Donkey Kong Bananza is everything I wanted it to be and more, so much so that I have no qualms about saying that this game is justification enough for buying a Switch 2. I have not had such an immediate and strong attachment to a game since I played first played Breath of the Wild back in 2017. Even as much as I love playing Final Fantasy 14, my first month with the game was full of fits and starts where I was not sure that I’d grow to love it as anything more than something I played with my friends. With Donkey Kong Bananza, I was hooked from the first instant I got control of DK and my time with the game has only increased this attachment. I’ve had a whole weekend to play this game (I planned to write this a week before posting it but time got away from me (which has nevertheless worked out the best for this review)) and I can firmly say that you will not regret your time with this game. You also don’t need to have any particular attachment to the franchise, knowledge of the history of Donkey Kong, or even gaming experience to enjoy this game. This could be your first video game ever and you’d probably have an incredible time with it, assuming you enjoy this kind of open-ish world collectathon adventure experience. That’s the one caveat about this game: you need to like collecting things to really enjoy this game. If you dislike or feel stressed by collecting things, there really isn’t a lot of other stuff in this game for you. You’d probably still have fun, but the way that collection drives so much of the experience would probably repel you. If you’re indifferent to or neutral on collecting things, then I think you would still have a great time with this game. You don’t need to be a “Collecting Things” sicko like me to have a good time with Donkey Kong Bananza, but it certainly helps.
Continue readingThe Other Side Of My Burnout
There’s nothing quite like being stuck in what amounts to a burning bag of shit left on the world’s porch. At least, that’s what it feels like to be a resident of the US these days. I’m not proud of it, every reasonable person hates it and is right to do so, the US government seems intent only on malicious destruction that has the potential to spiral out of control, and no one is going to come out of this without also smelling like shit. Our goose isn’t cooked or anything like that. Things aren’t irrevocably broken yet. They are irrevocably changed, though. Whatever survives this period of awfulness is going to have to find a path forward where none has yet been made. Any attempts to “go back to how things used to be” will only cause things to get worse. The only way forward is through significant change. Exactly what that looks like or how that would work… I don’t know. The whole idea of things changing for the better feels so foreign to me at this point that I’m not sure I can actually imagine what that kind of future would look like. All my conceptions of things being better are just images of the past, glimpsed through a heady filter of nostalgia and a genuine lack of awareness of how the world worked before I knew how to see it working. Who’s to say what positive change would look like this days, following the destruction of so much of the good parts of the US–such that they were–and this process can’t even be described as breaking a bone again in order to set it properly. It feels very “conspiracy theorist” to say it, but it’s difficult not to be aware of how the US is finally breaking along lines that have been slowly chiseled deeper and deeper over the last fifty years.
Continue readingStill At The Same (Raiding) Party Three Months Later In Final Fantasy 14
One of the activities I was most excited to do with the Free Company (what Final Fantasy 14 calls player guilds) was something called “Content Rewind.” This isn’t an official activity in Final Fantasy 14, but the name given to an FC activity by the founder that the rest of us have adopted. The idea is to go back to early raids and run through them in a way that resembles what it would have been like to play through them when they originally came out. Rather than the “MINE” method (Minimum Item level, No Echo) that is the hardest possible way to do the raids, doing them “synched, no echo” is a way to include a decent amount of difficulty without making them as difficult as possible. For MINE, you’re using gear that has been scaled down to the lowest item level (which represents the gear’s power, essentially) that the raid will allow. You’re also doing it with no echo, which is the game’s feature that makes repeating a fight easier after you’ve failed it by raising your hit points and damage by a certain percent. Synched, No Echo, on the other hand, limits your items to the highest level that would be allowed and while you’d be missing the boost from the echo as well, it doesn’t hurt as much since your gear is stronger. It’s supposedly even easier than if you’d gone into the fight with appropriately leveled gear that was available back then due to the slow creep of power that has occurred over the years. I have no experience with this since I’ve only been playing the game for six months, but enough people have said it independently that I believe it. What all of this means, ultimately, is that we get a group of eight players together and work our way through a tough boss fight, one strange battle mechanic at a time, until we eventually emerge victorious.
Continue readingWorking Out My Workout Routine
The main thing I’ve been doing to combat how awful I feel lately is to put more and more effort towards my exercise routine. I’ve let it slip almost completely over the course of this year due to the bodily pain and exhaustion I’ve been dealing with and I’ve been struggling to get back into it thanks to how burned out I feel and how much I’m struggling to adjust to waking up an hour earlier every work day. I can barely get myself out of bed in the morning, still, let alone push myself to get out of bed immediately when my alarm goes off at ass o’clock in the morning and then go do my morning workout routine. Especially because I know it’s going to be miserable for the first few weeks of actually doing that. I’m out of shape and the general aches and pains of every day life aren’t going to help. Working out will, fortunately, help with those. It might even help with the neck tension and pain I’ve been dealing with, assuming I can work on my neck and shoulder muscles without straining myself–that would have the opposite effect of what I’m aiming for. I want to feel better, not worse. Which is why I started working out as extensively as I do in the first place.
Continue readingThe Worst My Burnout Has Ever Been Continues To Get Worse
The past few weeks of banging my head against the same problem at work (on top of everything else going on the last few months) has burned me out worse than ever. I really wish I could say this and, with ANY degree of confidence, tack on that this was as bad as it could get, but I keep finding new depths. For instance, I spent the whole weekend resting and don’t feel any better going into work today than I did leaving work at the end of last week. Well, I mean, I feel a little better, but only because I’ve yet to work the full day since I’m writing this in the morning instead of the evening. That hardly counts in the face of how utterly exhausted I feel every moment of every day [how right I was… Evening came around and left me feeling worse than I did before the weekend]. Whatever rest I’d gotten this past spring was largely undone by how things have been going at work, between a lack of project clarity, the loss of trust in my coworkers, and my boss being so weird and evasive about things. There’s no way any amount of feeling well-rested could have survived that particular gauntlet, much less the gauntlet the last three weeks have been as my coworker dumped a problem on my lap and then dipped out of the office for several days, so it is hardly surprising that I’m feeling worse than ever. I just didn’t expect it to go from being a largely mental and emotional problem to a physical one as well. I thought I could just stay quietly miserable in my head and suffer through things until I managed to get a new job or pay off enough of my loans that I didn’t need to work as much anymore. Turns out that I was wrong.
Continue readingDedication To The Craft In Final Fantasy 14
One of the things that has taken up a large amount of my time alongside running through the plot of Final Fantasy 14 has been not just leveling the combat classes I need to complete the plot-based missions, but also leveling the crafting and gathering classes required to repair the gear for those combat classes. I mean, I can also make gear for the lower-leveled classes I’m working on getting up to snuff now, but most of the purpose for all that leveling is so I can keep my highest tier of combat gear in tip-top shape without needing to rely on other players I might not have easy access to when I need the work done and so I can stop paying an NPC vendor to repair my gear. Getting it fixed by a player character is a much better investment since you can repair gear beyond what you’d normally expect to it’s “full” state. It’s a bit silly since all this does is set a new point for what counts as “full” integrity on your gear, but it is satisfying to see all of those blue lines (to signify full integrity bars) next to all of my gear whenever I open my character window. Still, having all this extra space before you need to worry about your gear breaking is one of the main benefits of crafting to the person playing the game’s content and, for a while there, I couldn’t actually fix my top-tier gear. In order to hurry through the last two expansions, I set aside my usual schedule of 2-3 weeks on content and then 2 weeks on other stuff (mostly leveling crafting jobs), so while the leveling I’d done previously was enough to keep my gear going in the 2nd to last expansion (Endwalker), it was not enough to fix the gear I got following that expansion. And some of the gear I got toward the end of the expansion, too.
Continue readingA Brewing Storm Hangs On The Horizon
As I stand at my desk, looking at the distant reflection of color that is all I can see of the outside world from the part of my employer’s building I work in, I can’t help but think of last year’s torrential storms and the hour and a half I spent stuck in a bathroom, waiting for the tornado warnings to clear. The storm now distending the sky, wrapping it unevenly in darkness long before the sun is due to set, will not be as fierce as the storm last year that left me without power and anxious about something entirely new after I finally made it home between tornado warnings. Even if the weather reports can no longer be trusted as much as they once could, I’ve spent my life watching for storms of all kinds. I know when one is coming by the way the air feels on my skin, by how the temperature and pressure change, by how the wind blows and the various layers of clouds move relative to each other. I studied a lot of meteorology as a child, with the same fervor as I once studied trains and Richard Scarry’s books, but only because I once got surprised while hiding from my family in the woods by a torrential storm. Sure, the science of it all was interesting, as were the remote and–in my eyes–exciting places such science got done, but I was looking for practical lessons and I learned them well enough that they serve me still. I can’t tell exactly when the storm will happen, but I can tell that it will and how bad it will be.
Continue readingDreaming Through It
For the past few years, I’ve been dealing with an increasing number of dreams. For a lot of my life, I didn’t really dream much aside from a few repeats. I had one when I was younger about being swallowed by a blanket that showed up every time I got sick (our family called this specific blanket “the sick blanket” since, as little kids, we got bundled cosily into it when we weren’t feeling well), a weird warped-perspective dream about being a tiny dot that couldn’t move around my parents house every time I got sick after I was ten or eleven, and some weird tons-of-armies-fighting-a-giant-war dreams that were basically my imaginary play games given life and ridiculous scale by my sleeping mind. I’m sure I had other dreams from time to time, but I really didn’t have many and it was only in high school that I realized that most people dream much more frequently. These days, though I still don’t dream often, I now have about as many dreams a month as I used to have in a year. Generally speaking, they’re a much wider variety these days, having replaced the old “got stuck in high school as an adult somehow” anxiety dreams of my college years and early twenties with a much greater breadth of mental fiction. Unfortunately, this uptick in dreams coincides with me starting to finally process the trauma of my childhood and so most of my dreams since then have a dual attachment to my present and something I’m working through or have mostly worked through from my past. It’s kind of exhausting, to be frank, but I try to stay focused on it being a good sign that my mind is actively healing from the stuff I went through as a child.
Continue readingRepetition Is The Key To My Job Security
One thing I’m known for amongst many of my oldest friends is being willing to repeatedly tackle a problem. I will bang my head against a wall until it caves or I do. I’m not one to feel particularly bad about failing at something, nor do I tend to spend a lot of time caught up in self-recrimination. I’ll take a moment to assess what happened and what I could try differently and then get right back to it. I’ve got my limits, of course. I won’t keep tackling a problem I know I can’t solve and I’ll eventually give up for at least a while to rest if I’m feeling particuarly worn out by my efforts, but my limits for this kind of repetition and effort are much more expansive than most people I run into. This is one of the qualities that has made me a good software tester. Unlike a lot of my peers who will write up what they saw and move on if they can’t reproduce the issue quickly, I will (when the situation calls for it) dig in and keep messing with things until I either figure it out or I feel like I’ve done my due diligence. This is an ever-moving goal, unfortunately, but it’s still something I and my coworkers have come to count on. If there’s ever a tricky little bug with a lot of finicky details and no clear cause, I will usually be sent in to figure it out because I will just keep trying stuff without letting it wear me down. It’s worked so well in the past that everyone on my team knows me for this quality at this point, for better or for worse. They can always count on me to do whatever needs doing in as exacting detail as it needs (if not maybe a little too exacting sometimes).
Continue readingThe Hit Point Method Of Finding Traps In The Rotten Labyrinth
In this latest session of my “The Rotten Labyrinth” Dungeons and Dragons campaign, we kept things pretty short. My players tried to revisit a magical source of treasure, one of the player characters sulked instead, the party continued to roll horribly enough that they blundered into a few traps, they found two new sources of treasure, decided that chopping through a wall was a better idea than looking for secret doors in a move that would eventually be revealed to be much less expedient than they thought it would be, and discovered that sometimes the dungeon giveth danger disguised as magic items. One of my players also joked about keeping track of how much damage they’ve taken after chugging what turned out to be a potion of poison rather than a potion of healing and having their character knocked unconscious for the second time that hour despite starting the hour at full hp. All of which happened in just about two real hours because one of the players had to leave early and, following the interrupted night’s rest (the encounter with the strange memory-stealing ooze), the rest of the party decided to just call it a day after their trapfinder and healer got knocked out twice in maybe an hour of exploration. Which gave me the opportunity to give them their next level-up, courtesy of surviving so many nasty encounters, and now we’re primed to start the next session fully rested and with an unknown group approaching from outside the labyrinth.
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