initially. This led to an alternate timeline when technology advanced faster than it did in our world where, y’know, we decided science wasn’t very useful. The details are already fuzzy but it is sometime after 2030 in Prey. The station was decommissioned, then bought by a private company who has been using it for scientific research. Oh and the apartment that you wake up in at the start of the game? All a simulation, as was the spaceship ride to the it. We’ve been up here all along, oblivious.

So that’s the story so far. Lots of stuff that can and does kill me. Not many resources or skills. Still kind of lost and confused.

I did find a blueprint for manufacturing Medkits as well as bullets, so that should help, though I clearly need better weapons to fight these ‘Phantoms’, which is what the bigger bipedal baddies are called. They can 1 shot me and seem able to teleport. I can empty a clip into them and it seems to just make them angrier. I mostly run away from them for now.

I got killed (again…I’ve died dozens of times already) trying to get out of my office safely and it was almost dinner time so I stopped for now. Looking forward to my next session!

Prey That I Can Break Into This Lab

Posted on by Nimgimli

Always one to keep my finger on the pulse of gaming, I recently started playing 2017’s Prey [See? Now the ‘typo’ in the title makes sense, right?]. As opposed to 2006’s Prey, which as far as I can tell is completely unrelated to this game. I played a little bit of that one too, back in the day, but I don’t remember much about it other than it made me motion sick.

In THIS Prey you are on a space station overrun with what I assume are aliens or maybe it is some life form that was created in a lab? Too soon to know for sure. But the ‘trash mob’ of the game is the Mimic. This is a little tentacled thing that can disguise itself as anything in the game. You’re walking past a chair and suddenly it turns into a critter that attacks. This has made me SO paranoid that sometimes I go into a room and just do a melee attack on EVERYTHING to be sure nothing is a Mimic.

I’ll admit right away, I’m confused when I’m playing Prey. I’m sort of not sure what I’m supposed to be doing yet. I don’t really know who I am. I have some general goals that game has given me, but no real indication of what I should do first. There are also areas basically locked behind a skill system. You collect these geegaws that let you upgrade your skills. For example you find a broken door and it requires Repair 2 in order to fix it, but you only have Repair 1. So you make a mental note to come back here when you have managed to upgrade that skill.

Let’s just say at this point I have a LOT of these mental notes. I’m assuming Prey is one of those games where you’ll be retracing your steps a lot.

Screenshot showing a "Breach Failsafe" device that is broken
I’ll have to remember to come back here when I have a better Repair skill

One of the first tasks I got was to get into a doctor’s lab. I can’t get into this dude’s lab. I have been all around it, found secrets and passages to other rooms, but thus far I cannot get in. I even found the doctor himself — dead unfortunately for him — but the keycard to his lab door wasn’t on his corpse. I’ve gotten into at least one locked room by crashing through the ceiling but so far haven’t found a way to do the same with this lab, though I haven’t ruled it out yet.

Normally, this is where I’d go online and look up how to get into this lab. But I’m not going to do that, yet. Lately I’ve been on a bit of a kick where I’m trying to play games like in the old pre-Internet days. No instant solutions via search engines. Not yet anyway. There’re other places to go in this space station and maybe if I explore them I’ll find enough geegaws to level up my skills to get past some of the obstacles blocking my way.

A screenshot of a corpse in a white lab coat floating in space
I don’t think Doctor C is going to be of much help…

I learned a little bit of a trick to help me stick to my guns on the ‘no lookups’ thing, and that is to play short sessions. Once I start feeling the frustration of not making progress, I just save the game and go play something else. This might mean it takes me a LONG time to finish Prey, but it’s about the journey, right? I’m having scary fun exploring this world (I’ve met bigger enemies than the Mimic and they KICK MY BEHIND), wishing I could find MedKits, and scavenging everything in sight to break down into components for crafting. Prey is the game that reminded me I have a headset for the Xbox; since we moved I hadn’t dug it out. But the Mimics make a skittering noise and the better directional audio in the headphones helps me figure out where the noise is coming from. Anyway I put those on, turn the lights down low. and creep around this station, freaking out about Mimics, trying to explore, hiding from the big bads. It’s just the right amount of frightening. Like a tingle rather than anxiety and dread. (I don’t normally indulge in horror media, be it games or movies. I’m a big chicken!) I managed to do a spacewalk and that was crazy fun.

Not a surprise that I’m having fun, really. Over on Steam Prey has a “Very Positive” score with over 21,000 reviews (and it’s on sale for $5.99 during the Spring Sale) so it’s not like some dark horse game I just ‘discovered.’

But y’know, sometimes you just want to write a blog post about a game you’re enjoying even though it’s some old-ass game that everyone else has already played.

[BREAKING NEWS!] So while writing this post I fired up the game to take some screenshots, including the one of Dr Corvino’s corpse. And what did I notice floating in space a little ways away from him? Yup, his Lab Keycard! Woohoo! Who needs the Internet!!?

Partial screenshot showing that I found the keycard
The trick, I guess, is to not actually be looking for the thing you’re looking for….

The Weird Relief of Getting Older

Posted on by Nimgimli

My brain has been coming to grips with some odd things lately. For most of my professional life my mindset has been: what’s the next thing I really should learn in order to improve myself, and when I say improve myself I generally mean “make myself more marketable for the job market.” Y’know, I need to learn another programming language, or get good using some tool or something. Lately I’ve started wondering if maybe I don’t actually need to keep doing that.

I make lots of plans but never get around to executing them. By the time my work day is done I just want to chill and relax. Watch TV, play a video game. Have a beer. Nothing the least bit productive in any of that.

For years I’ve carried around low-grade guilt that I’m not working harder to make more money so that I have more security. I’m not talking “buy a new yacht” money. I’m talking “not being one disaster away from being broke”.

Everywhere you go online you’re bombarded (or at least I am) with offers to teach me how to code better, how to learn AI, how to improve this, that and the other thing. Get smarter, get more marketable, make more money, work more!

Recently, though, I’ve started coming to terms with some truths. I am 65 years old. Almost 66. Every day the news is full of people younger than me who have died recently from one disease or another. I could be gone tomorrow and it’s probably like a 50-50 chance I’ll still be here in 10 years. And I very much doubt I’ll still be working in 10 years, at least not in my current job. Maybe I’ll be one of those old folks stocking the shelves at Walmart or something, but I doubt I’ll be a 75 year old web developer.

This is just reality, not trying to sound like I’m throwing a pity party for myself!

But here’s the good news that comes with that. I’m getting close to being done. I don’t NEED to continue to improve my skills all that much. If I WANT to, I certainly can and will. But I can let go of “I should” completely and not feel guilt around that. If I want to spend my free time gaming, or hell, napping, why not? I don’t have kids that I’m ignoring. Don’t even have a pet. PartPurple is always busy doing her stuff and I’m pretty sure she is far from feeling ignored. We both work from home so we’re both in each others business all day most days.

This wasn’t a lightning bolt of a realization. It’s something I’m still orbiting, getting closer and closer to really accepting that when I’m not working I don’t really have to be doing anything I don’t want to do [setting aside, y’know, personal grooming, keeping the apt clean, paying bills… basic adulting].

Let me tell you, it’s a weird feeling and a very ‘light’ feeling. All this self-imposed stress and guilt is slowly, slowly melting away.

So I guess there is a silver lining to getting old, after all.

I’m curious though — has anyone else felt something like this? Either the pressure to improve or better yet, the relief of accepting that you are enough as you are.

[A note on the AI used in this post: the header image was generated at Night Cafe using Seedream 4.0. It’s a representation of how I’d like to spend my final days. Sitting on a beach like a piece of driftwood, drinking rum and taking it easy.]

February 2026

Posted on by Nimgimli

Well, I’ve done it again. I forgot to start a placeholder post for the February recap, so here I am doing the whole thing from memory. HOWEVER, it won’t be so bad since for the most part I played one game all month: My Time At Sandrock, and I just wrote about that yesterday.

I didn’t expect to do this. I had no inkling it would take me so long to finish, but I did WANT to finish so it was by far my main game. I played other things for rewards points and so forth, in particular Ball X Pit which I also finished (which was a suprise.. I didn’t expect it to have an ‘ending’ any more than I expect Tetris to have an ending).

I eased back into social media this month, which led to noticing some buzz around Kevin Brill’s TempusGameit which I’d kind of forgotten about while I was away from PC gaming. But I got back into that and can see that I played a bit of The First Descendant and Eternal Strands. The latter was the game I was going to focus on once I finished Sandrock but… the best laid plans, am I right?

Ball X Pit was really good, by the way. Imagine Breakout only it’s an RPG. Instead of a paddle you control a character who is shooting the balls, and who has stats that contribute to how effective the balls are. There are a bunch of characters all with special abilities, and a bunch of balls and powerups that you gather while playing the Breakout portion of the game. There’s even some city building mixed in. If you enjoy Breakout, give Ball X Pit a try. It’s pretty cheap ($15 at full price) and if you get into it you can play it for a LONG time.

Watching

I don’t have any kind of reminders for this category so I bet I’ll miss something.

Pluribus (Apple TV) — This is such an odd show and we’re still in the thick of it so, if I’m wrong, no spoilers please. The basic premise is, what if the population was taken over by pod people that formed all of humanity into a hive mind? The protagonist is one of a handful of people who escaped this fate. Sounds rote, right? Except the twist is that all the ‘pod people’ seems really happy and genuinely nice. They are aware of the protagonist and just want to help her and make her comfortable, but she is so mean and angry and bitter that she tends to end up looking like ‘the bad guy’. Her intent is sound: she wants to undo what’s been done and give people their individuality back. But she keeps doing awful things along the way. Right now we’re kind of on the side of the pod people, but we’ll see if that changes by the end of the series. I assume it will. Anyway if you like dark, dry humor, you’ll like this.

Man on the Inside S2 (Netflix) — Ted Danson is back as a retired professor who gets a second lease on life via becoming a detective. In season 1 he was undercover in an Elderly Care Facility (is that the polite term? My instinct is to say “Old Folk’s Home”) but in Season 2 he is back on campus as a ‘visiting professor’ who is really undercover. This show is just marvelous. Season 1 was great and Season 2 was, if anything, maybe better. Some of his friends he made in S1 are back, and of course we now know his family and friends. I’ve read a third season has been greenlit and I can’t wait to watch!

Sanctuary (Prime Video or Peacock) — Our lunchtime habit is to re-watch an old show we liked. It’s been working well. We re-watched all the Star Trek shows, we’ve re-watched Stargate SG1. We re-watched Warehouse 13 and Haven and Defiance. All great times. Then we decided to re-watch Sanctuary and…. it is not good. It has not held up well, or maybe (probably) it was never very good. I would NOT suggest watching this show, unfortunately. To jog your memory it’s the one that stars Amanda Tapping as the head of a Sanctuary that protects ‘abnormals’, including one of her staff who is a sasquatch. One of its claims to fame back in the day was that it was almost all CGI with very few physical sets. Like yeah, that was something to brag about once upon a time, I guess. But no… it looks bad. A lot of the acting is bad. Tapping is OK but she can’t carry the whole thing. Avoid this one.

Reading

Still on the old sci-fi magazines, currently working through a small stack of Aboriginal Science Fiction, published in 1991 (the issues I have, I mean). Some of the stories are really good. Others not so much, but it’s still fun reading old sci-fi to see the kinds of future we thought would manifest back then. One thing I almost never see if the basic death of paper. Even on starships moving between solar systems characters are always reading printouts of something.

So that was February. Things are going OK. [knock on wood]. We’ve been basically healthy, we’re settling into the new location, getting driver’s licenses updated, finding new doctors and all that jazz. Work is work, nothing terrible there. It has been delightfully dull, to be honest. After the past few months I can deal with a month or two of quiet routine.