Saturday Casual Gaming

 

In Which I'm Gaming Again!!!

It's a hot and hazy summer's day, and I have not had the guts to go outside. My father has been burning our wood pile down slowly because it was starting to put off its own heat waves and we do not want it to spontaneously combust. My mother has been gardening. We entertained the idea of taking the cat to the beach for the first time, but she has been hiding in her blanket fort all day after she had a brief outing this morning.

Instead of being active (beyond my usual squats and self-soothing rocking lol), I've been starting an indoor garden!

Oh, not a real one. I have a black thumb, not a green one lol.

But as I may have mentioned on Tuesday, I have found itch.io and been able to start playing new games!

And today's title is "Plant Daddy" by Brady Soglin.

In this game, you're the eponymous Plant Daddy - a lonely college grad who has just moved into their first apartment with nothing and no one. You buy your first plant - a "garden plant" - and start caring for it. As your plant grows, it will give you Leaves, which are your first currency, and after it fully matures, it gives you Blossoms, which act as a second currency. As you gain these Leaves and Blossoms, you can spend them in the store tab for such niceties as places to sit (or set plants on), artificial lighting, and even room expansions. Mostly, though, you'll be using your currencies to buy new plants.

Sometimes, you'll get special traits on your plants like variegated leaves and fancy stem colors! You can get special pots for those plants with the Nursery item, and you can even develop seeds from them, so if you want an army of variegated Tiny Trees named David, you absolutely can. Yes, you can name your plants. I am naming all of mine.

You can also buy decorations and more places to set plants down, which the game strongly encourages you to do.

Yes, that's a plant next to a candle on top of a cardboard box, and yes its name is Dan.

Zoomed out to show that to-do list on the wall above the shelf
It's how you find your objectives!

How's Annie?

Anywho, this game is really fun! It's relaxing and quiet and cute and you can easily lose a few days just trying to work your way through your To-Do List and raise an exceptionally cool plant or three. Currently I'm about 50 blossoms away from unlocking the next room - the bathroom - where I can then proceed to grow mushrooms on the back of my purchasable toilet lol!

There doesn't seem to be any way to pay-to-win in this, either! No "pay 99 cents to speed up" or "buy x amount of currency for 3 bucks of real money" stuff that I'm used to from generator-based idle games like this. It's refreshing and pleasant and as long as you don't turn the sound effects up too much while watering, you're not going to have to go to the bathroom a bunch of times.

In short, this is a perfect game with a deceptively simple interface that leads to fabulously deep gameplay. It looks cute, the "story" is adorable and relatable even if you're a plant-killer like me, and sometimes it's nice to just look at a room full of potted plants named things like "Leroy" or "Chad" and think "yeah, this is exactly what I wanted this to look like". 

All in all, this is a game that is absolutely worth a playthrough!

So Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Thursday Art Walk

 

In Which I Have Squares, More Squares, And A Goomba.

"Squares 1.0" digital art; 2022

I... screwed up. Big time. See, I forgot to set things to "Nearest Neighbor" and "lock aspect ratio"... and it's now perma-blurred. Balls. I'll have to try again, sadly. Maybe this time I'll do it with fewer colors & more pixels? It's a fun project though!!!

Regardless, I also have a bit of a product review!

I recently bought some more Peter Pauper Press goodies - namely some watercolor brush markers! I decided to swatch them up and try to make a painting with them. There's 24 brushes plus one water brush (yes another one).

I swatched up the colors to see how they worked!

Swatches!

All of these colors are very bright and saturated and delightful, the paint goes on strong and thick and did I mention bright? Yeah, they're BRIGHT. They respond well to water when you try to blend, and they have absolutely no smell! There's a good variety of colors, too. Plenty of different tones.

These would probably work really well for someone who wanted to do watercolor lettering or illustration (which it suggests on the shockingly sturdy plastic box), and they seem like they'd be great for travel.

My only issues are that the brown brush has a loose cap so it's already dried out (I only got to use it once and now it's.... not really working anymore, sadly) and that the colors do not have names anywhere on them.

That being said, I really do think they're nifty!

And since it's March 10, I figured I'd get in on the Mar10 day shenanigans!

"Goombye-bye"; Watercolor brush marker; 2022

Don't worry, Dedbert isn't gonna hurt the Goomba, he's just gonna drop him off at the nearest warp pipe! (Not that the Goomba understands what's happening lol).

Alright, that'll about do it for me today. Don't know why I'm so tired, but here we are, 9:30 at night on a week night and I already want to curl up with some fun videos and a nice chat with my guy, maybe drift off to the sounds of a cute beagle who likes neither cats nor pools...

Go Enjoy Something, guys!

FC

Saturday Casual Gaming: Leaf Blower Revolution

 

In Which I Play A Game About Leaves

If you know me, you know Fall is my favorite season. I didn't find this game until November, however, so you're getting a review of Leaf Blower Revolution - Idle Game by Humble North now. In January. Because I'm lazy and I've been playing a lot of Stardew Valley.

But yeah! Leaf Blower Revolution! Available on Steam! Free to play!

A simple, leafy game

I'm a lazy player. That's why I like idle games so much - you start it up and half pay attention to it. You don't need sound. You don't need it to be flashy. This game is a relaxing time-sink, and I've really enjoyed playing around with it.

You are a dude (or lady, or Santa...) who has a bunch of leaves on his lawn. You move your mouse/touchpad around to make the leaves go off screen and get points. You spend your points on things to move the leaves faster, including lil leaf Roombas which toodle around until they stop dead, recharge, then toodle off to move more leaves.

There are multiple menus of upgrades. There's multiple currencies. There's multiple kinds of upgrades. Do you want better skins for your tiny lil pixel person? Spend red coins (which you can earn several ways, but mostly through daily play and soft resets). Do you want a better leaf blower? Spend leaves. Do you want a change of scenery? There's a currency for that!

Basically, it's a very simple game with a lot of customization and such. I'm currently dressed as Santa and hunting down Void Leaves and Apples with my army of red-nosed Leaf Roombas and armed with a frickin Lazer. Life is pretty good.

There's no heavy clicking to be done - all of the effort is put in by just moving your cursor (which is your lil avatar dude) around. You only click on menu buttons. Which is actually a problem, because if I have one complaint it's that most of the menus with scroll bars are very hard to get to cooperate. Sometimes I'll try clicking the down arrow and nothing happens. Sometimes I try to drag the scroll bar and nothing happens. Sometimes neither approach works for a few minutes.

Admittedly, this could just be a problem with my computer - my laptop is getting pretty old and I'm resisting an upgrade because I hate that new laptops don't have any dvd/cd tray :|

What can I say, I'm an internet oldie.

And yes, this game is 100% free on Steam, though you can give the developers money for DLC packs. If you really love simple games about shuffling leaves back into the forest from whence they came in all their 8-bit glory, then by all means, financially support the devs!

If you want to download this game from Steam, it's here. I'd recommend it :)

That will do it for me today!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Weekend Warble 324

In Which I Blather About My Weekend

This weekend has mostly been filled with writing, but I've got some video game, food, and other thoughts to share lol.

I'm watching some shows to help with research on the wrestling book, but I'm also watching other shows to help with another project. If you've been hanging around me, you probably know that I don't believe in ghosts (or, at least, not in the idea of a physical spirit which is released from the corpus upon death). I believe fully that there is such a thing as a haunting. I believe that people have seen and experienced some stuff. I don't believe in angels, demons, ghosts, or spirits. Hauntings are your brain trying to cope with an overload of information. We only have limited experience, limited instinct, and limited understanding, so when, say, a house we know people have probably died in makes weird noises or has strange shadows or drafts, our brains fill in the details with something like ourselves. We're social animals. We look for other humans, and when there aren't any, our brains try to make people so we don't die of loneliness. That's why we personify everything from bloodstained volleyballs to pets to toast with unusual burn patterns. We want other people (yes, even introverts).

We also don't like things we don't recognize.

So we add our innate desire to see other people, our dislike of the unknown, and our innate understanding that literally anything can kill us at any time including our own bodies, and you get a bizarre set of reactions and overreactions to external stimuli, simulating what we call "haunting".

I'm sorry. It's probably not really your grandma you're seeing. It's probably your memories replaying and trying to form new connections, craving what is familiar. It's probably your mind and heart trying to heal from loss.

That's all to say I've been watching a crapload of Ghost Adventures and Ghost Brothers. Mechanically, GA is a far better-constructed show, but if you're going for entertainment, you cannot beat GB.

And the only reason I'm watching them is so that when I write about the ghost hunting group I've got on the back burner, they're believable.

So far, it's looking like I can pretty much do whatever I want. I've learned that with few exceptions, the leader is usually pretty sanctimonious and deeply paranoid, there's one guy everyone craps on who follows along for whatever reasons, and there's someone who should probably be on meds because no one sane drinks in that much woo.

It's always dangerous to write about people you find annoying, though, so here are some of the things I like about these shows:

• These shows tend to increase tourism whenever they go somewhere, so they can be a great economic stabilizer for these "haunted" towns
• I've never seen them litter
• There's at least a surface-level attempt at learning and disseminating real history from locations, without pretending that lynchings aren't murders or saying that a supposed Native American haunting targeting white people (usually middle-aged or older, I've noticed) aren't warrented.
• While there's an overuse of outdated terms (like Indian :|), there are attempts being made to not be dicks about other people.
• Actors are getting paid to do reenactments, and that's always good.

Now, I'm also watching a lot of wrestling to work on my wrestling novel, and someone on YouTube has just added a bunch of vids of behind-the-scenes stuff and satellite feeds from WCW! This is great, because now I have a better grasp on what goes on before the cameras are beaming out to the public. It's also really fun to watch Mean Gene get annoyed with unprofessional crew behavior.

That's my tv habits from this week.

For gaming, I have a few things to talk about!

First of all, I suck at the Trials of the Sword quest in Breath of the Wild. I've gotten to the next to last floor, but... it was all for naught. Dead. Every time, dead. I gave up and now I'm going through Hebra. I'll get Revali's Gale and then blast off to the desert to grab that sweet, sweet lightning (and to finish leveling up my armors...), maximizing my hearts along the way, and then I'll try again. If I can get the upgrades to the Master Sword, then I'll try to go for the Champion's Ballad DLC. I'm pretty sure it won't end well for me lol.

I've also been playing more idle games on Kongregate, including a fun little game called Loot Loop Loot. You play as a character going through a map until you die, gaining skills and loot as you go. It's fairly straightforward, but if you get good at it quickly... it can be pretty short. It took me a week to beat, and that's with me barely paying attention to it.

Since I play a lot of Breath of the Wild, you can probably guess that I've also been greedily consuming all those multitudinous Zelda Theory videos you can find on YouTube. You'd be right. I'm ravenous for them. Here are a few things I've been noticing, myself:

• Yes, if you play the teaser for BOTW2 backwards, the singsong voice is singing "poor Hyrule, for Link has found the body/Poor Hyrule, for Link is gone". And it's freaking me out
• Have you noticed that part of the Castle theme towards the end of BOTW is kind of a variation on the theme for Link's Awakening? Because I swear, it is. The low brass that comes in sounds like a dark version of the theme. Which makes sense, since you're "awakening" both Calamity Ganon and Zelda...
• Do you think that the Stables are modeled after Malanya, or is Malanya modeling himself after the stables? Also, if Malanya is a god, does that mean the Great Fairies are also gods? And is the Horned Statue one of these Old Gods who was naughty and got locked away? Is it going to be a part of BOTW2? How will the fairies and Malanya fare in a World of Malice (which is what BOTW2 is rumored to involve).
• Speaking of the World of Malice theory, what if, instead of being just the same Hyrule, blanketed in evil jam, you're literally transported to a straight up Malice Hyrule - kinda like Lorule or the Dark World or something, where you have to cleanse that realm before returning to save Hyrule? I mean, Ganon would get a kick out of chucking both Hero and Princess out of Hyrule as has been done to him before...
• Since there's a new Zonai theory out right now, here's a thought in addendum to it: what if there were multiple "barbarian" tribes? The Zonai were clearly warlike, but their worship at the Spring Of Courage tells me they were likely closer to Courage than Power. The Lomei were clearly Wisdom-based (their labyrinths!) and likely comrades of the Ancient Sheikah (or perhaps they had housed their own shrines or something in each labyrinth), but who were the last Tribe? The Tribe of Power? Were... were they the ones who became the Bokoblins?
• Uh... Zonai armor is made from Lynel bone. The Zonai were badass enough to slaughter Lynel for armor like we would slaughter cows for hide armor... What were they protecting themselves from??

That's my Gaming Thoughts for this week.

And for food...

Guys, I like food.

I really, really like food.

But I only really like to cook if no one else is home here, and that's not really feasible during Lockdown, even with regulations lifting.

That being said, I'm working my way slowly through a bunch of snacks my partner gifted me, and boy, do I have one thing to tell you:

I do not like fishy fish.

Give me tuna any time, but if I ever so much as smell a sea bass snack again, I'll hurl. Not my thing. Not even the cat's thing - she picked it up, spit it out, and kicked it across the kitchen.

That being said, I really, really liked the mentai-flavored corn snack I had (mentai is cod roe). It kinda tasted like sweet Doritos.

So aside from gorging on tasty Japanese snacks and drinking way too much coffee, I haven't done much food-wise. I've baked some bread twice for my partner, and if you know how to make a quickbread, that's what I did. If you don't, then just look on the internet - it's almost as easy as a box mix, I promise.

I have been watching a lot of YouTube vids on Thai food, so the urge to cook Thai food is strong. Perhaps one day soon... Regardless, I have seen a lot that I want to try making, so here's the easiest recipe I found on Facebook this week:

WENDY'S FROSTY TASTE-ALIKE:

• 1/2 gallon chocolate milk
• 14oz can of Eagle Brand milk
• 8oz tub of Cool Whip

Blend together until smooth, then place in freezer. This mixture should not solidify fully, but remain constantly at Frosty consistency!

That'll do it from me, guys!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Weekend Warble 321

Apologies for the Radio Silence...

What a whirlwind weekend it's been here in Quarantine/Social Distancingville! Let me give you a brief rundown of what things have been like since Thursday:

• I was an exhausted, sleepless mess on Friday, spending most of the day watching silly YouTube videos and playing Breath of the Wild.
• My mom made roast chicken for dinner that night.
• Saturday, I was so tired that I'd become dizzy with exhaustion. Been a while since I've done that.
• The roast chicken was reworked into a delicious leftover-based dinner!
• Despite the sleepiness, however, I managed to write over 200 words!!! That, I credit entirely to a very productive and enjoyable digital work session with my partner. <3 li="">
• Today, I helped my mother fix one of our windows, which became weirdly angled in its tracks. It took the better part of two hours to wrestle the dang thing back into the right position. Tilt to clean windows are great, but they pose their own risks lol.

So I mentioned a leftover-based recipe above. You want it? I give it:

CHIKKY BIKKY BAKE

• Leftover cooked chicken
• Chicken Gravy mix
• herbs & spices to taste
• Frozen Corn
• Onion
• Cooking Oil
• A biscuit recipe, prepared

Do you have your grandma's drop biscuit recipe? If you don't, just find one online. They're usually pretty simple. You don't really want a firm, cut biscuit recipe, though, so don't pop open the Pillsbury or whatever - you want to splat that dough on at the end, so hold off on it until you've got everything assembled.

1. Pre-heat the oven according to your biscuit recipe
2. Shred up that cooked chicken as thick or fine as you want, then dump it into the bottom of a casserole dish in a more or less uniform layer
3. Sprinkle the gravy mix over your chicken - use as much or little as you like! Then add maybe 1/4 the water it calls for, throwing in any herbs or spices you like and think would go well (like thyme, for instance). Smooth the new chicken/gravy mixture out into a nice layer.
4. In a saute pan, drizzle some cooking oil and cook up some frozen corn and diced onion! You can use any veggies here, though you'll want to par-boil any potatoes if you use them. You want the onions to get translucent and the corn to get soft.
5. Dump your veggies on top of your chicken, spread this layer out gently so that it's still on top of the chicken
6. Remember your biscuits? You want them to be a little wetter than your recipe calls for, so add milk or water (whichever liquid your biscuit uses) until it's just a bit easier to move around. You want it to be able to easily cover your casserole dish of meat and veg.
7. Once your biscuits are plopped/spread over the casserole, you want to pop it in the oven for about the same time as you would if you were just straight-up making biscuits.
8. Watch this like a hawk! Don't let these biscuits burn!
9. Once the biscuits seem done to you (they're the only thing uncooked, after all!) take this puppy out and let cool just long enough to be edible.
10. Spoon this tastiness out and gobble it up!

I'd have a photo for you, but we ate the food so fast there wasn't a chance to photograph it!

And once you're done eating, if you're looking for a game to play, may I suggest Idle Mine Remix on Kongregate? It's a simple clicker game with a lot of random chance to it. If you like that kind of gameplay plus simple graphics, go for it!

That'll do it for me today. I'll go back to sipping my coffee and griping about the hole in my sock :P

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 320

In Which I Have Been Gaming!

So, this month, I've been gaming a lot! It's just... not free stuff :| Mostly.

Here's a list of games I've played this month and some notes on said games:

• Resident Evil 2 (N64)
• I am so glad I used Infinite Health and Infinite Ammo, because I couldn't figure out how to walk, much less run, away from the zimzams, resulting in my just... slowly circling as zombies chewed on me for about ten minutes
• Graphics? Not great, but holy crap I'm impressed at what they crammed onto an N64 cartridge, since... uh... it was not designed for a cartridge-based system but a cd-based one!!!
• Music: Gorgeous, eerie, some of my fav music.
• This was especially poignant due to Paul Haddad, voice of Leon S Kennedy, unfortunately passing away. Yes, he had cancer, but his surgery had to be postponed because of COVID, so we can thank the 21st century plague for us not having this absolute treasure of a man any longer :(
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch)
• I love this game, even though it kicks my ass.
• Seriously, this game is kicking my ass.
• Maybe I overestimated my abilities with Master Mode?
• Yet! I totally killed three Hinox yesterday, a feat that was... much harder in the regular mode, especially with Black Hinox...
• I'm using way more two-handed weapons this go-round, but I haven't yet mastered the dodges.
• I... think I'm experiencing some pretty annoying Drift, because sometimes, my POV will just shoot straight down, so I'm in a top-down view, and sometimes I can't look up.
• I think I have more Star Fragments in this run than in my previous three regular modes combined...
• Watching so many speedruns has made me... not better at the game, but perhaps a little braver. But I still hate any of the falling hazard shrines (like the Synced Swing shrine - ugh)
• DOGS!
• My horses are murder machines in this runthrough - they won't stop running over all of the wildlife. On the plus side, I have so much food.
• I am hoarding arrows like a madbeast because I desire vast quantities of Ancient Arrows in the future...
• Coloring Pixels (Steam)
• What can I say? I like filling in boxes, and that's all this game is.
• Seriously, it's a paint-by-number.
• I like it. It's free.
• Escape Room Computer Office Escape (Kongregate)
• This game was fun!
• It was short, but only once I figured out the logic behind the puzzles. At first I was in chicken-with-no-head mode, running around and clicking everything. Thankfully, if you keep a level head, all of the puzzles give you their solutions... eventually.
• You should give it a go if you like escape room puzzles!

And that's my gaming updates for this week :)

Go Enjoy Something, guys!

FC

Talk About Wednesdaymania 320 lol

In Which Wait... This Isn't The Right Image?!

I can explain.

So... Tuesday. I'm writing this (technically) on Tuesday.

It's Taco Tuesday.

It's also Cinco de Mayo.

I'm not Mexican, but I do love an excuse to load up on beef & cheese in a taco shell...

But that's not the reason it's my Saturday image on a Wednesday while I talk about Tuesday!

Simply put, time lacks meaning right now.

So since it was/is Cinco de Mayo, we watched some AAA matches and some WWF Super Astros. Don't know what Super Astros is? It's the Spanish-language version of Superstars, basically. One of the episodes we saw was right after Over the Edge, so they were discussing Owen Hart and his unfortunate end constantly.

The matches on Super Astros were incredible. Lots of Super Loco, El Merenguero, Papi Chulo, and most fascinating of all: Tons of Minis. I have nothing but admiration and respect for the Minis of WWF. They put on insanely good matches with greater consistency than any of the other talent, and at the end of the day, they worked so much harder than they had to. I wish they'd have put Minis back into the mix, because while Hornswoggle was fun, he wasn't enough. Not when Max Mini and Mini Nova and El Torito were all running around.

Love me some crazy wrestling!

The AAA Matches are on their YouTube channel, so if you want to watch a clown and a dragon totally wreck the Lucha Bros in style, you go find that! There's also an intense, bloody match with Blue Demon Jr involving blading, bleeding, and a ball-peen hammer. It was a bit hard to watch in places, but insanely good. Seriously, go check out the AAA YouTube page!

So that explains the Wednesdaymania, right? And it happened on a Tuesday, so that's Talk About Tuesday... why video games?

Because I set up the N64 in my room today and set up my laptop so that I could have my partner watch me play through Resident Evil 2 on the N64... because I don't have a streaming setup and I don't have any way of streaming a legit N64 game via the internet.

It was a blast, so if you have a loved one who you like to play video games near, definitely set something like that up. We used the Facebook video chat feature, and it took a bit of fiddling with my overhead light, the window shade, and the angle of my laptop's camera to get everything to work. Then we worked on my unfamiliarity with N64 controls.

I used to play N64 games over at my cousins' place in the 90s and early 00s. We played a lot of the original Smash Bros, Pokemon Stadium, Pokemon Snap, and... actually, yeah that's it.

I played fifteen seconds of the demo for Ocarina of Time in a store once?

But yeah, I have very very little experience with any other N64 games.  And Resident Evil 2 has Tank Controls. Thank goodness I had put in both the invincibility cheat and the infinite ammo cheat, because I was running in circles constantly in the beginning. See, I couldn't figure out how the Tank Controls worked. I suuuuuuuuucked at first. And then my partner patiently walked me through the panic that was setting in (I was afraid I'd broken either the game or controller) and we made it all the way past the Spade Key! I'm lowkey not looking forward to the dogs...

But yeah, today was spend mostly clearing out space for me to play the game (I should get a chair...) and then playing the game! Then I went downstairs and ate tacos, and then I came back up to watch a bunch of great wrestling.

So that was today/yesterday.

I hope you guys are having a productive and/or safe Corona Season.

Go Enjoy Something!
FC