A cute puzzle game released in 2001, and 2004 respectively for the Nintendo GameCube. Collect parts of your crashed ship with the help of cute flower creatures. Things start off great, but as the games progress the way the 'difficulty' ramps up is by means of making the levels larger and require more moving around navigating the pikmin to different areas. Which after the midpoint or so started to wear thin and be more tedious than anything else. Fun at first, the sound and music in particular, but just couldn't carry me through the entirity of either game.

The original classic Zelda game that started it all. Although I first played through this game years ago I was feeling nostalgic and played it again. Although I did cheat by using a walkthrough to get through it quickly without searching every nook and crany for the secret locations I could no longer remember. The nostalgia was strong though and the game still felt enjoyable to play even after so many years. I didn't bother with the new game+ mode where everything is moved around and the difficulty is higher, maybe one day.

Released in Oct 2007 for the Nintendo Wii, this is a cute puzzle game that makes use of the wiimote motion controls for solving each stage puzzles. The controls are fun when they work correctly, but when they get flaky and on some of the later stages where proper timing is very narrow the controls can be infuriating. The puzzles themselves are great, but when you get hampered in solving them not because you can't figure out the next step, but because the fussy motion controls not working as intended it really detracts from the enjoyment. Which is too bad, because when the controls did work they felt great, and would really match up the feeling of whatever action was being performed, unfortuently the controls became so frustrating for me during the final stage that I just gave up and watched the ending on youtube and offloaded the disc to my local games store. As for the story, there are pirates, a magic monkey, and ghosts.

Here's a series that probably could have done with ending. Or maybe whatever nostalgia I had for the ps2 trilogy had all vanished by the time I got around to playing this follow up originally released in Feb. 2008, I probably didn't play this until 2016. I found Nero's over the top emo whining and Dante's too cool for school attitude both to be tiresome. The game itself probably would have been more enjoyable at a higher difficulty setting where proper use of the combat system combos was more required, but at the normal setting it a fairly mindless hack and slash of pushing the attack buttons performing whatever random combo seemed appropriate unless the boss or monster required something more specific. Probably not a franchise I'd continue to play after this.

Originally released on XBox 360 way back in Oct. 2012. I had played the first two games closer to their release dates after having this one sit on the shelf for nearly 5 years I finally got around to playing it. I enjoyed the intro plot twist of the prologue, but once into the game itself, I found the mini games of hunting, naval battles, trading, and crafting to be largely pointless as the game could easily be completed without them. The village building part was ok as it fleshed out some characters, I never finished the naval battle content and ended up just watching some clips of that side story on youtube. In terms of the story it really wraps up all the threads being teased in the first two games with the precurser civilization, the templars, and Mile's roll in all of it. And closes out the trilogy, or at least it probably could and maybe even should have. There's a lot more titles in this franchise and I'm not sure how they're going to keep it going story wise after what happened at the end of this one. It was a little dismaying to see the bonus season pass content being offered up as DLC for $25 (at the time I was playing anyways) it seemed a bit much for a few side story scenarios. So I passed on those, if I was curious enough about any cutscenes or story aspect I could probably find them on youtube. Overall a satisfying end point, it makes me a bit worried for even trying any subsequent games that it might just turn into ubisoft milking it instead of moving on to new ideas.

Going to be writing up a number of old reviews of some games I've played over the last few years, I had written up some notes from them after playing them, but never published them anywhere. Mainly due to them being older titles for the most part. The backlog of console games I've acquired over the years is far too long.

So github has this handy setting for github pages that will redirct your repo's or user's github.io page to some other server. But my dumb ass misread that and thought it was a setting to point my custom hostname at the github page and like, it needed to know what url was going to be redirecting to it for permissions or some such. But no it was a CNAME redirect.. meaning that when I went to my domain registar and pointed my custom domain at the github.io url I created a loop.I need to find some good books on that stuff at some point.

As alluded to in a previous post using a static site opens up some options for hosting such as github(or lab) pages. Which is what I'll be using. I'm not sure if that's in violation of their ToS, it doesn't seem to be. If a problem ever comes up I'll let future me deal with it. Luckily Nikola has support for using git pages built in so getting this to work hopefully won't be too painful. Eventually I think it would be interesting to self host, but that's for another day.

Although it is amusing to entertain delusions of granduer that this site will somehow allow me to not have a day job and get invited too all of my favorite podcasts, that really isn't why I am making an attempt at establishing an online presence. Rather I wanted to create a place where I could dump my thoughts, ramblings, hobbies, and document learning about various technologies web related or otherwise. This is just a project I picked that would be the vehicle that will hopefully help me learn all these things. If I ever do figure out how monetization works, I'd be pretty satisfied if it covers the domain name registration and hosting costs.