Author: MrBlueSky

The Eclipse Was Cool

So, I got to see the totality yesterday. In a fair world, this would have been something I planned for, and then executed that plan. Instead, a bunch of my friends were going to see it, so I kind of just grabbed a lawn chair, hopped in their car, and rode with them.

Traffic was pretty light on the way up. Dense, but it was still possible to drive the speed limit. It took maybe an hour and a half to get to Crystal Lake Park in Barton VT from our starting location. The place was pretty packed up, so we parked nearby, and carted stuff into the park.

The park itself was nice, but the recent snow melted off pretty quickly, so things rapidly went from damp to wet. At this point, it was maybe 11:00, so we sat down, waited, cracked jokes, and ate food and had soda. Not too much though.

It turns out that the real limiting reagent for staying at the park was access to bathrooms. There were 3 portable toilets, and what felt like 500-1000 people, if not more.

Outside of that, we had enough food, water, and other supplies to last quite a while.

And then the eclipse started.

The Eclipse

The eclipse is cool, but for me, it was mostly interesting because of the tension that arose from the impending totality. It’s fun to look up with your glasses and see the sun start to get covered up, but it’s more a “Hmm, neat” sort of experience. At least to start.

As things got closer, everything started to feel slight weird. It had been a very bright day, and all of sudden, it was not so bright, and I didn’t need the sunglasses I had been wearing. It had been a very warm day, and all of sudden it got a bit colder. That said, most of this didn’t feel super apparent until maybe 70-85% of the sun was covered, at which point things started to feel a bit weird.

And then we hit totality.

Totality

I’ve seen photos of totality before. They don’t capture the experience. I can tell you that the sun turned into a black hole in the sky surrounded by a white corona, but just saying it isn’t the same. I can tell you that at 3:00 PM, that everything went from feeling like a quiet afternoon, to a deep summer’s 7:00 PM. I can tell you that the temperature dropped; but instead of a creeping chill, all of a sudden it was just cold.

It’s unlike anything else I’ve ever witnessed. There are no photos or video I could take to do it justice, and the ones I did absolutely don’t. To look up, and see a hole in the sky, to be able to just stare at the sun is insane. For the light to just vanish mid-day is crazy.

It’s the sort of thing you witness, and you understand why you could found a religion on something like this.

And then it was over. It lasted just under 3 minutes. Shorter than it took me to write this paragraph.

Drive Back

We waited a few hours after it finished to head back home.

Remember how I mentioned that traffic was dense, but manageable on the way down? Yeah, absolutely not on the way back. A one hour trip easily became a four hour one. This (and some sunburn that I absolutely could have avoided) was the only real downside to this trip. There was a ridiculous number of cars on the road, and we slowed to a crawl. We were lucky to be able to go 20 MPH; mostly it was stop and go.

Worth It?

It’s tricky to assess the value of an experience. The costs to me were low.
I took a day off work, rode in a friend’s car, and ate other people’s food. Outside of the mild sun burn, I did not have a very difficult time. My costs were pretty much non-existent.

That wasn’t a universal experience though.

There was a family behind us who’d come up from Massachusetts. It’s a bit longer of a drive, but they were there because they’d tried to see the eclipse in 2017, but it had been cloudy. They’d then tried to schedule to see it in Texas, but after flying down to Texas, they realized it was looking like wasn’t gonna work out yet again, so they cut their trip short, flew back to the East Coast, and drove all the way up to the same park we were at.

They also seemed to think it was pretty cool, but they had a different set of
costs for the experience.

Why did I write this?

Gametrodon is technically my longest running project. In some ways, it’s not very successful. In other ways, it has done some of what I intended.

Ultimately, it’s a very abstract thing. It’s way of displaying text in a manner that could theoretically be seen by anyone in the world who wants to read it, to a world that doesn’t know or care that it exists.

All of that text is about self imposed little worlds; little places where we make up rules about how things work, and I write about how those rules feel.

Most days I’m okay with that.

The eclipse, and the totality was in some ways the opposite of that. It’s a reminder that what I actually am is a single lump of chemicals that lives on a small rock, surrounded by a slightly smaller rock, circling a ball of fire. And sometimes those rocks line up just right.

Those rocks will outlive the memory of anything I have ever written, anything anyone alive right now has written, and perhaps the idea of writing itself.

The next continental eclipse will apparently be happening in 2045 or so, by which point I’ll be over 50. Statistically, I’ll probably have lived most of my life by then.

Will this site still be up? I don’t know.

Will I remember seeing the last eclipse? I suspect the answer is no.

My memory isn’t very good. At some point, maybe in a week, maybe a month, maybe a year, I’ll forget.

I’ll forget what it’s like to look up at the sky, and see the sun with a hole punched through it, and a shimmering white crown around its edges. I’ll forget the quiet, the darkness, the cold, and all the little reminders that my existence is the result of good fortune whose odds are so incredibly low that I cannot perceive them. I’ll forget that I live on a rock, in the middle of infinite nothing, next to a ball of fire.

Hopefully when I do, I find this post.

And I’ll be briefly reminded.

PAX Report – Path of Exile 2

So, one of the coolest things I got to do at PAX was sit down and see the media demo for Path of Exile 2. I’d like to thank the folks Grinding Gear Games and Octavian0/Chris for showing me the game, since I’m obviously a much smaller outlet than a lot of other folks. If you’re curious about why you should care about my opinion click here.

Overall Thoughts

There’s a bunch of interesting small things, but as someone who previously played a bunch of PoE, two things stood out to me from the demo:

  1. A focus on making the game much more reactive than Path of Exile is.
  2. An intention to simplify the parts of the game that can be simplified.

Let’s go through them!

Increased Reactivity, Less Spamming

There were two big sets of changes I saw in the media demo of Path of Exile 2, and the demo I played. The first was that bosses felt and played differently than in the first game. I watched one boss fight thathad a sort of bullet hell sub-mechanic, and I fought against two bosses in the demo.

Of those bosses, the demo’s version of “Hillock” is a good example here. Hillock is the very first sort of mini-boss in the game, and he’s just a big chonky dude. In PoE, he just runs at the player, so you kite him back, and whack him down.

In Path of Exile 2, the boss has a much larger variety of attacks, including summoning packs of zombies, and a ground targeted panel that crosses a large portion of the screen and has to be dodged with the game’s new roll/dash. Plus, Hillock was just generally much more aggressive with its gap closers.

On the player’s side of the media demo, Octavian0 showed off a much larger level of interactivity between skills than I’ve seen previously in PoE. This included things like: throwing down clouds of poisonous gas and igniting them with fire; and setting up plants to grow over time, but that can be detonated early by casting another skill onto them. Instead of just having PoE’s synergy between skills, there was real interactivity between them.

Simplification

This might sound bad, but it really isn’t. In this case, I’m mostly talking about simplifying some of PoE’s internal systems, specifically mechanics around getting early game items.

I saw two big examples of this. The first was skill gems. Instead of single gems, gems now come as uncut gems that when dropped, and you use them to choose what skill you need.

The second was around…. GOLD. Yes, PoE has gold now, but it seems like it’s mostly to buy campaign items from vendors. And honestly, it feels like a really good change for onboarding. I’m someone who loves PoE’s economy, but asking a new player to understand the idea of alterations and chromas and vendor recipes, as well as the skill tree has always felt like a bit much when I try to get new friends into the game.

So yeah. Simplification of systems that can be simplified.

Some Other Notes, and Neat Stuff

I’m just gonna be rambling now, but there was a bunch of other cool stuff I saw. For example, there are gonna be mounts! And Rhoas have been been redesigned look more like Chocobos, and less like head-crabs with legs.

The WASD movement feels great, as does the dodge roll. It honestly feels better than right clicking. There are skills on weapons, so that seems neat. Also, many bosses seem to build up stun, giving them a much nicer sense of pacing than “dodge dodge dodge dodge pray flask dodge”.

Overall, after what I’ve seen, I’m really excited for Path of Exile 2. It’s gonna be a different game, and potentially a much harder one, but it looks incredibly fun. It’s trying to address a lot of the problems Path of Exile has, just as a result of 10 years of incremental updates.

My Background

I like Path of Exile. How much do I like Path of Exile? Well, here’s my Steam playtime.

And this before I switched over to the single player client, where a majority of my play time is.

For fellow PoE players, who are going “Yeah, but for all we know, that was spent farming tab cards in Blood Aqueducts,” I offer the following notes.

  • I killed Uber Elder when it was peak end game boss.
  • I almost exclusively play necro/summoners, but I’ve also played trappers/miners in a few leagues.
  • Most of my playtime was between Delve League, and Echos of the Atlas, with a smattering afterwards, so I am a bit out of date. That said, I tried to chat with some folks who have played more recently, and did a quick act 1 run for comparison with the demo I played at PAX East.

Legend of Mushroom

Legend of Mushroom confuses me. It is, technically, a video game. It is technically a video game that I have played a lot of. But in the grand scheme of things, if the average free to play game is a lure on a fishing line, Legend of Mushroom is made entirely out of hooks. It has no real bait aside from pretty graphics, and the most bare bones of dopamine reward loops. I’ve written about idle games before. Legend of Mushroom is different.

It looks like a game. It feels like a game. But much like John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” the second the flesh peels back, it becomes apparent that what you are dealing with is not of this earth, and would terrify even the devil.

Mechanically, Legend of Mushroom is what you get when you set out to make a Skinner box game, and do the Skinner box part, but forget the game. Every mechanic in the game is accompanied by bells, whistles, and a complete absence of player agency.

There’s a battle system, but you can just have all your skills auto-cast. There’s a gear system, but all gear is from a random lootbox, and after 15 days, I’m still not at a point where anything matters for the gear other then bigger numbers. There’s a pet/skill system, but getting pets and skills is, again, a random lootbox. You can’t really make builds, and the better ones are so much better that there’s no reason to not just slot them in.

And yet, technically, I have “played” this game for 15 days. In that time, I don’t think I’ve made any meaningful decisions about gameplay. Instead, I have just clicked on the things to be clicked, and then watched ads. And then I have watched more ads, to get more things.

Why bother writing about it?

Two reasons. One is the fact that after writing about this sort of game, I tend to stop playing. Writing purges any desire I have to continue. The second is that, as always, these sorts of games have some weird shit going on.

The standard weird shit is that one of the events the game is currently running is an event for spending money. Not too uncommon. But the amounts of money are just plain bonkers, especially for a game with no game play.

The game has another weird system though. It’s referred to in-game as the “Employment” system.

Here’s the UI.

You might now understand why I put those quotes up there. It’s also not really thematically about employment, because I’m unaware of a system of employment in which someone just beats you up, chains you in a basement, and extracts wealth from you until you either break free, or someone else sets you free.

That’s just called slavery. I’m not sure why the cute mushroom game has a system for taking other players as slaves, but is does, so that’s neat.

Conclusion

There is no reason to ever play Legend of Mushroom, and with this post, I am free from its grip. If you for any reason, were tempted to play, don’t. If you were tempted to spend money in Legend of Mushroom, do something more productive with it, like buying drugs, or lottery tickets.

Or setting it on fire.

Or “investing” in crypto.

Qiddaya Should Not Have Been Given A Booth At PAX East 2024

Something I’ve privately bemoaned/whined about over the last few years is how every year PAX East seems to have less games, and more brands and lifestyles. It’s a small thing, but one that annoys me slightly, and that I can’t do anything about.

In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter that much. I don’t actually care if Verizon wants to brand itself as internet for gamers. I’m not all that annoyed at whoever wants to sell me a new gaming chair. And ignoring everything else, my main problem with Wyrmwood is that I am never going be able to both own a house and one of their tables.

Qiddaya is not like that. Qiddaya is a problem.

What is Qiddaya?

Qiddaya is a planned tourism center in Saudi Arabia. It is owned by the Public Investment Fund, a sovereign wealth fund controlled and owned by Saudi Arabia.

The distinction I want to make here is that Qiddaya is not a private enterprise, it’s a government funded venture. As for why it’s being planned, there’s probably a whole thing on the nature of economic transition, oil economies, and soft power that should be written by someone who knows what they’re talking about, IE not me.

Why Should You Give A Shit?

Under sharia, as interpreted in the country, consensual same-sex sexual conduct is punishable by death or flogging, depending on the perceived seriousness of the case.

US State Dept 2022 Report on Human Rights Practices – Saudi Arabia

Forced labor occurred among migrant workers, notably domestic workers. Conditions indicative of forced labor experienced by foreign workers reportedly included passport confiscation, nonpayment of wages, restrictions on movement, and verbal, physical and sexual abuse.

US State Dept 2022 Report on Human Rights Practices – Saudi Arabia

The law does not provide citizens the ability to choose their national government in free and fair periodic elections held by secret ballot and based on universal and equal suffrage; it establishes an absolute monarchy led by the Al Saud family as the political system.

US State Dept 2022 Report on Human Rights Practices – Saudi Arabia

In short: Qiddaya will be a city built by slave labor, in a country where same sex relationships can be punished by death, and run under Sharia law as controlled by a monarchy.

Conclusion

I cannot stop Qiddaya from being built. I have zero capacity, influence, or ability to protest it, the organizations behind it, or it’s purpose.

What I can do is be FUCKING PISSED that ReedPop is giving them a booth a PAX East in the middle of Massachusetts to shill their version of the story.

Games are both art and a business, neither of which are apolitical, and as a form of mass media are going to end up fought over and contested. That said, ReedPop and PAX have echoed a message of diversity and inclusion over the last few years.

It’s hard to take that message even the least bit seriously when they give space to a foreign government whose own laws actively contradict that message.

One Final Note

Oh, and by the way. If we were in Saudi Arabia, I’d probably be breaking the law by making this blog post.

The press law requires all online newspapers and bloggers to obtain a license from the ministry.  The law bans publishing anything “contradicting sharia, inciting disruption, serving foreign interests that contradict national interests, and damaging the reputation of the grand mufti, members of the Council of Senior Religious Scholars, or senior government officials.”  On August 23, local media reported that the Council of Minsters approved a new tourism law that criminalizes any criticism of the country’s tourism industry.

US State Dept 2022 Report on Human Rights Practices – Saudi Arabia

P.S. I’m what I believe is referred to as a “whiny bleeding heart liberal”, but if you’re on the opposite side of things, you should still probably be pissed at Qiddaya/Saudi Arabia on account of it being a monarchist state run under literal Sharia law.

P.P.S If I was banking on my countries economic future, I would not do it by putting a water park in the middle of a desert.

Lost Ruins of Arnak: The Missing Expedition

Note: The Missing Expedition is the two player co-op expansion for the competitive base game, Lost Ruins of Arnak. While I’ve played a two games of Lost Ruins of Arnak, I’m mostly going to be going to be focusing on my experience with missing expedition. That said, the co-op expansion sits on top of the base game, so the game mechanics are pretty much the same.

At the end of Lost Ruins of Arnak, I was feeling a sort of intense “Hmmm”-ness. Not good, not bad, just “Hmm”. It wasn’t because the game is boring, but because the campaign was one of extreme highs and lows, and for various reasons I’ll get into, it ended on a low.

Lost Ruins of Arnak is made up of a bunch of different design elements, but isn’t really defined by any of them. It’s like those little fancy cheeseboards. There are deckbuilding elements, but given that you only draw 5 hands from your deck, and one is the starting hand, it’s hard to call it a deck builder. It’s got worker placement, but you only place 2 workers each round, and there are only 5 rounds.

The general structure of Missing Expedition is as follows: Like base Arnak, the game is played over 5 rounds. On each round, players draw a hand of five cards from their deck, then take turns performing primary actions, with the solo-mode opponent taking actions to lock off options from the players as well. Once a player can’t take anymore actions, they’re forced to pass, and can take no more turns. Once all players are out, the round ends, things are reset, and the next round starts. In addition, on a given turn, players can take any numbers of fast actions.

The actions fairly standard Euro sorts of things. Place a worker. Buy more card for your deck. Spend resources to advance down a progression track. Buy a different type of card. Play a card.

It is a dense game.

Like I said: Cheeseboard.

So now lets talk about the individual games a bit.

The Campaign

The Missing Expedition is six games long. Now, it doesn’t do the scaffolding campaign or legacy thing, where new mechanics are slowly introduced between games to build player familiarity. Instead, each game is more like a mod-pack, that sits on top of the base game, and adds even more mechanics and game behavior.

And while this does a lot of things, one thing it does do is make setup pretty slow. Arnak has a lot of pieces, cards and deck to be sorted, and setup was about 20-30 minutes each time we played.

I like the word Modpack to describe the co-op expansion, because Missing Expedition feels like a game for people who already a played a ton of Arnak, and wanted more, as opposed to a comfy tutorialized version where you don’t have the urge to shank your friends after they take the cards you wanted to buy.

For example, we ended game 1 with -12 points, and that game took four hours to play. It was not what I would call a energizing experience. But we got better! Game 2 ended with only -0.5 points.

Games 3-5 ended up going much better, giving us a fair amount of confidence going into game 6.

It was also game 6 that we realized we had been doing the games unlocks completely wrong, and should have unlocked much more then we actually did.

Game 6

Game 6 was the lowest of the lows for the experience. There are a lot of reasons for this. One is that is very hard. Another was that the story conclusion was a little bit lackluster.

Remember when I mentioned how each scenario works differently? And it’s all specific rules each time?

We misread one of the rules, and as a result played the last third or so of that scenario completely incorrectly.

I don’t have a good way to describe the experience of realizing the last four hours of what was supposed to be a climatic experience was, in fact, just kind of a mistake/waste of time. Now, we could replay it, but this is supposed to be a campaign game. If you know what’s coming, for me there’s not much point.

So. It ended on a low.

Conclusion

The Missing Expedition feels like an expansion made for people who already love Arnak. Like, really love Arnak and have played it a bunch. I think Arnak is fine, and so most of the fun for me was hanging out with a friend and trying to find ways to game the systems.

It also (and I should note my friend disagrees on this, so it’s purely a matter of taste) didn’t quite deliver on the narrative to the extent I was hoping? None of the mysteries brought up are really solved, and most of the story is just… fine. Not funny or super engaging, just present to remind you that it’s there.

We also really struggled with the rulebook at times, which led to the game 6 fiasco. I’m more then open the fact that my dumb ass can’t read rule books. But I was playing with someone who designs board games, and even he was having trouble. I don’t think The Missing Expedition does a great job managing the different game modes.

If you like complex co-op Euro games or loved Arnak and wanted more weird Arnak, The Lost Expedition might be right up your alley. But for me, I’m going to disappear into the forest.