Posts on roll for blogpost

Running Hex Kit on modern Linux systems via Lutris

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 16:05:22 +0000

In attempting to run Hex Kit on my current desktop Linux distro, I found that the native Linux version – unfortunately – no longer runs – or rather, it runs, but then crashes immediately once it tries to draw the contents of the application windows.

[69232:0722/012218.684735:FATAL:gpu_data_manager_impl_private.cc(894)] The display compositor is frequently crashing. Goodbye.

My gut feeling is this is an incompatibility with Wayland – Hex Kit hasn’t been updated in a couple of years and Wayland has seen pretty decent adoption since then. So I tried running it under Lutris and found that it would run, but also very poorly, and the contents of all windows were just blank. Bars, but no windows. So close.

More Steam demos

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 16:57:21 +0000

Still finishing off demos from Steam Next Fest. I may have overestimated my free time. Heck, two of the demos expired before I could play them; I got a “no licenses found” error on Steam, making them unplayable.

Anyway. Let’s get to it.

WIZman’s World Re;try

Sometimes you just need a good old-fashioned JRPG where you shove monster souls into fairies that belonged to your adoptive mom in order to find out why the city you’re in is surrounded by collapsing dungeons. It’s a neat story, if nothing earth shattering, and the pixel art and monster fusion are a treat for me. I’ll probably get it when it’s on sale sometime.

Blue Prince

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 15:15:57 +0000

Recently I decided that I had beaten Blue Prince – inasmuch as one can truly believe they have fully plumbed the depths of the bottomless puzzle pool that is Blue Prince, which at this point I fully believe I have done. But did I like the game?

First, an anecdote: a few weeks ago now I was a guest on the Blizzard Watch Podcast, and we asked editor-in-chief Liz if she liked Blue Prince. We then poked fun at it later because she hemmed and hawed about the game, talked about a number of things she did or didn’t like, discussed the weirdness and the puzzles and the worldbuilding and whether or not things like the letter I missing from every keyboard matters, and never got around to actually saying whether or not she liked the game. This is, I am finding, something of a common refrain.

Steam Next Fest 2025

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 16:40:33 +0000

A short rundown of my opinions on all the demos I played during Steam Next Fest 2025, before I forget them all. This isn’t even all the demos I downloaded, I just haven’t gotten to them all yet - I still haven’t touched Galvatein, Lock & Key, Outrider Mako, Starlight Re;volver, Ninja Gaiden Ragebound, Danchi Days, Tron Catalyst (which is actually released now!), or Wizman’s World Re;Try. (Yes, I downloaded a demo for everything on my wishlist. Yes, my wishlist is an absolute mess.)

Switch 2 direct quick thoughts

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 16:36:55 +0000

My coworker asked me for my thoughts on the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct. Since he was in a meeting, I took notes. And since I took notes, here they are.

Mario Kart World
- New Mario Kart was the one thing I figured was guaranteed since MK 8 was 11 years old
- Looks really nice - feels like PS4-era graphics?
- Like the idea of a circuit as one continuous race
- Free roam is a cute feature
- Only saw 1 new racer but I think it was one of the cows from Moo Moo Meadows. lol
Hardware features
- GameChat
  - Did not call the C button being for game chat.
  - Nintendo just straight up lifting Discord’s voice UI is a bold choice
- GameShare
  - Welcome back, one of the best features of the DS!
  - Online play via GameShare is wild, though
- Hardware details
  - 1080p up to 120 fps, with 4K docked, makes me more certain this is basically a PS4
  - I’m really hoping magnetic joycons feel less flimsy/fragile when attached and used in handheld mode compared to the rails
  - No mention of the joysticks being Hall Effect; hopefully they’ve fixed the drift issue…
  - Two charging ports is smart. More handhelds should do this.
Enhanced games
- Super Mario Party Jamboree: Neat and all but this is still my least favorite Mario Party in a while…. it’s so sloooooow
- Switch Zeldas: Very cool to see. Don’t think I necessarily need to play these again, but they look nice. The phone thing is a fun gimmick, but at least Nintendo is thinking about stuff like that.
- Kirby and the Forgotten Land: This is basically DLC, right? Fun game but man this was WAY too hard at points for a Kirby game
- Metroid Prime 4: Switch 2 Edition: This is how I’ll probably wait to play this. Kinda wild to see Nintendo offering graphical settings
- Pokemon Legends Z-A: See, now Nintendo is making problems for me: I want to play this game but I don’t want to buy it once and then buy the upgrade pack too to play it on Switch 2.
Mouse Mode games: Give me Mario Paint 2 or give me death
Third party games
- Elden Ring: Well, didn’t see THAT coming. “Tarnished Edition” is right; gameplay looking a little rough.
- Hades II: Not surprised, and this’ll be great. Hades still probably the most-played game on my original Switch. However, I already have it on Steam….
- Street Fighter 6: Local wireless and exclusive game modes, but no mention of allowing the Switch into the current online play. Pass
- Daemon x Machina 2: Day 1 purchase for me, no questions
- Split Fiction: Already playing this! It’s actually a great couch co-op game, my wife loves it
- Sports: zzzzz
- Hogwarts Legacy: didn’t play it before, not gonna play it now either
- THPS 3+4: Yeah, probably a day 1 purchase for this too
- Hitman World of Assassination: I haven’t played this Hitman game, but in general modern Hitman games are really fun. A James Bond crossover is interesting. Playing on Goldeneye nostalgia?
- Bravely Default HD: I have a funny comment about this that is also a story spoiler so if you haven’t played it I’m just gonna say: Bravely Default is very fun and I’ll probably get this.
- Yakuza 0: I’m not gonna buy it and play it again but Yakuza 0 is one of the best games I’ve ever played, happy to see it on Switch. Expect the rest of the series to follow.
- Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment: it might be nice to have a Hyrule Warriors that doesn’t run like garbage (a thing we haven’t had since the Wii U, of all things). I’ll end up picking this up.
- GameCube library on Switch Online membership: this just continues to be worth the money. F-Zero GX definitely the one I’m most interested to play right off the bat.
- Deltarune: This another one of those “not surprised to see it on Switch, happy to see it on Switch, but I already have it on Steam” moments
- Borderlands 4: They’re still making these? Sure, why not. Borderlands is fun.
- Civilization VII: If they fix the problems the PC version has, I might pick this up, but the PC one launched in really sad shape for a premium AAA title.
- Survival Kids: Okay, it’s extremely funny to see a Konami franchise last seen on the Game Boy Color in like 1999 come back for the Switch 2. This may or may not be good, I’ll probably hold off on picking it up.
- Enter the Gungeon 2: This should be extremely good if it runs well.
- Starseeker: I don’t know what this is, and the animation looks a little rough, but it gives me No Man’s Sky vibes, so might be worth a look.
- Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition: Is this finally what gets me to play CP2077? Guess we’ll find out.
- FF7 Remake Intergrade: I had a lot of fun with Remake after adjusting my expectations. This is pretty cool to see on a Nintendo platform again.
- The lightning round at the end (most of these I had no opinion on other than “that looks cool”):
  - Puyo Puyo Tetris 2S: Glad to see this series finally getting more consistent US localizations. Another good couch game.
  - Star Wars Outlaws: Maybe I’m underselling the Switch 2’s hardware capabilities. 😂
  - Grimdark Pac-man and Raidou Remastered are also on my to-buy list
  - Professor Layton and the New World of Steam: Wait, that’s not a Switch 2 game, that’s coming out THIS year for Switch 1. (And I’ll probably get it.)
- The Duskbloods: Okay, Nintendo scoring a Fromsoft exclusive is huge. A lot of people who have been begging Sony for a new Bloodborne for years are gonna love this: this feels like it’s trying to evoke Bloodborne without explicitly being set in that universe. But a multiplatyer vampire extraction shooter? No thanks.
Kirby Air Riders: I cannot imagine this is the game a lot of people wanted from Masahiro Sakurai, but man, Kirby Air Ride was fun. I’ll play this for sure. (Did he really have to say that the first one came out on the Gamecube over 20 years ago though?? My bones hurt.)
Donkey Kong Bananza: I honestly cannot believe it took this long to get Donkey Kong in a 3D platformer? With what looks like completely destructible environments, too. This looks extremely fun.
The price: $449.99 might be a little rich for my blood at this point, that’s my only issue. Nintendo very rarely has anything stay exclusive except for first-party games, and $450 is approaching the point of a PC handheld.

A busy March

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 16:35:09 +0000

Boy, I had a pretty good blogging streak going there for a while! Well, at least I’m not gonna let a whole month go by without putting something here. Heh.

I haven’t had a lot going on in March in terms of the usual things that I blog about: no completed video games to wax poetic about, no big projects like the great De-Googling, nothing like that. Bullet point time:

I’ve been going back and forth between two different ideas for game development projects, trying to decide which one I’d rather do first; I think I finally settled on one and am doing a good amount of worldbuilding as well as some low-level actual code writing. The other is on the back burner waiting to become more fully baked for the time being.
The Traveller 2e game that replaced my (now-wrapped-up) D&D 5e game finally started. I am currently playing former noble and current lawyer Fontaine Infinity, who has no combat skills to speak of but is surprisingly good at giving orders in combat as well as, well, lawyering. (He made it out of character creation with 4 ranks in the Advocate skill and a smattering of other face skills, but – surprisingly – none in Deception.)
World of Warcraft’s second major raid of the current expansion dropped, and so my raid team is back to raiding twice a week. We’ve made pretty astounding progress, clearing the entire thing in normal in one week and then trouncing 3 out of 8 heroic bosses very quickly, with a 4th likely to go down on Monday night when we raid again. Here’s a kill shot of us gathered around the most recent to fall, Rik Reverb:
The third of three episodes of an actual play I ran for The Tavern Watch Podcast, playing Triangle Agency, is up now. I thought it was a lot of fun, although trying to keep the spotlight going for six people can be a real task. I also thought on reading the adventure as written – it’s a pre-written one from The Vault, a book of premade mysteries that came with the Triangle Agency core book – that it’s not, uh, a very good mystery. As written, Dead Quiet presented a whole list of locations for players to go to, but they were so saturated in clues that led directly to the end of the mystery that there was not really a reason to visit more than one. (Essentially they only even went to two because the second one had an easy way to rack up 10 Commendations from the company.) A lot of the contents of The Vault are like that, so if I run TA again, I’m definitely going to be trying to write something of my own.
I have another actual play next month for the same podcast in which I’ll be running Legend in the Mist’s playtest materials. Should be fun; expect that to be out sometime in May, most likely.
Also my actual job has just been kind of going at breakneck speed? I’ve been pulled back and forth between two major projects, with a third looming in the wings to occupy any downtime I might have, which – well, look at the timestamps on previous posts, and maybe the explanation for why my post count in March is 1 might make sense. Heh.

Anyway: all that to say I am alive and well and keeping myself busy. Maybe I should do some devlog posts here once that game project starts being interesting to look at? Not sure if it’ll be here or somewhere else, but given how much I’ve enjoyed keeping everything sequested in Obsidian, it might just be here in a subfolder. Something to look forward to.

De-Googled

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 17:33:33 +0000

Over the course of the last year, I have slowly been taking steps to pull myself out of actively using the Google ecosystem. It’s hard sometimes – they feel almost ubiquitous – but when Gemini came around and it became clear that active enshittification was the name of the game for the big G, I had to start finding ways to get free.

The other inspiration was just what a fucking miserable experience searching the web had become. So my first de-googlefication was stopping use of Google, and starting to instead use Kagi. This has been a delightful experience, and I’ve talked a number of folks into coming along with me (enough that I have a family plan!), as changing your browser to search somewhere else is fairly low effort.

1000xRESIST

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 17:31:05 +0000

Sometimes you play a game, and maybe that game is fun for a while, but when you’re done, nothing really sticks with you. You bring nothing to the table, you take nothing away, and you’re finished with it, done and dusted. I find this to be a pretty common experience with AAA games these days, to be honest.

And then sometimes, you play Sunset Visitor’s 1000xRESIST and you have 1000% the opposite experience. (I guess this is finished game #3 for the year!)

A weekend full of games

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 17:29:16 +0000

Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred

Back in my post about Transistor I mentioned that the second game I finished in 2025 was probably going to be Helen’s Mysterious Castle; instead, it turned out to be Diablo 4’s expansion pack, Vessel of Hatred. It was… okay.

First, about Diablo 4 as a game: it’s actually really good, although it took some time to get there. The Diablo 4 team seemed entirely determined to learn absolutely nothing from the Diablo 3 team’s mistakes and recoveries early on, and honestly that’s still kind of a recurring theme across Blizzard as a whole (I suspect inter-team communication basically doesn’t exist), but Diablo 4 got really good – the game is fun to play, the classes are varied and have a lot of viable endgame builds for what is now a large variety of endgame content, it’s really everything you could want out of an action RPG. The seasonal content is hit or miss, but the current Season of the Witch is probably my favorite since the Season of Blood’s vampire-based content back in Season 2. So my comments on Vessel of Hatred do not reflect on how fun the game itself actually is to play.

Transistor

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 17:24:52 +0000

I decided at some point (probably after surveying my enormous Steam backlog) that I was going to start keeping track of games when I finish them, so that I remember to talk about them. Anyway, the first game of the year finished in 2025 was Supergiant Games’ Transistor. I actually own Transistor twice; once on the PS3, which I bought, and once on Steam, where my friend Maxine was kind enough to gift it to me for Christmas and thus remind me that I never really got too far into it. On the PS3, I both found the text size on screen infuriatingly small, and also found the combat system just way too hard for some reason, so I abandoned it not far into the game – which is a problem, because there is such a good game under the surface here.

The annual "dude retreat" and the perils of Mastodon administration

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 17:23:58 +0000

This past weekend was one of my favorite recurring events, now going on three years in a row: several of my college friends and I rent out an AirBNB and spend the weekend making food together, eating, drinking, and playing card, board and video games. It’s just like a weekend-long taste of dorm life again, except we’ve all moved from takeout to chili cookoffs and cheap beer to a bar full of nice bourbons and whiskeys. It’s always a good time catching up with people; as a bonus this time we managed to get a couple of folks we hadn’t talked with in maybe 17 years to join us as well. It felt just like old times again. We’re all the same, just older and greyer.

Dataview in Obsidian, and 100%-ing I Was a Teenage Exocolonist

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 17:21:17 +0000

New year, new really nerdy way to apply Obsidian. Ever since I bought I Was a Teenage Exocolonist in November I’ve been really obsessed with exploring every little corner of this beautiful little narrative deckbuilding RPG. I recently decided I wanted to get 100% completion of the game, but doing that requires two things that take some extensive tracking: getting every ending at least once (there are 29), and getting every card at least once (there are…. tons). Obviously I can just make checklists in Obsidian, but then I figured out I could use Dataview to query over those files as well, and show myself a nice table of my progress.

Re-learning Godot, and also publishing this site

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 17:14:25 +0000

Opened Godot today and discovered it had been so long since I used it that my skills had pretty much atrophied away to nothing (in fact, I think it’s had a full version update – I’d never touched Godot 4!). Luckily, I still had one of Ben Anderson’s excellent Godot courses and it’d been updated to Godot 4, so I started over from scratch. Trying something this time that I usually don’t do for video lectures and besides coding along, I’m taking notes – besides giving me yet another reason to use Obsidian, I thought it might be a nice way to actually remember some things in a more general sense.

Rambling about static site technology

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 17:13:25 +0000

Ed Zitron is right on the money again in Never Forgive Them, a look at the way tech companies actively make your life worse with the growth-at-all-costs mindset that has the tech industry in a death grip.

Why wouldn’t people feel insane? Why wouldn’t the internet, where we’re mostly forced to live, drive most people crazy? How are we not discussing the fact that so much of the internet is riddled with poison? How are we not treating the current state of the tech industry like an industrial chemical accident? Is it because there are too many people at fault? Is it because fixing it would require us to truly interrogate the fabric of a capitalist death cult?

Obligatory first post

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 17:11:29 +0000

Slowly getting used to Obsidian. I’ve got livesyncing working across multiple machines without actually paying for it (using the obsidian-livesync community plugin and a CouchDB database on my NAS at home), and I think my next goal is to be able to publish this folder of daily notes as a blog.

Need to find out if there’s a way to use YAML front matter to add a title to these notes without changing their filename, or if I’m just leaving it as is. Maybe titles are overrated? Tags would still be nice, if I intend to publish these as a blog.