I used to do more bullet posts than just once a year. I put more effort into my laziness. Let's do this.
We had a bit of a storm a few weeks ago, which took out a couple of willow trees along the stream next to the house.
One of said trees ended up resting on the roof of our garage. Fortunately no damage, except maybe a dent in the eaves trough.
The city showed up after a couple weeks and cleaned up their trees. To some extent. You can see from the photo above, they didn't go out of their way to make anything pretty. Got a cool time lapse out if it, tho.
After Chorus, I picked up Yar's Rising, which I mostly enjoyed as a short, fun little metroidvania with old Atari game mini-games. Fun soundtrack, cute premise, goofy story and not anything anyone's taken too seriously.
And then I went looking for more space games. Everspace 2 came up a bunch of times in comparison to Chorus so I figured I'd give it a shot. I bought Everspace ages ago but got turned off by the rogue-like of it all. Everspace 2 has more of a story, but the difficulty curve proved my undoing, even on "Very Easy" difficulty, I was still getting blown up repeatedly in un-fun ways.
I briefly picked up X4 again having forgotten how much I hate the controls.
Then I decided to finally bite the bullet (as it were) and pick up No Man's Sky finally. Whereupon I discovered it's not really a space game but a survival base-building game. Where you grub around for raw materials and somehow magically build shit at a tedious, monotonous pace. Not my favourite genre. But I've been meaning to give it a try forever and so far I haven't put it down yet.
The above probably could've been two non-bullet blogs posts.
So I was looking through the YouTube Music recommendations and turns out Billy Strings has a new album. I wouldn't call myself a Billy Strings fan, but I do occasionally find myself in a bluegrass mood and he's very good. Anyway, the album wasn't blowing me away, but then I got to a track entitled I Like Train Songs. And you know? I liked this train song.
Then, over on the blueskies, discourse in my feed turned, as it often does, to how highways suck and the 413 is a stupid idea when Esther Wheaton of local bluegrass band Onion Honeychimed in with their track They'll Add Another Lane To the 401, which is actually a (delightful, plaintive) train song.
Thus September 2 became Train Song Day, complete with a Mastodon thread and YouTube Music playlist. (I got a little distracted by work and local hurricanes and a willow tree on my roof, so I didn't quite get this to the level of a Christmas Mixtape, tho I was tempted).
I am happy with how the playlist turned out. The player above will play through it, even though YouTube doesn't do a good job of embedding YouTube Music. It goes to some interesting places, straying quite a ways from bluegrass, but I feel it holds together pretty well. Give it a try.
I'm pretty sure I heard about this from a video talking about its "innovative" drift mechanic. Which, honestly, is just a button that lets Newtonian physics work properly when you hold a button. I rolled my eyes a little. But it's actually pretty fun once you get used to it.
I really like space shooters, but getting the difficulty curve and flying mechanics right for a fun experience and not just incredibly frustrating. Or boring. It seems to be a rare thing.
To its credit, I managed to play though Chorus and have a fun time with it. It's a little buggy, and feels a bit unfinished, like scope was aggressively cut to actually ship the thing. Like I think they meant to have a pretty exhaustive ship customization and upgrade system, but what ended up in the game is, yeah, you can buy a few guns and marginal stat upgrades, but I didn't actually engage with that much. If I got a better gun from a mission, I installed it. Most of what I got just sat in inventory. The money I got from missions went to maxing out my armour and shields and once that was done, I had no use for it.
The story is... I dunno, Star Wars but make it grimdark and vaguely Lovecraftian. But you get to go around helping people by being the awesomest space pilot. I can't complain.
Oh, but I can complain that absolutely none of the environments you're flying around in feel anything like space. I guess navigating an empty void isn't terribly stimulating, but it's all rocks hovering completely stationary with no forces acting on them whatsoever. If it was just this game, I'd maybe give it a pass, but it seems like nobody is willing to let space be space anymore. It has to be all clouds and rocks and lightning and nebulae. It bugs me most in, say, modern Star Trek, which should know better. Space is cool. Let space be space. Does it fundamentally change how space combat works when I'm not constantly trying to avoid bumping into rocks? Yes. Could you still make it fun? I... think so...
Anyway, this was a fun game and I enjoyed it. If you want a single player space shooter, I think it's worth your time, even with all the caveats above.
