What's New: July

Grand Archive TCG, Hunter × Hunter, finishing Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Playdate Season Two, a new site theme, and health updates.

It’s Been a Minute

Wow, look at all the things I want to write about. This is going to be a bit of a longer post since I haven’t been blogging as much recently. Buckle up!

Grand Archive TCG

I’m gonna keep this section short and promise to write more about Grand Archive soon, since this has been my recent obsession.

I’m still not very good at the game, but it’s a lot of fun to play and collect! The new expansion Distorted Reflections just came out, which is inspired by Alice in Wonderland.

Hunter × Hunter

I’ve been watching Hunter × Hunter with Ash recently. We’re in the Chimera Ant arc, which is exactly what it sounds like so far. Apparently this is the most epic arc of the show, so I’m hoping to have my mind blown soon.

So far the first season was was surprisingly my favorite. Gon and Killua are a charming pair, and well written as absurdly talented pre-teen warriors.

(Left to right) Kurapika, Gon, Killua, Leorio

Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Should I write a full review for this? I’ve logged about 90 hours in this game according to Steam, but I’m notorious for letting games idle. I’m pretty sure 50+ of those hours were while I had shingles (which was fucking terrible) and took like two weeks off work. I just sat on the couch wincing in pain from shingles and occasionally rolling my eyes at Dragon Age.

Gomez Addams lookalike Emmerich died offscreen because I didn't grind enough faction rank to keep him alive in the final mission

Taash has the emotional maturity of a grapefruit, but their story was still fun.

It’s too long.

I’m no stranger to 100+ hour games, but they have to be realy good to keep my attention that long. This game really didn’t deserve to be as long as it was. It felt really stretched out, and I didn’t even finish all the side quests.
Combat is mid.

Learning that this game was originally supposed to be an online multiplayer live service game a la Anthem made this part make so much more sense. I’m not a tactics gameplay nerd like I used to be, but that’d probably be better than wave after wave of mediocre real time combat filled to the brim with big boom wow explosions that make my eyes hurt and the screen shake and glitter nonstop.
The characters are just fine.

I just didn’t get into any of the characters the same way I did in other Bioware games. Solas is still one of the most compelling characters, though he spends nearly the entire game locked in time prison, while you’re forced to slog through endless side quests in hopes of chasing down the two “mustache twirling supervillains”, as my friend Lilah calls them.
The tone is awful.

Apparently the original writing direction was insufferably smug and smarmy, but the backlash against Forspoken led them to pivot. Unfortunately, the damage had already been done, and no script edit could save this game. I was shocked to find out this was the less smug and smarmy version of a previous script. It must’ve truly been terrible before.
So much backtracking.

The weirdly labyrinthine levels beg you to traverse them again and again in hopes of finishing some stupid little side quest or picking up useless ores and gems (shnuck nuck nuck) to feed to your allied factions in order to raise their fucking rep rank. You can see the bones of the Anthem-like grindfest they were building here.
Did I even like this game?

Well, it’s a bastardized version of the “Bioware formula”, so I’m fairly forgiving. And I wanted to see how this stuff ends. And it’s not all bad! It’s just that at the end I see a mountain of complaints overshadowing the fun I had.
A nonbinary party member appears!

I’ll give them credit for writing a decent nonbinary awakening story for Taash, though the whole thing felt like it was a stuggle between the actually nonbinary author trying to tell a good story and the obviously we need to do Trans Rep 101 so all the cis dudes playing this game understand what’s going on, or whatever.

New Theme

Yeah, here I go again. This isn’t the first time I’ve redesigned my website to be more warm and orange colored in Summer. This time it’s a lot more restrained on the orange and I kept a bunch of the green I love.

As usual, I consider this a starting point, and I’m sure I’ll evolve it a bit before I eventually get sick of it. I was particularly inspired by my friend Anh’s lovely site redesign. Based around the color pink, I nicknamed this her Kirby theme. My favorite detail is her diamond-shaped footer nav.

Given my recent card-oriented obsession, I was inspired to make a more clean and paper-inspired theme again. As much fun as I had with wild gradients, I began craving something simpler that let the content shine. Inspired by my favorite HTML named color, PeachPuff, I paired a pale orange with a rich green. While pink might be the most obvious choice to pair with green, I prefer the look of orange.

I spent a long time exploring the Liquid Glass layout space for this site. Unfortunately, floating UI is just pretty annoying unless it’s really small, and I don’t want to compromise by using a hamburger menu. I spent an absurd amount of time trying to get an auto-hiding nav bar working well, but ultimately canned it. Between Firefox bugs in the scroll event and Safari not supporting scrollend, I couldn’t achieve parity with a proper native auto-hiding toolbar, like in Chrome. It was a fun experiment, but I decided to ditch it rather than ship something janky.

Floating UI can look great with low contrast backgrounds...

...And utterly terrible with high contrast

Playdate Season Two

Clown pee is definitely the funniest screenshot I've taken

I haven’t sunk my teeth into every Playdate Season Two game yet, but I’m having fun so far! The device still isn’t everything I hoped it would be, but I love the unique experiences I get on it.

Chance’s Lucky Escape is a hilarious old school adventure game… with a modern difficulty level. Honestly it’s pretty dang easy, but it’s very amusing! I chuckled a lot at the absurd situations and outcomes.

Long Puppy nearly feels like it could be a new Keita Takahashi game. I didn’t care for the time limits, but you can turn those off and have fun exploring.

Health Stuff

I’m getting a colonoscopy and endoscopy tomorrow! Not my first rodeo, but it’s gonna be a barrel of fun again I’m sure. My primary care doctor thinks I probably have migraines. I’ve been trying a new to drug to help with that… but it hasn’t been helping so far. More to come on this front. My acid reflux has improved since I started taking Prilosec. I’m also getting asthma tested soon, and need to go to the eye doctor again pretty soon.