Ruining It For Everyone Else Since 2004
Alright! First game of the year finished! It took me a good few years to get around to finishing it, but I did it! All that’s left is to mine the achievements and secrets, but I definitely got more than my money’s worth out of it – especially since this was being given away for free. 😛 I’ve left my glowing review for it over at Steam.
Guess I’ll have to check out Trine 2 now! Well… not now, it’s late.
Settled down tonight with a bit of Trine. I even got an achievement for using each character’s ability in one level, and I triggered it by turning into the Knight and falling onto a skeleton! I had a busy day of work, although I did stop at a new tea shop after I got off work today. They make really amazing milk tea! I went with a friendo for some authentic boba. Now I’m enjoying some peppermint tea before bed, tasty and helpful with inflammation.
For tonight’s little bit of play I decided to play Trine on my desktop. As old as this game is – it’s graphics are beyond gorgeous, even in 4K. At the rate I’m actually finishing games I might actually finish this one! I did come close at one point, but something in the level messed up and I couldn’t continue. Of course I’ve had plenty of other games to wander around in since then, and now I can work towards completing another adventure, and even more adventures to come!
Today I had some spare time during my lunch break to play a bit of Trine on Steam Deck! It keeps a steady frame rate even when you bump up the eye candy! I came pretty close to finishing it on my last playthrough, but decided to start again to see how it performs on Deck, and to get more familiar with the control scheme. If you like a mix of hack n slash, physics puzzles and magic I recommend it. You can also co-op with it with up to 3 people! Great for couch sessions with buds!
Today was great! I woke up at my leisure, made an excellent breakfast, rendered the ending in SFM, and played around more on my deck! I added my Yakuza mods onto the Steam Deck, and played/tested some other games. Okami runs perfectly. Trine needed a bit of a controller adjustment, but otherwise it was fine. I think I have enough of a good assortment to carry around for now, and enough modding to raise some eyebrows. 😛
Managed to get a some of video and audio work done today, would have continued to plug at it but started feeling kinda queasy (even now it’s still coming and going). I’ve also been trying to swing past the post office to send some things off but it’s been hella busy even after election day. I’m hoping tomorrow or the next day things calm down, at least until Black Friday season hits.
As a change of pace I decided to tap into Trine, an extremely addicting physics puzzle adventure game that I received for free quite awhile ago. My thief can shoot three arrows as well as shoot fire arrows to burn enemies or light torches (at the cost of Mana of course), my knight can now charge through crowds of skeletons with a firey blade or a hammer of Knock Off Thor, and my wizard can summon the power of the Illuminati to make a floating platform.
I’ll admit I played longer than I had originally wanted to, but I have a habit of only stopping when I either get tired or finally hit a brick wall giving me the edge to take a break. I just kept on keeping on getting past challenges and tons of skeletons… oh and achievement/trophy hunting! Think I’ve had my fill of being awake for now though, need to see if I can sleep off this sour stomach.
When I first woke up yesterday I contemplated getting out of bed, or staying put and playing a little game. The weather has been cold enough here that I’ve been leaving my computer on to act as both a heat source and entertainment, and my kind of entertainment is known to heat up a room or two. My muscles were too tired to do much, so I propped myself up on a couple of pillows and played AudioSurf 2 on my Steam Controller for awhile. I worked on what is turning into a nice config, it still needs some tweaking but it’s more usable than the default controller settings. I have the gyro and right touch pad enabled to act as a mouse, and if I enable the gyro I can drive my controller like a steering wheel. It’s fun, but I still need a bit of practice before I can match my score on my everyday Logitech G502.
I went through a bit of my library yesterday and revisited some other games that I’ve been neglecting, progressing a tiny bit before hitting a stuck point and going off to the next point of interest. Both for pleasure and preemptive pleasure. I went through some of my couch co-op enabled games and tried to optimize them to the best of my ability for if I ever want to invite someone over digitally or physically. I’m looking forward to getting my new Steam Controllers (assuming the orders don’t get cancelled) in the mail, if only to experiment with local co-op config building; see how well two of the same controller work together.
Yutram and I were going to play Trine last night, but that has been proving difficult with Steam Controllers and a regular mouse. I’m thinking the next time we attempt it we’ll try regular controllers (if possible). I was too tired to do any streaming last night (was still overwhelmed from Thanksgiving and Black Friday) and wanted to relax in some Borderlands 2 DLC instead… I think I’ll save that for another post, and maybe a future video.
Today was a little more productive; I did some Cyber Monday shopping, and drank lots of tea as per morning, afternoon, and evening tradition. I’ve been combining fruit teas with regular loose leaf tea to make super tea!
This morning was a Blueberry Watermelon Oolong morning. I have cranberry blood orange black tea lined up for tomorrow, though that one was already pre-mixed. Now I’m sipping just blueberry and jade green tea, both filled with antioxidants.
I’m getting closer to the finish line for this particular project. I worked on it a little bit today, will probably finish it the rest of the way tomorrow. There really isn’t much else to do on it other than some animation cleanup. Hand animating has been an interesting learning curve, and I feel like I get less and less worse with each attempt. After I finish up this project I’ll be putting together something for a New Years Eve video. To celebrate my new-ish video style I’ll be selecting the best animated bits from videos throughout the year. If anyone has a suggestion feel free to throw one my way. :melon:
You can already count on Ronald and Batman… Open Thread!
I was feeling a little artsy today and decided to play around in Shotcut and build the final scene for this episode I’m working on. Just need to find the time to do the voice recording and then off to animating. I also took a break and played the Linux port of Trine, Played a bit of Left 4 Dead as well, and we ran into one problem after another. We downloaded a fan campaign and it was so out of date that it caused both of us as well as the server to crash, resulting in us playing vanilla. We played public and got some new people that did a good job holding themselves throughout the game. It’s always nice seeing new blood in an old game, really shows its success.
Unfortunately my stream audio was futzed up, so you mostly just heard game audio…Â I’ve since fixed the issue, hopefully we won’t have a repeat next stream… and we’ll actually test the campaign before launching it in the first place.
I’ve already managed to pick up quite a few games from my wishlist, once again assuring that I will never ever be bored with my extreme library.
I will say though that this year the Steam Sale doesn’t seem as interesting as the previous ones. Hell, last year it felt like Valve started running out of ideas with the monster clicker game. I can tell Valve’s main focus is on VR at the moment.
I haven’t actually played any of my new games yet. Instead I decided to take a break from Skyrim to check out Trine. It’s actually quite enjoyable! It’s a side scroller with physics puzzles. You can switch between being a wizard, a thief or a knight to get over obstacles. Plus all the Trine games have Steam workshop, so when you finally finish the game (or get frustrated on one of the levels in the main game) you can test your brain on other peoples work. It’s also a 3 player game, local co-op or over the internet. Will probably drag my brother onto the couch sometime so we can play with our controllers. Which the game is really friendly with as well as with a keyboard and mouse.