Posts

Goodbye hellsite, I'll miss you

I have indeed decided to leave Twitter for the time being. It's going in a direction I can't say I'm massively enthused about, and Mastodon seems like the better alternative for the time being. If there's a dramatic about face in terms of leadership, or some sort of solid sense the whole place isn't going to collapse then I expect I'll return at some point. For now, I'll see you round.

Back in business

Who knew it'd take Twitter going down in a ball of fire to get me back to posting on a blog. Anyway, welcome to the very distant past. I don't even remember how to change the incredibly dated template to one of a dozen other incredibly dated templates, so good luck with that.

Oh hey, HTTPs finally works and I remembered I have a blog

I pretty much stopped posting after realising Blogger were possibly never going to enable HTTPs on custom domains, because I figured what's the point when I'm gonna be shunted out of search results? No reason to be penalised by Google for not having HTTPs when they wouldn't let me use the damn thing. Anyway, TL;DR is they finally enabled it as an option and after some fritzyness, I'm back and ready to post nonsense about junk. Hooray.

Andromeda Redux Boogaloo

I've now completed Mass Effect: Andromeda, and here's my follow up post to this . Do I still like it? Got bored? Fed up with a thing? Time to find out! Random thoughts ahoy, no major spoilers but maybe some mild ones: * The final mission(s) was great. No spoilers, but everything major you worked towards in some way paid off - or not - throughout the long last leg, and made for a dramatic conclusion. * The story does, eventually, move on from "help us live on all these planets" but even then, you'll still be better equipped to deal with the finale assuming you keep on with the whole Pathfinding thing. Part of me wishes writers wouldn't rely on magical ancient space alien tech as the quick fix for a story (good thing you ended up in a new galaxy with gigantic terraforming / atmospheric processors everywhere, huh), but having said that, you don't need to use them to make the planets habitable. Still, this feels like a missed opportunity to go in har

Thoughts on Mass Effect: Andromeda

Yeah, I saw all the bad reviews and laughed at the hilarious wonky animations. I've discovered ways to make Ryder either do a crab-walk shuffle or look like she's on rollerskates. Sometimes I load up the Tempest and she's vibrating up and down while team mates stand on tables. My biggest concern was that after having played an hour or so of Andromeda's demo, I didn't like it. The introductory planet feels wanky, with vision obstructing grass and awkward to climb rocks all over the place - not what you want when trying to get to grip with a new game and its mechanics. The combat seemed like some weird throwback to ME1 where everything is floaty and underpowered. Once you get past the first not particularly well done first hour or so, the game opens out into something I'm finding to be hugely enjoyable. It's gonzo ME1. It's all those Mako planets from the first game, but jammed with stuff to do on them. If the original ME, which felt like a lost s

No Man's Sky Foundation update: Survival impressions

No Man's Sky has had a rather large update after months of silence. I've been playing around with it, and here's what I think so far: 1) Every single action in the game now has a lot of weight behind it, and I mean every...single...action. The first half dozen planets I spawned on before giving up were all extreme temperature / weather conditions. If you don't craft your scope quickly and *really* look in every direction before setting out, you're going to run out of life support and die. If you don't zig zag looking for the smallest outcrop of rocks overhead in order to ward off radioactive / cold / heat effects, you're going to end up exposed and die. If you make the wrong choice in terms of the elements you pursue first, you're going to die. If you stagger your last to the one single chunk of heridium on the planet so you can take off, only to realise it's a thin outcrop laid over a regular one and you fall short by like 6 units...you'r

Not the ending I was looking for...

I recently picked up the doctor who graphic novel humble bundle  forgot to post this blog an absolute age ago, and was particularly looking forward to " The girl who loved doctor who ". The short version of the story is the doctor of the comics crosses over into our universe and is mistaken for Matt Smith,  goes to a convention and spends most of his time with a ten year old called Emma. It comes out in the wash that she's being bullied by a rather large douchecanoe, and of course we're expecting to see him get his just desserts at the end. Imagine my surprise when - spoilers - the "solution" to this problem is that Emma lures him to a nearby house and has him punch her in the face really, really hard. The idea is that the school head lives there, sees this take place and kicks him out of school. In practice, we see a really rather shocking panel of this girl getting a right old fist in the face which is totally at odds with the whimsy of the previous 3